It's Morning in America: BlueAnon vs. QAnon

It's Friday morning and Trump's hope for claiming a second term appear to be dashed by Biden pulling ahead in the Peach State. Surveying opinion, Scotsman Craig Murray seems most sensible to me:

I hope that those who consider themselves of the left enjoy their relief when the electoral process finally puts to bed the extraordinary populism of Trumpism, and returns the USA to the smoother control of the regular media and political classes and their billionaire controllers. Because anybody who believes any more than that is happening is a fool. I said that I did not blog about the US elections because of the appalling partisan nature of debate. The truth is the system threw up, again, two truly obnoxious candidates entirely antithetical to the real interests of ordinary people in the USA. Biden will do nothing to tackle the appalling wealth and resource inequality which is the most startling problem the country faces. He will hopefully resolve social tensions in the short term. But the cause of those social tensions is a system of gross exploitation of the middle and working classes which is not sustainable in the long term, and which was the root of the Trump political eruption.

Kamala Harris was of course the most right wing possible Vice-Presidential pick. Her advance into power, despite being entirely rejected in the Democratic primaries, is in itself a huge condemnation of the system. I believe I am right in saying that Harris’s Primary campaign was so disastrous she managed to obtain zero delegates at all to the Democratic National Convention. Zero, None. Absolute bottom of the pile. Rejected by Democratic voters as the candidate in toto. Attempting to confirm this zero delegate fact, I just looked up the Wikipedia page on her primary campaign, which turns out to be the most entirely false, hagiographic and manicured Wikipedia page I have ever seen, on any subject, which is saying a lot. Apparently her Presidential Primary bid was in fact a tour de force of brilliant debating and political strategy, recounted in enormous detail, not an abject failure resulting in no delegates. The extraordinarily dishonest Wikipedia page is not perhaps in itself hugely important, but it is emblematic of the sinister manipulation behind the scenes of Kamala Harris’s rise to power.

Let us put a note in our collective diaries to look again in two years and see whether the USA has entered a period of renewed social progress, or just reinvigorated its position as a violent threat to the world. I am looking forward to the period when Biden’s mainstream cheerleaders have to find something positive to say rather than just respond “But Trump is evil”. I predict most of the responses below will say nothing much more on analysis than “But Trump is evil.” Knock yourselves out.

I think World Socialist Web Site's Patrick Martin makes an important point when he says:

While Trump at present lacks the political support to overturn the results of the election, he is laying the basis for a campaign to present himself as the victim of a “stab in the back.” This narrative will be used by himself and members of his family to perpetuate the development of a fascistic movement, which will become a permanent and significant presence in American politics.

Trumpism isn't going to evaporate after Pennsylvania and Nevada are declared for Biden. The Republican Party is headed for a bloody bestial internal struggle. 

Will the Lincoln Project neocons return to the GOP to knife fight with faux working class hero Josh Hawley or will they continue to hole up in the Democratic Party with the likes of Abigail Spanberger? Either way both national parties have houses built on melting ice.

Last night ABC News' George Stephanopoulos had to remind his viewers that Russia seeks to divide us. It was the BlueAnon mantra recited right before a commercial break, a bang of the gong for the Democratic faithful, as Trump flag-wavers rallied in Phoenix and Las Vegas, a patriot here and there with an AR-15 slung over the shoulder.

It's morning in America: Russiagate vs. Pizzagate.

Wrong Again: No Blue Wave

UPDATE: It looks like Biden is going to hold on in a squeaker, 270-264. Give Biden Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada. That's 270. Give Trump Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina. That's 264.

****

At this point, the early morning after election day, the presidential race is too close to call. Biden needs the vote yet to be counted in Michigan and Pennsylvania to come in overwhelmingly Democratic, something that is distinctly possible since many of the outstanding ballots are from urban counties.

One thing though appears obvious: There was no blue wave. Texas didn't flip and Trump won Florida again. Republicans will likely maintain control in the Senate and even pick up seats in the House. The energized electorate was composed of more than just alarmed soccer moms; it included Trump loyalists as well.

The bottom line here is that the United States is a nation on its way down. How else to explain the inability of a well-funded opposition party to shellac an incumbent saddled with 13 million unemployed and over 200,000 dead from a pandemic?

It's difficult to rationalize. If Trump wins, the state polls in Pennsylvania will turn out to be even more inaccurate than they were four years ago -- a big blow to the mainstream media and the polling profession.

I'm not convinced that Biden has lost this. Trump's premature declaration of victory and call for a stop to the vote count is telling. As Republicans go to court it is unclear what arguments could justify halting the normal tabulation of election results.

On the other hand, maybe "the United States is a Bizarro world of inverted McCarthyism where the fellow traveler is a closet QAnon revolutionary."

The 2020 General Election: It's Another Blue Wave

As I emerge from the chrysalis of my COVID illness I am confronted with increased demands at work. I am now working a ten-hour day Monday to Thursday and a five-hour day on Friday. Where I used to wake up and spend 90 minutes on this page I am now heading to the office first thing so I can be at my desk by 7 AM. I work through lunch -- pre-lockdown I would walk ten minutes to a coffee shop and read the paper for 40 minutes -- then I scurry home at 4 PM where I work remotely until 5 PM.

It's going to be this way for the foreseeable future. Social distancing at work means I am the principal person in the office most days -- a one-man band answering the phones, processing the daily mail, receiving deliveries, etc. Also, the building where the office is located has been sold, and we have a vacate date sometime at the end of winter. Herculean chores must be performed the next few months.

With the general election a little more than a week away I wanted to get my prediction down, for what it is worth.

I was wrong, as were most others, about 2016. I thought the gender gap was real and that Trump would lose the suburbs as a result. It didn't end up that way, but it is coming to pass in 2020. Trump is losing the suburbs. For instance, Maricopa County, home to the Phoenix metropolitan area, is polling strongly for Biden.

A recent national poll shows Biden up by 9 points. Biden is up in the industrial swing states -- Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin; plus, Biden is also up in Arizona and Florida. For all intents and purposes Trump has no path to victory without Pennsylvania and Florida.

The diehard Republican has a couple responses when confronted by the slew of polls and other markers of Democratic strength like record-breaking Dem early voting and ActBlue fundraising totals. 

The first GOP argument, which cannot be discounted, is a significant voter registration advantage in big swing states like Florida and Pennsylvania. Republicans apparently earned this advantage by door-knocking during the pandemic. Good for them. You can't fault the party for working hard. Whether increased registration translates into a significant increase in votes is another question. It is of course better than nothing, but just because someone comes to your door and registers you to vote doesn't mean that you will actually fill out a ballot, let alone vote for Trump.

The second Republican argument is that all the polls in 2020 are even more off than they were in 2016 because of a "social desirability bias." The American Conservative summarizes this argument as follows:

Two pollsters who got 2016 right think that the mainstream polls are wrong again, and although they grant that the election is very close, at this point they predict a Trump electoral college victory. Patrick Basham of the Democracy Institute predicted a Trump win in ’16 and also got the Brexit referendum right as well. Basham, in his latest poll for 2020 predicts an easy electoral college victory for Trump with all battleground states ending up in Trump’s column. Robert Cahaly of Trafalgar Group in his 2016 polls predicted the exact number of electors awarded to Trump. Now Cahaly predicts that most battleground states will go for Trump with an electoral college victory in the mid-270s.

What both these pollsters are aiming to tackle is what is called social desirability bias in the polls. Social desirability bias is when a poll interviewee gives an answer to a question based on what he considers socially acceptable, rather than his true opinion on the subject. It has been observed that voters were more likely to choose Trump in a poll that felt more anonymous, such as a poll that used an automated, interactive voice response system instead of a live caller.

For me, this doesn't pass the smell test. It would mean that the United States is a Bizarro world of inverted McCarthyism where the fellow traveler is a closet QAnon revolutionary. It just doesn't add up. Trump has completely fucked up the federal response to the pandemic, and he fomented a race war over the summer, not to mention his overt messaging to the militia movement. Do you think a Grosse Pointe Park soccer mom is cheering for the Wolverine Watchmen?

So Trump loses. He holds the Confederate States of America minus North Carolina and Virginia. Trump's performance in Georgia and Florida will tell us whether the election will be a rout. If Trump holds on in Florida and Georgia he'll limit the size of Biden's margin in the electoral college.

In Florida Trump is doing much worse this go-round with senior citizens due to his handling of COVID. I think Biden wins there. In Georgia Biden has a real shot. Remember, Stacey Abrams lost in the 2018 gubernatorial race by just 50,000 votes despite a massive voter purge by the GOP.

All in all it's another Blue Wave.

Sinophobia

White House trade advisor and prominent Sinophobe Peter Navarro was interviewed yesterday by ABC's George Stephanopoulos. The interview provides a convenient encapsulation of Trump's reelection strategy of scapegoating China for the coronavirus pandemic.

The United States might be a faltering hyper-power, but it remains unrivaled when it comes to capitalizing on crises. By blaming China, the Trump administration hopes to dodge voter retribution in November at the same time braking the Dragon's global economic growth.

It is unclear to me how much blame can be ascribed to China. If patient zero was diagnosed on November 17 of last year in Wuhan, what do we make of the patient in France who was diagnosed on November 16?

Much too much is unknown about COVID-19. For instance, what are we to make of the spike in multi-system inflammatory disease among children?

At this point I don't think that we can rule out a man-made origin of the coronavirus. The mainstream press dismisses man-made origin, as Mike Baker did recently in "When Did the Coronavirus Arrive in the U.S.? Here’s a Review of the Evidence":

Dr. Bedford [of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle] said there was no evidence of genetic engineering in the virus, noting that it appeared to be a genetic outgrowth of a virus circulating among bats. It probably reached humans through an intermediate animal, such as a pangolin, he said.

“There’s no hallmarks of it having been manipulated in a lab,” Dr. Bedford said. “I think that’s definitive.”

He did not, however, rule out the possibility that some version of the virus being studied by scientists in Wuhan could have somehow escaped and spread from there. But he doubts that is the case. He said that the most prevalent theory about the virus’s origins — that it spread naturally among animals at a live animal market in Wuhan, then jumped to humans — was the most likely explanation.

But Kate Charlet's point in "The New Killer Pathogens" is that no such definitive statement is possible when it comes to genetic modification in a lab:

Ultimately, the power of these disincentives hinges on the ability to determine that an attack has occurred and to identify its source. For now, investigators looking at a pathogen in the aftermath of an attack would not necessarily be able to tell if gene-editing techniques had been used.

More Bad News on the Way

It looks like more bad news is on the way. "China, Germany, and South Korea have all reported substantial new outbreaks of COVID-19 after they eased lockdowns." Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin is predicting that U.S. unemployment will grow even worse in the coming months. And the U.S. and its Five Eyes partners are using the pandemic to step up attacks on China, locking in the New Cold War 2.0, as the Dragon is shunted into the corral with the Russian Bear.

For all intents and purposes the shambolic Trump administration should be on its way out the door. The problem is that the Democrats are equally shambolic. Biden is a joke, and if he chooses the uniquely unappealing Kamala Harris as his running mate, don't be surprised if Trump can stumble into a second term.

Bernie Goes Home

After another shellacking at the polls on Tuesday (Illinois, Florida and Arizona), the Sanders campaign emailed its supporters yesterday with the news that Bernie was returning home to Vermont with his wife Jane. The message was, basically, it's over.

Socialist Equality Party presidential candidate Joseph Kishore, writing for the Trotskyist World Socialist Web Site, provides a withering assessment of "Bernieism" in "Bernie Sanders draws his campaign to an end: The political lessons":

The Sanders campaign in many respects mirrors those of previous “left” and “insurgent” Democratic Party candidates and political figures, including Jesse Jackson, Dennis Kucinich, Al Sharpton, Howard Dean and Barack Obama himself—the “transformative” candidate of “hope and change” whose election in 2008 supposedly inaugurated a sea-change in American politics. The results of these previous proposals to perform political alchemy on the Democratic Party are self-evident.

Not only in the United States, but around the world, working people have experienced the betrayals of organizations that claimed to represent an opposition to the capitalist ruling elite, and ended up doing their bidding. This includes Syriza in Greece, Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, Podemos in Spain, the Left Party in Germany, and similar “lefts” in France and many other countries.

Sanders, however, is seeking to carry out the job of channeling opposition into the Democratic Party under far more explosive conditions. Masses of workers and young people are moving to the left. The coronavirus pandemic will vastly accelerate the political radicalization that has already begun.

What Kishore says is true. But I don't think he is entirely fair to the Sanders campaign. The problem with Trotskyites is that all their theory begins with the fiction of a cohesive, class-conscious working class. And of course nothing could be further from the truth. There is no greater proof of the hacked, alienated nature of worker consciousness than Joe Biden's winter electoral juggernaut. Biden had no campaign presence in states that Bernie should have won but that ended up going to Biden. Biden beat Bernie in King County, Washington, the progressive population center of the state.

I agree with Kishore that the Democratic Party cannot be transformed; that was the guiding light for Nader's Green Party presidential runs. I believe that the Democratic Party needs to be destroyed.

Right now we are in the midst of a whirlwind. We don't know how long the virus is going to continue to spread. Governments are resorting to a soft form of martial law. We don't how bad the unemployment numbers are going to be and for how long mass unemployment will last.

My worry is that once we begin to emerge from the COVID-19 crisis there will be no greater worker demand for change than that exhibited by a Democratic electorate voting overwhelming for Joe Biden. In other words, another banker-led bailout and an even greater concentration of wealth.

The End of Peak Neoliberalism

Extremely bad news from The New York Times this morning:

Oil lost nearly a quarter of its value in futures markets on Monday, dragging shares of energy companies lower. It was what one analyst called “another acute shock to markets.”

[snip]

Even before the weekend’s developments, stocks in the United States and other major financial markets had fallen by more than 10 percent in a sudden downdraft that began as the coronavirus began to spread outside of China.

The problem globally is growing worse.

[snip]

To keep cash flowing smoothly through the financial system, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on Monday said it will ramp up the amount of short-term loans it offers banks.

Starting Monday and lasting through Thursday, the New York Fed will increase its daily offering of overnight repurchase agreements — essentially short-term loans to eligible banks — to at least $150 billion from $100 billion. It is also increasing its offering of two-week loans starting Tuesday, to at least $45 billion from at least $20 billion.

The Fed had already been active in the market for short-lived loans between banks and financial institutions — called the repurchase or “repo” market — for months. Those operations started after rates in that obscure but important corner of the financial system’s plumbing spiked in September. It had recently been shrinking the size of its injections as markets calmed.

The moves on Monday “are intended to ensure that the supply of reserves remains ample and to mitigate the risk of money market pressures,” the New York Fed said in a statement.

All this before disruptions in the global supply chain have yet to deliver their full impact.

What's bizarre about the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting freak-outs in global stock markets is that it comes at a time when the mainstream corporate press is ejaculating all over itself because of Joe Biden's apparent triumph and voters' rejection of democratic socialism.

Amid the panic selling, panicked self-quarantines and stripping of store shelves of toilet paper is this unseemly self-congratulation and chest-thumping about the genius of neoliberal centrism and the great political gifts of a senile second-tier pol like Joe Biden.

If this doesn't augur an end of peak neoliberalism, I don't know what will.

Bernie Has to Win Michigan

If yesterday I was hopeful that the Sanders campaign could easily reverse Biden's Super Tuesday momentum, today I am far less so. The red-baiting has started again, and Bernie appears to be tacking to the right, aligning himself with Obama's legacy, in a bid to win over older African-American voters and suburban centrists. I guess this makes sense now that the #Youthquake model of bringing new voters to the polls apparently has been scrapped. Elizabeth Warren's departure did not translate into an endorsement of the Sanders campaign, and I doubt it will anytime soon.

Then there's Nate Cohn's analysis of the upcoming Michigan primary. It's not favorable to Bernie:

Mr. Sanders has so far failed to match his 2016 strength across the white, working-class North this year, and that suggests it will be hard for him to win Michigan.

This pattern has held without exception this primary season. It was true in Iowa and New Hampshire against Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar. It was true in Maine, Minnesota, Massachusetts and even Vermont on Super Tuesday against Mr. Biden.

Over all, Mr. Biden defeated Mr. Sanders by 10 points, 38 percent to 28 percent, in counties across Maine, Minnesota and Massachusetts where white voters made up at least 80 percent of the electorate and where college graduates represented less than 40 percent of the electorate. According to the exit polls, Mr. Biden was tied or ahead among white voters in every state east of the Mississippi River on Super Tuesday.

This is a marked departure from 2016. Back then, Mr. Sanders tended to excel among white, working-class and rural voters across the North. This made Michigan, where white voters represent a well-above-average share of the Democratic electorate, one of his stronger states. He dominated in Michigan’s small towns and rural areas, losing only in few counties that tended to have older voters.

It is hard to say why Mr. Sanders has faltered among these voters, given the consistency of his message and his improved name recognition. One possibility is that many of his 2016 supporters were casting protest votes against Hillary Clinton. Another possibility is that many former supporters of Mr. Sanders ultimately backed the president and are now lost to the Democrats.

One sliver of hope is that Michigan's black vote is far less disposed to the Obama administration because of its handling of the Flint water crisis. But if Bernie loses the rural vote, it might not matter.

In 2016 voters were reacting to the offensiveness of Hillary Clinton and the failed neoliberalism of the Obama administration. Now voters are reacting to the exhausting spectacle of a Trump White House. You would think that Joe Biden's reduced cognitive abilities, if not outright dementia, as well as his long spotty record of supporting free-trade deals and foreign wars, would make him radioactive. Unfortunately, voters in the Democratic primary appear to have decided on the addled Biden as the anti-Trump, and they are willing to the pull the lever back to Obamatime.

I think it's doomed and desperate. There's no going back to Obamatime, and Biden might not even make it to the convention -- that's how compromised I believe his mental health to be. Maybe the DNC will push the Biden people to adopt a front-porch campaign like William McKinley's; at least it would limit Biden's stress and strain.

In any event, Trump could easily defeat Joe Biden with social media memes alone, and Trump has the unlimited budget to do it.

There's one scenario where Biden could win the presidency; it's the one I mentioned in January: stock market collapse and economic recession. We do seem headed for an economic downturn.

Bernie has to win Michigan. If he can't, with Florida right around the bend, I don't think he can do it.

The Day After the Day After Super Tuesday

As California results continue to come in -- right now Sanders is up 1.25 million votes over Biden in the Golden State with 87% of the precincts reporting -- Super Tuesday is looking more and more like a draw. No wonder The New York Times is spotlighting Biden's big win in Virginia, not to mention dismissing Bernie's idea of increasing the youth vote. All Biden has to run on is his post-South Carolina bounce. But that bounce didn't end the race -- it might not even deliver a delegate advantage -- and there a lot of states yet to vote.

The primary campaign is going to change, and Biden is not in a position to fluidly adapt to that change. Now that it is a two-person race, with Elizabeth Warren paddling away to irrelevance, Sanders is going to start placing attack ads. Biden, with his history of fulsome support for free trade, is a sitting duck in the swing states. Bernie will tag Biden with gutting the manufacturing base of the industrial Midwest. That's the overhand right. Bernie's left jab to the snout will be Biden's role as the senate architect of the disastrous Iraq war.

There is a helpful FiveThirtyThirty roundtable discussion posted this morning (see "Does Sanders Need A New Strategy?"). What is surprising is how bullish, from a mainstream perspective, the participants are regarding Bernie's chances going forward.

Right, we are entering a new phase of the race. The field isn’t as crowded, and to some extent it’s a two-person race now, which will change both Biden’s and Sanders’s strategy. The race can definitely flip again, and I do think Sanders will pivot in some way moving forward. The Obama ad is evidence of this even if its timing felt off.

Biden “won” Super Tuesday, but we’ve still got a ways to go. And Sanders is still very much in this race.

The Sanders campaign got rocked back on its heels Tuesday night. It didn't go down, but it got rocked back. Now it is going to start counterpunching. Now we're going to see the strength of Sanders' organization, the state of its conditioning, the depth of its volunteer commitment. Michigan is the next battleground.

All is not lost. The goal here, as I see it, is not to go silently into the night as Bernie did in 2016. The goal here is to capture the Democratic Party. Absent that, absent winning the nomination, burn the motherfucker to the ground. The presently-configured Democratic Party isn't going to protect the republic from Trump. It didn't protect organized labor from Janus. So why pledge allegiance to a militaristic, plutocratic octopus that is hellbent on plunder?

Bernie needs to fight on as long as possible. Take it all the way to a convention. If it is brokered, let the superdelegates show who they are.

Super Tuesday Postmortem: Red-baiting Works!

A good overview of Joe Biden's incredible Super Tuesday is "5 Takeaways From a Super Tuesday That Changed the Democratic Race" by Lazaro Gamio and Shane Goldmacher

Momentum, not political organization or money, is what mattered.

Mr. Biden’s incredible 72 hours between his victory in South Carolina and the first poll closings on Super Tuesday exerted a kind of gravitational pull rarely seen in politics. Three opponents dropped out (Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar and Tom Steyer) and then three former rivals endorsed him in dramatic fashion on Monday in Dallas (Mr. Buttigieg, Ms. Klobuchar and Beto O’Rourke).

Political operatives marveled at the thoroughness and speed of his consolidation of support. Kevin Cate, a former adviser to Mr. Steyer, noted that the cumulative value of Mr. Biden’s final three days of almost pure positive media coverage amounted to a staggering $72 million, according to Critical Mention, a monitoring company.

The question remained: Would there be enough time for all that to sink in and affect the Super Tuesday results? The resounding answer was yes.

For all of Mr. Bloomberg’s money — he spent more than $100 for every $1 that Mr. Biden invested on television in Super Tuesday states — and the organizational advantages that he and Mr. Sanders had, the momentum and free media attention proved far more important.

In Texas, which Mr. Biden won, he captured half of those who decided on primary day or “the last few days” — well more than double Mr. Sanders, who drew more support among those who decided earlier. It was the same story in Massachusetts. And Maine. And Virginia. Just about everywhere.

[snip] 

Even Mr. Biden seemed taken aback by the breadth of victories that would have seemed nearly unimaginable a few days ago. He won in Minnesota, where barely 36 hours earlier the home-state senator had been strongly favored and where Mr. Biden was not even seriously contesting.

On Mr. Biden’s own website, his “find a field office” page featured only eight offices in the 14 states that voted on Tuesday (an aide said the total was actually nine). 

Calling the lockstep coordination of mainstream corporate media with Democratic political leadership "momentum" obscures the establishment freak-out that occurred post-Nevada.

On the eve of the Nevada caucus, the Washington Post and New York Times reported that the intelligence community suspected Russia was working to elect Bernie Sanders. Then, on the Sunday after the Saturday Nevada caucus, Anderson Cooper of 60 Minutes interviewed Bernie Sanders, playing a videotape from the 1980s showing then Burlington mayor Sanders praising Cuba's efforts to increase literacy. Next came the Tuesday debate in South Carolina where Biden and Buttigieg tag-teamed Bernie for backing Fidel Castro. Wednesday James Clyburn endorsed Biden.  Saturday Biden won a commanding victory in South Carolina, which was followed by Buttigieg and Klobuchar dropping out of the presidential race and endorsing Biden on Monday, Super Tuesday eve.

Red-baiting still works. Biden, who prior to his win in South Carolina, hadn't campaigned in a Super Tuesday state in a month, won in Massachusetts and Minnesota, which is incredible.

The state I was keeping an eye on was Texas. I figured if Bernie could win there he could win the nomination. Sanders didn't win there. Biden narrowly beat him.

We have to consider Super Tuesday's result in a league with other spectacular electoral achievements of peak neoliberalism -- Macron's 2017 En Marche! victory and Boris Johnson's 2019 Tory landslide. The zombie paradigm is displaying an increasing number of marvels at the polls.

Nonetheless we're talking right now about a Super Tuesday delegate haul of 390 for Biden, 330 for Sanders, far short of the FiveThirtyEight's Biden overperformance scenario, which had Biden winning 614 delegates to Bernie's 445. Delegates remain to be allocated in California. AP called the state immediately for Sanders. Though the late vote shifted to Biden in other states, Gamio and Goldmacher think Super Tuesday will basically end close to a draw, and the national polling average still shows Bernie in the lead.

So it's not dark yet, but it's getting there.

There's only one path forward for the Sanders campaign. It has to go negative and start hammering Biden's lengthy, loathsome voting record in the senate. Biden shepherded the invasion of Iraq through the Foreign Relations Committee, which he chaired. Up until now the Sanders campaign has yet to run one negative television ad. That has to change.

After the 2016 electoral debacle, I figured that Bernie would run again; that once again the DNC would block him; and then the Democratic Party would split.

We're not quite there yet because Biden might win the nomination outright and paper over and tape up any fissure. More Democratic voters appear to be willing to go whistling past the graveyard than I imagined.

Sanders has to win Washington and he has to win Michigan on March 10, and he has to do it by spotlighting Biden's neoconservatism and neoliberalism.

Some Thoughts on the Morning of Super Tuesday

Beto O'Rourke joined Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg yesterday in endorsing Joe Biden. This circus of filth and corruption is meant to juice the addled former vice president's momentum coming off his Saturday South Carolina blowout win, a win obscured by domestic jitters over the fatal coronavirus, heading into today's important Super Tuesday primary.

FiveThirtyEight's Democratic Primary Forecast now, improbably, has Biden significantly ahead of Sanders, 31% compared to 8%, to win the nomination.  Based on what? One state in Dixie that is going to vote for Trump in November no matter what? It is hard to say for sure because no one knows what goes into Nate Silver's special sauce.

What I did notice is that the faux-hipsters of FiveThirtyEight were starting to climb aboard the Bernie bandwagon after Nevada. Then panic in the ruling class took hold and Nate Silver and his pals started to climb down off the bandwagon.

Having paid close attention to FiveThirtyEight the last couple of months I've come to the conclusion that Silver's forecasts, ever changing, are not forecasts but snapshots of the present corporate hive-mind; they don't predict the future but tell us what the future looks like currently in the neoliberal corporate now. I don't want to say it is entirely useless because a snapshot of the corporate political hive-mind is illuminating, but it is basically corrupt.

That being said, let's keep our eyes on the Lone Star. Polls won't close there until 9 PM. If Bernie can win in Texas, and then rack up big wins in California, Massachusetts, Colorado, Minnesota and maybe even North Carolina, he'll be in control, particularly with elections in Washington and Michigan next week. Nate Silver will have to rejigger his forecast yet again.

If Biden beats Bernie in Texas then we must acknowledge that the Democratic establishment still has quite a bit of game left. Reanimating a cadaver is no easy feat. Biden was DOA after his horrendous debate performances, Iowa and New Hampshire. A Biden win in Texas, Alabama and strong showings elsewhere means that superdelegate fantasies of a brokered convention are likely to come true.

One thing that has not been sufficiently factored in during this second-wave Biden boom is Mike Bloomberg's appearance on the ballot for the first time. Bloomberg has spent so much money I don't see how he fails to make a splash. Bloomberg will hurt Biden in the South, and I think he will hurt Biden in California. I think the touts at FiveThirtyEight and other outlets have prematurely written off the diminutive media mogul.

So Long, Pete. We Hardly Knew Ye.

Good riddance Mayor Pete. The New York Times is reporting that Buttigieg will likely endorse Biden:

Mr. Buttigieg talked with Mr. Biden and former President Barack Obama on Sunday night, according to a Democratic official familiar with the conversations. Mr. Biden asked for Mr. Buttigieg’s support and the former mayor indicated he would consider the request. Mr. Buttigieg wants to sleep on the decision, he told aides, some of whom believe he should move quickly to endorse Mr. Biden.

Mr. Obama did not specifically encourage Mr. Buttigieg to endorse Mr. Biden, said the official, who insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations. But Mr. Obama did note that Mr. Buttigieg has considerable leverage at the moment and should think about how best to use it. Should Mr. Buttigieg endorse Mr. Biden on Monday, it could reshape the Democratic primary if many of his supporters shift to Mr. Biden, creating a more formidable centrist challenge to Mr. Sanders’s progressive movement.

In his remarks, Mr. Buttigieg directed criticism toward Mr. Sanders, without naming him, that he has previously made on the debate stage and on the campaign trail.

“We need leadership to heal a divided nation, not drive us further apart,” he said. “We need a broad based agenda to truly deliver for the American people, not one that gets lost in ideology. We need an approach strong enough not only to win the White House, but hold the House, win the Senate and send Mitch McConnell into retirement.”

As Cenk Uygur correctly points out: 1) Buttigieg dropped out at the behest of his large donors, and 2) Buttigieg dropped out because he is going to get shellacked, blanked, tomorrow; a loss so resounding it would likely tarnish his brand for the foreseeable future.

The problem for the Democratic leadership class is that Obama neoliberal centrism no longer commands majority support, and it certainly doesn't command majority support if Biden is the standard-bearer.

A section of the Democratic electorate might be afraid of Bernie or put off by his style, but this doesn't mean that there is a majority for Biden's cadaverous business-as-usual neoliberalism.

Biden's Blowout Win in South Carolina: Can a Cadaver Get a Bounce?

Biden notched a commanding, campaign-saving win yesterday in South Carolina, beating Bernie Sanders by 30 points. The corporate press is going to boom Biden's first-ever win in a presidential primary as proof of life going into Super Tuesday and an omen that the former VP will reclaim his front-runner status in the national polls.

Unfortunately for Biden and Democratic superdelegates, such is not the case. Nate Silver, in rattling off the possible scenarios post-Palmetto State, mentions that Biden's big win might be merely a "dead cat bounce": "Hypothesis No. 1: This was a “dead cat bounce” for Biden because voters were sympathetic to him in one of his best states. It may have been a one-off occurrence."

That's my reading, a reading backed up, believe it or not, by the anti-Sanders New York Times (see "Joe Biden Had a Big Night. He Needs Another in 72 Hours." by Matt Flegenheimer and Katie Glueck). Flegenheimer and Glueck make the obvious point, a point that elections guru Nate Silver inexplicably avoids, that, unlike billionaire Tom Steyer, billionaire Mike Bloomberg is not dropping out before Super Tuesday, and it's Bloomberg's presence on the ballot in Super Tuesday Dixie states like Alabama, where the media mogul has acquired the endorsement of the Alabama Democratic Caucus, that will block a repeat of Biden's South Carolina showing:

Top Democratic officials in key battleground states that go to the polls Tuesday, from Alabama to Texas, have said that Mr. Bloomberg poses an acute threat to Mr. Biden, eating into his standing with moderate voters. It does not help that early voting has already been underway in many states against the backdrop of Mr. Biden’s bleak finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire.

So, yes, South Carolina was a "dead cat bounce" for the cadaverous candidate Biden. Bloomberg's colossal campaign spending -- I received two pieces of literature in my mailbox Friday from Bloomberg 2020 (Washington's presidential primary election is March 10), which I guess is part of a saturation mailing to all four-for-four voters in the state -- in Virginia, North Carolina and elsewhere on Super Tuesday will act as a firewall to any national bounce that Biden might receive for his blowout South Carolina victory.

It is a delicious irony that Bloomberg's entire strategy of avoiding the first four boutique contests in order to dominate Super Tuesday with enormous ad buys will end up benefiting Bernie, the democratic socialist, rather than saving the fraudulent centrism that most voters despise. Just as Bloomberg buying his way into the presidential debates lethally backfired, so too now it appears that his plutocratic "outside-the-box" primary strategy will backfire as well.

Super Tuesday for decades has been the way in which the Democratic National Committee guaranteed that the most corrupt, machine-driven bloc of votes decided the presidential nominee; it was the corporate firewall of Dixiecrat states that would vote Republican in the general.

But Super Tuesday is no longer just the "Southern Primary." Big important progressive Democratic states vote on Super Tuesday as well -- California, Massachusetts, Colorado, Minnesota. Sanders will do well if not win all of these states outright. Biden and Bloomberg won't even get close.

The corporate masterclass and the mainstream media circled the wagons after Nevada. Fidel Castro was disinterred from his crypt; Putin's Oz-like visage was once again conjured. But the fundamentals of the primary remain unchanged. Bernie's campaign is the only one that is a popular movement; the rest are concatenations of lobbyists, party apparatchiks, big-dollar donors, with a grassroots sprinkle here and there.

Biden is not a viable nominee.

Democratic Superdelegates Plot Putsch

To understand the horrible rot and verminous infestation of the Democratic Party do yourself a favor. Read "Democratic Leaders Willing to Risk Party Damage to Stop Bernie Sanders" by Lisa Lerer and Reid Epstein. Party power brokers and stalwarts are convinced that Bernie will fail to win a majority of the pledged delegates during the Democratic presidential primary campaign and it will be up to the superdelegates to block Sanders and nominate an alternative candidate:

This article is based on interviews with the 93 superdelegates, out of 771 total, as well as party strategists and aides to senior Democrats about the thinking of party leaders. A vast majority of those superdelegates — whose ranks include federal elected officials, former presidents and vice presidents and D.N.C. members — predicted that no candidate would clinch the nomination during the primaries, and that there would be a brokered convention fight in July to choose a nominee.

The alternative candidates mentioned in the article signal that the addled behavior of Joe Biden is a shared condition among the superdelegates:

In recent weeks, Democrats have placed a steady stream of calls to Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who opted against running for president nearly a year ago, suggesting that he can emerge as a white knight nominee at a brokered convention — in part on the theory that he may carry his home state in a general election.

[snip]

A number of superdelegates dream of a savior candidate who is not now in the race, perhaps Mr. Brown, or maybe someone who already dropped out the race, like Senator Kamala Harris of California.

Representative Don Beyer of Virginia cast an even wider net, suggesting senators from Virginia and Delaware, along with Ms. Pelosi, as possible nominees.

“At some point you could imagine saying, ‘Let’s go get Mark Warner, Chris Coons, Nancy Pelosi,’” he said, while preparing to introduce the former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend., Ind., at a campaign event near his home on Sunday. “Somebody that could win and we could all get behind and celebrate.”

Democratic Party leadership is in denial. Nevada should have provided all the evidence needed that Sanders will be the nominee. But the prevailing attitude appears to be that Super Tuesday will distribute its pledged delegates in such a way that no clear winner is revealed. The problem here is this is not what the polling says. FiveThirtyEight, in a conservative model, predicts that Sanders will capture nearly twice the pledged delegates, 587 to 305, on Super Tuesday as his nearest competitor, Joe Biden.

Biden's performance on Super Tuesday is based on FiveThirtyEight's prediction that he is the odds-on favorite (three in four chances) to win South Carolina on Saturday. But there are indications that Biden is slipping in South Carolina. Tom Steyer has real support among African-American voters there. What is unclear is if that support is significant enough to tip the race to Bernie.

I guess what I'm driving at is the Democratic establishment plan to block Bernie at a brokered convention is looking more and more like a Rube Goldberg contraption: Biden has to win in a blowout on Saturday; followed by a "hung jury" on Super Tuesday; followed by another split decision on March 10 (Washington, Michigan); and so on. It could happen, but nothing, other than the hopes and prayers of superdelegates disconnected from a voting public they are supposed to represent, point in that direction.

The more likely outcome is that Bernie puts even more distance between himself and the pack on Super Tuesday, a day that could very well turn into a rout if Biden is upset in South Carolina this Saturday.

Then the superdelegates will have to surrender their fantasy of a brokered convention. At which point, I believe, post-March 10, you'll see Democratic power brokers establishing super PACs to attack their party's nominee; in other words, leaders of the Democratic Party working to elect Trump. As Lerer and Epstein mention:

While there is no widespread public effort underway to undercut Mr. Sanders, arresting his rise has emerged as the dominant topic in many Democratic circles. Some are trying to act well before the convention: Since Mr. Sanders won Nevada’s caucuses on Saturday, four donors have approached former Representative Steve Israel of New York to ask if he can suggest someone to run a super PAC aimed at blocking Mr. Sanders. He declined their offer.

South Carolina Debate Postmortem

The audience was stacked against Bernie at last night's debate in Charleston, South Carolina. There were full-throat cheers for billionaire Mike Bloomberg, as well as boos and hisses for deceased Cuban leader Fidel Castro and his erstwhile acolyte, the junior senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders.

It was not a good night for Sanders. But, that being said, it wasn't a good night for anyone else. After the lively, incendiary debate last week in Las Vegas, the show in Charleston returned to "normalcy"; meaning, it returned to an exhausted, ritualistic, soulless display before a live audience of the well-heeled. I imagine many tuned out halfway through.

Bernie was repeatedly attacked by the other candidates, and he was cross-examined by the CBS moderators, but, with the exception for a brief moment when he beat a retreat from the crossfire bogeymanning of the Sandinistas and Fidelistas by Buttigieg and Biden, Sanders did well enough. This seems to be the assessment found in the pages of the mainstream media this morning.

Tom Steyer, after investing so much in South Carolina, was marginalized. Amy Klobuchar, fed question after question and allowed camera time far beyond the electoral heft of her presidential campaign, is truly horrible. I'm looking forward to the time when she drops out of the race.

Joe Biden is an abomination. There is no other way to say it. He shouts; he spouts gibberish; he claims credit for any and all good legislation written in the last 30 years. Who could vote for this reanimated corpse? No one in her or his or their right mind.

Pete Buttigieg is a vicious, amoral egomaniac; a completely typical personality, but one now more perverse since we're in the end times of peak neoliberalism. If Buttigieg is the best and the brightest our society can vomit up, we're truly in trouble.

Mike Bloomberg came off much better last night than last week. He spoke confidently, and I found it refreshing to hear an opinion on China that wasn't 1950s boilerplate red-baiting. But it is apparent that Bloomberg is not suited for the presidency. He is a billionaire executive best left to handing out instructions from a skyscraper in Manhattan.

Elizabeth Warren's high point was invoking Matthew 25. For a hyper-power careening toward a crackup, I thought it was a timely, down-home reminder.

It is still Bernie Sanders' race to lose. Max Blumenthal is right. The Sanders campaign is going to be in constant retreat until it finds its footing and goes on the attack. Rather than running away when the bots bogeyman Fidel Castro and Daniel Ortega, the Sanders campaign needs to ask, "Do you even know who Anastasio Somoza is? Fulgencio Batista? These U.S.-backed dictators killed far more of their own people than the leftists leader of Nicaragua and Cuba."  I would also mention that at the time Fidel Castro was consolidating power in Cuba, establishing his populist programs of literacy and public health, the United States was backing a coup in Indonesia and had a key role in the slaughter of 1,000,000 Indonesians. So who loves a bloodthirsty dictator?

South Carolina: Last Stand of Neoliberals

The panic in the ruling class is palpable. Sabato's Crystal Ball is basically predicting Sanders to wrap up the Democratic nomination on Super Tuesday (see "The Democratic Nomination: It’s Getting Late Early"): "Democratic rank-and-file voters do not seem worried about Sanders as the nominee. Many Democratic leaders feel differently. They are running out of time to make the voters heed their warnings."

South Carolina is the last stand for the neoliberal Ancien Regime that controls the Democratic Party. AP does a good job compiling the attack ads targeting Bernie, the ones that have proliferated since the commanding Sanders victory in Nevada. Tonight's debate (CBS, 8 PM EST) should provide some insight into how effective these attacks will be in braking Sanders' momentum. My guess is that they'll come up short.

The principal corporate mainstream talking point is that Bernie somehow has not been properly vetted despite being constantly the focus of negative stories in the prestige press the last four years. The "Not Vetted" line acts as a segue for the "Bernie Worships Fidel Castro" attack, which, though still being given prominent placement following the 60 Minutes interview on Sunday, has lost a lot of its force with all the footage on Twitter of Obama praising Cuba.

Biden is predicting to win by "plenty" in South Carolina. He has thus placed a large hurdle in front of his campaign. A relatively close second is all Bernie needs to fuel a Super Tuesday romp and lock down the nomination. Then we'll have to explore the next line of attack for the neoliberal Ancien Regime -- Bloomberg's purchase of the DNC.

Get Ready for "Red Scare 2020"

The spreading coronavirus is adversely impacting global stock prices. The price of a barrel of Brent crude dipped 3.5% to about $56.40. Car sales in China, where Germany earns a hefty profit, fell 92% the first half of February.

The one thing an incumbent does not want in an election year is a recession. It is hard to see how the global economy avoids one now that the coronavirus has spread to the Middle East, Europe and is crossing borders in Southeast Asia.

The oligarchic elite have trundled out their first line of attack on the ascendant people-power campaign of Bernie Sanders. Bernie, we are told by anonymous national security officials, is favored by the Kremlin. Anderson Cooper in last night's 60 Minutes interview confronts Sanders with black-and-white video from four-decades past showing the Vermont politician praising Cuba for its healthcare.

These kind of smears will no doubt constitute the meat and potatoes of the Trump reelection campaign. If they are not calling Bernie a commie, they'll call him a brownshirt. This line of attack might resonate with older voters, voters Bernie is failing to persuade in Democratic primary contests so far, but I don't see it swinging a general election.

What the institutional red-baiting augurs is that the fantasy of a brokered convention where super delegates can award the nomination to a Mike Bloomberg on the second ballot will likely fail to materialize. Centrism is a zombie herd with marginal support. I don't even think party elites believe that Biden or Bloomberg or Buttigieg can somehow emerge from the pack and unite the party to defeat Trump.

I think before the primary is over we will witness the mainstream corporate media discard its "Never Trump" cheerleading for a 2020 red scare.

Bernie's Blowout Nevada Win and the Return of Russiagate

In the wake of Bernie's blowout win in Nevada, the Democratic primary contest is his to lose. Voters are climbing aboard the bandwagon.

The corporate press is not yet ready to concede. A line of argument that has started to appear, incredibly, is that Sanders, a politician of national stature for decades, has not been seriously vetted.

Also, Russiagate, which, remember, was spawned originally to obscure the DNC conspiracy to hobble Bernie's 2016 challenge to Hillary's anointing, has returned. Here, based on the Julian Barnes and Sydney Ember story, "Russia Is Said to Be Interfering to Aid Sanders in Democratic Primaries," is the long and short of it:

But some current and former officials expressed doubt that Russian officials think that Mr. Sanders has a hidden affinity for Moscow. Instead, they said that a Russian campaign to support Mr. Sanders might ultimately be aimed at aiding Mr. Trump. Moscow could potentially consider Mr. Sanders a weaker general election opponent for the president than a more moderate Democratic nominee, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The Washington Post first reported the briefing of the Sanders campaign. The campaign sought to pin the blame for the disclosure on the Trump administration, suggesting it was retribution for critical remarks Mr. Sanders had made about Mr. Grenell in 2018.

Russia also worked to support — or at least not harm — Mr. Sanders in 2016. Operatives at a Russian intelligence-backed troll factory were instructed to avoid attacking Mr. Sanders or Mr. Trump, according to the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, and an indictment he secured of 13 Russians working on the operation.

Both the indictment and Mr. Mueller’s report quoted internal documents from the Internet Research Agency ordering operatives to attack Hillary Clinton’s campaign. “Use any opportunity to criticize Hillary and the rest except for Sanders and Trump — we support them,” the document said.

Russian operatives used the troll factory in 2016 to pose on social media as Americans and sow divisions among already divisive issues like immigration, religion and race. It was one part of the Kremlin’s multipronged attack on the election that also included hackings of Democratic emails, payments to unsuspecting Americans to stage pro-Trump rallies in battleground states and at least one scouting trip to the United States in 2014.

It's a helpful rehash of what lies at the foundation of a huge part of American domestic politics the last four years. Thirteen people couldn't staff a city council campaign in a large U.S. city let alone have any sort of measurable impact on a multibillion dollar presidential campaign.

The whole "Putin Wants Bernie to Win" is a product manufactured by spooks -- no doubt with the intention of doing the oligarchs who run the country a solid -- designed to brake the runaway train that is Bernie 2020. I think voters will pay about as much attention to it as they do the oratory of Adam Schiff.

Shane Goldmacher thinks there is little chance that the corporate Dems will coalesce around a single candidate by Super Tuesday. I think he's correct. But I also think that there will be tremendous pressure placed on candidates after South Carolina to clear the field, particularly Biden, Buttigieg and Klobuchar. Additionally, starting now, the negative ads attacking Sanders are going to pop up everywhere.

Bloomberg Bombs in Las Vegas

The principal takeaway from last night's Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas is that billionaire Mike Bloomberg is a dud, plain and simple. Bloomberg was eviscerated from the get-go by Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, who rightly called attention to the close connection between Bloomberg and Trump in their predilection for atavistic misogyny. Bernie preceded Warren a few minutes earlier by blasting Bloomberg for overseeing many years of aggressive stop-and-frisk policing in New York City.

In responding, or, better yet, failing to respond, Bloomberg displayed a combination of patrician brittleness and spaced-out obliviousness. This isn't a candidate who will inspire voters.

The morning-after analysis is savage. Can Bloomberg recover and mount an effective Super Tuesday campaign? It's possible -- he'll get a chance to repair his performance with another debate in South Carolina -- but at this point he has lost the prestige press. Absent any real, organic support, it's going to be hard for Bloomberg to buy his way out of the hole that puts him in.

What became clear to me while watching last night's debate is that -- with the exception of the candidacies of Warren and Sanders -- the contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination are all iterations of the old Obama/Clinton neoliberal status quo. Buttigieg is a gay, white, charismaless version of Barack Obama; Amy Klobuchar is a poor man's Hillary Clinton; Joe Biden was Obama's VP; and Mike Bloomberg is a country-club Republican who has carpetbagged his way into the Democratic Party because he doesn't stand a chance in the new MAGA GOP, and he couldn't win as a third-party contender.

What all these candidates seem not to understand is that the Obama neoliberal status quo was not popular; in fact, it was so unpopular it elected Trump. That's why none of the old Obama status quo candidates have a good shot at beating Trump in a general election.

Elizabeth Warren will get a bounce out of her performance last night, but I think it's too little, too late.

Assuming there's no brake on Bernie's building momentum, the final question that must be answered is to what lengths is the Democratic National Committee willing to go to torpedo the nomination of Bernie Sanders.

Hard Ceilings for Bernie and Bloomberg

Today the latest NPR/PBS News Hour/Marist Poll shows Bernie Sanders topping the Democratic field with 31%. Bernie's closest competitor is Michael Bloomberg, 12 points south, with 19%. No surprise, The New York Times leads with Bloomberg's second-place finish (see Reid Epstein's "Michael Bloomberg Surges in Poll and Qualifies for Democratic Debate in Las Vegas").

The poll was conducted Thursday, February 13, through Sunday, February 16. If you were to ask me I'd say the holiday weekend saw last week's Bloomberg surge crest and recede. Liberal columnists like Charles Blow, Paul Krugman and Jamelle Bouie have teed off on Bloomberg's stop-and-frisk terror campaign as well as his embrace of the right-wing conspiracy theory that black people caused the 2008 financial crisis. On Sunday, The New York Times ran a lengthy expose on how the Bloomberg political octopus operates (see "Bloomberg’s Billions: How the Candidate Built an Empire of Influence" by Alexander Burns and Nicholas Kulish). Endorsing a racist, sexist billionaire might be palatable to a shameless clown like Thomas Friedman (see "Paging Michael Bloomberg"), but apparently it is something that doesn't pass the smell test -- yet -- for the smart set.

Good.

It is interesting that this morning's Nate Silver piece, "Does Sanders Have A Ceiling? Maybe. Can He Win Anyway? Yes.," appears the same time as the results of the Marist poll. Many corporate Democrats who dismiss Bernie do so with the statement that Bernie has a hard ceiling of 30%. Well, the Marist poll, though the sample size is not huge, offers proof that that might not be the case.

Silver has gone from being a Sanders skeptic to being bullish on Bernie. Though the FiveThirtyEight predictive model has reduced Sanders' chance of winning the nomination from 49% to 38%, to the point that Bernie is now basically in a dead heat with a brokered convention, Silver appears to be tacking in the direction of Bernie momentum.

It might be better to talk about hard ceilings for Bloomberg. Remember, he has to win 30% of the Super Tuesday delegates to be in a position to guarantee a brokered convention. It is hard to see how he gets there. Klobuchar, Buttigieg and Biden are likely to remain in the race through Super Tuesday. That clutters the ballot for Bloomberg. Plus, the more people hear about Bloomberg's record and his beliefs -- the guy is against the minimum wage! -- the harder it is going to be for him to break out of the low 20s. He needs more public intellectuals singing his praises and not just corrupt endorsements from pols.