[ Posted Tuesday, March 26th, 2019 – 16:43 UTC ]
Even though most of the political media refused to acknowledge it until after the fact, one big political issue emerged during the 2018 midterms that turned out to be a real winner for Democrats: protecting people's healthcare. This was really nothing more than a self-inflicted wound by the Republicans, since the voter backlash had been growing ever since the GOP tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with absolutely nothing. Democrats merely pointed this out in their campaigns, and the voters backed them overwhelmingly on the issue. And now it seems that Donald Trump is doubling down on this losing strategy in preparation for the 2020 campaign. Democrats, meanwhile, are moving forward on healthcare in a positive and constructive way, which paints the starkest of differences between the two parties' political attitudes, right at the start of the campaign season.
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[ Posted Friday, March 15th, 2019 – 18:03 UTC ]
President Donald Trump just got humiliated three times in the same week. By his own party. Could this be a trend? One would certainly like to think so, but that may be premature (or overly optimistic).
Of course, it's debatable whether Trump can even be humiliated, because it's tough to humiliate someone who does not know the meaning of the word humility. You can call Trump many things (and we often do), but "humble" certainly isn't one of them.
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[ Posted Friday, March 8th, 2019 – 19:06 UTC ]
President Donald Trump, as we all know, is a big fan of walls. Big, beautiful walls, according to him. But although he's never gotten Mexico to pony up a single peso for his border wall, and is still having trouble convincing Congress that it's the right thing to do, when future historians look back on this week, they might mark it as when Trump began constructing a metaphorical wall between his administration and Congress. Because the first big block of stone was just deposited on the White House lawn -- with 81 more big stone blocks waiting in the wings.
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[ Posted Monday, February 25th, 2019 – 18:58 UTC ]
Democrats are, if the political media is to be believed, in a soul-searching phase right now, deciding what exactly the party stands for and what they should run their next campaign on. They are deeply divided, the pundits tell us, between the "far left" and the pragmatists who don't want to win the primaries only to lose the general election. They can't even agree on which demographic will be the key one to delivering victory in 2020.
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[ Posted Tuesday, February 19th, 2019 – 18:19 UTC ]
Will American voters "feel the Bern" in 2020? We're soon going to find out the answer to that question, since Senator Bernie Sanders just announced he'll be making a second run for the Democratic presidential nomination. To mix a few pyrotechnical metaphors, Bernie certainly caught fire once, but the question is whether lightning will strike twice for him again.
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[ Posted Friday, February 15th, 2019 – 18:28 UTC ]
Emergency! Ahh! Everybody run!
Sigh. Well, here we are. Not only has Donald Trump become the first president to order the military to do essentially nothing just to make a political point (see: midterms 2018, border deployment), he has now become the first president to declare a national emergency because he made a political promise he just couldn't keep. He couldn't keep it because -- counter to his own self-portrayal as a dealmaking genius -- Donald Trump is such a terrible dealmaker that he couldn't even get a Republican Congress to give him what he wanted, for two whole years. And if that isn't a national emergency, then what is?
Let's just take a moment to quickly review how we got here. Donald Trump began his presidential campaign warning about the flood of evil brown people who were coming to rape and murder us all in our own beds. He boiled this down into one call-and-response phrase to use at his rallies:
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[ Posted Friday, February 8th, 2019 – 18:52 UTC ]
It's been an eventful week, with Trump's second State Of The Union speech and Virginia politics entering complete free-fall. Democrats in the House began work in earnest this week as well, on both the legislative and investigative fronts. Also, there are now some new Boondocks comics! So the week was anything but dull, although it was a bit disjointed.
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[ Posted Tuesday, February 5th, 2019 – 23:21 UTC ]
As usual, what follows are my own snap reactions to President Donald Trump's second State Of The Union speech (he's actually now given three such addresses to Congress, but the first one doesn't technically count as a State Of The Union speech). I write all of this before hearing or reading what other pundits thought, so I won't be influenced by any sort of groupthink about the speech.
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[ Posted Monday, January 14th, 2019 – 18:26 UTC ]
Today seems to be another day for speculating about the upcoming Democratic presidential primary race, and (more specifically) answering the question: "What do Democratic voters want to see in a 2020 presidential nominee?" Since there is no real news today on the government shutdown front, I thought I'd join in this speculation. My apologies to those who are in the "It's just too damn early to even think about" camp, in advance. If you're one of those, I'd suggest just skipping today's article altogether.
The easiest and best answer to the question, of course, is: "Someone who can beat Donald Trump." That is going to be the overwhelming and deeply-held consensus among Democratic voters this time around. Trump is seen as such a titanic disaster among the Democratic base that they'll be willing to forgive a lot if they feel their candidate has the best chance of defeating Trump, in other words.
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[ Posted Friday, January 11th, 2019 – 19:27 UTC ]
If our president is going crazy over a non-existent "emergency" at our southern border, could it be called "borderline insanity"? We're just asking....
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