Continuing yesterday's theme of looking back precisely eight years to July of 2015, I came across this article (with a bunch of photos I took!) from one of the first Bernie Sanders rallies of his 2016 campaign. While we all know the outcome -- Bernie eventually lost to Hillary Clinton -- the excitement that was present at the beginning was not just palpable but almost overwhelming. At this point in time, very few people even knew who Bernie Sanders was. His ideas had not yet moved the entire Democratic Party's Overton window into a far more progressive place. Bernie was an upstart, seen by the media as no more than a curiosity. But when political historians assess the time period in the future, I am confident that Bernie Sanders will be given a lot of credit for effecting real change in the direction of American politics. And I was there to witness it, almost at its very start. So enjoy this look back, as I believe this was the first time I ever used the phrase "feel the Bern" in my writing.

Originally published July 22, 2015

Yes, it's true. This past weekend, I joined 11,000 other people in Phoenix to "feel the Bern," as the supporters of Bernie Sanders would put it. Sanders held a rally in the city immediately after the Netroots Nation conference concluded, which made it pretty easy for me to attend (and take a few photos). Netroots routinely draws a crowd of around 3,000, so even if everyone from the conference went to the Bernie rally (actually, not everyone did), the conference crowd could only roughly have been about a quarter of the people there to see Bernie. The rest were locals from a very red state. All there to feel the Bern, as it were.

All photographs © Chris Weigant 2015

This applied to both young and old. Since I got there a bit early, I was able to circulate among the people streaming in to see Sanders. I saw a child working on his own "Feel The Bern!" sign, and talked to a woman who told me Sanders was only the second "real" politician she had ever been excited about (the first being Eugene McCarthy).

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I am on vacation all week, and to start off this series of re-runs I just went back to July of 2015 to see where the presidential race was going, at this point eight years ago. This was pretty much the point where everyone had to stop treating Donald Trump as a joke. Which is what the following admits, although I have to admit that thinking the even-more unthinkable ("President Trump") was beyond me, at the time.

Originally published July 29, 2015

It's time to think about what has previously been in the realm of the unthinkable: Donald Trump might just become the Republican nominee for president. Two months ago, that statement would have elicited nothing but a big old belly laugh from just about anyone who pays any attention to politics. Nowadays, though, nobody's laughing. The very concept has moved from the surreal to the possible. So it's time to actually think about what it would mean for the country and for the Republican Party.

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Due to houseguests arriving unexpectedly early, I regret to announce that there will be no new columns here all week long. I am going to try to spend some time tomorrow setting up re-run columns for the rest of the week (so the site won't be entirely dark), but my original plan of posting today and tomorrow is now no longer operational. Have a great summer week, everyone, and rest assured I will be doing so as well! New columns will resume next Monday.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant

The nation celebrated its 247th birthday this year, leaving only three more to go until the second-biggest celebration of our lifetime (as we still personally remember the ushering in the bicentennial in Washington D.C.). But since it was a short week, what with Independence Day falling on a Tuesday, we are hoping this will be a short column (for once). Well, short-ish at any rate. We are cautiously optimistic.

Cautious optimism is a good place to start, actually. We stumbled across an interesting paper from two Democratic strategists (Celinda Lake and Mike Lux) which confidently states: "All the elements are in place for a big Democratic victory in 2024," and predicts that the "trifecta" of winning the House back, holding the Senate and keeping Joe Biden in the White House is well within grasp.

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Because it is a slow political news week (and for the salacious nature of it all), the mainstream media is currently digging into every aspect of the "Cocaine Found At White House" story. News articles are being written summarizing all possible past rumors or actual instances of drug use at the White House. My favorite came at the end of a Washington Post article on this theme, under the heading: "Rocker Grace Slick." But I found their rundown of what happened awfully sparse, so as a public service today I am going to run an extended excerpt from Grace Slick's autobiography Somebody To Love, of which (of course) I have my own copy (signed and personalized, even...).

Anyway, this all comes from Chapter 29, and uses the same title as the chapter. Enjoy....

[Context note: "Grace Wing" is Grace Slick's birth name]

-- Chris Weigant

Dosing Tricky Dick

Another grandiose "Get Nixon" idea we came up with was the "Let's Dose Dickie" trick. That one wasn't carried through to conclusion either, which was probably fortunate since the repercussions might have been more than we bargained for. But the planning stages were pretty exciting.

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It has long been a Hollywood maxim: "There is no such thing as bad press." To movie stars, it doesn't really matter why you get your name in the papers, because it puts your name in front of the public, whether for good or bad. The worst tragedy for a Hollywood star is being forgotten by the public, to put this another way. So it doesn't matter what gets you in the news -- a scandal, a real stinkeroo of a movie, whatever -- it reminds everyone who you are and creates the magical "buzz," which means you stand a higher chance of getting better roles in the future.

We seem now to have reached the point where this maxim is true in politics as well, at least for some people. News that would previously have been not just bad but downright disqualifying in the past now boosts your name recognition and actually builds support among your party's base. This is becoming more and more frequent in the age of Trump, as more and more politicians learn how to capitalize on the phenomenon.

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Program Note: For the next two weeks, I will be on semi-vacation. Or "two vacations," really. The first of these starts today and will continue tomorrow during our national holiday. So I will be re-running columns to start this week, but then I'll be back for the end of the week as usual. Next week, I may (or may not) get a column out on Monday and/or Tuesday (we'll see how things go), but then after that point it'll be re-run columns for the rest of the week. By Monday the 17th, everything will return to normal and new columns will appear with regularity once again. I apologize in advance for the gaps in service.

Today's column was (obviously) written to be run yesterday, July 2nd. However, since the 2nd fell on a Sunday this year, I thought it'd be a good bridge column between the weekend and the actual Fourth of July. In any case, enjoy, and have fun celebrating our independence no matter which actual day you decide to celebrate it on.

Originally published July 2, 2012

Happy Second of July, everyone! Happy Independence Day!

Now, you may be thinking: "Has Chris gone bonkers? Why is he jumping the gun, two days early?" The answers to these important queries are: No, Chris has not gone any more bonkers than usual; and, in fact, the rest of you are celebrating a fictitious event on a fictitious anniversary date. So there.

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It is "Supreme Court Decision Week" in the world of politics, and while a few earlier SCOTUS decisions of this term turned out surprisingly liberal, the court saved its most radically-restrictive rulings for the very end. Three big rulings this week will have the effect of: (1) removing race from college admissions processes and all but killing affirmative action, (2) halting President Joe Biden's student loan forgiveness program before it starts, and (3) making it allowable -- as long as you cite religious reasons -- for businesses to discriminate against and refuse to serve gay people. This was a pretty grim end to the court's legal term, obviously.

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Will the public see any meaningful debates during the 2024 presidential election cycle? That is an open question at this point. By "meaningful," I mean a primary debate with at least one of the frontrunners for the two major parties' nominations on the stage, or a general election debate between the two parties' nominees. Right now, there is no guarantee any of this will happen.

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President Joe Biden launched an interesting campaign strategy today -- one that wouldn't be all that remarkable for a Republican, but one that has proven somewhat tough for Democratic presidents to manage. He is going to take credit for the economy and make it a centerpiece of his efforts to convince the American electorate to give him four more years in office. And he's not doing this by halves, either, he is jumping in with both feet by embracing the term: "Bidenomics."

I have no idea how effective this will be out on the campaign trail, but it certainly is refreshing to see a Democrat at least make the attempt. Democrats generally shy away from bragging about the economy, because they are always perpetually worried about people whose situations haven't improved thinking they are "out of touch." This leads to being overly shy and too cautious about touting anything good that has been happening. Biden is looking to break out of this mold and completely own the economy, for better or for worse.

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