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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Editor’s Corner

September 25: Nothing Wrong With the House That an End To Delusion Won’t Fix

We’re all going to be treated to an orgy of inside baseball over the weekend about the genesis of House Speaker John Boehner’s resignation, and lots of weepy stuff about his sacrifice in the national interest. Indeed, some hands are wringing over the terrible weakness of the contemporary Speakership, as though that is some hallowed Washington Institution.
Asked by Politico to comment on that dire possibility today, here’s what I said:

I’m afraid I have to challenge the premise of a Politico question again. The Boehner resignation didn’t show the demise of the Speakership, but its abiding strength. Think about it: Congress avoided (more than likely) a federal government shutdown; angry conservatives got a scalp; and Boehner himself got the clock ticking early on the one-year lobbying ban that’s the only thing standing between him and vast wealth. Everybody wins!

More fundamentally, the problems with the House since 2010 have less to do with the power or powerlessness of the Speaker than with the inability of certain Members–and the radicalized conservative movement they represent–to recognize the limitations of the House as an institution in an era of divided government. Many conservatives became furious at Boehner and the GOP Establishment for failing to keep promises they had no business making. If everybody stops pretending a House majority can tell a president of another party what to do, the House and the speakership will be healthier institutions.

To put it another way, the problem that led to Boehner’s resignation isn’t going away other than temporarily, even with a different personality holding the gavel. What’s required is an end to the ideological delusion that leads conservatives to believe they are destined to have their way.


September 24: Sometimes the Party Doesn’t Decide

This presidential nominating cycle, certainly on the Republican side, is not following any sort of rulebook. And so it’s inevitable the bible of the nominating process from a political science point of view is coming under fresh scrutiny, as I explained today at the Washington Monthly:

Regular readers know I enjoy expressing irreverent thoughts about The Party Decides, the 2008 tome by political scientists Marty Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel, and John Zaller that is often quoted like Holy Writ by academicians and even some journalists as the final work on presidential nominating contests. That’s not because I don’t respect the authors and the scholarship involved in this book, or doubt that it captures some important insights about the interplay of party elites, candidates and primary voters. It’s more that I think the small sample involved, the close cases treated as not so close at all, and above all, some of the simplistic interpretations being made of the data make the book and its expositors valuable but not definitive. Perhaps the most annoying thing about the usages of the book (I won’t attribute it to the authors) is the insistence on bean-counting elected official endorsements as the be-all and end-all of who’s where in the Invisible Primary and who’s going to win once voting begins. I know a lot of political practitioners, and none of them place that high a value on accumulating such endorsements unless they happen in an early primary or caucus state.
But now comes Vox‘s Andrew Prokop with a skilled deconstruction of the idea party elites control presidential nominations, which is obviously looking pretty dubious this year as three candidates virtually no elected officials or organized constituency groups are going to endorse–Donald Trump, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina–continue to dominate the field. Not only have party elites failed to get behind a single candidate; they have so far signally failed to veto a candidate they have clearly and mightily sought to destroy, namely Trump.
Prokop backtracks to earlier nomination contests and concludes the domination of party elites is mostly clear in cycles when the nominee was pretty obvious, and that voters may have independently played a stronger role than later acknowledged in breaking ties. The party as defined by elites did not, after all, “decide” the Democratic nomination in 2004 and 2008, and arguably not the 2008 GOP nomination either. And there have been a significant number of cases–the 1984 Hart challenge to Mondale, the 2000 Bradley challenge to Gore, and even the 2012 Santorum challenge to Romney–where some relatively small changes in single-state primary outcomes might have changed everything, regardless of what “the establishment” wanted.
In defense of the “party decider” faction, they do generally adopt a definition of “elites” that’s broader than what journalists tend to assume; they include organized constituency and ideological groups like the antichoicers and the Club for Growth on the Republican side and unions on the Democratic side. And it’s possible their basic theories will be confirmed by this year’s Democratic contest, where Hillary Clinton is rolling up indicia of elite support rare for a non-incumbent, or even the GOP contest, where a late decision by elites to get behind a single candidate like Rubio or Bush could still have a big impact.

But it doesn’t look like one of those years where any analyst, academic or journalistic, ought to feel very smug in making predictions.


September 18: Sorry, GOP Elites, the “Trump Fever” Hasn’t Broken Yet

A lot of the hype over Carly Fiorina’s performance at the CNN Republican presidential debate on Wednesday night was emanating from Republican elites frantic for anyone or anything to end Donald Trump’s momentum. So there’s been a palpable sense of anticipation of data to show that, as one Politico article this morning put it, the “Trump fever has broken.”
Well, the first poll is in, and it is helpfully limited to people who actually watched the debate. I discussed the results at <Washington Monthly today:

[T]here now is some “new data,” but it’s not going to much cheer the Trump-hating Republican Establishment.

Former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina won Wednesday’s second Republican presidential debate, according to voters who watched the Simi Valley showdown polled by Morning Consult.
It was a performance that vaulted Fiorina into the top tier of a crowded field. A plurality of 29 percent of registered voters who watched the debate said Fiorina won, just higher than the 24 percent who said real estate mogul Donald Trump came out on top. Seven percent said retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson won the debate, while 6 percent each chose former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).

But here’s the catch:

Trump continues to lead the Republican primary field. Thirty-six percent of registered voters who watched the debate said they would choose Trump, compared with 12 percent for Carson and 10 percent for Fiorina. Rubio placed fourth, at 9 percent, followed by 7 percent for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and 6 percent for Bush and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R).

So Carly’s boom really just means that now 58% of respondents support a candidate with zero experience in public office. And that’s among the people who actually watched the supposedly Trump-destroying debate.
We’ll see what later polls say, but for the present the idea things are about to return to normal and voters will sagely choose between “real candidates” Bush and Rubio and Kasich looks no closer to reality than before.

Nice work, RNC.


September 17: The CNN Debate: Much Ado About Very Little

Last night I live-blogged that endless GOP presidential debate at the Washington Monthly, and then had to make sense of it all in a column for TPMCafe, wherein I concluded the main event left things essentially where they had been with perhaps Fiorina replacing Carson as the red-hot outsider:

Like a really brutal boxing match between equals, the CNN Republican presidential debate was long and bloody and not terribly conclusive.
For the second time in two debates, the moderators had a big impact. But while the Fox debate revolved around a network decision to demolish (or at least rein in) one candidate — Donald Trump — the CNN debate was skewed heavily by a format that began nearly every question with a quote from one candidate about another, and then allowed follow-up by the candidate quoted. This naturally favored the more combative and quote-worthy candidates, and also guaranteed another Trump-heavy debate.
The candidates who had been on the receiving end of the most errant Trump snarks — about Fiorina’s experience and Jeb’s wife — had a great opportunity to make hay, and Fiorina took full advantage of it.
Her deftly delivered line about women hearing exactly what he said after he tried to spin it away (which managed also to underline a criticism Trump had made of Jeb Bush for dissing women’s health care services) was the line of the night, and was probably only partly offset by the back-and-forth with Trump about her, er, ah, interesting business career. I couldn’t really tell whether Fiorina’s rapid-fire detail on national security issues came across as showing her policy chops or mixing up a word salad.
Beyond that, the constant opportunities to get drawn into murky and divisive sniping made it difficult to name “winners.” The losers were mostly the poor schlubs — Huckabee, Paul, and to some extent Walker — who apparently hadn’t criticized other candidates enough to get equal air time.
But then there was Ben Carson, the candidate who came into the debate with a big upward arrow next to his name.
On the positive side, he managed to get through the debate without so much as once saying the words “political correctness” or muttering darkly about Alinskyites destroying the country. Indeed, the only discussion involving him and conspiracy theories cast him as the defender of traditional medicine against the vaccinations-cause-autism people. On the other hand, he almost certainly hurt himself with his conservative following by confirming and then defending the rather shocking news that he advised George W. Bush in the days after 9/11 to try diplomacy rather than war. Another low moment for Carson was Trump having to remind him that progressive taxation was not some sort of new-fangled “socialist” idea.
The rest of the candidates were largely up and down. People who aren’t tired of the patented Rubio Second-Generation rap or the Cruz I’ll-Fight-For-You rap may have been impressed by those two, who are simply good public speakers (though I wonder who advised Rubio to rant about our “left-wing government” and “The Left” so much). Jeb Bush probably thrilled people who like him already, and annoyed people who don’t; his spirited defense of his brother’s Iraq policies just reminds people of W.’s worst moments and his own confusion over them.
Above all, I don’t think this debate did much to solve any of the Republican Party’s problems. Did it “take down” Donald Trump, as so many hoped? I don’t think so, despite the bountiful opportunities the other candidates — at the earlier “J.V.” debate, where the first four questions were about Trump, as at the main event — had to do so. Did it “winnow” the field? Nobody did that badly, and the candidates with the least steam, like Mike Huckabee, are already committed to a living-off-the-land county-by-county effort in Iowa. Did the “uprising” on behalf of “outsider” candidates with dubious qualifications abate? Probably not; whatever ground Carson lost was probably gained not by the “experienced” pols but by Fiorina, whose background remains a real time bomb that only Trump has tried to exploit.
Should the “outsiders” fade, moreover, this debate did little to help build an “Establishment” consensus behind a candidate prepared to move into the lead just as people start voting. Indeed, an Establishment candidate long left for dead, Chris Christie, may have revived his extremely limited prospects with a good performance tonight. So the long slugfest may have resolved nothing.

Meanwhile, the clock keeps ticking on the now-mature Invisible Primary, and as the days get shorter the initiation of the real thing in Iowa gets closer. Better get it in gear, GOP party elites, if you want to clean up this mess.


September 11: Bernie and Barbara and Mary and Joe

As part of my regular effort to tamp down any unnecessary talk about “struggles for the soul of the Democratic Party,” I’d recommend a Nate Silver piece at FiveThirtyEight that scolds journalists who lazily lump together Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders as fellow “populists” fighting together against their parties’ elites. Here’s what I had to say about it today at the Washington Monthly:

As part of his argument, Nate put up a chart showing the percentages in which Bernie Sanders voted with selected Senate Democrats in the last full Congress. The colleague with which Sanders agreed most was Barbara Boxer at 96.2%. No surprise there. But not far behind Boxer on the Bernieriffic scale were a couple of famously “centrist” senators, Cory Booker (95.8%) and Maria Cantwell (95.8%), both of whom have probably been called corporate whores by a lot of Sanders supporters on more than one occasion. Meanwhile, the Donkey Party colleagues with which Bernie agreed least often include a virtual rogue’s gallery of New Democrats or even Conservadems. But you know what? Sanders voted with Joe Manchin 82% of the time; with Max Baucus and David Pryor 87% of the time; and with Joe Donnelly, Kay Hagan and Mary Landrieu 90% of the time. In three of these cases, moreover, these senators were running unsuccessfully for reelection in red states in a bad midterm cycle, presumably moving them far to the right.
Nate contrasts this relatively high level of party solidarity shown by Sanders to Trump’s adoption of wildly heterodox positions and his apparent hatred for his own party. I’d say it shows for the umpteenth time that despite more tolerance for ideological dissent the Democratic Party has less to fight over than you’d think.
Yes, I know, all Senate votes are not equal, and yes, most of the really vicious intra-Republican fights are over strategy and tactics (e.g., the Defunding Planned Parenthood and Obamacare brouhahas) rather than matters of principle or even policy. But all in all, Democrats do not look like a party coming apart at the seams even with the hourly reports that they are in a panic over Hillary Clinton’s standing in selective states vis a vis Sanders, Biden (the non-candidate enjoying an imaginary boom), or any Republican you can name.

The Democratic Party remains a pretty robust coalition.


September 9: Are Super-PACs Backfiring?

One of the perennial topics of this election cycle so far is the role of Super-PACs, those vehicles for really large donors that some presidential candidates are relying on heavily, especially on the Republican side of the barricades. I wrote about some concerns involving these beasts today at the Washington Monthly:

At the Atlantic Molly Ball poses a provocative question: will that super-weapon of contemporary politics, the Super-PAC, wind up being a lot more trouble that it’s worth to candidates who cannot even talk to the strategists and operatives deployed to “their” Super-PACs?
Ball focuses on the prohibition on “coordination” as the key problem with Super-PACs. I dunno. For one thing, I have a hard time imagining a serious presidential campaign going up in flames because of a “rule” no one other than the toothless Federal Election Commission is in a position to enforce. For another, the candidates were all free to coordinate with Super-PACs to their hearts’ desire before officially declaring (this was supposedly why some of them, especially Jeb Bush, waited so long to announce) their bids. Wouldn’t you figure Mike Murphy of Right to Rise worked out a daily operational plan with Jeb running right up to the Convention, with four or five variables factored in to account for what happens along the way?
Now it’s true that such advance planning probably did not anticipate an early Invisible Primary dominated by Donald J. Trump. And indeed, the signs of trouble in Bushworld Ball mentions all involve how the candidate and the Super-PAC are dealing, or failing to deal, with The Donald. Trump’s emergence, moreover, has had a huge ripple effect on all the rival campaigns, not just those from whom he has presumably won poll respondents, but even the bottom-feeders who see no reason to give up since the presumed front-runners are down there with them messing around in the single digits as well.
But it’s way too early to pass judgment on Super-PACs as a group. For all I know, some monster of a Super-PAC not tied to any candidate may be building up a plan and a war chest as we speak to go totally medieval on Trump on the fairly reasonable assumption that no one, not even Jesus Christ, could survive a sustained and vicious negative ad barrage with an unlimited budget. And partisan Super-PACs will presumably play a big role in the general election, especially on the GOP side, when the strategic decisions such entities must make are a lot less complicated…..
I don’t think we should spend too much time wondering if Mike Murphy is weeping with frustration as he looks at his silent cell phone and realizes once again the Jeb’s not going to call.

As with so many other aspects of politics, we’ll have to wait until it’s all over to see if this is a cycle that breaks the mold or one that shows the CW can survive momentary craziness.


September 4: A Plan for a Counter-Revolution at SCOTUS

Are you one of those Democrats who don’t think it ultimately matters that much who wins the 2016 presidential contest, especially if someone you consider a corporate lackey wins the Democratic nomination? You really, really need to pay attention to Republicans plans for the Supreme Court, which encompass vast economic as well and social and civil rights issues. I discussed one very prominent conservative blueprint for remaking America via SCOTUS at Washington Monthly today:

I really do appreciate the efforts of Constitutional Conservative legal beagles Randy Barnett of Georgetown and Josh Blackman of South Texas College of Law in laying out in some detail–and not in a legal journal but in the Weekly Standard–rules for examining future Republican Supreme Court appointments. It’s not just a litmus test in the making–which presidential candidates in both parties typically say they do not want to administer–but a rationale for a litmus test. And their piece has the advantage of being very clear on the key points.
To Barnett and Blackman, who first discuss the notorious history of Republican SCOTUS appointments they view as betrayals, the big thing is that prospective Justices have a clearly documented willingness to ignore both other branches of government–the principle behind the receding Republican doctrine of “judicial restraint”–and stare decisis–the principle against overturning well-settled Court precedent–in pursuit of the “original” meaning of the Constitution. That means treating SCOTUS as an all-powerful institution communing with eighteenth century Founders–or worse yet, Con Con mythologies about those Founders–and empowered to kill many decades of decisions by all three branches of government, precedent and democracy be damned. No wonder they talk repeatedly about needing Justices–and presidents–with courage! And the dividing line between good and bad “conservative” Justices could not be made much clearer: Alito goooood! Roberts baaaaaad! Barnett and Blackman even suggest their rules should be made clear to and then demanded by presidential primary voters!
If that actually starts happening, it will be as or even more important to watch as any other discussions of any other issues. As Brian Beutler recently noted in an important piece at TNR, Barnett and Blackman are among other things leading advocates for a return to the Lochner era of jurisprudence, whereby most regulations of private economic activity by the executive or legislative branches would be declared unconstitutional as an abridgement of “natural law” concepts in the original Constitution and an exotic understanding of the due process clauses in the 5th and 14th amendments. These are dangerous people to let anywhere near a Supreme Court nomination. But they and many others like them, who now play a dominant role in the very powerful conservative legal fraternity the Federalist Society, are likely to be right there with their litmus test in hand.

Think about that before uttering any “not a dime’s worth of difference” assessments this year.


September 2: Behind the Friendly Face of Dr. Ben Carson

It’s time to take a really good look at Dr. Ben Carson, as I noted today at Washington Monthly:

Now that Ben Carson is all the rage in the GOP presidential nominating contest, sharing the spotlight with Donald Trump without a trace of the negative vibes The Donald brings to the table, I figure my little hobby of trying to understand what the man means with his incessant references to “political correctness” is becoming a public utility…
One of my exhibits for describing Carson as a “wingnut with a calm bedside manner” was his reference in the Fox News GOP presidential debate to Hillary Clinton as a denizen of the “progressive movement” who was following “the Alinsky Model” for destroying the country. Even as they declared him the winner or one of the winners of the debate, MSM observers slid right over the ravings about Alinsky as though they couldn’t hear The Crazy or, more likely, didn’t understand what he was talking about. That sure as hell was not the case with right-wing media, who heard the dog-whistle loud and clear. Indeed, at National Review, John Fund even called it that:

The award so far in this Republican debate for dog-whistle rhetoric goes to Ben Carson. He answered a a question about Hillary Clinton by referring to her belief in “the Alinsky model,” a topic of great interest in the conservative blogosphere.
Named after Saul Alinksy, the late community organizer who inspired both Hillary and Barack Obama, the model calls for destabilizing the existing system from the inside and paving the way for radical social change.
Despite his mild manner and soft voice, it may be that Ben Carson is the candidate on tonight’s stage who is privately the most deeply ideological.

According to people like Carson, a big part of the Alinsky Model is “political correctness:” disarming opponents by deriding their utterances as small-minded and offensive…. [H]ere’s a fine description of the core idea in a Tea Party take on Carson’s well-received 2014 CPAC speech:

Dr. Carson says that the good news is that the majority of people in this country have common sense, but the problem is that they’ve been “beaten into submission by the PC (political-correctness) policemen,” which has kept people from speaking up about what they believe.
To thunderous applause, Dr. Carson revealed one of Saul Alinsky’s (author of leftist bible, Rules for Radicals) more deceptive tactics that he taught to his progressive, Marxist followers:
“One of the principles of Saul Alinsky, he said you make the majority believe that what they think is outdated and nobody thinks that way, and that the way they think is the only way intelligent people think. And if you can co-opt the media in the process, you’re far ahead of the game. That’s exactly what’s happened, and it’s time for people to stand up and proclaim what they believe and stop being bullied!

So every time Carson denounces “political correctness,” which he does in just about every other sentence, that’s what he’s talking about: a conspiracy by “progressives” to suppress common-sense (i.e., hard-core conservative) “solutions” by pitting people against each other through talk about race, gender, income inequality, etc. etc. In Carson’s heavily Glenn-Beckish worldview, all his talk about “unity” and “civility” means the kind of country we can have once the snakes (i.e., you and me and HRC) have been thrown out of Eden.

It would be nice if political reporters would play closer attention.


August 28: Jimmy Carter’s Forgotten Fight for Voting Rights

On this 50th anniversary year of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Democrats are remembering that epic development and the protests and sacrifices that produced it, even as they intensify efforts to defend and restore voting rights under attack today. But we sometimes forget battlefronts in this fight that occurred between then and now.
In honor of Jimmy Carter’s current condition at death’s door, journalist and historian Rick Perlstein wrote a powerful column at the Washington Spectator reminding us that the 39th president launched a major push for expanded voting rights back in 1977. Carter aimed at goals we have yet to achieve, thanks to a conservative counter-revolution–still underway today–against what had been a bipartisan effort to vindicate everyone’s right to vote.

Everyone loved to talk about voter apathy, but the real problem, Carter said, was that “millions of Americans are prevented or discouraged from voting in every election by antiquated and overly restricted voter registration laws”–a fact proven, he pointed out, by record rates of participation in 1976 in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and North Dakota, where voters were allowed to register on election day. So he proposed that election-day registration be adopted universally, tempering concerns that such measures might increase opportunities for fraud by also proposing five years in prison and a $10,000 fine as penalties for electoral fraud.
He asked Congress to allot up to $25 million in aid to states to help them comply, and for the current system of federal matching funds for presidential candidates to be expanded to congressional elections. He suggested reforming a loophole in the matching-fund law that disadvantaged candidates competing with rich opponents who funded their campaigns themselves, and revising the Hatch Act to allow federal employees “not in sensitive positions,” and when not on the job, the same rights of political participation as everyone else.
Finally, and most radically, he recommended that Congress adopt a constitutional amendment to do away with the Electoral College–under which, three times in our history (four times if you count George W. Bush 23 years later), a candidate who received fewer votes than his opponent went on to become president–in favor of popular election of presidents. It was one of the broadest political reform packages ever proposed.
It was immediately embraced. Legislators from both parties stood together at a news briefing to endorse all or part of it. Two Republican senators and two Republican representatives stepped forward to cosponsor the universal registration bill; William Brock, chairman of the Republican National Committee, called it “a Republican concept.” Senate Minority Leader Howard Baker announced his support, and suggested going even further: making election day a national holiday and keeping polls open 24 hours. House Minority Leader John Rhodes, a conservative disciple of Barry Goldwater, predicted it would pass “in substantially the same form with a lot of Republican support, including my own.”

But then the conservative movement, led by Carter’s eventual successor, Ronald Reagan, struck back with every weapon at its disposal, including the Senate filibuster, and stopped the initiative, after polarizing Republicans against it. And under the lash of the conservative movement, Republicans have been at the very best fair-weather friends of voting rights ever since, before becoming outright enemies during the Obama administration.
As Perstein notes, Carter is more concerned about voting rights than ever:

This spring, when only those closest to him knew of his illness, Jimmy Carter made news on Thom Hartmann’s radio program when he returned to the question of democracy reform. In 1977, he had pledged “to work toward an electoral process which is open to the participation of all our citizens, which meets high ethical standards, and operates in an efficient and responsive manner.” In 2015, he was still at it.
He declared our electoral system a violation of “the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president.”

It’s no time to give up the fight.


August 26: Let’s Don’t Drag the Vice President Into the 2016 Presidential Contest

I don’t know about you, but the runaway talk about Joe Biden being on the brink of running for president in response to the demands of a “panicked” Democratic Party are making me a little crazy. I rebelled against the meme today at TPMCafe.

All this speculation is second- or third-hand and unsourced, with the exception of a few quotes from famed media manipulator Dick Harpootlian of South Carolina. The meeting between Biden and Warren–between the president of the Senate and a senator, to put it another way–could have been about anything or nothing. There are zero indications Warren’s fans are the least bit interested in Biden; they are mostly already signed up to ride with Bernie Sanders, and probably remember Biden was on the wrong side in the battle over bankruptcy “reform” that really launched Warren’s national career.
And of course the White House spokesman, when pressed, is going to say nice things about the number two figure in the administration. For that matter, why should Joe Biden go out of his way to make a Sherman Statement disclaiming any interest in a presidential run five months before a single vote is cast?
So much for the supply side of the equation. What about the demand side?
Notwithstanding attributions of “panic,” and despite heavy, heavy negative press for months now, Hillary Clinton is maintaining a lead over all potential Republican nominees in the RealClearPolitics polling averages. In the last national poll to be released, from CNN/ORC, she led Bush by nine points, Fiorina by ten points, and Walker and Trump by six points. In the Democratic nomination contest, she’s leading Sanders nationally two-to-one, even though pollsters are choosing to muddy the waters by including Biden in the surveys, and is leading Bernie in every state other than (in some polls) New Hampshire. Biden’s running a weak third at around 12 percent. Having run twice before and failed dismally twice before, amid signs he did not or could not raise the kind of money needed for a serious candidacy, he’s not exactly a natural magnet for moneyed or tenured elites, either.
The more you look at the Biden bandwagon, it looks more like a ghost ship being pulled through the mist by a combination of hungry political reporters, Hillary haters (including most of the conservative media), and Delaware-based Friends of Joe who, of course, would love to see him run. Plus there’s Harpootlian!
Now as Michael Tomasky pointed out this week, Biden (with or without Warren) as a fallback contingency for the Democratic Party in case all the fears about HRC actually do materialize is one thing. Leaping into the race now would be not a rescue, but a demolition mission. For starters, it would be received bitterly by the many Democratic women who figured HRC’s final assault on the political glass ceiling was a natural follow-up to Obama’s historic presidency. And worse yet, it’s hard to imagine Biden would have any compelling rationale for a candidacy that did not depend on feeding MSM and GOP attacks on her character.
To the extent that there are some voices Biden listens to on this matter, whether it’s Obama’s or vox populi, let’s hope they are telling him to stay well to this side of the failsafe point no matter how many reports pop up at Politico flattering him on his prospects. Should HRC’s candidacy crash and burn before Iowa, let the party as a whole sort it out and choose its own rescuer. If Bernie Sanders defeats her in the Caucuses and primaries, let him reap the rewards of his own remarkable campaign. And more likely, if Clinton can overcome the obstacles before her, real and imaginary, the last thing Democrats need is some deus ex machina lurching onto the stage at a crucial moment. Let the Republicans enjoy all the drama.

By all credible accounts, the Vice President is still mourning the death of his son Beau. He should be allowed to take his time, instead of being dragged into an unnecessary and potentially destructive presidential race.