The NYTimes is reporting what all of us can just imagine, that Biden is pissed about his long term allies abandoning him after long years of loyal public service.  He’s still isolating at his Delaware beach home, trying to get over yet another case of Covid as his campaign crumbles around his ears.  What’s happening is tragic, and most certainly not fair to Biden, especially after the events of 2016.  2016?  Read on.

I find it pretty rich that the very people who are whining and hissing through gnashed teeth about the calls for Biden to step aside in 2024 are the very ones who gleefully celebrated pushing him aside during the 2016 election because it was Hillary’s “turn”.  It was unfair, unwise, and strategic blunder.  Pushing Hillary in front of Biden is the precise reason that TFG is even around today.  Let’s review: Immediately after the 2012 election, Obama handed Hillary the keys to the DNC.  She immediately fired all of the senior staff, installed her loyalists, including Debbie Wasserman Schultz, unwound all the reforms that Obama had put in place, and began building a huge wall of money to keep out all other viable candidates before the primaries even started.  Those efforts were aimed directly at Biden to push him aside and keep other candidates like Bernie at arm’s length.  How?  I’ll tell you how.

The Joint Fundraising Agreement Hillary forced onto the DNC in 2015 was actually a giant money laundering operation that washed money from donations to state parties through the DNC and then immediately to her campaign coffers.  That kept the DNC and state parties starving for money and all of the control in Brooklyn, not in DC.  DNC staff had to run EVERYTHING by Brooklyn, including hiring, press releases, primary process, EVERYTHING. The result was that a candidate, who had not even been nominated yet, was in total control of the primary process.  Another irony is that all of this was discovered through WikiLeaks’ leaking of DNC emails which marked  the trail that Donna Brazile later followed to get to the bottom of the corruption.  The public scandal was “Hillary’s emails;” the actual scandal was Hillary’s complete control of the DNC and rigged primary process fully ONE YEAR before she won the nomination.

Mad about Biden now?  Blame Hillary.  And those who supported her.  The Queen of Coasting blew it by pushing Biden to the curb, and not taking TFG seriously, and not campaigning in battleground states when she desperately needed to as she started slipping in the polls.  Add her incompetence to meddling by the Russians, Clinton Foundation scandals, and the ridiculous “Hillary’s emails” scandal, and you get the disaster we all witnessed live on national television.  Hillary was clearly qualified to be president, but as I’ve said many times before, a TERRIBLE candidate and incompetent manager.  Oh, and one last thing; Biden didn’t pull out of the 2016 campaign because his son Beau died; that was a diversion.  Biden bowed out because Hillary boxed him out with Obama’s assistance.  Those are the facts.

So, while you’re all pissed off about Biden being treated unfairly in 2024, remember that you probably supported him being treated REALLY unfairly in 2015.  And, in 2015, he was a vibrant well conditioned, fast on his feet 72 year old.  The tragedy is that, but for Hillary’s corruption and mismanagement, added to Obama’s benign neglect of the DNC, Trump would still be playing golf and losing money while putting his name on cheesy buildings in Asia rather than getting ready to waltz back into the White House in 2024.

So, get over yourself and read the objective numbers.  It’s a cold hard truth, but the 2024 election is already lost unless Dem leaders move quickly and decisively.  After all, they’re 4 years behind, and they’ve got three months to have any chance of pulling this out.

Joe Biden has never been afraid of getting out in front of his party, or even his boss when he was VP.  After all, we have Biden to thank for dragging Obama over the line on marriage equality when it counted, and he’s also done it on assault weapons, troop support, healthcare, and other key issues.  He’s doing it again by shaking up the 2024 primary season, and that shake up is long past due.  The most controversial elements of the schedule is pushing South Carolina to the front, and relegating Iowa farther down the line.  New Hampshire would share the second night with Nevada.  Not surprisingly, Iowa and New Hampshire are pissed.

I happen to agree with Biden 100% in this change.  First let’s look at the obvious – diversity.  Iowa and NH are two of the whitest and most rural states in the US.  Iowa is 90% white.  NH is 87% white and packed with libertarian gun crazies.  After all, their state motto is Live Free or Die, which is not exactly comforting or consensus building.  Ignoring all other factors, the demographics alone disqualify these states as leaders, period. But it gets worse. In the last 12 primaries, Iowa chose a candidate who didn’t eventually win the nomination 4 times.  In 1976, in fact, Uncommitted beat Jimmy Carter by 10 points. In those same historic primaries, NH picked the wrong candidate 5 times.  To me, though, the death blow for Iowa happened in 2020 when it took them THREE WEEKS to announce the results, and that delay managed to pick…wait for it…Pete Buttigieg.  Biden placed fourth.  The Iowa caucuses can best be described with the words SHIT SHOW and have caused the state to lose all claims to being first in the primary/caucus season.

The rest of Biden’s plan is to push very important states to the front – South Carolina, then adding Nevada to the second week along with NH.  Those states will be followed by Georgia and then Michigan to round out the early states.  This plan makes a lot of sense as it brings demographic diversity, geographic diversity, and battleground states into the early results which will hopefully bring candidates with the broadest appeal to the front sooner.  This is a welcome change that has a number of advantages, not the least of which is motivating more people to participate.   I won’t be surprised, though, if the calcified leadership of the DNC kills it, once again snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

The DNC is now considering what to do about Iowa in terms of where it sits in the order of presidential primaries, since it is traditionally first to go in the presidential race every 4 years.  My opinion?  Dump it.  The unmitigated shitshow of 2020’s caucuses should be the nail in the coffin of Number One Primary, but it goes beyond that.  Iowa voters are not predictive of a winner; its population is older, more rural, and generally less informed than many other states. As an aside, I even question the importance of New Hampshire, but whatever, let’s dump on Iowa tonight.  I’ve got an idea, how about we start out with Super Tuesday and just go from there?

There’s also other upsides to dumping Iowa; no more stupid steak fries, corn on the cob roasts, butter cow sculpture contests, and hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on bus rentals going from VFW hall to VFW hall to press the flesh of octogenarians.  On top of that, the Iowa Dems can’t even manage implementing a Goddam iPad app, hence 2020’s disaster.  In short, fuck those hayseeds.  Go to the back of the line; sit down, shut up. Eat your corn.

Not that I’m opinionated.  Or worn out.  Or just sick of hearing about Iowa.  Rant over, good night.

Last night, CNN persisted with their silly lightning round “debate” format encouraging 0% candidates to attack the few actual serious candidates.  Whoever thought that was a good idea was wrong, dead wrong, because it gave idiots like Bill De Blasio, who has ZERO chance of being nominated, an amplified voice to attack the front runner.  To illustrate the point, here is a chart I built that plots each candidate’s average national poll average from realclearpolitics.com against the minutes they talked during this round of debates as timed by the Washington Post.  To be clear, though, what’s illustrated here is total airtime, not the subject of that airtime.  For example, over HALF of Biden’s airtime was spent defending himself from attacks most of who are polling at less than 5% nationally.  The blue bars are national average poll percentage.  The orange bars are airtime spent in this round of debates.  Have a look:

This chart illustrates how goddam stupid the DNC is allowing 0% candidates on a national debate stage.  What it doesn’t illustrate, and it’s an important point, is that these 0% candidates used their time to attack…wait for it…Barack Obama.  It was shocking how, to get at Biden (and to be fair, Harris did it, too) these candidates attacked policies of the Obama administration.  The burning dumpster in the room, Donald Trump, was almost completely ignored while Joe Biden fought off withering attacks on his record of 50 years of public service.  The entire episode was shameful, set up by CNN as some silly cage match, and enabled by the incompetence of Tom Perez and the other leadership of the DNC.

During both of these most recent debates circular firing squads I followed several debate threads.  Almost every one of those threads, which were of DEMOCRATS, had a number of “Sleepy Joe” and “sleepy old white man” comments that were surprising.  And what was shocking were that many of those making those comments supported Warren or Sanders.  Let’s look at some of the ages of some well known people:

Bernie Sanders – 77
Joe Biden – 76
Elizabeth Warren – 70
Charlie Watts – 78
Mick Jagger – 76
Keith Richards – 75
Ronnie Woods – 72

I saw the last four guys outperform most 20 year olds onstage last Saturday.  So let’s be fair here.  If you’re a Bernie or Warren supporter, attacking Biden for his age is hypocritical and a Trump talking point.

But I digress from slamming the DNC and CNN for yet another disastrous night for Democrats that HURT not helped them mount an offense against the worst president in US history.  It’s long past time for the DNC to stop being stupid, get 75% of those people off the stage so we can have a serious discussion about the future of our nation and strengthening actual candidates so they can aim their fire where it should be aimed, Donald Trump, not each other.

Until 1968, Democratic Party bosses picked its candidates.  In 1968, Eugene McCarthy, who had won the most primaries, was pushed aside when party bosses picked Humphrey.  As we all know, Nixon beat Humphrey, which began our long national nightmare which ended in scandal and Nixon’s resignation in 1974.  In 1970, the party became democratic by giving the votes to the rank and file, but in 1972, the party nominated McGovern, who was slaughtered in 49 states by Nixon.  That’s when party bosses seized power again by inventing superdelegates, who had an outsized role in selecting candidates.  That outsized role was used to the extreme in 2016, which resulted in the second long national nightmare, the Trump era.  That happened when Hillary erected a huge wall of money and used that money to vacuum up almost all super delegates before the primaries even started in 2016, she abused Democratic Party rules to destroy the fundamental principle of our country – democracy.

Since the 2016 electoral disaster, the left side of the party has been at war with party leaders to get rid of superdelegates.  This weekend, they won a major battle when the DNC voted to reform the superdelegate system.  That reform took away the vote of superdelegates in the first vote in a contested convention. What that means is that if a candidate has enough votes to win the nomination without the superdelegates, they can vote.  If it hasn’t been decided yet, they have to wait on the sidelines on the first ballot.  This change, while not pure reform, is huge.  No longer can another candidate, like Hillary, use the party structure to suppress the vote of the rank and file before the primaries even start.  Because of this reform, party bosses like Donna Brazile, who had opposed the change are not happy.  Leaders like Karen Carter Peterson of Louisiana were outraged that their power to destroy democracy was being taken away.  Addressing the rules committee she said, “Are you telling me that I’m going to go to a convention, after my 30 years of blood sweat and tears for this party, that you’re going to take away my right?”  Well, Karen, if you mean your right to force your will over the voters, the answer is that you’re goddam right we’re taking away your right.  You abused that right, so now the people have taken that privilege away from you.  Welcome to democracy.

How do you like ‘dem apples?

There is a place for anger, and THIS is it.

Friday, the DNC Rules and Bylaws committee proposed a rules change for the 2020 campaign.  The new rule is directed straight at Bernie Sanders:

The new rule specifically requires that someone running for president must declare in writing his or herself as a member of the Democratic party and that they will run and serve as a Democrat.  Easy, right?  Not so fast.  The two party system in the US is cemented in place by statute, creating an almost impenetrable wall to outsiders.  Party primaries are paid for by the taxpayers, and getting on the ballot in all the states as an independent presidential candidate is virtually impossible.  Because of this, the only realistic path to the presidency is as insurgency in one of the two entrenched  political parties.  You saw that in spades in 2016 where Trump used his television persona to hijack the GOP and Sanders’ grass roots campaign almost uprooted Hillary’s coronation.

This rule seeks to stifle competition for the nomination, all while DNC political operatives are loudly denying that fact, which is as obvious to normal people as a hillbilly at a Newport garden party.  Even while these operatives are all sniffy that outsiders understand their actual intent, Sanders supporters aren’t happy.  Mark Lonabaugh, a senior Sanders advisor, call the new resolution “stunning”.

Someday, establishment Dems will have to face the fact that they are way out of step with their constituents.  The Sanders phenomenon should have shaken these pillars of the party to the core, but it didn’t.  They are ignoring, at their own peril, the 13 million voters, many first time voters, who went for the tottering old candidate from Vermont instead of the tottering old candidate from New York, Chicago, Arkansas (pick your accent).  He brought a message of social justice, equity, and fairness that the Dems abandoned in the 1990s.  And it appears that, rather than learning from that experience, the DNC is trying to keep it from happening again by further rigging the rules in favor of the establishment.

Oh, and one last thing – While the DNC specifically designed a rule to keep out insurgents, there are no adopted rule changes to eliminate or significantly reduce the influence of superdelegates, and no rule that prevents a presidential candidate from controlling the national party until AFTER they are nominated.  It appears the Democratic party is the LEAST democratic organization in US politics, and that should piss you off.