Cagle World

It was already clear, two years ago, that Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp had a screw loose.

In a TV ad during his successful gubernatorial campaign, the right-wing businessman displayed his handguns and rifles – standard procedure in the South, where it’s de rigueur for a Republican to flaunt manly manliness – but he decided to go a step further. He brandished a double-barreled shotgun and pointed it at a kid, joking that the kid had better behave while dating his daughter. Even Georgia gun-lovers complained that pointing a weapon at someone – in a TV ad, no less – was seriously stupid.

But, as governor, Kemp has since trumped his own stupidity metric. Back on April 2, Kemp informed Georgia citizens that he had just learned that asymptomatic carriers of the coronavirus can carry the disease and infect new people. Which was fascinating, given that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had been clanging that alarm since January – and that CDC headquarters is located six miles from Kemp’s office.

This week, Kemp has gone full stupid. By gubernatorial fiat, Donald Trump’s Mini-Me has decreed that henceforth, beginning Friday, all kinds of close-contact touchy-feely places can reopen for business – even though Georgia virus cases are still on the rise (nearly tripling between April 6 and April 19), and even though the body count is still mounting.

This is what happens when you elect a vote-suppressing Republican. A lot more Georgians will likely pay for that decision with their lives. Goaded by Trump’s dangerous reopen-America rhetoric, Kemp is devising the perfect death experiment. If and when it goes tragically awry, we can only hope that others in positions of power elsewhere will learn from Kemp’s idiocy.

As April winds down, look at all the great stuff Georgians will be able to do: sweat in a gym, get their nails done, get a tattoo, get a massage, go to restaurants, take in a movie, go bowling, get a haircut. But hang on a second…

Bowling alleys? Aren’t those places where you fit your feet into borrowed shoes, and stick your fingers inside borrowed bowing balls? I guess that’s a good idea, if your goal is to boast to the guy in the next hospital bed that you bowled 300 before you got sick.

And hang on, hair salons and barbershops? Where the workers get physically up close and personal? I guess that’s a good idea, if your goal is to ensure that in the event of an open casket, your hair will look awesome.

Kemp also says it’s cool if churches want to resume in-person services, because, after all (to quote one protest placard the other day), Jesus is their vaccine.

Why is Kemp endeavoring to lead the league in lethal recklessness at a time when his state ranks 45th in coronavirus testing per capita? Why reopen for business when he himself has admitted that “we’re probably going to have to see our cases continue to go up”? Why is he stiffing the mayors of Georgia’s largest cities, who warn that his “dangerous” decision is “putting folks in harm’s way” by risking new spikes in infections and fatalities?

Georgians with common sense will probably stay home anyway, but even Kemp appears to understand that enough Covidiots will probably make things worse for everyone. He says, “If we have an instance where a community starts becoming a hot spot, then, you know, I will take further action.” Now there’s a brilliant plan.

So hey, springtime tourists, book those plane tickets for Atlanta. Plenty of seats available. No need to sacrifice for the greater good. And if you still need to be reminded what real freedom is all about, just listen to Steve Hasty, a reopen-rally organizer who paraded in Tennessee the other day. Steve said that he missed sitting in restaurants and getting free drink refills. In his words, “I hate having to get two iced teas in the drive-thru.”

That’s the America we’ve become.

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Copyright 2020 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

Democrats have entered the hand-wringing phase of the election season, fretting about Joe Biden and poised to leap from their windows. I’ve been around this game long enough to tell you that this happens every time with every nominee. Everyone needs to chill. We’re all stuck at home anyway, so there’s no reason not to.

Assuming that the November balloting takes place (it’s mandated in the Constitution, if that’s any solace), I foresee six reasons why Uncle Joe is likely to oust the worst excuse for a human being to ever fail upward:

This election is a referendum on Trump. His predictably disastrous botching of the pandemic has made it so, and the verdict is already in. By the time this pandemic wanes, Trump, by dint of his serial incompetence, will have presided over the highest civilian American death toll in history (exceeding the Civil War’s 50,000). Try running for re-election on that record. And did I mention that he can no longer claim credit for a robust economy?

Government experience takes precedence. In 2016, a fatal share of voters, fed up with the Clintons, took a flyer on an “outsider” who’d never served a day in any elective office. How’s that working out? If nothing else, this pandemic has likely (I stress likely) taught a sufficient number of naifs that in matters of life and death, it’s really better to be governed by feds who know what they’re doing.

Joe Biden may not be exciting, and he may not pack the rafters, but he has already assembled a smart cadre of public health advisers to guide his response to the pandemic. Back on March 12, he released a comprehensive pandemic fight plan. Earlier this week, he shared his thoughts about how and when to reopen America. Granted, all his moves thus far have garnered insufficient attention – the media is currently mesmerized by Trump’s daily propaganda show – but it’s early yet. The out-party nominee will get his say, and will draw the competence contrast, when the battle is fully joined.

The empathy chasm. The current White House occupant celebrates the mounting death toll by toasting his “ratings” and boasting that he’s number one on Facebook. His challenger has suffered grievous losses in his personal life (a wife, a daughter, a son) and shares his pain in the presence of those who have suffered similar loss. Timing is everything, in politics as in life. Uncle Joe’s ministrations will resonate in this year of tragedy.

The health care issue. Remember why Trump and the Republicans were drowned in the House blue wave of 2018? And why they lost the national popular vote margin by nearly 9 percent? Because their relentless attempts to cripple or kill Obamacare triggered a huge backlash, even in normally Republican-leaning suburban districts. Now we have a pandemic, and people are losing their health coverage. Trump’s longstanding hostility to Obamacare looks even worse. Biden’s reluctance to endorse full government health care will tick off some Bernie Bros, but his defense of Obamacare, and his support for a public option, will be more than enough to draw a favorable contrast with Trump.

Goodbye to the “socialist” bogeyman. Trump and the GOP yearned to run against Bernie in order to conjure the evils of socialism. But not only have they been denied Bernie, they’ve lost that phony issue as well. How can they scream about socialism when a pandemic is compelling Republicans to spend trillions of government dollars? There’s an old joke that a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged. This year, a liberal is a conservative who needs a handout.

Some historical perspective, please. Democrats always freak out about their nominee. They need to get a grip. I covered the 2008 Democratic Convention, and I remember that people were worried that Barack Obama would lose the race. He wound up winning the biggest Democratic majority since LBJ in 1964.

And in April 1992, presumptive nominee Bill Clinton was running third in the polls – behind incumbent George Bush and nutty Ross Perot. I was covering that race as well, and that month I described Clinton as “the laggard runner in a three-man marathon, a leaky vessel that had dropped anchor in the Bermuda Triangle.”

Clinton went on to become the first Democrat since FDR to win two elections.

So skip the woe for Uncle Joe. Trump got himself impeached for trying to smear his foe at the starting gate. Just ask yourself why he tried.

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Copyright 2020 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

Before focusing on today’s timely topic – Trump and Fox News, deadly together – I want to tell you a little story about the time Fox broke the fake news that President Obama wanted to tax Christmas trees.

In November 2011, I received a string of emails raging at Obama for (supposedly) imposing a tax on Christmas trees, which the angry readers took as fresh evidence of the (alleged) socialist Muslim’s (alleged) war on Christmas and Christianity in general. My reaction was: Huh?

So I clicked around the Internet. It turned out the emails landed within days of a fraudulent Fox News report about “a new Christmas tree tax” imposed by Obama. A trade group, the National Christmas Tree Association, had suggested a 15-cent fee per tree in order to better promote domestic trees, and thus compete more effectively with artificial trees from China. The idea had been around for 20 years. But because the U.S. Department of Agriculture had agreed to consider the fee, as a way to help the domestic tree industry…presto, Fox News framed it as an Obama anti-Christian plot.

I’ve brought up that tiny but instructive episode (lost forever in the incessant Fox News sludge) to remind us that Fox has been spewing disinformation – and breeding stupid people – for a very long time. Numerous studies have long determined that regular Fox viewers are more clueless about factual reality than citizens who get their info elsewhere. This tragic situation has long been a menace to democracy, but now – with the coronaviros crisis – it has turned deadly.

For many weeks, as the pandemic began to spread, Fox News and Trump echoed each other – downplaying the threat, telling us everything was fine. Fox hosts said the mainstream media was inciting “mass hysteria,” that real journalists were “panic pushers,” and that Democrats were whipping up fear in “yet another attempt to impeach the president.”

As late as March 13, one of the pundettes on “Fox & Friends” said that it was “the safest time to fly.” And this past Sunday, shortly before Trump started tweeting that it was time to get people out of their homes and back to work, a Fox host declared that it was time to get people out of their homes and back to work. Then, on Monday, Tucker Carlson doubled down: “You can’t let epidemiologists run the country.”

It’s hard to determine whether it’s Fox or Trump that is most hazardous to our health – admittedly, it’s kind of a chicken-and-egg thing. But rest assured that every sap who watches Fox or listens to Trump, and who then dismisses social distancing as a liberal plot, is a sap who’s imperiling those of us who take science seriously.

On Tuesday, Trump fled to the friendly Fox cocoon for a virtual “town hall,” and spewed lies to the credulous fans at home. And naturally, those lies were not challenged by his hosts. For the umpteenth time, he compared COVID-19 to the common flu (“we’ve never closed down the country for the flu”), but his hosts didn’t bother to point out two obvious scientific facts: that COVID-19 is two to three times more contagious than the flu, and that its mortality rate (according to the World Health Organization) is 30 times higher than the flu.

Trump also declared that he wanted to “open” the country by Easter, April 12: “I would love to have that. It’s such an important day for other reasons, but I’d love to make it an important day for this…Easter’s a very special day for me. Wouldn’t it be great to have all the churches full? You’ll have packed churches all over our country…I think it’ll be a beautiful time.”

Neither host from Fox’s “news” side summoned the moxie to challenge Trump. Instead, one replied: “Oh wow, OK…That would be a great American resurrection.”

They even sat silent when Trump held up a story from a crackpot right-wing conspiracy website that accused New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo of refusing to buy 16,000 ventilators in 2015. They didn’t ask Trump to name or vet his source, or to explain where that (fake) information came from or how it was supposedly substantiated.

So it’s no wonder that Fox News fans are more out to lunch about reality than everyone else. In a poll released last week by YouGov and The Economist, roughly 70 percent of the people who get most of their news from national papers, CNN, MSNBC, and network broadcasts are worried about the coronavirus. Only 38 percent of Fox consumers say they’re worried.

In other words, most Fox fans are a threat. I hope none of them sneeze on us in the grocery line.

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Copyright 2020 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

I’ve been reading Erik Larson’s new book, “The Splendid and the Vile,” which chronicles the first year of Winston Churchill’s wartime stint as prime minister. He was a gifted rhetorician who used the power of words to move a nation. He combined grim candor with upbeat inspiration: “It would be foolish to disguise the gravity of the hour. It would be still more foolish to lose heart and courage.”

What we’re saddled with today is precisely the opposite. Not Churchill at his best, but vaudeville at its worst.

Did you happen to catch Trump’s act Wednesday night in the Oval Office? Nothing could be more clownish than hearing a fake president confront America’s dark hour by screwing up three policy pronouncements in 10 minutes. Either his hapless handlers loaded errors onto his TelePrompter, or, just as likely, this guy read the text wrong because he had no clue what he was reading.

And the way he read the text…as we know, inspiring fellow Americans is certainly not Trump’s metier. He looked like a drugged sullen schoolboy serving detention, forced to write “I will behave” on a blackboard. But never mind that. His fake facts were worse.

For instance, while announcing a xenophobic travel ban between America and Europe (to supposedly fight a “foreign” virus that’s already here), he said “these prohibitions will not only apply to the tremendous amount of trade and cargo, but various other things as we get approval.” What? No more trade? No more cargo imports? The Trump regime subsequently said that, oops, his travel ban does not apply to trade and cargo.

During his address, Trump also made it sound like his ban would prevent traveling U.S. citizens from returning to their country – with the exception of those citizens who’ve undergone “appropriate screenings.” The Trump regime subsequently said that, oops, his ban exempts all U.S. citizens, it’s mostly intended to target certain foreign nationals.

And during his address, Trump announced a major breakthrough with health insurers: “I met with the leaders of the health insurance industry who have agreed to waive all co-payments for coronavirus treatments.” Turns out, that was bull. A spokesman for the health insurance lobby later said that insurers will only waive “for testing. Not for treatment.”

Even worse was what he didn’t say at all. Amidst all his patriotic breast-beating, he never mentioned that the United States isn’t mass-testing its citizens the way other countries are, much less tried to explain the reasons for our poor preparedness. That he would never do, of course, because that would require owning up to his manifest failures.

Which brings us to his most notable omission: His three-year mission to hollow out the federal offices and agencies that are most needed now. “Acting” Trump flunkies – as opposed to Senate-confirmed experts – have been installed in key health and science posts at Homeland Security, the State Department, the Transportation Department, USAID, and the National Science Foundation. Trump’s proposed Centers for Disease Control budget cuts are still on the table. And worst of all, of course, was his 2018 decision to erase the global health response team that was created by President Obama.

Trump, last week, was asked why he fired all those people. This was his response: “Well, I just don’t think – I just don’t think that somebody is going to – without seeing something, like we saw happening in China. As soon as they saw that happening, they essentially – not from the White House. I mean, you know, we don’t need a lab in the White House…Who would have thought we would even be having the subject?”

And this guy thinks Joe Biden is incoherent.

Twenty-fifth amendment, anyone? What more evidence of his unfitness does anyone need? Watching him address the nation, you could almost smell the flop sweat.

Gary Kasparov, the celebrated Russian dissident now living in America, said it best last night in a tweet: “Trump is afraid not because Americans will die, or because the economy is tanking, but because he’s accountable at last, exposed as the fraud he’s been his entire life.”

And in some celestial realm, Winston Churchill, who had the good fortune to deal with FDR, is marveling how we’ve fallen so far.
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Copyright 2020 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

Joe Biden, seemingly DOA, has staged one of the greatest political comebacks in history.

On Tuesday night, he won at least nine of Super Tuesday’s 14 primaries, including Texas, which nobody foresaw. He won states where he never set foot and never advertised. He posted shocker wins in the north (Massachusetts, Minnesota), ran the table in the south (Arkansas, Alabama, North Carolina, Tennessee), and buried Bernie by 30 points with record turnout in Virginia. Throw in his win in Oklahoma, plus the news that he’ll get a hefty share of California delegates by scoring a solid second, and here’s the result:

Biden is now on top in the national delegate count. How sweet it is.

And with Biden-friendly primary states on the near horizon – notably, Georgia and Florida – and with profligate Mike Bloomberg waving the white flag (after spending half a billion bucks to win four delegates in American Samoa), Biden’s sudden bandwagon is likely to kick into fourth gear.

I’m reminded of a Biden story from 1972. At age 29, he was an unknown newbie who had the temerity to challenge a two-term Delaware Republican senator named Cale Boggs. Everyone assumed that Biden was dead meat; Boggs had all the incumbent advantages, and the GOP ticket that year was headed by a president positioned to win in a landslide. But Biden, at three percent in the polls, rented the best and biggest ballroom in the state for what he called his “victory celebration.” Turned out he needed the ballroom, because he won.

So what the hell has happened? It’s simple, really: Democrats came together and came to their senses.

Crunching the numbers, it’s clear Biden has begun to fashion a winning November coalition – especially suburban women (the prime drivers of the 2018 House blue wave), African-Americans (the most loyal of all Democrats), and moderate swing voters (including crossover Republicans) who detest Trump and want an electable alternative. Biden is surely imperfect, but the Super Tuesday verdict was that he’s good enough.

And what about Bernie? I’ll just borrow a lyric from Gil Scott-Heron: The “revolution” will not be televised.

With the exception of his outreach to Hispanics, Bernie has not grown his support. He basically has the same (losing) base that he had in 2016 – most notably whites under the age of 30, and people who describe themselves as “very liberal.” You don’t beat Trump with that. Heck, you don’t win a Democratic nomination with that – especially when you’re dissing Democrats as “corrupt” and “establishment” and “corporate.” No wonder self-identified grassroots Democrats clobbered Bernie in most states last night.

It’s nice to have young people. But, an umpteenth reminder: Young people do not vote heavily. Bernie can talk all he want about a youth-powered “revolution,” but let’s take a look at Texas, a state that Democrats are trying to put in play for November. Only 15 percent of the primary voters were under age 30. Voters aged 45 to 64 were the biggest share of the Texas electorate (38 percent) and they chose Biden over Bernie by a 2-1 margin. The second biggest share were seniors (25 percent) and they chose Biden over Bernie by nearly 3-1.

And in Texas, as well as in most Super Tuesday states, the voters who made up their minds at the last minute surged to Biden. Translation: People were waiting to see who, if anyone, would emerge as a live alternative to Bernie – and when they got proof that Biden was viable (thanks to South Carolina, thanks to Pete and Amy ceding the center-left field), they wisely fell in line.

What a relief it is to put Democrats and wise in the same sentence. What a relief it is to see that money doesn’t buy you love. Bloomberg, with his bottomless pockets, has proved that. Bernie has proved that too. He outspent Biden in the Super Tuesday states (heck, Biden hardly had any money), and he out-organized Biden on the ground.

Granted, as Yogi Berra used to say, it ain’t over til it’s over. The delegate battle will rage for many weeks, perhaps all the way to the convention.

But remember, this wild saga won’t end well unless the entire party coalesces behind the nominee. If Biden sustains his near-miracle comeback, the Bernie base will be needed in November.

Would Bernie and his fans be more graceful in defeat than they were in 2016? Given the existential threat of a second Trump term, one could only hope so.

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Copyright 2020 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

Bernie Sanders’ sweeping win in the Nevada Democratic caucus will surely prompt the Russians to pop Champagne. They’ve been reportedly boosting Bernie behind the scenes, having calculated that a 78-year-old socialist with a tricky ticker in his chest is the foe most likely to lose to their stooge. They’re surely marveling at their good fortune, at how easy it has been to conquer America without firing a shot.

Even though I’m on record believing that Bernie would crash in November, and even though his lefty pipe dream of all-government health care (forcing 160 million Americans to lose their private coverage) would likely erase the suburb-driven blue wave that swept House Democrats into power, and even though skepticism about Bernie is so endemic that 65 percent of Americans now believe Trump will win a second term (new CBS News poll), I’ll try to be a good sport.

Among the Democratic candidates, only Bernie has demonstrated that he can stoke voters under age 30. They’ve grown up alienated from both party establishments, with millions burdened by college debt, mindful of the ever-widening gap between the rich and everyone else. Of all the age cohorts, theirs is by far the most supportive of democratic socialism. To win in November, Democrats need young people en masse, and Bernie alone would pull them into their coalition.

Bernie, more than any of his rivals, is connecting with young Latinos. Hispanic Americans have long been called a “sleeping giant,” because their ballot participation – relative to their population – has been markedly lower than other minorities. Bernie, with his potential strength among the youngest adults in that community, could awaken the giant. That could have a big impact on one potentially crucial state on election night: Arizona.

Bernie’s economic populism can potentially attract a lot of the white working-class voters in key Rustbelt states. Remember how Hillary Clinton narrowly lost Michigan to Donald Trump? Well, eight months earlier, white working-class voters helped Bernie beat Hillary in the Michigan Democratic primary. If Bernie wins the 2020 nomination – which now looks more likely than – he can pitch again to those voters (especially women), contrasting his economic agenda with Trump’s track record, which features a tax cut law that made the rich richer.

Democrats and left-leaning independents, desperate to halt the slide toward authoritarianism, will vote blue no matter who. By late autumn, all partisans will bury their qualms and unite for the common cause of saving democracy. One Democrat’s tweet summed it up: “I’ll vote for Bernie if he’s the candidate. I will also still think he and most of his supporters are assholes.”

Bernie could pick a running mate that broadens the ticket’s appeal. Nobody seems to be talking about this factor. Given his age, his determination to hide his heart attack medical records (reneging on his promise to release them), and his need to at least calm the Democratic establishment, his veep choice would be of paramount importance. A smart choice would be someone who helps put in play the swing states (Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin) that put Trump over the top in 2016 – or add states that weren’t in play last time (Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida).

Do you buy these arguments? Trump certainly doesn’t.

If he feared Bernie as an opponent, he’d be trashing him. Instead, Trump’s been rooting for Bernie at every turn. If and when Bernie wins the nomination, the GOP slime machine will kick into gear. Rest assured, if the Republicans and their allies could successfully trash John Kerry’s war medals, imagine what they’ll do with the 1980s videos that show Bernie praising the Soviet system – and marveling at the subway station chandeliers.

And even if Bernie does inspire massive turnout among habitual non-voters, 2016 third-party voters, and young minorities, who’s to say that his presence won’t inspire massive turnout among dormant Trump voters? As progressive analyst Ruy Teixeira warns, “It is truly magical thinking to believe that, in a highly polarized situation, only your side gets to increase turnout.”

But I should stop. I promised to be nice.

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Copyright 2020 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

Yogi Berra has a timely warning for the fractured Democratic party. The baseball legend and accidental oracle is reputed to have said, “It gets late early out here.”

Translation: Democrats better get their act together – rallying behind a candidate who can actually beat Donald Donald – and doing it sooner rather than later, lest they tear themselves apart in a marathon slog to the mid-summer national convention.

The results Tuesday night in New Hampshire make that task more urgent than ever. If Democrats fail to coalesce behind someone with moderate crossover appeal, they’re going to be stuck with Bernie Sanders – the GOP’s dream opponent, for reasons that are obvious to everyone except his zealots.

Yeah, he won the primary. But he eked it out with the lowest winning percentage – 26 percent – in the history of the primary. Four years ago in New Hampshire, he got 152,000 votes. This time, he got roughly 75,000. Granted, the field of rivals this time was much bigger than in 2016, but that’s because many in the party know darn well that Sanders, with his “socialist” tag, would be a big beautiful cake on Trump’s plate.

Even though Sanders is holding his core base of Bernie Bros, he has yet to demonstrate that he can expand his appeal and unite the party. And his Bros certainly don’t help; at victory headquarters Tuesday night, they booed Pete Buttigieg. Because that’s how the Bros roll.

But here’s the problem: If the more electable Democrats keep divvying up the not-Sanders voters, Sanders will keep winning with tepid pluralities and will eventually cement an unbeatable delegate lead. He’s also far better organized and financed than Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar, who is now faced with the daunting task of ramping up in time for Nevada, South Carolina, and 15-state Super Tuesday.

I haven’t yet mentioned Joe Biden. It’s hard to do so without wincing. It’s like watching a car wreck. If Sanders is stopped, it’s seems unlikely that Joe will do the deed.

Biden limped out of New Hampshire in fifth place with a paltry 8 percent, the worst showing for a former vice president since Dan Quayle pulled out of the 2000 Republican race five months before the primary. Fun fact: This is Biden’s third presidential bid, and he has yet to win a caucus or primary.

The former vice president has fled to South Carolina, where he believes that black voters will be his firewall in state’s Feb. 29 primary. But that’s a shaky assumption. Black voters are jonesing to defeat a detestably racist president, and even though they respect Biden’s partnership with Barack Obama, they’re not likely to stick with a candidate who has the whiff of a loser.

No Democrat can win the White House without strong black support and turnout. But if not Biden, who? Sanders has shown no ability to rally them (although he’s making some gains with Hispanics). Buttigieg and Klobuchar are starting from scratch with the black community. And in white New Hampshire, Elizabeth Warren (have we mentioned her yet?) didn’t even score with whites, finishing in a distant fourth-place finish. Faced with likely fundraising woes going forward, she may not be around long enough to woo voters of color. As for Mike Bloomberg, the Democrats’ wild card, he’s been busy this week apologizing anew for his mayoral stop-and-frisk program – a past sin that could hamper his own outreach.

Bottom line: There’s no clarity in sight, because Democrats remain divided along racial, generational, class, and ideological lines. For now, Sanders is strongest with the lefty young and white working-class folks lacking college degrees. Buttigieg and Klobuchar are strongest with (and fighting each other for) older folks, suburbanites with college degrees, and more moderate voters. And with Biden fading, nobody knows where voters of color are likely to go. But a winning Democratic coalition requires unity among all.

Warren, in her concession speech Tuesday night, pleaded for Democrats to come together, to stop their fractious infighting. In her words, candidates should not “burn down the rest of the party to be the last man standing…We can’t afford to fall into factions.”

Or, as Yogi Berra also warned, “You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going, because you might not get there.”

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Copyright 2020 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

What a dire scenario: A corrupt Republican president soaked in scandal wins re-election in part because dimwitted Democrats decide to nominate a small-state senator who’s way too left-wing for the American mainstream.

But enough about how Richard Nixon thrashed George McGovern in 1972.

If Democrats want to reprise the past, they need only nominate Bernie Sanders in 2020. Donald Trump would eat him as an appetizer.

Beside the fact that Bernie’s grassroots army is overloaded with abusive and sexist acolytes who terrorize his Democratic critics (some critics have felt compelled to hire private security), and beside the fact that only 53 percent of Bernie fans say they’ll support a different Democratic nominee (according to a recent Emerson College poll), the core problem is most swing-voting Americans won’t buy Bernie’s deluded dream of a big-government, high-tax America that mimics Scandinavian democratic socialism.

Young progressives are fine with the word socialism, but most people abhor it. And on Bernie’s signature socialist issue -taking away everyone’s private health insurance and forcing everyone to join government health care – public opposition is just as fierce. If Bernie were to win the nomination and crusade on that issue in the fall campaign, it would be electoral malpractice.

Health care should be an easy lay up for the Democrats. Trump is trying to kill Obamacare in federal court, which means the 2020 presidential nominee need only follow the playbook that turned the House blue in the 2018 midterms: Highlight the Trump threat, and campaign on a pledge to improve Obamacare (much the way that Social Security, enacted under FDR, required a number of legislative tweaks over a period of years). But Bernie is determined to botch a winning issue and shoot for the moon.

Trump is already caricaturing “socialism” as a clear and present danger to the American way of life. Bernie would make the job even easier – and, for once, Trump wouldn’t even have to lie. He could simply quote from Bernie’s Medicare for All bill, the Senate provision which decrees that it would be “unlawful for a private health insurer to sell health insurance coverage,” or for “an employer to provide benefits” that duplicate what the government offers.

I’m sympathetic to the concept of Medicare for All. But politically speaking, it’s suicide. Democrats need to attract independents and moderate Republicans who will feel comfortable with a Democratic candidate. But, fairly or not, many of these potentially persuadable voters are reflexively opposed to bigger government and higher taxes. Bernie would exacerbate their wariness because he refuses to specify the price tag of his pipe dreams.

When asked recently about the cost of Medicare for All, he replied, “I don’t give a number and I’ll tell you why: it’s such a large number and so complicated.” And when a CBS News host sought his reaction to the economists who’ve concluded that his democratic socialist “revolution” could double the federal budget by roughly $60 trillion over 10 years, he got huffy: “You don’t know. Nobody knows. This is impossible to predict.”

That’s fine with the Bernie Bros – Bernie, like Trump, has stoked his own cult of personality – but there’s a reason why Trump’s advisers reportedly view him “as their ideal Democratic opponent” and why they’re “doing what they can to elevate his profile.” They know Trump is widely detested, but they also know that Medicare for All, as a socialist concept with a mystery price tag, is widely detested. The observable reality, in this country, is that voters outside Bernie’s bubble don’t want to pay sharply higher taxes (which Bernie would have to levy, but won’t admit) for a massive new federal incursion into the private sector.

And if Bernie were to win the party nod, Trump’s opposition researchers would go to town. They had a book on Bernie in 2016, but never had to use it. This time around, imagine the possibilities: Trump would go viral with Bernie’s 1976 newspaper column, which declared that the “U.S. Congress must institute public ownership, with worker control, of the major means of production.” Trump would talk about how Bernie and wife Jan honeymooned in the Soviet Union. (It was part of sister cities program, but Trump would omit that nuance.) He’d talk about how Bernie once co-sponsored a Senate bill to cart Vermont’s nuclear waste to a poor Texas Latino community (true, though the shipment never happened). He’d talk about Bernie’s past support for the communist Socialist Workers Party (true).

If you don’t think Trump can successfully stoke that kind of info to demagogic proportions, I have one question for you: Were you alive during the Trump-Hillary contest?

What Democrats need to do is park all talk of a democratic socialist “revolution.” As best-selling novelist Richard North Patterson smartly says, right now “the task of winning is revolution enough.”

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Copyright 2020 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

Back in December of 2015, on the cusp of the 2016 presidential primaries, when candidate Trump was previewing his Putinesque behavior, I warned in a column that “we’re in danger of embracing a very American version of autocracy…Do we really want to flirt with autocracy?”

A fatally thin margin of voters in pivotal states basically said “Yup.” And on Wednesday, sure enough, a hireling on Trump’s “legal” team vocally extolled autocracy – declaring during the Senate trial that Trump cannot be impeached for anything because his self-interest is the personification of the national interest. Which is the same mentality that marked the 17th-century reign of France’s “Sun King,” Louis XIV, who famously decreed L’etat c’est moi (“I am the State”).

Former O.J. and Jeffrey Epstein lawyer Alan Dershowitz framed it this way:

“If the president does something that he thinks will help him get elected, in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid quo pro that results in impeachment.”

And to think this guy actually taught law at Harvard.

Let’s play out his reasoning. If Trump were to extort a foreign country for domestic dirt on a potential election opponent, that would be in the national interest, and therefore not impeachable? Correct, because that’s the issue at hand. And if he were to, say, order the Justice Department to gin up phony probes of election opponents, that too would be in the national interest and therefore not impeachable? Correct. And if he were to cover up evidence of those probes, that’s no problem? Correct. And if he were to simply throw those opponents in jail, that’s OK too? And if he were to order a Watergate-style break in at Democratic headquarters? Ditto.

A more urgent question: When Dershowitz crafted his monarchist credo, did a single Republican senator in the chamber utter a peep of protest, or in any way signal that such a statement clashed with the U.S. Constitution – and that, in fact, the American Revolution was a revolt against the divine right of kings? Why bother to ask. As they plot Trump’s exoneration, they have become supplicants to royalty.

Dershowitz is mostly a joke, a TV celebrity long past his sell-by date, best known these days for claiming that he kept his undies on while he was massaged by one of client Epstein’s girls. But what he said merely distilled what Trump’s previous enablers – and Trump himself – have been saying all along. Not to mention what Trump has been doing all along.

Back in December 2017, when it was clear that Trump was working hard to block Robert Mueller’s probe, Trump lawyer John Dowd contended that a president, by definition, “cannot obstruct justice because he is the chief law enforcement officer.”

And Trump went much further during a speech last July: “I have an Article II, where I have to the right to do whatever I want as president.” In truth, Article II of the Constitution doesn’t give a president total power. It also stresses the importance of congressional oversight, and holding presidents accountable via impeachment.

But Trump has long proved he can’t be stopped by a piece of parchment. He has indulged his authoritarian impulses on multiple fronts both large (declaring a fake “national emergency” to build his border wall, spending money far beyond the amount authorized by Congress) and small (pressuring Air Force crews to stay at his Turnberry resort in Scotland during refueling stops, then claiming he knew nothing about it) and chilling (confiscating the notes of his private meetings with Vladimir Putin, concealing the details from his senior aides.)

Parchment can’t save democracy – only people can do that. And the Senate Republicans, forfeiting their constitutional duty to act as a co-equal branch of government, are preparing to put the Dershowitz credo into practice. It’s certainly the easiest way to let Trump off the hook. They can’t contest the facts about what Trump did in his bid to rig the 2020 election. Therefore, Plan B is to simply say that he did it in “the national interest” because he is L’etat and vice versa.

What this ultimately means for the future, assuming there comes a time when Trump is gone, is that any president would be free to do whatever he or she wants, to retain or abuse power, as long as a mere 34 senators are willing to exonerate whatever he or she does.

But hey, we have nobody to blame but ourselves. A sufficient share of voters, aided by the distortions of the Electoral College, put us where we are and where candidate Trump always signaled we would go. The window for democracy is rapidly narrowing, and November may be the last chance to pry it open.

As a French lawyer-diplomat, Joseph de Maistre, warned two centuries ago, “Every nation gets the government it deserves.”

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Copyright 2020 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]

In a column on the eve of the 2016 election, I warned that if Donald Trump were to inexplicably occupy the White House, he would wreak havoc on American values, and his “authoritarian sensibility” would precipitate “a systematic breakdown of our democratic institutions.” I was merely stating the obvious. Any two-bit seer could foresee how his destructive reign would play out.

Now it’s playing out.

The 53 Republicans who run the chamber are busily abetting Trump’s authoritarian assault on democracy and the rule of law by systematically sabotaging any semblance of a fair impeachment trial. On Tuesday, in a series of votes, they blocked all attempts to subpoena witnesses and new evidence. And Wednesday, in Davos, Trump openly boasted about his coverup: “We have all the material. They don’t have the material.”

Trump has predictably stressed our constitutional system to its breaking point. Mitch McConnell and his lockstep legions seem determined to break it.

They’re doing so in defiance of American majority sentiment. According to a Washington Post-ABC poll, 71 percent want to hear witnesses at trial. Other recent mainstream polls have seen similar results, including a new Quinnipiac poll, where 66 percent say they want key ex-aide John Bolton to testify.

In the Senate chamber, they appear totally unperturbed that Trump’s lawyers are offering zero evidence to refute the Articles of Impeachment – which prove that Trump shook down a foreign power to get domestic campaign dirt for his re-election bid, then covered up his abuses. They apparently don’t care that Trump’s core anti-impeachment argument is a crock that would shock the Founding Fathers.

Basically, Trump’s legal eagles claim that the two impeachment articles are “ridiculous” because they don’t specify that Trump committed a crime. One of those lawyers, TV talking head Alan Dershowitz, said last weekend that Trump should not have been impeached because the articles merely describe “non-criminal actions.” He said on TV that “the (House) vote was to impeach on abuse of power, which is not within the constitutional criteria for impeachment.”

But here’s the obvious rebuttal: “(Impeachment) certainly doesn’t have to be a crime if you have somebody who completely corrupts the office of president and who abuses trust and poses great danger to our liberty. You don’t need a technical crime.”

Thank you, Alan Dershowitz! Because that’s what he said on TV back in 1998, when he deemed Bill Clinton’s extramarital sex to be sufficient grounds for impeachment.

The Founders never specified that impeachment and removal required a crime – because at the time the Constitution was being drafted, there was, as yet, no federal criminal code. Instead, the Founders anticipated that Congress – awarded the sole power of impeachment – would take its cues from Alexander Hamilton, who spoke broadly about “the misconduct of public men…the abuse or violation of some public trust.”

Remember, last month, when Republicans were lauding law professor Jonathan Turley, who’d testified at the House hearings that he thought Democrats were moving too fast on impeachment? Well now Turley says that Trump’s lawyers are wrong to claim that impeachment requires a crime. That claim “is at odds with history and the purpose of the Constitution…I do not believe that the criminal code is the effective limit or scope of possible impeachable offenses.”

The gist of Trump’s defense argument – the argument that Senate Republicans are destructively indulging – is that he can do whatever he wants, and that whatever he wants is sanctioned by divine right simply because he wants it. Who is he, King George III? That’s the monarchist mindset that the American Revolution’s soldiers fought and died to overthrow.

So now we’ve arrived at the end game. McConnell and his colleagues appear bent on ratifying Trump’s power abuses, thereby destroying the checks and balances that are crucial to our constitutional order. The only hope is that Democrats – with the winds of public opinion at their backs – can hold Trump and the Senate Republicans accountable at the ballot box.

I warned in my 2016 pre-election column that a Trumpist future “is down the dark path at the fork in the road. If we take it, we own it.” We took it, we own it, and the election 10 months hence is our last best chance to reverse it.

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Copyright 2020 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]