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Did you catch the important news story about Hillary Clinton the other day? I’m guessing you missed it, because it was buried beneath the latest bombshells about the Russia-abetted grifter who barely beat her. Indeed, if you happened to see the print version of The New York Times, the story was inexplicably consigned to page 16:

“A years-long State Department investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server found that…there was no systemic or deliberate mishandling of classified information.”

Let’s repeat that conclusion, this time by quoting the report released by Trump’s State Department:

“There was no persuasive evidence of systematic, deliberate mishandling of classified information.”

Gee, whattaya know. The fake scandal ginned up by candidate Trump and amplified by a complicit mainstream media turns out to be a nutrition-free nothingburger. Too bad the hyperbolic brouhaha about her private server tilted the 2016 election to an aspiring authoritarian who vandalizes the Constitution and sells out America to its enemies. Compared to Trump’s impeachable acts, what Hillary did was tantamount to jay-walking in traffic.

The lesson for the mainstream media, a lesson that by now should be obvious, is that false equivalence is a crime against fact.

Candidate Trump’s sordid past – his mob ties, his multiple bankruptcies, his financial dependence on Russia, his stiffing of small contractors – got a fraction of the media coverage that Hillary’s emails received. By the late summer of 2016, that’s basically what most Americans “knew” about her – the vague unfounded suspicion that she might be a risk to national security.

That suspicion, preposterous back then, looks especially so now thanks to a new report by the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee. The reporth documents the Kremlin’s systematic 2016 campaign to get Trump elected, a campaign so successful that Russian operatives literally drank champagne on election night. And they’re still celebrating. Trump’s military retreat from Syria is a boost for Russia, according to Russia. As one Moscow commentator wrote this week, “Putin won the lottery!”

It’s weird that Trump assails reporters as “enemies of the people,” because he arguably owes his ascent to their obsession with Hillary’s emails. For most of 2015 and 2016, they covered the “story” relentlessly, despite the dearth of actual evidence she’d breached national security. Most of the time, the nothingburger was stuffed with fillers like “Questions are being raised.” This was a typical New York Times paragraph in August 2015; “But the email account and its confusing reverberations have become a significant early chapter in the 2016 presidential race and a new stroke in the portrait of the Democrats’ leading candidate.”

Even last Friday, while reporting on Hillary’s exoneration (and burying the story), The Times wrote that the State Department report “appears to bookend a controversy that dogged Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.” Oh please. She was “dogged” by the “controversy” precisely because the press saw it as “a new stroke in the portrait.”

One commentator, legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin of CNN, has at least copped to his complicity. Bravo to him. On the air Monday, he discussed the exoneration and said: “This is also a story about the news media, about how much time we spent on (Hillary’s emails) and that’s something that I have felt a great deal of responsibility for, because I talked about the emails here at CNN. I wrote about it in The New Yorker, and I think I paid too much attention to them, and I regret that, and I hope a lesson is learned.”

We’ll see about that. Eying 2020, Trump is already running the same false-equivalence playbook. He’s trying to sucker the media and citizenry into believing that the Biden family’s so-called “corruption” is worse or no worse than his own.

Hillary’s exoneration should be a wake-up call. Shame on this benighted nation if we sanction a second con.

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Copyright 2019 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]

If only the Democrats could fight like the Washington Nationals. The new National League champs won four straight on the way to the World Series, with great pitching and clutch hitting. End of story. Or as Joe Biden would say, “Period!”

But alas, every month or so, we get a three-hour marathon of umpteen presidential candidates talking in 90-second bursts, and all we can do is try to parse the rhetorical mire. As Biden said Tuesday night, “These debates are kind of crazy, because everybody tries to squeeze everything into every answer that is given.”

And will any of Tuesday night’s squeezed answers move the needle in the Democratic race as we trudge closer toward actual voting in Iowa? I have no idea (nor do you). And that frees me up to focus on the sub-narrative that I found most compelling – namely, the stellar performances of two moderate underdogs, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar.

Democrats are typically torn between the aspirational and the practical. In 2019, their hearts tilt toward the aspirational (Medicare for All and other progressive dreams), but many fear – with good reason – that if they overreach, they risk alienating swing voters in key Electoral College states, thus imperiling ousting a criminal “president” and putting him on a path to jail. I doubt that Buttegieg or Klobuchar can win the nomination, but during the debate they did the Democrats a big favor by slamming the brakes on some of the most runaway aspirations.

When Elizabeth Warren recycled her summer debate performance – again refusing to say whether Medicare for All (government health care) would require a middle-class tax hike in the short term – Buttigieg pointed out that she never explains “how a multi-trillion-dollar hole in this Medicare for All plan is supposed to get filled in.”

Bernie Sanders intervened to say that, yes, taxes would indeed go up, which I bet Warren did not appreciate. And Klobuchar pounced all over that before pointed out the popular public option is more doable in Congress: “The difference between a plan and a pipe dream is something that you can actually get done.”

That was the moderate underdogs’ big theme: Being practical and getting stuff done, rather than dreaming too big and risking a disastrous election loss. It surfaced again when Beto O’Rourke – desperate to revive a dead candidacy – decided to talk up his politically suicidal issue of gun confiscation. Or, as O’Rourke calls it, “mandatory buyback.”

Buttigieg jumped all over that, schooling O’Rourke that the gun violence crisis requires urgent, practical solutions: universal background checks “that we finally have a shot to actually get through,” a ban on the sale of high-capacity magazines, red flag laws that would disarm domestic abusers and prevent suicides. In short, “We cannot wait for purity tests. We have to just get something done…We are this close to an assault weapons ban. That would be huge. And we’re going to get wrapped around the axle in a debate over whether it’s ‘hell, yes, we’re going to take your guns’?”

Warren didn’t like all the cautious talk. Later in the debate she said that various unnamed candidates “think that running some kind of vague campaign that nibbles around the edges of big problems in this country is a winning strategy. They are wrong…Democrats will win when we give people a reason to get in the fight.”

Did Joe Biden (still the front-runner in some polls, but not in others) gain or lose ground Tuesday night? Did Warren? Who knows. But Buttigieg and Klobuchar, in the second tier, probably raised their profiles. As Democrats toy with their most progressive dreams, a some Midwestern common sense can’t hurt.

Toward the end, Buttigieg said: “I don’t agree with Senator Warren that the only way forward is infinite partisan combat…Think about what (a new) president can do to unify a new American majority for some of the boldest things we’ve attempted in my lifetime – (a public health care option) for all who want it…an assault weapons ban, which would be a huge deal…Yet there are some here on this stage who say it doesn’t count unless we go even further.”

Moments later, Klobuchar referenced the debate’s Ohio locale and said: “You know, this isn’t a flyover part of the country to me. The heartland is where I live. And I want to win those states that we lost last time…But we can’t get any of this done unless we win.”

Amen to that.

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Copyright 2019 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]

Surely I’m not alone in noticing that most of the people fueling Donald Trump’s impending impeachment are women. This strikes me as significant.

We have Nancy Pelosi, the highest-ranking female lawmaker in history, who kick-started the burgeoning probe that will put impeachment into the first paragraph of Trump’s obituary.

We have the five moderate House Democratic women, all with national security pedigrees (ex-CIA, ex-Air Force, ex-Navy), who shattered the House’s inertia on Sept. 23, by assailing Trump’s impeachable bid to squeeze Ukraine for domestic campaign dirt. Joined by two token men, the women wrote that Trump’s collusion efforts “are a threat to all we have sworn to protect…This flagrant disregard for the law cannot stand.”

We have Marie Yovanovitch, the career diplomat who served as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine until she was recently ousted by Trump and henchman Rudy Giuliani for failing to play ball on the plot to get (fake) campaign dirt. Last Friday, she ignored a presidential directive not to testify on Capitol Hill and warned that Trump and Giuliani are shredding the American-led alliances that had kept the peace for generations.

“The harm will come come when bad actors in countries beyond Ukraine see how easy it is to use fiction and innuendo to manipulate our system,” Yovanovitch said. “In such circumstances, the only interests that will be served are those of our strategic adversaries, like Russia, that spread chaos and attack the institutions and norms that the U.S. helped create and which we have benefited from for the last 75 years.”

Now we have Fiona Hill, a former intelligence officer who served on the National Security Council as senior director of Russian and Eurasian affairs until she quit in July. On Monday, ignoring the Trump regime’s refusal to cooperate, she became the first White House official to testify in the impeachment probe.

Some of the closed-door details have inevitably leaked, and bravo to Hill for what she has revealed. She said that Giuliani, Mick Mulvaney (Trump’s acting chief of staff), and Gordon Sondland (rich Trump donor who bought himself an ambassadorship to the European Union) ran a rogue operation to squeeze Ukraine for dirt on Joe Biden. And she said that her NSC boss at the time, John Bolton, was horrified. She quotes Bolton as saying, “I am not part of whatever drug deal Sondland and Mulvaney are cooking up…Giuliani’s a hand grenade who’s going to blow everybody up.”

Hill also reportedly testified that Sondland had no right to meddle in Ukraine affairs; as ambassador to the EU, he was ranging far beyond his duties. But he told her that he was in charge of Ukraine, and when she asked him who told her that, he said it was Trump. In her presence, he also said that Ukraine president Zelensky would get a White House invitation if Zelensky agreed to open an investigation of the Bidens.

Why have the five moderate first-term lawmakers from traditionally red districts, Nancy Pelosi, Fiona Hill, and Marie Yovanovitch (Trump’s assessment: “the woman was bad news”) been so willing to storm the barricades while so many men close to power have stayed silent or cowered behind the lines?

Perhaps it’s merely what one of the five lawmakers, ex-CIA officer Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, recently said: “Having a sitting president of the United States use leverage over a foreign leader to get dirt on an opponent – that very basic idea, I think, cut for us, as national security people, just close to the bone.”

But I suspect that the real reason is broader – and simpler. Women in power, and those who seek a share of it, are less likely than ever to take any crap. Pelosi said it best last November, after an historic blue wave drowned the male-dominated House Republican majority: “I want women to see that you do not get pushed around. You don’t run away from the fight.”

Trump was back on Twitter Monday, fuming about “A total Impeachment Scam!” But if there’s any justice, historians will one day record that women like Yovanovitch and Hill were the heroes who helped take him down.

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Copyright 2019 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]

Have you heard that Elizabeth Warren has an ambitious plan – a surefire popular plan – to boost Social Security payments by roughly $200 a month?

Amazingly, the details she unveiled last week never came up in the Democratic debate on Thursday night. Which was a shame, because this proposal could help her draw older voters away from Joe Biden, and – if she were the 2020 nominee – it could work the same magic in a showdown with Trump.

Without getting wonky, here’s the gist: She wants to take from the rich and give to the middle class and the needy. She wants to finance the $200-a-month Social Security hike by slapping a 14.8 percent tax on the net investment income of individuals who earn more than $250,000 a year, and families that earn more than $400,000 a year. Right now, Social Security is funded by a flat-rate payroll tax (half of which we pay, half of which our employers pay) that’s capped at $132,000 of a worker’s income. Investment income garnered by the rich isn’t touched at all.

Warren’s idea would put so much fuel in the Social Security tank that not only would the average recipient get an extra $200 a month, it would also extend Social Security’s solvency from the currently projected 2035 to 2054. What’s not to like?

Granted, this progressive idea would be DOA in the Senate if Mitch McConnell remains in charge after the 2020 election – and, thanks to a GOP filibuster, it would likely die even if Democrats win the White House and Senate. But unlike some of the politically suicidal ideas currently being circulated by Warren, Bernie Sanders, and the longer-shot progressive candidates (erasing private health coverage, decriminalizing illegal border crossings), a Social Security boost is at least a political winner that would help oust Trump.

As Democratic strategist Ruy Teixeira says on Facebook, “Taxing the rich: Popular! Increasing and expanding Social Security benefits: Popular!” That’s what the polls say. This is a left-of-center issue that the center likes a lot.”

And if you question whether Social Security (the “socialist” program created during the New Deal, over vociferous Republican opposition) is broadly popular, remember what happened when newly re-elected George W. Bush decided to use his political capital to pitch a partial privatization plan in 2005. As I wrote at the time for The Philadelphia Inquirer: “The longer Bush stayed on the road talking up partial privatization, the more people got turned off to the idea. The more he tried to explain it, the more confused people became” – and the lower his approval rating fell. People didn’t trust the Republicans’ idea of exposing Social Security to the vagaries of the free market.

Here in 2019, Warren can potentially tout her Social Security plan to peel a sizeable share of older Democratic voters away from Biden. As a CNN analysis recently reported, voters over the age of 45 dominated the 2016 Democratic primaries – casting roughly 60 percent of the ballots. And looking ahead to the general election, lest we forget (and try not to gag) that Trump arguably won last time in part because he scored solidly with the older electorate – winning 52 percent of voters aged 45 and higher.

As we know, a huge share of the electorate is predisposed to hate the Democratic party. But Social Security is solid Democratic turf. Dissing the program has been part of the GOP’s DNA ever since it was created in 1935. As New Jersey Republican Senator A. Harry Moore warned that year, while urging Congress to vote no, Social Security “would take all the romance out of life. We might as well take a child from the nursery, give him a nurse, and protect him from every experience that life affords.” Seventy-five years later, GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry called Social Security “a Ponzie scheme.”

The road to ousting Trump and saving democracy can start with this issue. Democrats need to own it anew, and Warren’s plan could make it happen.

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Copyright 2019 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 has long been adept at talking with a foot in his mouth, so perhaps it’s no surprise lately he has overdosed on whoppers. Nevertheless, it has unnerved many Democrats to hear their 2020 front-runner oscillate so frequently between fact and fiction.

Which prompts me to wonder: Is a serial gaffer the best possible candidate to challenge a serial liar? Or is Donald Trump so uniquely horrific – Peter Wehner, a former aide to three Republican presidents, calls him “pathologically dishonest” – that he has basically lowered the bar for Biden?

Biden has been on a tear, and not in a particularly good way. In August, he said that Bobby Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King had been assassinated in “the late 1970s.” Actually, they were assassinated in 1968. He lamented the recent mass shootings in “Houston” and “Michigan” – which took place in El Paso and Dayton. He said that he met with students of the Parkland shootings while he was vice president, but the shootings took place in 2018, long after Trump was elected. A few weeks ago, he thought he was in Vermont, when in fact he was standing in the critical early-primary state of New Hampshire.

We’re perhaps tempted to chalk those up to the aging process (he’s 76), but in 2008, when he was 11 years younger, he offered this Great Depression history lesson: “When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television.” Um. When the market crashed in 1929, Herbert Hoover was president. Roosevelt didn’t become president until 1933, and he never went on television. He was dead during the rise of television.

But Biden’s piece de resistance (thus far) happened on Aug. 21, in a New Hampshire meeting hall, when he recalled how he had journeyed to Afghanistan and pinned a medal on a Navy captain who had rappelled down a ravine to fetch the body of comrade killed in combat. The Navy captain had risen back up the ravine, carrying the body on his back. The captain said he didn’t deserve the medal, telling Biden: “Do not pin it on me, sir!” Recalling this story, Biden told his New Hampshire audience: “This is the God’s honest truth. My word as a Biden.”

Well, some fact-checking reporters at the Washington Post scrutinized Biden’s “God’s honest truth,” and found that “almost every detail in the story appears to be incorrect… In the space of three minutes, Biden got the time period, the location, the heroic act, the type of medal, the military branch and the rank of the recipient wrong, as well as his own role in the ceremony.”

Biden has long told variations of this story to a number of audiences. Sometimes it’s a Navy captain (according to military records, that character is fictitious), sometimes it’s an Army captain (according to military records, ditto), and sometimes the heroic action took place in Iraq, not Afghanistan. Sometimes the dead soldier was pulled from a ravine, sometimes from a Humvee.

The truth (which should be enough) is that, in 2011, Biden did pin a medal on an Army staff sergeant who’d tried without success to rescue a dead comrade from a burning vehicle in Afghanistan – and who had indeed told Biden that he didn’t deserve the medal. And yet, after The Washington Post parsed his erroneous story-telling, he didn’t seem to understand the problem: “I was making the point how courageous these people are … What is it that I said wrong?”

Hence the conundrum for Democrats: Has Trump – with his documented 12,000 lies – lowered the bar so that Biden’s falsehoods should be deemed no big deal? That Biden should get a pass because his fictional forays are far more benign?

Biden himself has insisted that he should get a pass, saying last December,”I am a gaffe machine, but my God, what a wonderful thing compared to a guy who can’t tell the truth.”

Some Democratic primary voters in South Carolina, interviewed recently, don’t care a whit. One woman said Biden’s flubs were fine because “his heart is in the right place and that’s what we need right now.” One guy, asked about Biden’s errors, said, “So what? I do too. He’s human. It makes him real.” Another woman said, “That’s what makes him likable.” Another guy said, “The gaffes don’t matter because we all mess up, we’re all human.”

If voters like a politician, they’ll give that person plenty of slack. Trump’s cultists prove the point in the extreme, but it’s not a new phenomenon. After all, voters elected Ronald Reagan twice despite his frequent flights of imagination.

Context is everything. If Biden can convince enough people that he’s a comfortable soft landing after four dire years of Trump turbulence, his blarney won’t be a deal-breaker.

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Copyright 2019 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman is the national political columnist at WHYY in Philadelphia and a “Writer in Residence” at the University of Pennsylvania. Email him at [email protected].

Pop quiz: What did Lyndon Johnson in 1968, Gerald Ford in 1976, Jimmy Carter in 1980, and George H. W. Bush in 1992 have in common?

Those incumbent presidents were all seriously challenged – and seriously weakened – by insurgent candidates within their own party. LBJ was so jolted by antiwar Democrat Eugene McCarthy’s strong primary showing that he decided to junk his bid for renomination. Ford barely survived a Republican primary challenge on his right flank, from Ronald Reagan, and lost his re-election race. Carter weathered an acrimonious Democratic challenge on his left flank, from Edward Kennedy, and lost his re-election race. The senior Bush was beaten up badly by a challenge on his right flank, from Pat Buchanan, and lost his re-election race.

That’s my way of saying that former tea-party congressman Joe Walsh – who joined the GOP presidential race this week as a vehicle for Republican primary voters who are fed up with Donald Trump – should not be dismissed out of hand.

No, he won’t wrest the nomination away from Trump, but Walsh is a rhetorical brawler who’s willing to say out loud what he believes many Republicans whisper in private. A challenger on Trump’s right flank is arguably the only person who can make the case to Trump’s base.

“The country is sick of this guy’s tantrum. He’s a child…He’s nuts. He’s erratic. He’s cruel. He stokes bigotry. He’s incompetent. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s a narcissist,” Walsh said on ABC’s “Right now he is literally tweeting us into a recession. He will tweet us into war.”

It’s not entirely clear when Walsh broke with Trump. Granted, he says now that “I helped to create Trump, I’m sorry for that.” But as recently as last year, he defended Trump’s denigration of some non-white nations as “s—holes.” He also assailed immigrants at the Mexican border as “invaders” and prior to Trump’s ascent, he had a habit of referring to President Obama as “a Muslim.”

In other words – and what a shock – Walsh is an imperfect messenger. Conservative websites are gleefully compiling his past bombastic statements, and Democrats are stewing about them. But let’s get real: There is no perfect messenger. A disenchanted former Trump supporter is arguably the best possible candidate for grassroots Republicans, and Republican-leaning independents, who’d consider casting protest votes during primary season. Potentially, they could use Walsh’s ballot line to send a much-needed message about what Republicans have lost as a party, and what they hope to regain.

Sarah Longwell, publisher of The Bulwark, a conservative anti-Trump website, wrote in a Twitter thread that Walsh’s candidacy could be “a path forward” for people on the right who still adhere to civility and American values. She said, “There must be a moment when the spell breaks (and) the rationalizations stop. And there is a clear-eyed reckoning with who we’ve become…Because what Joe Walsh is doing is what we hope every Trump supporter will do, right? (To) say that their support or even silent toleration of Trump’s racism, incompetence, and bullying was wrong, and make an affirmative decision to refuse to allow it to go any further.”

Stuart Stevens, a veteran Republican strategist, favors the more moderate Bill Weld (an ex-Massachusetts governor), but says that, regardless of candidate, “Republicans need an active, robust primary.”

Joe Walsh will face many obstacles, everything from name recognition (no, this is not the Joe Walsh who played guitar for The Eagles) to the challenge of raising money. But in political time, we’re light years away from Iowa and New Hampshire, and the odds are strong that Trump will say or do things that will feed Walsh’s simple message to silent Republicans: “We’re tired of the lies. We’re tired of the drama.”

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Copyright 2019 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman is the national political columnist at WHYY in Philadelphia and a “Writer in Residence” at the University of Pennsylvania. Email him at [email protected].

Winston Churchill understood that in times of national emergency, it was imperative to forge alliances with anyone willing to help – no matter how odious those allies might be. As the British prime minister famously declared in 1941, “If Hitler invaded hell, I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.”

In politics, as in international warfare, you win by addition, not subtraction. You win by welcoming anyone who wants to join the ranks. That’s how successful coalitions are built. But it’s amazing how so many litmus-test Democrats seem impervious to reality.

The other day, Oliver Willis, a senior writer at the liberal media website ShareBlue, tweeted his disdain for three prominent anti-Trump Republicans: ex-GOP congressman Joe Walsh, and conservative commentators Bill Kristol and David Frum, all of whom have signaled their willingness to make common cause with Democrats.

“Joe Walsh isn’t good. Bill Kristol isn’t good. David Frum isn’t good. These people are not worthy allies,” Willis wrote. “They’re working to undermine what is good. They’re just embarrassed at Trump for saying the BS out loud.”

Willis was applauded by many in the lefty Twitterverse. But prominent Trump critics on the right – including George Conway, Max Boot, George Will, and Peter Wehner – give voice to the restiveness within Republican-friendly ranks. According to recent polling, it appears a sizable number of reality-based Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are loath to vote for Trump again – not necessarily because they now oppose him on policy, but because his tweets and reckless antics have simply exhausted them.

For instance, Tom Nichols is a Republican who teaches at the U.S. Naval War College who is begging for any reason to vote Democratic in 2020. He wrote last Thursday: “I don’t care if Sen. Elizabeth Warren is a mendacious Massachusetts liberal. She could tell me that she’s going to make me wear waffles as underpants and I’ll vote for her … I don’t care if Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is a muddle-headed socialist from a rural class-warfare state … He could tell me he’s going to tax used kitty litter and I’ll vote for him.”

Why? Because Nichols is fed up with Trump’s “compulsive lying, fantastic and easily refuted claims, base insults, and bizarre public meltdowns …It is a sign of how low we have fallen as a nation that ‘rational’ and ‘not compromised by an enemy’ are now my only two requirements for the office of the president of the United States.”

And Boot, an ex-foreign policy adviser to John McCain and Mitt Romney, is rooting for a blue victory. Earlier this month, he pleaded: “Don’t mess this up, Democrats. To preserve American democracy, we need to get rid of Trump. Then we can return to debating our normal policy differences.”

But because these people have toiled for the red team – George Conway (who calls Trump “a sociopath”) helped investigate Bill Clinton’s sex history during the 1990s, and Bill Kristol was a cheerleader for George W. Bush’s Iraq war – they’re deemed to be unacceptable allies in 2019. As one liberal magazine, The Nation, contended recently, “They’ve had their day. Democrats don’t need their votes.”

Really? If I’ve learned anything while covering national politics for the last 30 years, it’s the axiom that a campaign or a party needs all the votes it can possibly get. That’s not exactly rocket science. And fortunately, during that Twitter spat the other day, some Democrats seemed to get it.

Neera Tanden, a former Hillary Clinton advisor who now runs the Center for American Progress, wrote, “Our democracy is under siege. Make allies wherever you can. We can disagree again when Trump is gone.”

Elizabeth Bennett, a former congressional staffer, added: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend, at least while our mutual enemy is still a threat. Maybe we should just graciously accept the help b/c they can speak to people who won’t listen to us.”

Or as the old saying goes, “Politics makes strange bedfellows.” That’s still true – unless purist Democrats spurn the Republican migrants by building a wall.

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Copyright 2019 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman is the national political columnist at WHYY in Philadelphia and a “Writer in Residence” at the University of Pennsylvania. Email him at [email protected].

The word in Colorado is that John Hickenlooper is being pressured to quit his futile presidential quest and run for the Senate in 2020. Good.

A top newspaper in Texas is pleading with Beto O’Rourke to quit the presidential race and run for the Senate in 2020. Good.

Democrats hither and yon are urging Montana Gov. Steve Bullock to quit the presidential race and run for the Senate in 2020. Good.

In other words, a sizable share of Democrats fully recognize that capturing the Senate, and dethroning Mitch McConnell, is nearly as critical as ousting Donald Trump. Even if they do manage to put a Democrat in the White House, the new president’s legislative agenda and federal court nominations are DOA if Republicans still rule the Senate. McConnell has been candid about that. In April, he told an audience in home state Kentucky: “If I’m still the majority leader of the Senate after next year, none of those [Democratic] things are going to pass the Senate. They won’t even be voted on. So think of me as the Grim Reaper.”

For Democrats, winning the Senate in 2020 will be a daunting task anyway – most of the competitive seats are in red states – but they’ll definitely fail unless they field the strongest possible candidates. Some of them are currently wasting their time and money cluttering the presidential debate stage, and when asked how a Democratic president would be able to get anything done with McConnell still at the Senate helm, their answers were lame. (Elizabeth Warren: “We have to push from the outside and have leadership from the inside and make this Congress reflect the will of the people.”)

McConnell’s Moscow-friendly maneuvers should be sufficient motivation – have you heard the latest news, about how one of his Senate actions triggered a huge Russian investment in his home state?But Democratic strategist Brad Bannon rightly warns that unless McConnell is relegated to the minority in 2021, “life will be hell” for any new Democratic president.

So much press emphasis is being placed on the presidential race that we pay insufficient attention to the daunting Senate map. If Democrats win the presidency, they need a net gain of three seats to control the chamber, which doesn’t sound like a lot until you see the map. Republican incumbents are up for re-election in 22 states, but only two of those states – Colorado and Maine -have gone blue in the last two presidential elections. If we assume, for the sake of argument, that Hickenlooper goes home and unseats Cory Gardner, and that Maine finally ousts so-called Republican “moderate” Susan Collins, Democrats would only need to net one more Senate seat.

Easy right? Nope.

Unless Alabama Republicans debase themselves by renominating accused child molester Roy Moore, it’s likely that Democratic incumbent Doug Jones will lose in 2020. So where else can Democrats net two more seats?

Maybe, conceivably, in some combination of red Arizona (ex-astronaut and Gabby Giffords spouse Mark Kelly has a shot), red Georgia (where Stacey Abrams declined to run), red North Carolina, red Iowa, red Texas (if O’Rourke runs), and red Montana (if Bullock runs). McConnell himself is up for re-election in Kentucky, but that’s one of the strongest of all red states – Kentuckians backed Trump last time by 25 points – and MAGA voters will again flood the polls, benefiting McConnell down ballot. (One big reason why Democrats aren’t strongly competitive in those states is because the party’s appeal to culturally conservative, small-town, and rural voters has waned in recent decades. Democrats badly need to reconnect. But that’s a discussion for another day.)

The bottom line for 2020 is that unless Democrats can pull off a near-miracle by fielding their strongest senatorial candidates – including Hickenlooper, O’Rourke, and Bullock – the chamber will bury whatever a Democratic president aspires to do.

Kamala Harris, the senator who’s hoping to trade up to the top job, reminded an audience last month that “2020 is also about the United States Senate,” but with everyone seemingly fixated on the presidential race, that message has yet to resonate.

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Copyright 2019 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman is the national political columnist at WHYY in Philadelphia and a “Writer in Residence” at the University of Pennsylvania. Email him at [email protected].

Deep into Wednesday’s Democratic debate, exasperated Republican strategist John Weaver tweeted: “When the topic is criminal justice, how are they not talking about the criminal in the White House? Huh?”

Weaver, who detests Trump, nailed it. The Democrats, in their predictable and often desperate zeal to attack one another with gusto, failed to train any substantive firepower on the incumbent – who has presided over a crime scene.

Mired as they were in squabbling among themselves – wading deep into the weeds, yet again, on the abstruse details of health care policy – Donald Trump got off easy. And much as Trump hates CNN, he should send the network a bouquet of flowers, thanking its moderators for goading the Democrats to beat each other up and leave him alone.

Perhaps some TV viewers were galvanized by the intramural attacks on Sen. Kamala Harris’ old tenure as California attorney general (she says she’s proud of it), and by the attacks on Joe Biden’s old senate record (he says he’s proud of it), and by the attacks on Barack Obama – and, by extension, Biden – for deporting millions of undocumented immigrants (some candidates seemed far more upset about Obama than about Trump). But I doubt it.

“No Democrat wants to watch our candidates savaging one another. It’s a gift to the GOP,” said Simon Rosenberg, a center-left Democratic operative.

Here’s an example of a timely topic of national importance that never came up during either night: Trump has forced Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, to quit his job. Coats, you may recall, was fiercely independent in his assessments of threats to our national security, including Russia and its meddling in the 2016 election.

Trump’s ongoing mission is to subsume the intelligence community, to make it a partisan instrument of his will at the expense of our national security. Which explains why he’s now trying to replace Coats with a congressional toady who has limited intelligence experience, and whose longest stint in public life was eight years as mayor of a small Texas town.

This dire development, which fits into the larger narrative about Trump’s authoritarian instincts at home and weakness abroad, was certainly worthy of attention. The CNN moderators could have asked the candidates about it, or, at risk of breaking the moderators’ “rules,” candidates could have found ways to bring it up.

On the domestic front, here’s something else that never came up: A scant 10 miles from Detroit’s debate auditorium, in the swing county of Macomb, autoworkers are losing their jobs because a historic General Motors plant is shutting down. Back when Trump campaigned for president in Michigan, he declared: “If I’m elected, you won’t lose one plant, you’ll have plants coming into this country, you’re going to have jobs again, you won’t lose one plant, I promise you that.” The other day, a Trump voter in that community lamented: “He said the jobs would stay here. But then I hear about the plant closing. What the hell is going on?”

Over a span of two nights, not one of the 20 Democratic candidates mentioned this plant closing – and the chasm between Trump’s promise and performance. That might have helped their cause, since wresting Michigan from Trump is a top priority in the next Electoral College tally.

If the CNN moderators had found the time to mention the plant closing (instead of asking Harris to fight anew with Biden over busing that took place 40 years ago), they could’ve teed up a question that the electorate truly cares about: How do these Democrats propose to expand the economy and create good jobs at good wages – in contrast to Trump’s trickle-down economics and fealty to the rich?

Barely a sentence was devoted to that fundamental issue. By contrast, Twitter blew up after Biden greeted Harris on stage by saying, “Go easy on me, kid.” Was “kid” an insult? Was it condescending? Was it just Joe being Joe? Was it a big deal about nothing? Was it a disaster?

Meanwhile, Trump says and does worse whenever he breathes. Thanks to the Democrats’ dearth of perspective, and CNN’s myopic lust for intramural conflict, Trump basically won the debate.

We’re left to wonder whether round three, in September, will yield a better result.

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Copyright 2019 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman is the national political columnist at WHYY in Philadelphia and a “Writer in Residence” at the University of Pennsylvania. Email him at [email protected].

Remember the now-distant days when we Americans who closely track Donald Trump’s lies and lawlessness waited in great anticipation for “Mueller Time”?

That historic reckoning seemed virtually assured – until Trump’s servile attorney general, Bill Barr, falsely spun the Mueller report as a total exoneration of his client. Barr’s bumper-sticker mantra, amplified by his client’s relentless tweets, infested the mainstream media bloodstream and struck a chord with a public that hasn’t bothered to read the densely circumlocutions report.

So it’s quite possible that Robert Mueller’s long-awaited open testimony, slated for Wednesday in front of the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees, will be a yawner. Indeed, he recently warned that “the report is my testimony.” But key House Democrats believe (or hope) that if the special counsel merely recites the most crucial passages on TV, that he will somehow bring the report to life and seed more grassroots support for impeachment.

If that were to happen, fine. But it’s a sad commentary on our attention-deficit, sub-literate culture that the powerful substance of the Mueller report has not sufficiently resonated. Only three percent of Americans have reportedly read the entire thing, and only 10 percent say they’ve read some of it.

If Mueller’s public testimony moves the needle, fine. But legal experts with federal prosecutorial experience know already how damning it is – regardless of whether Mueller remains characteristically reticent under questioning.

Donald Ayer, a former assistant U.S. attorney and a deputy attorney general under George H. W. Bush, calls it “a very readable account of repeated acts by the president carefully tailored to interfere with and disrupt (Mueller’s) investigation.” Mimi Rocah, another former assistant U.S. attorney, says the report amasses “an overwhelming amount of incriminating information” that documents how Trump “engaged in obstruction of justice by repeatedly trying to dissuade witnesses from cooperating or testifying, using threats and intimidation” – and she points out (as have more than 1000 current and former prosecutors) that if not for a Justice Department memo that argues against indicting a sitting president, obstruction charges were likely justified.

Indeed, those current and former prosecutors write in their open letter: “To look at these facts and say that a prosecutor could not probably sustain a conviction for obstruction of justice – the standard set out in Principles of Federal Prosecution – runs counter to logic and our experience.”

There’s certainly fertile ground for substantive questions. House Democrats, most notably Judiciary Chairman Nadler, would ideally love to hear Mueller endorse the obstruction angle – in colloquial, everyday language. They will surely ask him whether he, as an experienced professional prosecutor, believes that Trump committed obstruction-of-justice crimes, as determined by the weight of the evidence, even though Trump, as a sitting president, cannot be criminally charged.

Will Mueller elaborate on his report and answer that question in the affirmative? Yeah, right. And the 2019 Phillies will rally to win the National League East.

So if Mueller won’t bite on whether Trump should be criminally charged, Judiciary Democrats will surely ask him to elaborate on the remedy he offered in his report: “The Constitution requires a process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse a sitting president of wrongdoing.” Well, the only other process is impeachment. Does Mueller believe that the evidence he amassed meets the threshold for an impeachment probe of high crimes and misdemeanors?

Could Mueller answer in the affirmative? Yeah, right. And unicorns will gambol on the National Mall.

Excuse me for trying to lower expectations, but Mueller is not likely to break character and deliver an indelible Hollywood moment. In fact, when the news broke that his testimony was being pushed back one week, because House committee Democrats wanted to ensure that their junior members would have the chance to speak, the odds of another Democratic muck-up increased. Expect repetitive questions badly framed within a five-minute window, all while preening for the cameras.

Perhaps Mueller’s mere appearance on live TV will dominate the news cycle for a day, and remind enough potential 2020 voters that our Russia-enabled president is soaked in corruption ‒ regardless of whether Mueller does little more than read aloud from what he has written. But if “Mueller Time” lays an egg, I’ll be reminded of an old Peanuts cartoon, circa 1968, when Charlie Brown laments, “What a team. We can’t even win enough games to have a slump!”

He could easily have been talking about the Democrats.

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Copyright 2019 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman is the national political columnist at WHYY in Philadelphia and a “Writer in Residence” at the University of Pennsylvania. Email him at [email protected].