President/National:
2020: Trump has taken to twitter these last few days to handicap the 2020 Democratic field. Even I have to admit that some of these descriptions are witty.
2020: He’s running! Again! Sen. Bernie Sanders (D/I) has made it official; he’s trying a second time for the Democratic nomination, after losing the first time to Hillary Clinton. In addition to his long history of railing against income inequality, this time he will also focus on racial injustice. Probably a wise move, seeing as how he got creamed in states with a high share of black voters last time.
2020: Seeking to address the rumors that she is an abusive employer, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D) on Monday defended her record, while admitting she was “a tough boss”. While turnover in Klobuchar’s DC office is said to have been the highest in the Senate and stories of her abusive ways have abounded, several staff members who have been with her for years have come to her defense. Klobuchar also tried to shape an identity as a relative moderate on fiscal issues, as she said she was going to weigh the costs before jumping on board any new, expensive initiatives and warning about a ballooning deficit. She seems to be staking out a Bidenesque way to the nomination (or perhaps a veep position under him).
2020: One candidate who has no qualms about raising taxes to pay for nice things is Sen. Elizabeth Warren. She unveiled her plan to create a universal child care plan on Tuesday, to the tune of $70 billion per year. Among the goodies were free child care for families with incomes below 200 percent of the poverty level, or less than $51,500 for a family of four. For other families, there would be a cap of 7% of their income for child care costs. Expect this to become a very expensive primary season.
2020: Former NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg (R/I/?) will decide by month’s end whether to seek the Democratic nomination. Bloomberg has already spent millions on analyzing a theoretical run from all sort of angles and one possible source of strength is all the money he has sprinkled out over various charities and institutions over the past years. It has bought him goodwill, and Bloomberg may be counting on that money buying him the nomination too (I’m just previewing the Republican line of attack, should Bloomberg win).
2020: Sen. Michael Bennet (D) will arrive in Des Moines Thursday to spend an oval weekend in Iowa, whence he will gauge the people’s craving for a zombie president.
2020: Speaking of zombies, presidential candidate and former Congressman John Delaney (D) actually made sense Tuesday when he said that the 2020 Democratic primary would be “between socialism and a more just form of capitalism”. Delaney went on to state that he believed in “capitalism, the free markets, and the private economy” and that he didn’t believe socialism was the answer, nor that it was what the American people wanted, with its top-down, government-only approach. Now that’s something I could get behind, so until something better comes along, I am officially declaring for Delaney 2020!
2020: Lest we forget that there are other parties than the GOP and the Dems, Youngstown School Board member Dario Hunter has launched a bid for the 2020 Green nomination. Hunter has an interesting story; born to an Iranian Muslim and an African-American Christian, he is now an openly homosexual Rabbi and his work history includes a stint as an environmental lawyer in Israel. He won election in 2015 as a write-in and joined the Greens in 2018. The party’s nominee in 2012 and 2016, Jill Stein, has indicated she’s not running again so the nomination is wide open.
SCOTUS: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is back in person on the Supreme Court, for the moment squashing many people’s wet dream of another Trump appointment. Ginsburg had surgery eight weeks ago to remove cancerous cells from a lung and had been missing from the Court since then….