Will Biden’s South Carolina Blowout Translate into Super Tuesday Success?

By John McCormack

Monday, March 02, 2020

A week ago, Joe Biden’s campaign looked like it might be on death’s door.

On Saturday, February 22, the day of the Nevada caucuses, his lead in South Carolina had shrunk to 2.3 points in the RealClearPolitics average of polls. But Biden’s second-place finish in Nevada, Tuesday’s debate in South Carolina, and Wednesday’s endorsement of Biden by Jim Clyburn — the influential 14-term South Carolina congressman and House majority whip — all made one thing clear: The former vice president was the only viable alternative to Bernie Sanders in the first-in-the-South primary. In the final RCP polling average of South Carolina, Biden led Sanders by 15 points. His margin of victory was nearly twice as large on Saturday.

Biden walked away from South Carolina with 39 delegates; Sanders took only 15. Overall, the Vermont socialist has only a narrow delegate lead over Biden. Even though Sanders won the most votes in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, Biden’s margin of victory in South Carolina was wide enough that the former vice president has won the most Democratic-primary votes to date.

A look at the South Carolina exit poll reveals even better news for Biden: He won not only by running up the score among African-American voters, but he carried white voters by double digits as well. Black voters were 56 percent of the South Carolina Democratic-primary electorate, and Biden carried that group 61 percent to 17 percent over Sanders. White voters made up 40 percent of the South Carolina primary electorate, and Biden carried them 33 percent to 23 percent over Sanders.

Biden’s performance among white Democrats on Saturday is important because in several of the Southern states that vote on Super Tuesday, black voters will make up a much smaller share of the electorate than they did in South Carolina. Although black voters were a majority in Alabama (54 percent) in the 2016 Democratic primary, they accounted for less than a third of voters in the other Southern states voting on Super Tuesday: North Carolina (32 percent), Arkansas (27 percent), Oklahoma (14 percent), Tennessee (32 percent), Virginia (26 percent), and Texas (19 percent).

Biden’s performance on Saturday suggests that he has a chance of winning all of those states, although Virginia and Texas are the most uncertain. In the two Virginia polls released in the past week, one showed Biden ahead by five points while the other showed Sanders ahead by nine points.

In Texas, Sanders has led in the last seven polls — by margins ranging from 4 points to 17 points — and Biden has to worry about splitting the relatively moderate vote there with Michael Bloomberg, who has spent over half a billion dollars mostly aimed at Super Tuesday contests. One poll released last week suggests that Bloomberg’s presence in the race could help Sanders win the Lonestar State.

Of course, Super Tuesday marks the point in the race when the number of states in which a candidate finishes first is less important than the overall delegate haul: one-third of all 3,979 Democratic National Convention delegates are up for grabs tomorrow.

Bernie Sanders will very likely emerge with a wider delegate lead on Super Tuesday; the only real question is whether Biden can limit Sanders’s gains to a number that he might reasonably overcome.

What Biden needs to do on Super Tuesday is keep things close in Texas, where 228 delegates are at stake, and run up the score in the rest of the South, where 393 delegates are at stake. If he does that, Biden can compensate for losses in the whiter and more liberal states where Sanders is strong: Colorado, Maine, Vermont, Utah, Massachusetts, and Minnesota. There are 302 total delegates in those Super Tuesday states, and Sanders will build a sizable delegate lead over Biden here even though Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren still have a decent chance of coming in first in their home states.

The biggest question is what exactly happens in California, where 415 delegates are at stake. It’s pretty much a given that Bernie Sanders will win. The RealClearPolitics average of California polls shows him leading by nearly 20 points: Sanders 34.4 percent, Warren 16.2 percent, Biden 13.2 percent, Bloomberg 11.6 percent, Buttigieg 9.0 percent. To keep Sanders from building a big delegate lead in California, Biden badly needs to clear the 15 percent threshold necessary to win delegates. And in a race that is rapidly evolving, there’s good reason to think he can do that. The South Carolina results will nudge some undecided voters toward Biden, and Pete Buttigieg dropped out of the race last night. Buttigieg’s departure could very well help both Warren and Biden clear the 15 percent threshold in California and tamp down Sanders’s overall delegate haul from the Golden State — and that could turn the race for the Democratic presidential nomination into a toss-up between the former vice president and the socialist senator from Vermont.

Events, Dear Boys

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, March 01, 2020

If it isn’t coronavirus, it is going to be something else. Are we going to be ready for it?

When Governor George W. Bush of Texas decided to run for president, he had some big ideas about education and entitlement reform, about encouraging Americans to invest and build an “ownership society” in which not just the affluent investing classes would have a substantial personal stake in the economy.

While he was planning to build his “ownership society,” Osama bin Laden was planning 9/11.

And so George W. Bush, the would-be “education president” who had made noninterventionist noises about those entangling foreign alliances and “national-building” abroad that so trouble some of our paleoconservative friends, became a “wartime president,” as we used to say before they were all wartime presidents. Like his father before him, Bush came into the presidency with very pronounced small-r republican inclinations and brought to his public career a very old-fashioned sense of modesty. (Borrowing from Churchill, Bush’s opponents would insist that his modesty came from having so much to be modest about.) He ended up transforming the presidency into something more imperial (from imperator, “commander-in-chief”) than any chief executive since Franklin Roosevelt might even have dreamt of.

When he was asked about the greatest challenge facing a statesman, Harold MacMillan is said to have answered, “Events, dear boy, events.” Bush’s presidency was bookended by 9/11 and the financial crisis. Neither of those was exactly his administration’s fault — there is a good argument that the events of September 11, 2001, were set in motion in 1979 and that the United States had been an undercard contender in them until 9/11, while the subprime meltdown and financial crisis resulted from a string of policy errors extending all the way back to the 1930s. Bush might have had better or worse policies when dealing with these events, but dealing with them was not what he had in mind when he ran for president.

Donald Trump’s conception of the presidency is, to put it generously, peculiar and unique to him. Trump was quite the Twitter warrior when it came to the Obama administration’s handling of the Ebola outbreak in 2014 and, as a Howard Hughes-class germophobe, he ought to be pretty well positioned to bring some energy and focus to the coronavirus. Maybe he will, or maybe Captain Chaos will keep letting his freak flag fly — who knows?

Donald Trump is not the only American with a distorted view of what the presidency is and what the president ought to be expected to do and to be able to do. The American president is not a prince, potentate, or pope, not an ersatz emperor or a democratic demi-monarch. He is the chief administrator of the national state. “State” is a word that has a whiff of evil attached to it: Trump and his cheerleaders bawl about a conspiratorial “deep state” that opposes him, libertarians warn against statism and statists, progressives whimper about “state violence” and the like. And students of American history know that the scope and character of the national state was the defining issue of post-revolutionary politics: Under the Articles of Confederation, there was hardly any national state at all; Antifederalists and Jeffersonian democrats were suspicious of giving the state too much power, while Alexander Hamilton and likeminded nation-builders (nationalists, Rich Lowry would say) set about building a powerful state.

Francis Fukuyama, in his magisterial Origins of Political Order, outlines three contributors to political stability: accountable government, the rule of law, and state-building. State-building is at heart a risk-mitigation project, something that is implicit in theories of government going back to Thomas Hobbes and explicit in the modern “social insurance” model of the welfare state, in which the state takes a prominent role in “providing for those common hazards of life against which few can make adequate provision.” The rule of law makes relations among citizens and between citizen and state predictable, creating procedures for justice that supplant clientelism and vendetta. Accountability in the democratic West normally is ensured by elections, but Fukuyama argues, not unpersuasively, that there is a kind of accountability at work even in stable autocratic regimes such as the one in Beijing, which is being tested by the coronavirus, just as we are likely to be tested.

None of this is a brief for limited government or for expansive government — for a small state or for a large one. It is, rather, a brief for a state with well-defined roles and responsibilities, one that has adequate resources and authority to execute its duties in relation to these. It is in no way contradictory or inconsistent to advocate a settlement under which the national government has no role whatsoever in, say, K–12 education or the management of churches or newspapers, and in which it is very limited in its role in building highways or regulating trade — but at the same time has a great deal of power and authority when dealing with an epidemic or other public-health crisis and a relatively free hand in matters of national security. (This strikes many people as obviously reasonable and unobjectionable, which is why our reflexively sneaky progressive friends are always trying to redefine gun control or climate change as public-health and national-security issues.) It is perfectly defensible to favor a smaller welfare state and a bigger budget for the Centers for Disease Control.

But our heroic, god-emperor conception of the presidency prevents the emergence of that understanding of the state. If the presidency is a kind of sacral kingship and the state is mainly a vehicle for the apotheosis of our national demigod, then it must be very difficult to achieve a schematic reimagining of the state as a series of discrete means directed at a series of discrete ends. Barack Obama promised to “fundamentally change” the country, and Donald Trump promised to “Make America Great Again.” But these are slogans, not a program for responding to unpredictable epidemics.

And epidemics are unpredictable — as are the most important things for which we rely on the state for mitigation. Perhaps there is a straight line (an almost straight line) leading from the Mosaddegh coup d’état to 9/11, but if there is one, the dots can only be connected retrospectively. We cannot know what is coming in any specific way. But we know trouble is coming, because trouble is always coming. Winter is always coming, which is why it is better to have a government of Aesop’s thrifty ants rather than one of spendthrift, deficit-happy grasshoppers. Maybe we dodge a bullet on coronavirus. Maybe we don’t.

But we are not likely to dodge every bullet. The world of November 7, 2000, was radically different from the world of September 11, 2001. That was not the first time our world has been suddenly reordered by unforeseen events. It will not be the last. We have literal and metaphorical viruses — a world full of them.

Being lucky is not the same thing as being smart. And there is a kind of compound interest on being smart: It is good to do the smart thing today, but it is better to have done it ten years ago.

Biden’s Triumph Scrambles the Democratic Race

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Saturday, February 29, 2020

Joe Biden thumped all the competition in South Carolina. The scale of his victory there scrambles the Democratic race. And Biden’s victory takes more steam out of the candidacies of Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg. But it is not easy to imagine Biden having the stamina to take on Sanders in a long race.

The result should worry Democrats who wanted unity. There had been some evidence in the polls that black voters were warming up to Sanders. They did not do so in sufficient numbers in South Carolina to begin making Sanders into a consensus candidate.

Can Biden sustain the momentum? It’s hard to imagine that he can. This is a Saturday-night victory just days before Super Tuesday. Biden cannot mount much new campaign organization in the upcoming states or process any surge of donations into a surge of advertising. If Sanders wins the preponderance of delegates available next Tuesday, then Biden will just be another non-Sanders candidate, like Pete Buttigieg, who was given a strong look by a particular subset of voters within the Democratic Party. Meanwhile Sanders continues to put points on the board.

Biden’s biggest difficulty is the media. Biden is now depending on an avalanche of earned media gushing about his “comeback” in the race in South Carolina. But, unlike John McCain in 2008, Biden is a candidate uniquely disliked and distrusted by the liberal media apparatus that would provide him such a narrative. They are very likely not to give it to him.

Although much has been made about the continuing importance of black voters and black turnout to Democratic general-election victories, I expect to see stories in the next 48 hours about the unique nature of South Carolina’s Democratic electorate. There may be an undercurrent of internal Democratic class warfare in these accounts, emphasizing that South Carolina’s Democrats are much less educated, less Latino, and less progressive than the party as a whole. Sandersistas will emphasize that Sanders polls better with blacks in the North.

Biden’s victory raises serious questions about the role that liberal-leaning media play in the Democratic process. Black voters overwhelmingly rejected the liberal-media-approved alternatives to Bernie — Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg. That media class has been whispering about Biden’s unfitness for office.

More provocatively, did African Americans in South Carolina just vote to reject the future of the Democratic Party? Until recently, it seemed that the future would be set by an educated elite that was committed to “woke” social issues or socialist politics. In fact, one of the great undercurrents in this year’s Democratic primary was a debate about which of those tendencies should have the upper hand in the future. Sanders supporters wanted to put class warfare and economic issues at the fore; anti-Sanders progressives wanted to address cultural issues and even emphasized the role that Big Business plays in progressive social change.

In South Carolina, African-American voters had an opportunity to weigh in on this debate, and instead they went their own way entirely: with experience, with a figure they trust. More than that, they went with a candidate who started his campaign by bragging that he had worked with segregationists in the Senate, and who was attacked over his historic opposition to bussing, and over his support of the Crime Bill. African Americans are supposed to be the “revolutionary subject” of woke politics, but black voters in South Carolina chose the most moderate, “least woke” Democrat. Black voters are often invoked as the soul of America’s working class; they are the kind of voter that democratic socialism intends to champion. But they weren’t particularly interested in Sanders.

The result also raises a question about the coherence of the Democratic coalition itself. While it is impossible to imagine blacks beginning to defect in large numbers from the Democratic Party, it seems obvious that this particular slate of candidates has exposed a growing divide within the party. Educated whites have been defecting from the GOP to the Democrats for two decades.  Less-educated whites have been defecting from the Democrats to the GOP. Are the white and African-American parts of the Democratic Party resembling each other less and less, in socioeconomic terms? Without traditional gatekeeping institutions in the party, how can it intelligently reconcile these conflicting interests, especially when the liberal media seem to so badly misread the priorities of black Democratic voters?

Oh, and we learned tonight that Sanders victories are not leading, as early victories usually do, to an obvious and overwhelming victory march to the convention. If he wants a majority, he’s going to have to fight for every inch.

Goodbye, Liz

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Saturday, February 29, 2020

In a recent interview with 60 Minutes, former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg tried to describe the political scene:

A few years ago, there was a revolution against the intelligentsia. People said, “You know, those people, particularly on the coasts, are trying to tell us what to do.” They wanted a change. That explains Donald Trump. Now, people seem to have changed. This cycle, people want stability.

Have they changed so much? Bloomberg thinks the tides are turning in his direction. I’m not so sure on either count. If people wanted the intelligentsia, if they wanted someone on the coasts telling them what to do, Elizabeth Warren would be on her way to the Democratic nomination. Instead, she is soon to be packing up her campaign. Her job will have been to knife Michael Bloomberg before he could launch a sneak attack on Sanders on Super Tuesday.

Warren was clearly the favorite candidate of academics and journalists — the intelligentsia. Why? Because she was the quintessential “front row” candidate, to borrow a term from author and photographer Chris Arnade. The image of her campaign will be her on a debate stage, hand raised, ready with an answer — but losing support roughly every minute she speaks.

After her dismal showing in South Carolina, there is no chance of Warren becoming the electoral alternative to Bernie Sanders. The first three states tried Pete Buttigieg in that role. South Carolina resoundingly chose Joe Biden. Her campaign fell between two stools: the young, somewhat nervous Left, and an older, aspirational center.

Her campaign persona had a funny way of playing to each. To the Left, she offered her ambition: her plans to end private health insurance, institute a wealth tax, make day care universal and free. Her promise was to give them security. To the center, she gave her ability to do homework. Every issue had an elaborate plan. Every plan was drawn up in dollars and cents. Sometimes the figures weren’t quite right. To them, she offered her competence and attention to detail.

Well, sort of. Her Medicare for All plan would send the federal budget into a new stratosphere, and she didn’t even include the cost of her plan to cover illegal aliens as well. Not to mention that her proposal includes tax increases that are unconstitutional and politically infeasible.

No matter, her numerous plans weren’t meant to be real. Congress doesn’t make a habit of passing a presidential candidate’s PDFs into law. The plans were meant to communicate that she was serious, that she puts in the overtime and sweats the details, just like all the other high-achieving non-billionaires have to do. Her sell to the Democratic Party was that she could pursue left-wing ideals in a responsible way. That is, she was proposing an impossible trade off: the pretense of radical action to thoroughly restructure existing power structures, while making sure that almost none of the affluent voters who support her would get hurt.

But the Left rejected her as a phony. She wouldn’t call herself a socialist, like Bernie Sanders. Also, if you looked carefully, the plans weren’t socialist in a traditional sense. They weren’t intended to destroy the social stratification of American life, but to reinforce it. In the debate preceding the South Carolina primary, Warren said that cancelling student debt was one of the ways she would help black and Latino Americans achieve equality with their white peers. But of course, this would be the equivalent of passing reparations for the doctors, lawyers, academics, and other professionals who hold the bulk of the loan debt and who would benefit the most from seeing it disappear. Working-class kids, disproportionately black and Latin, who saved their pennies, paid their freight as they went along, and chose an affordable night school would come out the biggest sucker of all.

She was also a phony in deeper ways. Elizabeth Warren vowed to stop taking the support of super PACs, which she opposed as part of her anti-corruption agenda. She had already tapped out her donor network in super Pacs before she stopped taking their money. Or so she thought. More recently, she reversed her position on super PACs once again and raised millions of the supposedly corrupt soft money in the days leading to Super Tuesday.

And on top of it all is the evidence suggesting that she deliberately lied about her own ethnic identity, claiming to be a Native American, so that Harvard Law School, which was desperate for nonwhite law professors, could hire her and quell a growing protest movement on the campus.

Elizabeth Warren was not a Native American, she was not a radical egalitarian, her homework answers were elaborate but did not add up. Neither as left-wing as she proposed to be, nor as responsible and diligent. She won’t be missed.

This Is What American Disengagement Looks Like

By Noah Rothman

Friday, February 28, 2020

Tensions had been building for weeks in Syria by late January when forces loyal to Bashar al-Assad launched an offensive on the towns surrounding the last rebel-held stronghold in the country, the city of Idlib.

The Russian-backed Syrian government offensive represented, according to Turkey, a violation of the “ceasefire” agreement Washington helped broker between the nations and non-state forces competing over Northwestern Syria. The attacks had unleashed a new wave of refugees streaming toward the Turkish border, numbering now almost 1 million strong and once again threatening to destabilize Europe. More importantly, Turkey warned, its positions were at risk of being targeted by Syrian forces, and they would retaliate if necessary. And on February 3, six Turkish soldiers were killed by Syrian artillery. Turkey responded, striking 54 military targets inside Syria, reportedly killing at least 76 Syrian soldiers.

But the fighting did not stop. The cycle of attacks and retaliatory strikes between Syria and Turkey accelerated. Five Turkish soldiers were killed on February 10, to which Turkey responded by shelling Syrian targets. Two more soldiers loyal to Ankara lost their lives on February 20, yielding another proportionate response. On February 22, Turkey destroyed 21 “regime targets” after it lost its 16th soldier this month to Assad’s forces. All the while, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned both Assad and his logistical partners in Moscow that his country would not tolerate these attacks forever, and Turkey would be “everywhere in Syria” if it needed to be.

This violence may have climaxed on Thursday in a staggeringly brazen escalation when at least 33 Turkish troops died and 30 more were wounded in an airstrike. Once again, Erdogan’s retaliation was proportionate, attacking Russian and Assad regime strongholds near Latakia with missiles. But the time for proportionality may be coming to an end. Since the collapse of the 2019 ceasefire in January, Ankara has warned the Syrian government that it has until the end of February—this weekend—to halt its advance on Idlib. “We plan to free our besieged observation towers, one way or another, by the end of this month,” Erodgan said this week. The slaughter of scores of Turkish forces has surely only hardened his resolve.

Turkey claims that the strike was attributable to the Assad government, but Russian warplanes supporting the advance of Syrian forces are more likely to blame. You can see why Erdogan would run reluctant cover for Moscow. There are no guarantees that a low-intensity conflict between a member of the NATO alliance and Russian forces won’t spiral into a more dangerous series of increasingly violent confrontations.

This is now the most dangerous period of the conflict since Turkey shot down a Russian warplane in 2015 in the earliest days of Moscow’s military intervention on behalf of its besieged client in Damascus. As it did in 2015, Turkey immediately invoked Article IV of the NATO alliance treaty—a provision that compels member states to enter into emergency consultations, a prerequisite for triggering NATO’s mutual defense provisions in Article V. The Atlantic alliance was able to talk Turkey off the ledge in 2015, but the West can produce few inducements that might convince Ankara to endure these deadly assaults on its soldiers and sovereign dignity indefinitely.

None of this should come as a surprise. This is what American disengagement looks like. The United States beat a hasty retreat from Northern Syria last year—a political, not strategic, decision that seemed justified only by the president’s frustration with America’s modest footprint in that lawless part of the world. In its wake, America left behind a fiction of a “ceasefire” arrangement, the fragility of which was apparent to most observers even as the administration was celebrating its achievement. Even if the deal was doomed to fail, said its more candid supporters, so what? This was not America’s fight; it’s time to let the rest of the world fight its wars and get America out. Well, mission accomplished.

For all the consternation U.S. deployments in Syria caused advocates of American retrenchment, the small and cost-effective American presence in the Levant deterred states like Russia and Turkey—whose interests in Syria are in direct conflict—from litigating their grievances on the battlefield. In America’s absence, deterrence has broken down, and the prospect of something far more dangerous now looms large.

American disengagement from such a crisis is an untenable position. The United States will commit itself to de-escalating this potentially catastrophic state of affairs; its interests in this region and in this crisis are imperative. But in that effort, the tools at its disposal are limited. We left them behind in Northern Syria.