Former Vice-President Joe Biden said he wanted to elect his nominee no later than August 1 – which is not long!
(This is my last view of 10 women who will most likely be Biden’s choice.)
Biden himself retreated from the previous quarterbacking about who was considered and who, well, no.
While he sometimes still offers praise for the most mentioned candidates – and his campaign has held virtual fundraising with politicians like New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham – the former vice president has tended to reject many political obstacles lately.
Which means things are becoming more serious.
4. How does the Democratic Party dance ‘Defund the Police?’:
What Democrats want to spend in Congress this week is about the legislation package they introduced last week aimed at reforming the police – from banning chokehold to building a national database of police violations.
What they might have to fight for – for the second week in a row – is an ongoing call from several Black activists to fully harass the police and reallocate the funds to support marginalized communities.
A very full position, politically. A
ABC News-Ipsos poll released Friday showed that two-thirds of Americans oppose police denudation. But nearly 6 out of 10 (57%) of black Americans support such actions – and reallocate the money to more community-based programs.
Trying to move beyond the “defund the police” debate, House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, a high-ranking African-American official in Congress, said this on CNN on Sunday:
“Nobody will fund the police. We can restructure the police forces. Restructure, re-imagine the police. That’s what we will do. The fact is that the police have a role to play.”
Which is politically the right place. Many people support law enforcement reform. Much less back is shaved completely.
The question before the congressional Democrats was whether Clyburn’s position on Sunday was enough for their party activist wing.
3. Trump and the road:
On Saturday, President Donald Trump delivered the opening address at West Point. And when he left the stage,
the camera catches it walking carefully down the road to the ground.
Twitter became a banana, showing Trump looking old and weak. Of course what Twitter does.
But then Trump decided to drastically strengthen his current profile – and make sure it became a much bigger story.
“The road that I went down after West Point’s speech began very long & steep, had no grip and, most importantly, very slippery,”
Trump tweeted on Saturday night. “The last thing I will do is ‘fall’ on the Fake News for fun. The last ten feet I run to flat ground. Momentum!”
It’s hard to overstate the miscalculation here by Trump. Without his tweet, the video of him walking down the path is, perhaps, a little Sunday story. With that tweet, it is a BIG story on Sunday, with the potential to leak into the week that the President wants to focus on restarting his re-election campaign.
So why did he do it? Because he cannot be described publicly as a weak person or anything that is less than fully in command at all times. So even if he magnifies criticism, Trump feels as though he has to respond. (Read this about the definition of Trump’s twisted obstinacy.)
It was a political instinct that brought disaster.
2. The Trump campaign resumes:
It’s been the last few weeks of disaster for Trump and his party. (See below). The president hopes this is a week where things change, with everything leading to Saturday’s rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Meanwhile it has been tampered with (The rally was originally scheduled for Friday, June 19, known as Juneteenth, a day celebrating the end of slavery) Trump and his closest allies see the return to the campaign trail as perhaps something that can heal what upsets the political fate of the President.
Trump, once a hype man,
said on Twitter Friday that “we already have ticket requests for more than 200,000 people. I hope to see everyone in Oklahoma!”
There is no doubt that Trump is driven by crowd energy, and that there will be a ton of people present on Saturday night. (No, there won’t be 200,000 people; the arena where the event is held has the capacity
more than 19,000.)
But with soaring coronaviruses – in the west and southwest in particular – this week’s news coverage tends to focus, at least in part, on Trump’s policy of holding a huge general meeting at all.
Participants have been asked to sign a waiver that acknowledges the Covid-19 contract at a general meeting is a possibility. The Tulsa health director said that Saturday
he hopes Trump will postpone the general meeting because of concerns about “our ability to protect anyone who is attending a large event indoors.”
However, there are no current plans to establish social distance at public meetings or wear mandate masks.
So yes, Trump is likely to get what he wants – a large crowd celebrating the country’s “transition to greatness”. But how much does it cost?
1. Press the panic button:
Late Saturday night, the Des Moines Register released a poll about the Iowa Senate race. And that was very surprising.
Democrat Theresa Greenfield took 46% in the poll to 43% for Iowa Republican Senator Joni Ernst. As a poll for J. Ann Selzer
note down, that’s the first
the election since Ernst ran and won in 2014 which shows he trailed electoral opponents.
While the numbers don’t indicate that Ernst will lose – the Republicans are just getting started
attack / define Greenfield afterwards
his main win earlier this month – they make it clear that the race that looks on the competitive edge now looks like a very real contest.
And that is t-r-o-u-b-l-e for the Republican Senate who hopes to maintain their narrow majority this fall.
Why? Because there are many seats that are seen by independent handicapers at least as fragile as Iowa.
That
Cook Political Reports, for example, ranks Iowa as “leaning Republicans” along with Georgia, Kansas and Montana seats. And they rank four more GOP seats – Arizona, Colorado, Maine and North Carolina – as a lottery, which means they are the most endangered.
Do the math: That’s nine chairs. In contrast, Cook judged that only two Democratic seats – Alabama and Michigan – were competitive. And when you think that Democrats only need to get three seats to win back the majority if Biden wins the presidential election (and four if he doesn’t), you can see why the Republicans have a very bad Saturday night (and Sunday).
