Iowa Vortex Sutra: And so it begins
Campaign 2024 has officially begun
And so it begins.
The President has officially entered into the gladiatorial fundament.
It is exciting to watch Joe Biden, at the start of the New Year, come out throwing haymakers and right-crosses at the guy that is hoping to explode democracy. “He’s a loser,” the President said this week. It is just the sort of statement that will stick in Trump’s head, burrow into his marrow and drive him to distraction. For too long Joe Biden has been above-the-fray, presiding over the nation’s recovery, flying to war zones, crafting intricate responses to allies and adversaries while relying, in the process, on surrogates to get into the hand-to-hand dirty combat of the campaign.
This is, of course, a perfectly defensible strategy, considering that there is still something of a race for the GOP nomination going on. The Iowa caucus is in less than a week, immediately followed by the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries. Why acknowledge, in 2023, that Trump is the nominee when not a single vote has been cast in either caucus or primary?
The pendulum swings. It is now 2024 — election year. Increasingly, it appears obvious that the Republican nomination will go to Trump. He literally rigged the Republican primary process to favor himself early, in the case that he gets convicted of any of the 91 counts against him. How could anyone expect anything otherwise of the would-be American strongman? This is the thug who wants immunity from criminal charges in trying to subvert the results of the 2020 election because, well, he was in power. Discount Pinochet. This sets the darkest of precedents as to what a Trump 2.0 Presidency might resemble. “Trevor Morrison, associate White House counsel under Obama, says the key is whether the courts rule that Trump has immunity on the theory that his alleged criminal conduct does fall in the outer perimeter of presidential duties—and how the courts define that perimeter,” writes Greg Sargent in his debut at The New Republic. “If they accept Trump’s broad version of immunity or something like it, he might argue that future potentially criminal acts also fall within that perimeter.”
The quiet part — the strongman part — is now being said aloud. Further, strongman tactics are not just being used in his behind-the-scenes legal strategy, but in the actual Republican primaries, signaling just how much contempt the former President has for democratic politics in general. Trump’s playbook, now enacted, thanks, ironically, to a Romney, favors the former President to clinch the nomination by Super Tuesday, when almost all of the superdelegates will already have been meted out. Trump, almost certain to win Iowa, is nevertheless accusing DeSantis of rigging the caucus (“No, you’re the puppet”). So — trial results and pending appeals notwithstanding, Trump should be the Republican nominee before any of these issues get decided, depriving voters of the right to know if the party is nominating a convict. And so it makes less sense to delay the inevitable, which is the 2024 rematch of Biden v. Trump.
It makes even less sense delaying the inevitable, considering that Trump has already been campaigning against Biden for months. The unanswered jabs and volleys only adds to the public perception of Biden as overtired, despite the fact that he is only four years older than Trump (and, also, in better health). We won’t entertain the possibility that this newfound aggressive streak on the part of “Amtrak Joe” had anything to do with a recent lunch with former President Obama. Tyler Pager of the Washington Post reported on that catch-up session:
During the lunch, Obama noted the success of his reelection campaign structure in 2012, when some of his top presidential aides, including David Axelrod and Jim Messina, left the White House to take charge of the reelection operation in Chicago. That is a sharp contrast from Biden’s approach of leaving his closest aides at the White House even though they are involved in all the key decisions made by the campaign.
Obama also recommended that Biden seek counsel from Obama’s own former campaign aides, which Biden officials say they have done, the people said.
Obama has been even more explicit with people close to Biden, suggesting the campaign needs to move aggressively as Trump appears poised to quickly wrap up the Republican nomination. His concerns about the campaign structure were not tied to a specific moment, but rather his belief that campaigns need to be agile in competitive races, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential conversations.
And then there is the question of surrogates, which both candidacies are relying on. Elise Stefanik (NY21), eager to be Trump’s running mate — or, consolation prize, on the fast-track to the Speakership — played point-guard for 45 this weekend. And, fresh from having two elite college Presidents ousted from their cushy cultural perches, Stefanik is not only getting better at scoring wins over limousine liberals, she is definitely feeling her oats.
On Sunday’s increasingly irrelevant Meet the Press, Stefanik outclassed new host Kristen Welker, offering an “alternative facts” counter-narrative on the January 6 insurrection. The appearance can only be properly construed as a blizzard of lies. In Stefanik’s reckoning, the January 6 attack on the capital was an attack on the attackers. “‘I have concerns about the treatment of January 6th hostages,’” Joan Walsh in The Nation, recounts Stefanik as saying on the longest running show in the history of American television. “Unbelievably, or not, Welker didn’t challenge her on the use of that charged term.” Welker, we cannot fail to note, seemed similarly overwhelmed against Trump.
President Biden is also employing surrogates in the lead-up to the caucus and primaries. His surrogates are better versed in reality-based arguments. Leading up to the new year, Biden relied on people like California Governor Gavin Newsom to defend his record. At the end of November, Newsom debated candidate Ron DeSantis in a no-stakes appearance on the Sean Hannity’s Fox TV show, essentially campaigning for the Biden-Harris ticket deep into enemy territory. And despite Sean Hannity’s — how shall we call it? — “unreliable refereeing,” Newsom essentially nuked the DeSantis campaign. And it’s not just Newsom. The Democrat backbench — decimated during the blowback against Obama — is operating at full strength. Biden can call on surrogates like Hillary Clinton (who knows how to live rent-free in Trump’s pea brain), Kentucky’s Governor Bashear, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Senators Warren, Kelly and Warnock. And we will mention here only in passing Barack and Michelle Obama.
For Biden the strategy now is multi-dimensional. Stress, in this initial volley, how dangerous to democracy a second Trump Presidency — on a whole host of public policy, the human rights and transatlantic alliances — would be. This is at the core of the Biden re-election campaign, but it will not be the only point of attack. Just the first. There will be others, evolving out of this one as the winter turns to spring then summer then deep election season. But as the initial point of attack, as the late Cus D'Amato once advised Mike Tyson, the first attacks should be a show of “bad intentions.”
The Biden campaign is also involving itself — psychologically at least — in the Republican primary. For example, in courting African-American voters in South Carolina — with James Clyburn, his consigliere. South Carolina is all but certainly not going to be a competitive state in the general election in November. Still, it was a maneuver clearly calculated to rasp. In going to Charleston, Biden rattled the Nikki Haley campaign, on the former Governor’s gaffe on the subject of, well … race. “Her recoil from the question about the civil war was an ingrained instinct,” Sidney Blumenthal in The Guardian gets it exactly right. “She keeps trying to pass the southern test.” But what does it profiteth the Haley campaign to pass the southern test among independents in New Hampshire? “It may not have occurred to Haley that there are no Confederate monuments in New Hampshire,” writes Blumenthal.
And so it begins.
“It is wrong to say that our trade policy was ‘letting the chips fall where they may.’ It was in fact far worse. The policy was to deliberately subject manufacturing workers to competition with the low paid workers in the developing world. This had the predicted and actual effect of eliminating millions of manufacturing jobs and lowering the wages of manufacturing workers in the jobs that remained. Furthermore, since manufacturing had historically been a source of high-paid employment for workers without college degrees, this put downward pressure on the pay of less-educated workers more generally. At the same time that we were using trade policy to depress the wages of less-educated workers, we continued to leave protections in place for more highly educated workers like doctors and dentists. We also increased protections in the form of patent and copyright monopolies, which we made stronger and longer both in domestic policy and internationally through trade agreements. This raised the profits and the wages of those in a position to benefit from these monopolies.” (Dean Baker/CEPR)
“In 1996, then-Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan told me that he saw his and the role of other global captains of finance as increasing the speed by which capital flowed and moved through the world. I asked him whether the analogy for the increasing velocity of finance might be more truck and car crash victims as highway speeds increased. He responded that the market rewards and punishes, and governments will tend to the needs of victims. This was before America’s tech bubble burst two decades ago, and before the systemic corruption in mortgage products led to a global economic subprime lending heart attack in 2008-2009. What followed the simple partisan divisions of the 1970s was a more complex ideological battle inside and around the White House between competing schools of thought on how to run and manage an economy. The neoliberal economic school would aim to grow the global economic pie, reject sanctions, and celebrate offshoring. The other would focus on protecting victims of economic growth and turbulence, favor trade protections and tightly-enforced rules, and devote more concern to microeconomic impacts and outcomes.It’s surprisingly hard to figure out where in this tug of war Joe Biden and his brain trust placed themselves.” (Steve Clemons/semafor)
“The antitrust lawsuit brought by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and 17 states last fall hardly addresses the book industry—the first market that Jeff Bezos and his now trillion-dollar corporation targeted and took over. But that doesn’t mean Amazon is, or should be, off the hook. Amazon is the largest bookseller in the world. Consequently, the publishing industry relies on it to get its product to market. Amazon earns an estimated $28 billion a year from selling books. In 2020, the House Judiciary Committee found that Amazon controlled more than 50 percent of the overall (online and offline) print book market and more than 80 percent of the e-book market. In other words, if a publisher’s titles aren’t available on Amazon, it might as well close shop and find a new line of business. Even the biggest publishers are no match for Amazon’s death grip on the book market. That’s why all publishers, including those in the ‘Big Five’ such as Hachette and Penguin Random House, are afraid of doing anything that might upset the company. Amazon has proven time and again that it won’t hesitate to retaliate against publishers that step out of line. These retaliatory games include removing the ‘buy’ button beneath a title’s listing on the site, delaying shipping books to customers, claiming that titles are out of stock when Amazon is actually just refusing to restock the titles, and rejecting pre-sales for new books.” (Sandeep Vaheesen and Tara Pincock/The Nation)
“The far-right figures — notably ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir — harbor deep anti-Palestinian views and are resistant to U.S. proposals that they consider too friendly to the Palestinians. If they abandon Netanyahu’s coalition, he could lose his prime ministership, increasing his legal peril. That has made Netanyahu reluctant to take American advice on the war, and it suggests that U.S.-Israeli tensions will grow as Palestinians struggle to survive Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip. ‘It’s not always clear who’s driving the train’ in Israel, said a U.S. official familiar with American-Israeli discussions. ‘There have been times where [Netanyahu] has intimated or even been more explicit in telling us, ‘My hands are tied. You know, I have this coalition. It’s not me. It’s a coalition. It’s not me. It’s the political imperatives that I’m facing.’’ The official, like a number of others I talked to, was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive talks.” (Nahal Toosi/Politico)
Excellent insights as always.