Painful Way to Kill Your Political Career, Dean

Oh, while I was surviving MegaCon yesterday, apparently the Democratic Party officially started their Presidential primarying in South Carolina, with incumbent Joe Biden stomping hard on his primary opponents with 95 percent of the vote across the entire state (via Asma Khalid at NPR):

President Biden won the South Carolina Democratic primary on Saturday, according to The Associated Press. It is the first official nominating contest for the party, and one that Democrats hope sends a message to Black voters.

As the incumbent president, Biden had been widely expected to carry the primary. Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn., and author Marianne Williamson were also on the ballot...

The Democrats are changing up the order of primaries this cycle, trying to shift away from the small populated states like Iowa and New Hampshire that also don't display the demographic diversity of the party itself. South Carolina isn't a major population state like California, New York, or Illinois - Democratic-leaning states - but it's big enough to matter.

Unwilling to play by the new rules, New Hampshire still held an unsanctioned primary last month allowing write-ins to happen for the Democrats while the Republicans held theirs officially. Biden STILL cleaned up there without campaigning a single day there while his opponents Williamson - you might remember her from last time - and Phillips showed up and begged for votes. 

You might notice I haven't run a Character profile - based on Professor Barber's work - on Dean Phillips even though he threw his hat into the Democratic primaries months ago: Mostly because I viewed Phillips attempts to kneecap the incumbent candidate Biden was doomed to failure. In the modern era of presidential elections - I would say turn of the 20th Century with McKinely (not Teddy!) - there hasn't been a successful challenge against a first-term President within the party. Teddy Roosevelt tried to against his successor Taft but failed (running third-party instead). Truman and LBJ technically quit their campaigns for re-election when they saw the writing on the wall, so we can't be certain how those would have turned out. Thing is, Phillips was in no position - he was a literal unknown backbencher congresscritter with no national profile; he lacks the natural charisma any challenger needs to prevail; and Gods know what he was actually campaigning for - to challenge a well-known relatively popular figure like Biden who isn't quitting any time soon. 

If I can quote from Tori Otten at New Republic:

Phillips is running a long-shot campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination against President Biden. If you’re wondering how that’s going for him, Phillips won just 19.6 percent of votes during New Hampshire’s unofficial Democratic primary on Tuesday. Biden won 55.8 percent—as a write-in candidate.

Following his New Hampshire loss, Phillips revealed Wednesday morning on Fox & Friends that he had attended one of Donald Trump’s rallies to try to connect with far-right voters. When his actions prompted backlash, Phillips spoke out against political divisions...

Phillips then tried to point to the 2016 Electoral College map which shows a lot of Republican Red. But he erred by thinking geography matters instead of actual population density: Online critics hit Phillips by pointing out the Democratic Blue places on the map have more people who actually matter ("Land doesn't vote, people do!")

“There was probably a lane for someone to do reasonably well against Biden,” tweeted Osita Nwanevu, a columnist for The Guardian and contributing editor for The New Republic, “but being maximally annoying to every constituency in the Democratic Party at once wasn’t it, obviously.”

I exaggerated a bit earlier when I said nobody know what Phillips is campaigning for: He's actually campaigning on the belief that Biden is old, and that Biden's too unpopular to both the Democratic voting base and the independent voters overall.

Depending on which poll you're looking at, Biden's popularity isn't as healthy as it ought to be - considering the positive economic news Biden keeps generating over the past year thanks to his Infrastructure Bill efforts - but then again polls this far out from November are unpredictable as hell.

And regarding Biden's popularity with the Democratic voting base, those massive wins in New Hampshire (unofficially) and South Carolina - where Williamson beat out Phillips by a percent - ought to bury that particular narrative right quick.

Democratic voters will support their incumbent candidate, especially considering how Biden seems to be the only candidate who can keep donald trump at bay. It's likely - again, no guarantees - that the Indy voters who turned out against trump in 2020 will do so again in 2024 and vote for Joe. Phillips is essentially committing political suicide doing all this.

How Phillips got talked into thinking he could be a savior candidate to outduel Biden and then defeat trump remains a scandal of its own. Approached by a "political strategist" in Steve Schmidt, a campaign advisor most famous for talking John McCain into taking Sarah Palin as his Veep running mate, who claims he's "worried" about Dems relying on an aging President Biden (as though trump is any healthier three years younger and clearly more physically and mentally unfit). You have to look at who's paying Schmidt - deep-pocket "technocrat" billionaires worried about their tax cuts and Biden's pro-union stances - to get an idea of who's really worried about 2024 (and who they really want to win, which is trump). Schmidt basically went fishing for an egocentric millionaire among the Democratic ranks to be the stalking horse to weaken Biden's standing within the party itself.

Good news is, that's not working.

Bad news is, we're getting a clearer picture of how the real Political Establishment - not just the deep-pocket billionaires paying for everything, but also the "expert consultant" class and the upper-income media punditry - don't view trump as the dictatorial, openly destructive force that he is.

Gods help us. This 2024 election is going to be a war, with disinformation coming from every media outlet "convinced" that Biden can't win... even though Biden is winning the primaries and proving his popularity with actual voters with barely a finger lifted.

Get out the vote, America. Support Biden. Stop trump (and his billionaire buddies).

And let Dean Phillips crawl back to some state college on a guest lecturer gig for the rest of his life. His political career is toast. If he thinks he can make a comeback in 2028 based on his dismal performance this year, he's more delusional that trump.

Never the Honest Answer from Republicans

As part of her ongoing campaign to survive long enough for trump to get jailed / barred from the ballot to be the Republican presidential candidate for 2024, Nikki Haley has been making the tour stops taking questions from people so she can sell herself as presidential timber.

Of course, this means she's exposing her political, cultural, and historical ignorance when she does so, such as making a massive gaffe when quizzed about a simple fact of American history (via Ashley Lopez at NPR):

Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley is facing significant backlash after failing to mention slavery as a driving force behind the Civil War during a campaign stop in New Hampshire.

At an event on Wednesday, a voter asked Haley: "what was the cause of the United States Civil War?"

She replied that the cause "was basically how government was going to run, the freedoms, and what people could and couldn't do."

"I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are," Haley continued. "And I will always stand by the fact that, I think, government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people."

Haley essentially regurgitated the "States Rights" defense that the former Confederacy flew as their excuse to the historians once the bloodshed stopped. At no point did she even explain what "rights of the people" were getting fought over. Even the person who asked the question replied "you didn't mention slavery."

So let's go over this, one more time about how the Civil War was unavoidable because slavery was the dividing issue between Free and Slave states.

The Confederacy happened because most of the pro-slavery southern states would not accept the election results - both the popular vote AND Electoral College - going decisively towards the anti-slavery Republican Party in 1860. Even with Abraham Lincoln promising only to "limit slavery's spread" and not abolish it outright, the slaveowner class knew it still meant the death of their "peculiar institution" because the industry needing slavery - Cotton - consumed all agricultural land and it needed to expand.

And when slave state after slave state seceded from the Union in that period between November 1860 through March 1861 (before Lincoln would be sworn in as the next President), nearly every declaration of secession included Slavery as the motivation.

Nikki Haley's own state of South Carolina - infamously the birthplace of secession (its incubator since the days of John C. Calhoun and talk of Nullification) - put slavery - and the growing resistance to the Fugitive Slave Acts - as center to their "Declaration of the Immediate Causes" and the core argument for their attempt to break the Constitution: 

...The General Government, as the common agent, passed laws to carry into effect these stipulations of the States. For many years these laws were executed. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the State Government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution. The State of New Jersey, at an early day, passed a law in conformity with her constitutional obligation; but the current of anti-slavery feeling has led her more recently to enact laws which render inoperative the remedies provided by her own law and by the laws of Congress. In the State of New York even the right of transit for a slave has been denied by her tribunals; and the States of Ohio and Iowa have refused to surrender to justice fugitives charged with murder, and with inciting servile insurrection in the State of Virginia. Thus the constituted compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding States, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation...

If the conflict ever was over the idea of States Rights, it was over WHICH states who have more rights over the others. South Carolina - and the other slave-owning states - found themselves in opposition to the freedman states that didn't want slavery imposed on them. Rather than accept the democratic - or  republican if you're going by the Roman model - concept of the majority having a say when the Republicans won outright control of the federal government in 1860, the slave states got upset they weren't in charge like they were in the 1820s or even 1852 anymore, and decided they wanted to take their ball and go home.

Just to show how the other slave states were taking it, here's the declaration of secession from my birth state of Georgia. They mentioned slavery right off the bat, and more often than South Carolina's:

The people of Georgia having dissolved their political connection with the Government of the United States of America, present to their confederates and the world the causes which have led to the separation. For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery. They have endeavored to weaken our security, to disturb our domestic peace and tranquility, and persistently refused to comply with their express constitutional obligations to us in reference to that property, and by the use of their power in the Federal Government have striven to deprive us of an equal enjoyment of the common Territories of the Republic. This hostile policy of our confederates has been pursued with every circumstance of aggravation which could arouse the passions and excite the hatred of our people, and has placed the two sections of the Union for many years past in the condition of virtual civil war. Our people, still attached to the Union from habit and national traditions, and averse to change, hoped that time, reason, and argument would bring, if not redress, at least exemption from further insults, injuries, and dangers. Recent events have fully dissipated all such hopes and demonstrated the necessity of separation. Our Northern confederates, after a full and calm hearing of all the facts, after a fair warning of our purpose not to submit to the rule of the authors of all these wrongs and injuries, have by a large majority committed the Government of the United States into their hands. The people of Georgia, after an equally full and fair and deliberate hearing of the case, have declared with equal firmness that they shall not rule over them. A brief history of the rise, progress, and policy of anti-slavery and the political organization into whose hands the administration of the Federal Government has been committed will fully justify the pronounced verdict of the people of Georgia...

I'd quote more but good lord do my Peach State peeps go on and on about this.

You can tell from the Georgia declaration more than the South Carolina one how the slave states were framing the argument: That they were the ones under attack, that the poor slave states were getting pressured to change a perfectly legal and constitutional institution as human slavery, and that it's the fault of the abolition northern states who refuse to accept the natural order of things.

That view got spelled out by the Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens, who bluntly makes slavery the Cornerstone of what the rebelling states wanted:

...Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth...

...The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity. One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the anti-slavery fanatics. Their conclusions are right if their premises were. They assume that the negro is equal, and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man. If their premises were correct, their conclusions would be logical and just but their premise being wrong, their whole argument fails...

Spoken like true Far Right conservatives convinced of the righteousness of their side, which back in 1860 were the slave-owning Whites of the Southern Democratic faction. Today, the Far Right conservatives are the immigrant-bashing civil-rights-denying anti-woke anti-women Whites of the modern Republican Trumpian Party

These declarations were not only their excuses for giving up on the American Union, they were the foundations for the Lost Cause mythos that built up in the post-War Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras where the Southern states - even after slavery was abolished for good with the 13th Amendment - refused to accept the sins of slavery and tried to rewrite history to make themselves the victims of an aggressor North. In order for that Lost Cause to work - in order for the southerners and Klansmen and Confederate sympathizers to paint themselves as tragic heroes "betrayed" by abolitionists - the revisionists had to argue the fight was never about slavery.

So you get modern-day Confederate sympathizers - who are now all camped with a Conservative Republican Party that flipped from being the Party of Lincoln to the Party of Jeff Davis during the Southern Strategy of the 1960s-80s - who keep parroting that Lost Cause narrative as "vice signaling" to their fellow racists.

People should ask Nikki Haley about her assertation that the Civil War was about "the freedoms" for the people. Where was the "freedom" from an intrusive government when it came to the African-American slaves still in bondage when the Civil War started? Because according to the slave states like South Carolina and Georgia and Florida and Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana and Texas and Arkansas and Tennessee and North Carolina and Virginia, their idea of government was making sure the Blacks had no freedoms at all.

The American Civil War - the first one, which by some measures never really finished because it's fueling the coal-burn of the second one we're in - was about slavery, Republicans. Stop feeding yourselves the Lost Cause myth that your party founders abhorred back in the day, because those slaveholders they fought weren't the heroes of that war, and neither are you when you keep plotting to reset our nation back to 1850. You're lying to yourselves, and you keep getting caught in spite of your denials.

Gods help us. This is how 2024 is going to be.

Some Thoughts About South Carolina and Nevada Tonight (Updated)

The primaries trudge on, this time stopping in South Carolina for a GOP primary and also a side trip for the Democrats into Nevada for another confusing caucus (Republicans will caucus in Nevada next week, Democrats will primary next week in South Carolina. This is how effed up our primary system is).

As far as the Nevada results go - coming in earlier than South Carolina due to odd hours of the day hosting them - it's looking like Hillary Clinton secures the win there despite the Bernie Sanders late surge.

As far as the results are going for the Republicans, the media outlets have already declared Trump the winner, and now it's a question of who gets to be in Second Place and get the set of steak knives, because Third Place is gonna net zero delegates right now and that's pretty much means Alec Baldwin is here to fire you.

As things are polling now, Rubio is in a tight spot for Second Place, which is going to be annoying as hell because the effing media is gonna keep acting like Rubio is gonna happen. /headdesk

It's odd to note that Cruz - who campaigned as sleazy and pandering in South Carolina like never before, even robocalling in favor of the goddamn Confederate Battle Flag - isn't doing as well in Fundamentalist, Far Right Wingnut South Carolina. Very odd...

It's not odd to note that Jeb? is polling under 10 percent overall in South Carolina. Considering how the Bush family has used that state - in 1988, and in 2000 - to effectively firewall their closest opponents into burnt burger meat, this is a telling sign of both their family's political pull - none - in Far Right states and Jeb's overall terrible campaign style.

I was thinking Jeb would keep campaigning at least to Florida, in one last-ditch effort to win SOMETHING considering his own home state might help him, but reports are coming in right now that Jeb? is suspending his campaign. The zombie nightmare may well end... and the Trump nightmare keeps steamrolling along.

So, in short, Trump is dominating and dooming the Republicans, Jeb's out, Rubio is gonna become the Great GOP Hope for the next goddamn news cycle, Cruz is scheming, and Hillary is sitting somewhere in Vegas thinking "I can win with a straight over a full house, right?"

And it's not even March yet.

Update: just to clarify, Trump is pretty much claiming ALL - by winning the state as well as each county/congressional district - of the delegates South Carolina has to offer (50) leaving the Second/Third place "winners" Rubio or Cruz (they're too close to call STILL) with nothing to pin a "victory" on. And yet both Rubio and Cruz gave "victory" speeches avoiding the reality of the fact that Trump is gaining serious distance between himself and the rest of the horse race.

The pundits are going to point out that with Jeb out, the likelihood of his backers switching to Rubio as the best possible candidate vs. Trump will go up. But considering that Jeb had roughly 6-to-8 percent of the GOP voting base and that Trump is pretty much 10-to-12 points ahead of Rubio, Rubio's still not getting enough people out Jeb's departure. And if Kasich does stick it out at least until Ohio's primary (March 15) that is going to cut into Rubio's numbers.

Rubio's not gonna happen, media elites. I don't blame you for thinking he could - as Trump is a nightmare candidate - but he's not gonna save you.