More reflections on how the nomination process is terminally screwy. Molly Jong-Fast writes at WaPo, about Joe Biden:

To run on electability, one should demonstrate the ability to be elected. And that’s shown by — stick with me here — winning elections. …

…Biden has distorted the whole 2020 primary cycle: He sat on top of the polls as the default front-runner for months, and in the process he sucked up endorsements (five senators, more than two dozen House members, state-level elected officials all over the place) and cash (though perhaps not enough of it) that could have gone to other candidates who, instead, had to drop out for lack of money and establishment support. And then he lost the first two elections. It’s only since his front-runner status started to slip that other centrist candidates have had much of a chance. … Biden took up the space that could have been occupied by an Amy Klobuchar or a Pete Buttigieg or a Cory Booker or a Kamala D. Harris.

And of course, Joe Biden sat at the top of the polls because of name recognition. People knew who he was. Most people who are not politics nerds had barely heard of Klobuchar, Buttigieg, Booker, or Harris. Any sensible person looking at those polls should have known that. Sensible people would not have attached a great deal of importance to polls taken weeks and even months before serious campaigning had begun. But media needed stuff to report on, so Much Was Made of Mighty Joe, the Front Runner.

I go back to what Paul Waldman wrote last week:

News media on the whole have been irresponsible in their reporting on the nomination process. (I am calling it the “nomination process” because, of course, there is a lot more to it than just primaries.) Perhaps they don’t consciously intend to — or maybe they do — but media really do shape how people understand the candidates and make their choices, and not in a good way.

Instead of providing background on candidates and issues to help us understand them, we get the horse race. We get endless yammering about who is “electable.” Who is up or down in the polls. We get debates in which candidates are not allowed to discuss anything in depth but instead are goaded into attacking each other or being tripped into saying something controversial.

So we get told over and over again that Joe Biden is the front runner, so a lot of people decide on Biden because, you know, he’s supposed to be the front runner. And he’s a nice man, and we know who he is. His debate performances may have been tepid, and he hasn’t been making as many public and media appearances as other candidates. And he has trouble raising money. But those polls!

But it’s not just news media. There has been more reporting on the Iowa debacle that paints both the state Democratic party and the DNC to be remarkably clueless and cavalier about problems with the Iowa Caucus.

… the episode has called into question the broader credibility of a process whose importance in determining American presidents has taken on epic significance since assuming the first-in-the-nation status in 1972. Multiple people with years-long involvement in the caucuses said the mathematical irregularities exposed by new transparency rules point to problems that have often been present but quietly glossed over by party leaders before final results were announced.

Exactly what is it that the DNC does? The state party tried to get some assistance from the national group as it planned to make the caucus more transparent. The DNC, which should have had the technical expertise to steer the state Dems, instead appears to have given them only cursory attention until a few hours before the caucuses began. And after that its primary focus was to be sure the state party got the blame for the screwup.

We’ve got another caucus coming up in Nevada. There are already news stories about another meltdown:

Anxiety is rising over the possibility of another tech-induced meltdown at the Nevada Democratic caucuses on Saturday.

In interviews, three caucus volunteers described serious concerns about rushed preparations for the Feb. 22 election, including insufficient training for a newly-adopted electronic vote-tally system and confusing instructions on how to administer the caucuses. There are also unanswered questions about the security of Internet connections at some 2,000 precinct sites that will transmit results to a central “war room” set up by the Nevada Democratic Party.

We may need divine intevention.

George Caleb Bingham, Stump Speaking, ca. 1953-54. Oil on canvas. St. Louis Art Museum.

Yesterday I wrote that I hadn’t been following the Andrew McCabe prosecution all that closely, and it wasn’t clear to me what had happened. Rachel Maddow had an excellent segment on it last night that clarified it quite a bit for me. However, that segment isn’t included in the latest videos on her webpage. This is frustrating, because I didn’t take notes. The transcript should be available some time next week. In the meantime, Vox has a pretty good rundown on all the Justice Department developments that happened yesterday.

Russia Russia Russia

This is fishy:

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at a security conference in Munich on Friday that the State Department did not publicly disclose before nor after the fact.

Politico reported that the two diplomats met in Lavrov’s meeting room at the hotel in which the conference took place.

Maria Zakharova, Lavrov’s spokesperson, posted about the meeting on Facebook and included a photo of Pompeo in the hotel hallway with Lavrov and others. …

…The State Department did not list the meeting in its official schedule of Pompeo’s travels from February 13-22 and did not provide a readout for it.

 

Trump’s Wall

Trump has gone from claiming that Mexico would pay for his wall to claiming that “redemption money” from illegal immigrants is paying for his wall. This is flat-out nonsense, of course.

Democrats Should Read This and Take It Seriously.

Eduardo Porter, How the G.O.P. Became the Party of the Left Behind. This very much reflects what I have observed here in the Midwest, over many years.

Is This Constitutional?

Peter Wade, Rollling Stone, Trump Is Sending Elite Border Patrol Units to Make Arrests in Sanctuary Cities

Today’s development in the Roger Stone case:

A day after Attorney General William P. Barr publicly warned President Trump not to tweet about the Justice Department, Trump did just that, declaring that he has the “legal right” to ask his top law enforcement official to get involved in a criminal case.

Back story, which should be subtitled “Bill Barr Is a Lying Sack of Shit”:

Barr’s story of how he decided to intervene in Roger Stone’s sentencing makes no sense. Lawrence O’Donnell walks us through the essential screwiness of Barr’s claims.

See also Greg Sargent.

Barr recounted that a top deputy — apparently Timothy Shea, a longtime Barr adviser just installed as U.S. attorney in Washington — had grown concerned that sentencing guidelines would dictate too draconian a punishment.

Stone’s prosecutors wanted to recommend the stiff sentence. But Barr wanted the judge to make the determination without any affirmative department recommendation.

I found this quote in an old Mahablog post from 2007. It’s fitting for right now.

The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole.

Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile.

To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else.  T. Roosevelt, May 1918

Teddy wrote this in an editorial for the Kansas City Star in 1918. He was opposing the Sedition Act of 1918, which criminalized the publication of “disloyal” statements about the U.S. government.

If you need any more proof that the people steering the national Democratic party are a pack of inept, out-of-touch losers, just take a good look at the absurd Rube Goldberg nomination process we continue to be stuck with. In a recent column, Paul Waldman pointed out only some of the problems:

To take just one example: I’m hardly a fan of Joe Biden’s candidacy, but when you read an op-ed begging him to drop out after these two states have voted, you have to admit that there’s something very odd going on here.

That’s not to mention the long list of appealing candidates who dropped out before anyone had a chance to vote for them, including Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Julián Castro. I’m surely not the only one thinking that the race might be more compelling if they were still around.

A big part of the problem, Waldman continues, is that news media need somethng to report for several months before the voting starts. And, inadvertently, the way the pre-primary nomination race is reported in media distorts it quite a bit.

After a year or so of campaigning without any actual voting, we in the media are desperate for something concrete we can report on. And we want to write a story that changes, with a narrative momentum to it. That’s why we wind up getting influenced by how one or another candidate has performed relative to expectations, which when you think about it is utterly ludicrous.

Whose expectations are we talking about, after all? Those of journalists and pundits themselves. If someone exceeded expectations or fell short of expectations, it just means we inaccurately predicted how well they’d do in one state. And why should our mistaken assessment mean that in any objective way they did well or poorly?

It shouldn’t take a genius to understand that Joe Biden’s early lead in national polling had more to do with name recognition than anything else. Polls taken months before an election are not just unreliable; they are fantasies. People don’t form real opinions until they choose to focus on the race and pay attention, and for most that doesn’t happen until it’s close to time to vote. But in part because of an overwrought process in news media that jerked around our expectations, a lot of good people dropped out before anyone could vote for them.

The way the DNC decided who could be in the debates is another issue. I’m not sure what the answer is, but it seems weird that having a lot of money should qualify someone over years of government service.

Also: throughout these debates, with few exceptions, moderators’ questions were more about pushing candidates into controversy than illuminating their positions on issues. Many just repeated Republican talking points rather than ask honest questions that reflected they had a clue about the actual substance of issues. CNN was, IMO, far and away the worst of these, and the Dems should refuse to allow them to moderate debates in 2024. But between now and then serious thought needs to be given to how the debate format can best be designed to let the candidates present themselves to the American people. And then the hosts and moderators must agree to that format, or they don’t get the gig. Why this hasn’t been done already is, frankly, baffling.

And then there is the order of the primaries, which makes no sense. There has been no end of justifiable criticism of the outsize role played by Iowa and New Hampshire, for example. I think the old schedule needs to be entirely scrapped in favor of primaries that are grouped by regions, and Paul Waldman seems to have had a similar idea.

So what do we do about this? The longer-term answer is to change how we select nominees; a system of rotating regional primaries, in which all the voting would take place on four or five days, is one possibility.

My idea is to schedule primaries in groups of a few contiguous states, so that the candidates can focus on a region at a time. Instead of just Iowa, for example, candidates would focus on an upper midwest region that would include Illinois (arguably the most demographically representative state in the nation) and Wisconsin, Nebraska, maybe one or two more states. These states would have their primaries on the same day or at least within a week or so of each other.

This would reduce travel cost and media costs, since media markets often overlap state lines, as well as allow for a more representative demographic mix. Allow for some time in between each region so that candidates can spend some meaningful time there. As it is, candidates practically live in Iowa and New Hampshire for months while the rest of the nation gets only fleeting glimpses of them.

In 2017 I wrote a post about making the nomination process fairer. In that I was open to the idea of eliminating the caucuses, although not completely sold. Okay, now I’m sold. No more caucuses.

Another proposal was to allow anyone except registered Republicans to vote in Democratic primaries. That’s done in some states but not in other states. Allowing independents — whose votes we’ll need to win the general election — a say in choosing the nominee seems only sensible to me.

And, finally, just bleeping get rid of the superdelegates. This year the superdelegates won’t be allowed to vote on the first ballot, but they haven’t been eliminated altogether. I fear what mischief might be done at the convention if there is no clear winner.

But at least this year they aren’t reporting primary results with the superdelegate votes added in, the way they did in 2016. That was infuriating. In 2016 the vote gap between Clinton and Sanders was a lot closer than people realized, but because the vote totals that were reported always included the Clinton superdelegates, it looked as if Clinton was much further ahead in votes than she actually was.

Franklin Roosevelt won the nomination on the fourth ballot in the 1932 Democratic National Convention.

This just happened:

Attorney General William Barr has accepted an invitation to testify to the House Judiciary Committee on March 31, ending a year-long standoff that began when the panel first demanded his testimony in the aftermath of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

The arrangement comes as Democrats have demanded answers about Barr’s apparent intervention in the sentencing of President Donald Trump’s longtime ally Roger Stone, who was convicted last year on charges that he lied to congressional investigators and threatened a witness.

Greg Sargent:

Congratulations to Attorney General Bill Barr for taking charge of a case that was totally out of control and perhaps should not have even been brought. Evidence now clearly shows that the Mueller Scam was improperly brought & tainted. Even Bob Mueller lied to Congress!

This is a straight-up celebration of the fact that in intervening for Stone — who was convicted of obstructing Congress and witness tampering in connection with investigations into Russian subversion of our election — Barr is doing the president’s political bidding.

Even better, Trump has moved on to judge intimidation.

Is this the Judge that put Paul Manafort in SOLITARY CONFINEMENT, something that not even mobster Al Capone had to endure? How did she treat Crooked Hillary Clinton? Just asking! https://t.co/Fe7XkepJNN

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 12, 2020

It has been obvious all along that Trump believes the proper role of an attorney general is to act as a political operative for the administration and use the power of his office to stop whatever the president doesn’t like. The AG is also supposed to enable whatever is in the president’s personal interests.

See also If Trump Is Allowed to Turn the Justice Department Into a Political Weapon, No One Is Safe.

DALLAS, TX – SEPTEMBER 14: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at the American Airlines Center on September 14, 2015 in Dallas, Texas. More than 20,000 tickets have been distributed for the event. (Photo by Tom Pennington/Getty Images)

 

I have been looking for news on the turnout in New Hampshire but not finding it. And the FiveThirtyEight final forecast for New Hampshire is confusing and, I suspect, two or three days behind trends. This is a dynamic election; I suspect people are changing their minds by the minute. The only interesting news is that Joe Biden isn’t waiting around for results and has moved on to South Carolina.already. His internal poll numbers must be worse than the public polls.

So this just happened:

Another day, another example of corruption in the Trump Administration. It never ends.

There’s an audio clip of Mike Bloomberg saying nasty, racist things making the rounds. This could stop his momentum (fingers crossed).

Trump held a rally in New Hampshire last night just to keep Democrats from moving around. See Ratfu–ery in NH: Trump Camp Hoped Secret Service Lockdown Would Screw Dems.

If you read nothing else today, see Dana Milkbank:

Recall his [Trump’s] repeated promises not to “touch” Social Security and Medicare? Even as the elderly population swells, his budget calls for removing half a trillion dollars of funding from the Medicare program over 10 years, including $135 billion from Medicare prescription drugs, and tens of billions from the Social Security program.

Do read the whole thing.

The right-wing war against public education has taken various forms over the years. Indeed, some American conservatives have been hostile to public education going back to the colonial period. The modern-era war was kicked off in the 1950s and 1960s by court-ordered desegregation, which inspired a stampede of white kids into private, purportedly “Christian” schools.

Since then the Right has generated tons of propaganda about how public schools are failing. However, the righties argue, investing more tax money in them is pointless; just throwing good money after bad. And, of course, teachers unions are the work of the devil and must be broken up. The result has been something of a self-fulfilling prophecy — American public education on the whole isn’t as good as it could be if we invested more money in it. And the more Republicans can bleed public schools of tax money, the worse they get, and the more reason (Republicans say) we should put our tax money elsewhere. Preferably where their campaign donors can get their cut.

See also: Americans Have Given Up on Public Schools. That’s a Mistake. and The War on Public Schools.

The brilliant “solution” the Right came up with to this is to funnel taxpayer dollars into various kinds of privately run schools, through charters or voucher programs. Charters started out sounding like a good idea but quickly morphed into a means for unscrupulous people to get their hands on tax dollars (see also). Unlike public schools, private schools can deny admittance to special needs students. Charter schools are not supposed to discriminate, but they’ve been known to deny admittance to students they consider undesirable.

Both voucher schools and charter schools have been around long enough that we should hold them to their claims of providing superior education. How are they doing?

Charter schools on average do not get higher test scores than public schools, and in some states—like Ohio and Nevada—charters dominate the state’s list of the lowest performing schools. Some charter schools get high test scores, but they usually get high scores by excluding students with disabilities and English learners or by high attrition rates.

Voucher studies in Louisiana, Ohio, Indiana, and the District of Columbia found that students in voucher schools actually lost ground compared to their peers in public schools. This is not surprising since some voucher schools have uncertified teachers and are free to teach a curriculum that mixes facts and religious stories.

Milwaukee has had vouchers for religious schools for two decades and charters for three decades. All three sectors get the same poor results. Milwaukee is one of the lowest performing districts in the nation.

New Orleans is the only all-charter school district in the nation. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, a white Republican legislature imposed an experiment on a majority African American city. School enrollment declined from 65,000 before the storm to 48,000 a dozen years later. The latest state scores rated 49% of the city’s charter schools as D or F, based on their academic performance. The New Orleans district scores are below the state average, and Louisiana is one of the lowest performing states in the nation.

So the “school choice” sales point is a scam. We’d be much better off putting the money wasted on charters and vouchers into improving our public schools. But we’ll have to get Republicans out of the way to do that.

Note also that the Supreme Court appears about to lift limits on state aid to public schools.  If they do, public schools in states governed by Republican majorities will be bled dry in record time.

There is one other point I’d like to make about public versus private schools, which is that in small-town and rural America public schools are essential to maintaining a sense of community. You’d have to be from a small town to appreciate that, I suppose, but it so happens I am.

Even in a small town there may be several different churches, many of which don’t speak to each other. People are usually too spread out to meet in any kind of town square or in the village pub. About the only place everybody goes is the WalMart.

But, by golly, everybody or nearly everbody went to the public school and sends their kids to the public school. Crowds still turn out for the high school homecoming parades down Main Streets in these parts. People cheer the football and basketball teams even if they don’t have kids on the roster. Folks from many parts of the community who wouldn’t otherwise meet get involved in school programs. More than anything else, the public schools provide communities with identity and shared focus that, literally, nothing else offers.

Often the first bit of information strangers, even elderly people, exchange around here is Did you go to Local School? When did you graduate? Did you know so-and-so? He might have been in your class. And then he married that girl who was in my class. Before long, there’s a taxonomy of shared acquaintances worked out. But it nearly always starts with Where did you go to school?

When I see people like Donald Trump or Betsy DeVos running down public schools and pushing private ones, I see people who are utterly out of touch with life in rural and small town America. That is true even as they blather on about the greatness of the “heartland,” a term that gives me the willies, frankly.

Of course, another irony is that small town folks often don’t connect political propaganda to their real-world lives. They don’t make the connection that the campaign to destroy the public school system might mean destroying their public school system. Just some other public school system. Makes me crazy. So they might be sold on the idea of charter schools in the abstract but would probably revolt, eventually, if the local public school districts were gutted out to make room for them. Sometimes you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.

My great-uncle Lloyd Thomas and his students by their log-cabin school in southern Missouri, ca. 1910.

Mandatory Credit: Photo by Elise Amendola/AP/Shutterstock (10551224k)
Former Vice President Joe Biden, left, embraces Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., during a Democratic presidential primary debate, hosted by ABC News, Apple News, and WMUR-TV at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, N.H
Election 2020 Debate, Manchester, USA – 07 Feb 2020

The Democratic Party seems roughly evenly split between the “establishment” and the “progressives.” Or, right now, that would be the “Biden/Buttigieg” faction and the “Sanders/Warren” faction.

The divisions and rancor are worrisome. It would be lovely if the Democratic Party were more united around a single standard bearer. However, I think the rise of Trump and the fragmentation in the Democratic Party speak to a massive political realignment that’s just beginning. The old establishments of both parties may see themselves replaced sooner rather than later. Whether the big shots like it or not, it is imperative that the people be given a say in choosing the nominee. In 2016 the establishment pre-selected the nominee for us. That didn’t work.

The Democratic establishment is nearly frantic to stop Sanders, but so far they’ve done a piss poor job of it. At Vox, Matt Yglesias has an analysis I mostly agree with, with some quibbles. In The Democratic establishment is doing a really bad job of stopping Bernie Sanders, Yglesias writes that the only way to beat Sanders for the nomination is to unite behind an alternative candidate. Yet they can’t seem to do it. Even though the message I was seeing from the establishment is “Joe Biden owns the nomination,” Yglesias says that’s an illusion.

Obama hasn’t endorsed his own VP pick, even though “Obama likes me” is central to Biden’s pitch. Clinton, who clearly has a problem with Sanders, hasn’t endorsed his biggest rival either, even though she could help shore up support with college-educated women currently backing Elizabeth Warren. Chuck Schumer and Pelosi haven’t endorsed. Nor has former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid or Gore himself. John Kerry is backing Biden but then was overheard seemingly musing his own run, undermining the Biden effort.

Solid backing for Biden from high-profile Democrats wouldn’t make Sanders’s factional support dry up. But it would deliver a clear and unambiguous signal to Democrats to rally behind Biden instead of fracturing across three or four candidates.

A lot of the traditional bundlers, fundraisers, and donors were moving to Pete Buttigieg even before Iowa. “But as a coordination point for a party elite that’s supposedly trying to close ranks and stop a socialist insurgent, he’s a frankly bizarre choice, starting with his thin résumé and his issue gaining support from black voters,” Yglesias writes.

“One possible interpretation of all this is that top Democrats have profound doubts about Biden,” Yglesias continues. Yet for some reason, no one said this out loud, allowing Biden to assume the role of establishment standard-bearer until he stumbled in Iowa.

Another possible interpretation is that the old Democratic Party that coalesced around the Clintons in the 1990s and appears to have assimilated Barack Obama when he prevailed over Hillary Clinton in 2008 is just plain out of gas. Or else, that the people who run the DNC and donate the big bucks were so fixated on making Hillary Clinton president for so long they don’t know what to do without her. They’ve lost all direction and are flailing around waiting for orders from somebody that never come.

I personally would be happier if the establishment rallied around the much less irritating Amy Klobuchar rather than Pete Buttigieg. I believe Bittigieg and Klobuchar are very close in their positions on issues, and in the last couple of debates Klobuchar has been outstanding. It wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of centrist voters really like Klobuchar but are holding back because they worry a woman can’t beat Trump. I say the same people who wouldn’t vote for a woman wouldn’t vote for a gay man, either. Just go for it, people. Vote for the candidate you like the most.

Complicating the picture are the two billionaires, Steyer and Bloomberg. Bloomberg has moved ahead of Buttigieg in the RCP polling average, although he’s still behind Biden, Sanders, and Warren. It has to be said that Bloomberg’s ad campaign is terrific, even if it inflates Bloomberg’s accomplishments quite a bit. But if Bloomberg intended to get in the race to stop Sanders, as is rumored, he’s botching it also, since he appears to be taking more votes from Biden than from Sanders.

Can the Democrats unify when all is said and done? What about the Bernie or busters and the equally pernicious Never Bernies? I see at least as many comments like this than I see people swearing they’ll vote for no one but Bernie in November. Maybe more.

It may be that the greatest unifying force for the Dems will be Trump himself. It’s very possible that this past week will have been the high point of Trump’s presidency, and that for him it will be all downhill from here. More evidence of his violations of the Constitution will emerge. Likely there will be new scandals we don’t even know about yet. And do not forget the Supreme Court decisions scheduled to be handed down before the election. Nancy LeTourneau —

As I wrote previously, they will rule on three cases a few months before the election that will consume both the media and the voting public.

* Whether the Trump administration can end DACA
* A case that could end Roe v. Wade as we know it
* Whether Donald Trump must release his tax returns and finances

On the first item, ICE Director Matt Albence recently made it clear that if the Court rules in Trump’s favor, they are already prepared to begin deporting DACA recipients immediately. …

… What we don’t know right now is how the Supreme Court will rule in these cases. But especially on the one affecting Roe v. Wade, all signs point to its demise. If that happens, it will overwhelm any other issue on the table at that time. On the other hand, if the Court rules that Trump must release his taxes, pouring over those documents will consume the media and their reporting. If what we expect turns out to be true, Trump could be toast.

This is another reason why we shouldn’t be so fixated on who can beat Trump. Events may do that job for us.

Here are some random thoughts on the current state of the Democratic nomination campaigns.

First, can we say that the Democratic National Committee has totally bleeped up the primary process so far? I think we can.

It’s not just Iowa. I’m genuinely sad that we’ve lost Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, and Julián Castro. Andrew Yang is in tonight’s debate (yes, there’s another debate), but he’s laying off staff, I understand, and will probably end his campaign soon. I am not sure what can be done to prevent nonwhite candidates from falling by the wayside before votes are cast. And yes, one nonwhite candidate did go the distance in 2008. But Booker, Harris, and Castro were all very respectable candidates who should still be in it, at least until after New Hampshire.

Part of the problem was that there were just too damn many candidates, and most of the early debates were hosted by blockheads who were more interested in generating controversy than informing the public. I’d like to see the DNC get tougher with the networks. The CNN debates were especially bad, to the point that CNN shouldn’t be allowed to host debates in 2024. But they probably will.

On the other hand, Tom Steyer is still going strong, even though FiveThirtyEight gives him a one-in-one-hundred chance of winning the nomination. Steyer is proof that the DNC’s criteria for qualifying for debates are seriously screwed up.

Pete Buttigieg has broken out of the pack and is now a co-front-runner. Buttigieg is strong on charisma but sorely lacking in experience; I think if he won the White House Washington, and the demands of the job, would eat him up and spit him out. Even so, he has claimed the status of Great White Anyone-But-Bernie Hope. However, his odds for the nomination currently are one in twenty-five, or just 4 percent, the nerds at FiveThirtyEight say.

Joe Biden has been coasting on name recognition and the assumption by members of the media and party establishment that he is far and away the most electable candidate in the field. However, by now even Chuck Todd might be rethinking that assumption. Dan Balz:

Biden was vice president to Barack Obama, the most popular Democrat in the party. He is a veteran of four decades in the United States Senate. He is liked — even loved — and respected by many people in the party. But Iowa suggests that that’s not enough. His candidacy has lacked a spark of enthusiasm, whether that’s defined as vision or energy or fight.

Biden’s best argument for himself was “electability.”

What did that get him? In Iowa, more than 60 percent of the people who participated in the caucuses said electability, rather than compatibility on issues, was what they were looking for in a candidate. Only a quarter of them backed Biden, according to the Edison Research entrance poll. In Iowa, not enough voters were buying what he was selling.

It’s not clear to me what Biden is selling, other than familiarity and comfort. He’s something like the political equivalent of your favorite old chenille bathrobe. Even I would be reasonably comfortable seeing Biden become POTUS. He’s a decent person, he knows how Washington works, and his ideas are mostly good. But I think people are looking for the hammer of Thor to run against Trump, not a bathrobe. On the other hand, it’s possible that if he does win South Carolina his campaign might have learned from mistakes, and his candidacy will make a comeback. He’s not out of it yet.

Biden is down to a 20 percent chance at the nomination. Pundits are still saying that Biden will win the South Carolina primary, and he very well might, but Sanders of all people has pulled slightly ahead of him in South Carolina by the nerds’ calculations.

I am genuinely sad that Liz Warren isn’t doing better, and I’m not entirely sure why that’s true. Of all the candidates, she’s the one I’d most want to be elected POTUS. I think she’d be great at it. But she’s not out of the contest yet.

Amy Klobuchar should have done better in Iowa; if she can’t get votes in the Midwest, I don’t see much hope for her. But her poor showing might have been an effect of the weirdness of the caucus. Perhaps she would have done better in a primary election. They seriously need to end the Iowa Caucus.

Sanders currently has a 46 percent chance at the nomination, the nerds say. The advantage of a Sanders administration is that he would not only shake up Washington but would finally break the grip of the old Clinton-Third Way contingent on the Democratic Party. This would be good for the party and the nation.

The wild card in all this is Bloomberg. I would not be surprised to see the anyone-but-Bernie vote gravitate to Bloomberg as soon as he has a decent showing in one of the primaries. Bloomberg is a Terminator. He’s relentless and has more money than God to spend on his campaign. I still have massive doubts he could gain nonwhite votes, though. We’ll see.

Bloomberg is not in tonight’s debate in New Hampshire, hosted by ABC. The participants will be Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Sanders, Steyer, Warren, and Yang. There are predictions everyone will gang up on Buttigieg. I don’t know, though; this year it seems that attacking other candidates backfires more often than not. My only prediction is that Biden might try to be more aggressive, to show some “spark.”

Stuff to Read

Maggie Koerth at FiveThirtyEight, You’ll Never Know Which Candidate Is Electable

Just Published at WaPo: Secret Service has paid rates as high as $650 a night for rooms at Trump’s properties

Greg Sargent, Here’s a new abuse of power by Trump that should alarm you