Sundance admires the skilled professionalism of the democrat party organization.

The key takeaways from the Super Tuesday results so far… Joe Biden won significantly, and it looks like those wins were by design. The media are amplifying a strong Biden narrative on behalf of the professional political class within the DNC Club.

(1) If you accept the Club objective to keep the progressive Sanders vote split, and then assemble the non-Sanders vote – all proportional states, the Club was very successful.

(2) As a result of coalescing within the moderate lane, the withdrawal of Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg helped Joe Biden achieve wins in states he never even campaigned in.

(3) If you align Elizabeth Warren votes with Bernie Sanders (progressives) and Michael Bloomberg votes with Joe Biden (Club “moderates”)… Elizabeth Warren staying in the race cost Bernie Sanders wins in Minnesota, Maine and Massachusetts.

(4) Extending the math, the delegate impact from Warren staying in the race was a net negative to Bernie Sanders and a net positive to Joe Biden. Without Warren Bernie would have had larger delegate wins in Utah, Colorado and California.

(5) Joe Biden winning Texas was arguably the biggest surprise.

(6) Without Warren in the race Bernie would have won seven states: Minnesota, Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, Colorado, Utah and California. Biden would have also won seven states: Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, Alabama, Tennessee, Oklahoma and Texas.

(7) If you accept the Club goal was to diminish Bernie Sanders, the plan for Klobuchar and Buttigieg to exit the race and Warren remaining in the race did exactly what was intended.”

RTWT

Long, long ago, a friend from Yale tried running for the Connecticut Legislature from a suburban New Haven district.

I went out to a polling place, took a position the required legal distance away, and began handing out flyers outlining my friend’s positions. Some democrat poll-watchers came over and began denouncing my friend’s candidacy which started a debate between us. I’m a decent talker and I scored some effective points. So I was chuckling to myself at how well everything was going.

Well, in just a few minutes, a couple of cars pulled up and unloaded some new democrats. A well-dressed middle-aged man strode over and took up a position directly in front of me. There was no more debate. He just greeted every voter as he or she arrived by name, shook hands or hugged them, asked how this or that family member was, and thanked them for their vote for Good Old Irv Stolberg.

In the other direction, there was another similar democrat crew doing exactly the same thing.

I was greatly outnumbered within minutes, and by sharp cookies with strong ties to most of the local voting population. I was from Pennsylvania. I knew none of these New Haven voters personally. I was so out-matched it wasn’t even funny. And my friend got slaughtered.

They are doing it for the money and their livings depend on it. They are not theorists or philosophers. They are pros, and they’re not fooling around.

The Spectator’s Cockburn has some very focused suggestions.

1. Age

Given the current crop of candidates, an age-focused debate seems only apt. We can judge them on correctly remembering the names of those around them, the best use of nostalgia and staying continent for the full two hours.
2. Free stuff

Who doesn’t love free stuff? Rather than a dull night focused on the economy, let’s hear about deals, deals, deals! Free healthcare? You bet! Free college? Sure! Free childcare? Heck, why not?! This one should be hosted by Oprah, who will inform the studio audience to check under their seats for the first installment of their $1,000-a-month and the keys to their free Tesla.
3. Mistakes

It would be much simpler for all of us if we had a single evening dedicated to screwing up, rather than spreading it ad hoc throughout the entire process. Here the contenders can deliver long apologies for unfashionable policies they supported in the Eighties, claim the heritage of another race before furiously backpedaling, flog interns, smell hair and, if AOC herself is competing next time round, talk about towns in southern England instead of leading economists. Let’s face it, this one is the debate that would run over.
4. Trans issues

From the coal-miners of western Pennsylvania to the trawlermen of Michigan, the farmhands of Texas to the church-going grandmothers of South Carolina, only one issue has the potential to energize and unite the entire working-class Democratic base: the right of 0.6 percent of Americans to pee where they want. Yes, nothing will turn out voters like talking trans, so a vigorous televised discussion where every sentence is punctuated by the phrase ‘trans women of color’ is a no-brainer for the DNC.
5. The apocalypse

Chaired by Gov. Inslee and Greta Thunberg in knee-deep water on a Louisiana flood-plane, we need to hear the candidates debate at length exactly how long it is until we all die. Wouldn’t Bernie look rather fetching in a pair of waders?

RTWT

The new paper of record has the story:

U.S.—The recent U.N. conference on climate change and especially the words of 16-year-old activist Greta Thunberg have had a profound impact on the Democratic presidential candidates, so much so that they are now turning words into action and dropping out of the presidential race since they now think there’s no point to it.

“We’re all going to die, so why am I wasting my time on this?!” cried Cory Booker as he collapsed to his knees. “There’s nothing we can do!”

“Why am I fighting for abortion on demand at 39 weeks when we’re all going to die anyway?!” screamed Elizabeth Warren. “It’s all pointless! All my plans are pointless!”

“Here I was worrying about billionaires when it’s the sun that’s my enemy!” yelled Bernie Sanders as he shook his fist at the sun. “I should have taxed the sun!”

RTWT

Victoria Taft, at PJ Media, says what a lot of Americans are thinking this morning: “These are the people who want to make our health care and all our economic decisions for us?”

The Iowa caucus data operation just crashed and burned. That means that it could take days to get find out who actually won the Democratic contest – the first of the 2020 presidential election cycle.

Gobsmacked candidates have come out to throw confetti, drop balloons, and declare “on to New Hampshire!”

There’s nothing else to do except to declare victory and move on. No one really knows, right?

Joe Biden’s lawyers have sent the Iowa caucus organizers a sternly worded letter ordering them not to reveal the winner until the results are cleared with them.

Speculation has begun in earnest. Bernie Sanders can’t help but think that mainstream Dems are after him again and will do anything to keep him from the party nomination. Robby Mook, Hillary Clinton’s data czar and strategist from 2016, has had suspicion cast on him since he participated in conceiving of the Iowa caucus data platform with Harvard University. Or, of course, Democrats could blame the Russians again without allowing the FBI another look-see under the hood. That’ll be good for another impeachment of Trump in a second term, right?

In the short term, bring on the boo-birds.

It will take a while before the Democrats live this one down.

Government-run health care anyone?

Not all kamikaze attacks succeed.

Kudos to Mitch McConnell for a good job of Senate leadership. Note that he precisely and economically corralled just the 51-49 vote needed to end the nonsense not as a tie or requiring Chief Justice Roberts to vote. Mitt Romney was permitted to thumb his nose at Trump to avenge previous Trump insults, and Susan Collins also got to vote wrong in order to propitiate all those members of her Down East constituency who threaten to burn her farm and strew her fields with salt if she should fail to vote like a democrat in crunch situations.

John Bolton is a Yale classmate of mine, with whom I used to be mildly acquainted. I tend to suspect that what happened was: some liberal hack at the NY Slimes was reading through the advance copy of Bolton’s book and pounced with avidity on some crumb that appeared to support democrat fantasies of Trump pressuring Ukraine President Zelensky. I run into liberals leaping wildly to self-gratifying conclusions and misreading texts all the time.

I think it would have served them right, if McConnell had agreed to subpoena old John Bolton for them, because I suspect JB detests those democrats about as much as I do, and my own theory is that Bolton would, however he may feel about Donald Trump, take great pleasure in delivering testimony completely adverse to everything the democrats wanted. There’d be Adam Schiff and Jerome Nadler with egg all over their faces.

Fun as that particular denoument might have been, I will concede that Mitch McConnell did the country a favor by moving more quickly to bring all this disgraceful nonsense to a quicker conclusion.

Make no mistake. This episode represents an unseemly, utterly irresponsible, completely reprehensible piece of pure political theater. The charges brought against Donald Trump were nothing but subjective nonsense. There was never the slightest iota of possibility that this impeachment would succeed in removing Trump from office. There was never going to be a two-thirds vote to remove this president in a Republican-majority Senate with a good economy and an absence of strong public support.

The whole thing was nothing but an exercise in fantasy and spite, undertaken without decent regard for due process, or the precedent they were setting, or the injury to the Constitution, simply to feed raw meat to their deranged and radical left-wing base. The democrats even proceeded in this utterly unethical and destructive course despite the massive and disastrous self-harm it inevitably entailed.

The democrat party was already in the unhappy position of having to try to defeat a successful, popular incumbent without any strong viable candidate. The current democrat field is a professional political operative’s nightmare: superannuated, crazy radical, personally repulsive, and/or amateurish and preposterously under-qualified. Why not distract the public from the presidential campaign with an impeachment circus to focus on instead? That’s bound to help. Especially when the impeachment fails, the whole thing blows up in the democrat House majority’s faces, and the public is irritated and made angry.

A famous passage from Sophocles’ Antigone is commonly rendered in English as: Those whom God would destroy, He first makes mad.

HT: Bird Dog.

Glenn Reynolds:

“If Trump were a dictator, all the people calling him one would be in unmarked graves. Or, more likely, sucking up to him.”

via GIPHY