These content links are provided by Content.ad. Both Content.ad and the web site upon which the links are displayed may receive compensation when readers click on these links. Some of the content you are redirected to may be sponsored content. View our privacy policy here.

To learn how you can use Content.ad to drive visitors to your content or add this service to your site, please contact us at [email protected].

Family-Friendly Content test

Only recommend family-friendly content

Website owners select the type of content that appears in our units. However, if you would like to ensure that Content.ad always displays family-friendly content on this device, regardless of what site you are on, check the option below. Learn More

News

Klobuchar 2020 Looking More and More Like It

If there’s one thing that political observers should have learned over the past few decades, it’s that open Democrat presidential primary contests are wildly difficult to predict. The only exception to this in recent years was the 2016 Democrat primary, when the DNC decided Hillary would be the nominee early on; Bernie Sanders didn’t receive that memo, but every other 2016 candidate dropped out before the primaries even started.

The media, the pollsters and the professional talking heads are almost always wrong in predicting open Democrat primaries. That’s worth thinking about as we head into 2020.

Back in 2008, Hillary Clinton was the presumed nominee for the Democrat Party. We’d been reliably reassured by the media for 16 years straight that it was Hillary’s “destiny” to rule over all of us with her gentle iron boot on our liberty-loving throats.

What could possibly go wrong? And then an inexperienced, first-term Senator from Illinois grabbed the nomination out from under her.

2004 was an even wilder contest. John Edwards was the unstoppable media favorite – by far. It was his contest to lose. He had Kennedy-like hair, a charming fake Southern accent and perfect Hollywood teeth. And he was a trial lawyer!

When rumblings about Edwards’ love child and affair with a campaign staffer threatened to derail his campaign, the media’s loyalty quickly shifted to Howard Dean.

Dean was an angry, screeching, labor union-friendly governor from a state in New England. What wasn’t to like about him? The media and pollsters shifted their love of Edwards to Howard Dean, and then it was all over.

His campaign sucked all the oxygen out of the room. Democrat voters were swooning at Dean’s rallies, because he was going to be such a manly, white, masculine candidate to run against the wimpy George W. Bush. Howard Dean was an unstoppable force. The script was already written. The 2004 campaign would be Bush-Cheney against Dean and his running mate.

But then when the primary voting started in Iowa, something that no pollster or media talking head could have predicted. If you had taken 10 million immortal monkeys and given them 10 million typewriters to bang away on for 10 million years, not a single monkey would have every typed out the prediction: “John Kerry will be the 2004 Democrat presidential nominee.”

No one saw that coming. The media and pollsters got it entirely wrong. John Kerry was the most boring candidate running in the crop of Democrats that year. He was an unlikeable carbon copy of Lurch from “The Addams Family,” but with a slightly better tan.

He had a weird accent and was a wholly unaccomplished career politician. Veterans hated him even before the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth pointed out Kerry’s betrayal of his fellow troops during the Vietnam era. And yet Kerry somehow went on to become the nominee.

The mainstream media’s top two or three picks rarely end up winning the Democrat presidential nomination. Given that there is no legacy candidate like Hillary Clinton in the race, what does that mean for 2020? The media and all of the pollsters keep telling us that the nominee will most assuredly be either Obama’s Vice President, Joe Biden, or Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. If history is any guide, neither one of them will be able to secure the nomination once the actual voting starts.

Joe Biden has been floundering for months. He is severely diminished by dementia or Alzheimer’s or simply old age. No one in the media wants to openly say that, so Biden remains the assumed “safe” frontrunner.

Biden’s not looking well, however. In the latest debate, Biden proclaimed that he had served in the US Senate with the “only black female Senator in history, Carol Mosely Braun.” That was kind of hilarious, since he was standing right next to Kamala Harris.

While we’re on the subject of gaffes, Harris told MSNBC after the debate that President Trump had staged a photo-op with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un while standing in front of a bunch of “f*gs.” (She had intended to say “flags.”)

The other frontrunner, Elizabeth Warren, has tremendous negatives with the minority voters that the Democrat Party relentlessly panders to. It’s clear that minority voters won’t turn out for her in the primaries – which is what she needs if she’s to have any hope of securing the nomination.

What sad choice does that leave Democrat voters with? Andrew Yang? Deval Patrick? Michael Bloomberg? Maybe Amy Klobuchar?