I think that when the state polls showed Warren surging ahead of Biden, it kinda poked a hole in Biden’s electability argument. And I don’t think it’s gonna get any better for him now that he’s going to be caught up in the vortex of Trump’s negative publicity. Whatever is aimed at Trump as part of the Ukrainian scandal will ricochet and graze (and in some cases wound) Biden as well.
Biden is increasingly in danger of becoming the Democratic party’s Jeb Bush.
The predictions derived at Predictwise.com continue to change. Trump was 90% to win the GOP nomination a week ago, but has dropped to 82%.
Trump’s fall may be understandable — he effectively confessed to a felony a few days ago — but what about Warren? She was never above 20% until mid-July but is now shown as 48% to win the Democratic nomination! What happened?
(Please tell me if Predictwise numbers are a useless distraction — I don’t need to post.)
Maybe, maybe not. That’s the standard pundit take anyway, but I’m suspecting the opposite.
It is VERY clear that there is no there there as far as Joe Biden doing anything wrong in this matter and he will get a chance to say that forcefully with no one else on the stage arguing otherwise (even though proxies will say other things elsewhere). Couple that chance for him to be forceful with the fact that what actually happened is very illustrative of his key operations role in the Obama terms? It gets him into ground where he’s more comfortable knowing where to place his feet … and his mouth.
This also hurts Warren in another way: Warren’s strengths shine when the discussions get into actual policies and plans, her articulating her positive vision and how we get there from here. The Ukraine scandal and the impeachment process will take up the attention of the media and the public and leave little left for those items. To resort to tired cliches, she’s been steadily kindling the fire for a while and just as it was really taking off there goes all the oxygen from the room.
Tru dat.
I’ll believe this will hurt him when his poll numbers take a noticeable drop. Hasn’t happened yet.
Well, he IS good at placing the former in the latter. 
Now this I have to disagree with. Among the candidates, Warren basically owns the pro-impeachment position, while Biden in particular has been much more reluctant to go there, and even now his support is conditional.
Rather, at a moment when people were starting to say she was being evasive over funding of Medicare for All, the topic switches to a big issue where she’s been strong and unequivocal, and on the right side. The M4A discussion might have hurt her, but impeachment will be wind in her sails.
Well played on foot mouth!!
Do you think her being for impeachment is why people like her? I don’t. Coming on board as evidence rise to that level, as it is rising to, and as Biden will do, will be enough.
The Democratic primary winner will not be decided by who argued for impeachment earlier or stronger. It will be decided by opinions about who will win and who would be better in the job. Her case for better in the job is best with D voters on policy items, especially economic inequality issues, and intellect. IMHO. But we will see!
I don’t think being for impeachment last April is much of a feather in her cap, when the reason so many want to impeach now had not yet happened at that time. In April I was against impeachment. In fact, a week ago I was against it. Now I am for it. That is the same for many Democrats.
Thanks for setting it up so nicely for me!
And it is different with many other Democrats.
Two things here, responding to both of you at once:
There’s a lot to suggest that coming out for impeachment early (April 19) helped pull her out of the pack. If you look at RCP’s average, on 4/19 she’s tied for 5th with Buttigieg at 6%, behind Harris and Beto as well as Biden and Sanders. Two weeks later, she’s over 8% and basically owning 3rd place from that point on, with only brief exceptions. (Until overtaking Bernie more recently, of course.)
The other question is, does it help her beyond that initial boost? I’d say hell yes, it sure does. While I agree that many Democrats are OK with having gone slow and only now coming around on impeachment, there are also many Democrats who have been frustrated as hell by the Democrats’ inaction, not just on impeachment in 2019, but on a shit-ton of things over the years. As part of that camp, I’ll say: we want a fighter, dammit.
Now that doesn’t mean fighting over everything - you always have to pick your battles. But you have to be willing to fight over the big stuff. Warren gets this: whether it’s fighting for keeping people from being foreclosed on back in 2009-2010, or whether it’s fighting to impeach Trump now, she is willing to fight when it’s important to do so.
That’s part of her brand, just as much as the plans and the wonkiness are. That’s a big part of why she’s come as far as she has, and why she has a real chance to be the nominee.
OK, but isn’t that already baked in? I thought the argument was that since impeachment is happening now, she would get an extra boost now for having been into it early. But it’s happening now because a lot of Democrats (like Pelosi and me) only believe Ukraine justified it. For us, any reminder that she was calling for it in April is just reminding us that she jumped the gun. Impeaching at that time would have been terrible politics.
But being the first to go for it, with the expectation that eventually it would be the right move politically, is in fact the right move politically. Thus Warren should get double points for it – being right, and being politically savvy (and politically brave).
I remain slightly leaning to Warren for now, and am at this point full in on the need to impeach (knowing that conviction is extremely improbable and that it even now runs a major risk of being politically costly) and her calling for it earlier than this remains a point against her.
What has happened validates Pelosi’s waiting to pull the trigger for the right moment approach. This is the simple story that lower information voters can comprehend clearly. Moving to impeach earlier was bad political instincts and would have been horrible tactics. You prosecute your case when you have the best case to make, and when have confidence in the case, not when you personally first conclude someone is guilty.
Moving to impeach earlier may have been poor political instincts (had it occurred), but advocating for impeachment earlier may have been excellent political instincts, understanding that there was a high likelihood that the “right moment” would indeed come, due to Trump’s incompetence and corruption. Those are two different things. We want a politically skillful nominee – one that can navigate these kinds of differences.
So did Warren advocate against moving to impeach earlier and waiting for the right moment to come (or to be put together)?
Or did she advocate for actually beginning impeachment proceedings back in April?
Right… how does this dispute my point? I’m saying that this might have been the politically savvy move. Definitively staking out this territory to be the “first”. Not saying something boring and practical (and thus entirely forgettable), but making waves, anticipating that eventually you will be shown to be right, even if it doesn’t quite look like it at the time. Everything Warren said in that quote was correct. That maybe it was smart of the House to ignore her (at the time) isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. She was a “maverick”, going against the popular understanding and conventional wisdom at the time. She was fighting against the status quo and “normal” Washington DC inaction.
IMO, this is good politics. I want someone who is good at this.
Personally???
Even if you didn’t read the Mueller Report (I didn’t either), Mueller’s testimony, and the published summary of his report, made it abundantly clear that Trump had repeatedly obstructed justice.
Obstruction of justice: that’s why Nixon resigned ahead of almost certain removal.
And I can tell you that in Trump’s case, it’s way more clear than it was with Nixon’s ‘smoking gun’ even.
There have been multiple ‘right moments’. This is the third, AFAIAC, with the first being in the immediate aftermath of the Mueller Report, which the Dem leadership apparently had no plan to deal with (“You shoulda planned ahead.” - Rocky Balboa).
The second was when we found out this summer that not only had the cruel treatment of children at the border not ended after last summer, but that they were keeping babies and young children in crowded, freezing cages, with babies being taken care of not by qualified caretakers, but by whatever older kids in the same cage were willing to look after them, with not enough room for them all to even lie down, only one damn toilet per cage, only barely sufficient food…fuckitall, if human rights abuses on that scale weren’t impeachable, then what the fuck is wrong with this country?!?
You know, I don’t think the Democratic Party should be or have a Perpetual Outrage Machine like the GOP/Fox News mind-meld is, but there are some things they should damn well BE outraged over, and STAY outraged over. And make sure their outrage is routinely in the public eye.
And babies in motherfucking cages is damn well one such thing.
So third time’s the charm, thank goodness, but to say this was the first ‘right moment’ and therefore Pelosi was justified to wait until now, and Warren totally jumped the gun, is totally fucked-up bullshit.
Not to mention, if the Ukraine extortion hadn’t come to light, there would have been NO ‘right moment’ as far as Pelosi was concerned, and the most criminal President in our nation’s history would have gone without any rebuke that would have meant anything, either to him or to history.
So you’re saying that actually DOING what she said she wanted to do then would have been politically inept, but disingenuously saying that she wanted to do it was savvy? That she knew better than to actually do it then but was saying something she didn’t really think should be done then to score political points later?
Okay. You think that.
I don’t think she is that kind of politician. And that is a point in her favor.
Yes personally.
I know you know that impeachment is a political process with “high crimes” being whatever those elected officials decide it is at the moment. Getting enough of those public officials to decide so requires having a solid majority of public opinion in their districts/states believing so.
The Mueller report and his testimony by themselves were not that straightforward easy to understand conclusive slam dunk that the critical mass of lower information voters would be able to glom onto.
Going early with anything other than the strongest and easiest for the lower information voter to understand case possible would have been DUMB. A weaker case, harder for the typical voter to grok, 100% doomed to not result in a Senate conviction, with plenty of time to leave the news cycle and have a backlash before the general election, would have done great harms.
Pelosi slow walking it, gathering the evidence to build the best case possible, letting Trump meanwhile make the case stronger himself, to “self-impeach”, and putting it out to time most effectively with the Senate killing that best case as looking bad for the general without time for it to leave the news cycle as much, was a much better approach.
I am not yet confident in how this will play out. Too many unknowns. But clearly that approach has resulted in a much better shot at better outcomes than pushing ahead earlier, as Warren advocated doing, would have.
It doesn’t require disingenuousness – she could honestly want them to do it (due to morality and decency), while still understanding that it’s probably not the right move politically. So she chooses to play up the former and play down the latter, because politicians have to make decisions like that in order to get their message out and try to appeal to voters.
I’m not sure if I’ve ever known of a successful politician who isn’t “that kind of politician” in some fashion. That’s a feature, not a bug, when it comes to politics.
At the moment, I consider her a policy wonk who got handed a safe seat six yeqrs ago. We’ve yet to see how successful a politician she is.
I agree. If she wins the primary, that will be some indication she’s a skillful politician – that’s a tough thing to do. But right now I’m just hoping, for the most part.
By themselves? Well, of course not! That’s what Congress is for.
First, those lower information voters follow the cues that their leaders provide. The Mueller Report was publicly a flop because both parties signaled it was - the Republicans by claiming vindication, the Democrats by shrugging.
If the Dems all say, “omigod, this is horrible,” then all the Dem-leaning people are going, “I don’t know what’s going on yet, but apparently there IS something going on here.” Then the Dems have hearings. They summarize the key parts of the report, they explain obstruction of justice (Patrick Fitzgerald’s “throwing sand in the umpire’s eyes” is pretty straightforward - the prosecutor thinks someone’s committed a crime, but she can’t tell, because they’ve done things that have made it impossible to tell - destroyed evidence, fired the investigators, etc.), and describe the key instances of it.
Are people dumber now than they were in 1974? If not, then this should have worked just fine.
She didn’t do any of this. Instead, a lucky break landed in her lap.
They say hope is not a plan. As it turns out, it worked out this time. But until you know that this is going to happen, it’s a terrible plan. It’s like looking at a lottery winner after he’s won, and saying that’s how you do it, alright.
You are creating a fairly tortured imagined presumption of what her thought process “could” have been.
One that I do not personally see and one that if I did see would remove her from my consideration completely. Intentionally undercutting Democratic leadership messaging for a perception of personal political gain when you in fact recognize that what you propose would be “probably not the right move politically”?
You think that perception of her being so “savvy” will win her support??
I think she honestly just does not have the same sort of quality political instincts and understandings that Pelosi has. I believe her statements at face value.
I believe that for her it was enough for her to be throughly convinced of the case with no real consideration for the need to prosecute the case inclusive of the public-at-large with a case strong enough to win a majority over and not timed in a way that potentially benefits the GOP side any more than is absolutely necessary.