" It was this weekend in 2012 that I went to a Halloween party wearing a quite realistic-looking Joe Biden mask. After about an hour, people said it was too spooky and asked me to take it off. When the Obama presidency ended, I threw the Biden mask away, assuming I’d never need it again. Wishful thinking is always a mistake.

With Halloween in the air, it’s the right moment to discuss the central role played in presidential politics by bogeymen—creatures conjured to distract and scare the citizenry. In politics, the bogeyman is always just around the corner. For John F. Kennedy it was “the missile gap”; for Barack Obama, “the wealthiest”; and for Donald Trump, criminals pouring across “the border.”

Naturally, the Democrats running for their party’s presidential nomination needed a bogeyman, and they have created one even scarier than the Trump monster. It’s them—“corporations!” At their recent presidential debate, one candidate after another claimed corporations were wrecking the country.

Elizabeth Warren, who knows a thing or two about scaring people: “They have no loyalty to America. They have no loyalty to American workers. They have no loyalty to American consumers. They have no loyalty to American communities. They are loyal only to their own bottom line.” And by the way, “I have a plan.” Yikes.

Cory Booker ranted about “corporate tax incentives,” and Amy Klobuchar wants a rollback of “what we did with the corporate tax rate.” Beto O’Rourke somehow related a woman he said was working four jobs with “some of these corporations,” and  Tom Steyer, billionaire, said we have to “break the power of these corporations.”

Finally Joe Biden, seeing where this was going, invoked the “corporate greed” of companies that are “not investing in our employees.”

Politics, as has been proved lately, can get crude, and one understands why candidates play the race card, the class-warfare card or the anti-immigrant card. But how has the Democratic Party arrived en masse at playing the anti-corporation card?

If one sits through any of these three-hour-long Democratic debates or their climate and LGBTQ town halls, it’s hard not to notice that there is an 800-pound elephant in the room that none of them (including the moderators) want to talk about—the American economy in the here and now.

Unless the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics is another front for Donald Trump, the reality of historically high job creation and rising wages for people regardless of income level, race, sex or sexual orientation has become impossible not to notice.

Even the New York Times recently admitted the jobs boom was forcing “corporations” to dig deeper for workers: “With the national unemployment rate now flirting with a 50-year low,” it noted that companies are offering work-from-home options to parents, accommodating employees with disabilities, reducing educational requirements and waiving criminal background checks.

This 50-year unemployment low—and the self-respect and sense of personal possibility that comes with it—didn’t just happen. It is the explicit result of Congress and President Trump redeploying two proven pillars of Reaganomics. They dropped the tax rate on—yes—“corporations” to 21% from its investment-killing decades at 35%, and he unwound a waaay-overboard Obama regulatory regime that was imposed on virtually every private-sector producer in the U.S. economy.

You’d have to be obtuse not to recognize the historic burst of individual economic opportunity happening now. The wonder wasn’t so much the economic revival this produced but the astonishing scope of the Trump boom.

The Democratic presidential candidates aren’t talking about the real economy because most of them don’t understand it. The Democratic Party’s historic link to the real economy was private-sector labor unions affiliated with industries such as steel, mining and cars. With the decline of those unions, the Democrats have become an almost wholly public-sector party, for which the private economy, which employs millions of workers, has become a distant planet whose only function is to send the oxygen of tax revenue. Which is why Democrats propose unpriceable ideas like Medicare for All or the Green New Deal. Which is why so many blue-collar workers in 2016 managed to identify their lot with an unapologetic billionaire businessman.


This is the real reason a moderate and totally embedded private-sector Democratic figure such as Mike Bloomberg isn’t likely to run. The party, captured by cotton-candy socialists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has deserted him. The real-world disconnect even got to primo Never-Trumper Alec Baldwin, who recently lamented the attacks on “a country built on both freedoms and commerce.” Commerce? What’s that?

The economy slowed to a 1.9% growth rate in the third quarter as business investment fell beneath the enduring weight of the Trump tariffs, which could yet take some sheen off his accomplishment. But come the general-election debates next year, Mr. Trump will relentlessly pound his opponent with the fact of real work created for real people. Whether it’s Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren, they’re going to need a better bogeyman to compete than corporate greed. "

( Angel Rebecca Ballhaus  [ Pronounced  : ' Ball House ' ]  ; Angel Nicole Hong  ; Angel Rebecca Davis O'Brien  )  .

" A year from now, the polls tell us, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren or maybe even Bernie Sanders will spoil Donald Trump’s bid for a second presidential term by a decisive margin. Maybe.

While that might prove to be the 2020 scenario, history tells us there’s a good chance next year’s election will look a lot different from the way it does now. That could mean almost anything from Trump’s reelection to a narrow Democratic victory by some other nominee over Vice President Mike Pence.

A prime example was the 1980 election that chose Ronald Reagan. A year earlier, he not only trailed President Jimmy Carter, but he was even further behind Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy. And Kennedy seemed likely to deny Carter renomination.

The conventional wisdom was that Reagan was too conservative to be elected; certainly, the Carter folks felt that way. Kennedy faded, and, as late as three weeks before that election, polls showed Carter ahead. But the former movie-star-turned-California-governor wound up winning a 44-state landslide.

The only other recent president to lose reelection, George H.W. Bush, looked like such a good bet a year out that many top Democrats opted against running, leaving a field of lesser-known candidates.

One was Bill Clinton, whose support was in single digits in November 1991, well behind Mario Cuomo, until the New York governor decided against running. The next year, the Arkansas governor lost both the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, had to surmount not one but two scandals and still beat Bush (and independent Ross Perot).

All three presidents since then — Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama — were reelected. But their success was not at all clear one year out.

Where things have turned out most differently has been in the nominating battles among non-incumbents, especially in the party out of power. Here are some:

2016: By November, Trump already led GOP polls, despite widespread doubts over his prospects. But he consistently trailed Hillary Clinton in general election matchups, and even his own people were surprised when he won.

2012: At various times in the fall of 2011, ultimate GOP nominee Mitt Romney trailed former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Texas Gov. Rick Perry and business executive Herman Cain.

2008: Obama entered the Democratic race with substantial fanfare. But in the fall of 2007, he trailed Hillary Clinton (while ultimate GOP nominee John McCain was losing to former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani). Obama’s Iowa caucuses victory reversed that, and his South Carolina primary triumph solidified his lead.

2004: Before Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry finally emerged as President George W. Bush’s opponent, the Democratic race had multiple leaders: Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, the party’s 2000 vice presidential nominee; Gen. Wesley Clark, helped briefly by opposition to the Iraq war; and former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, one of the first to tap the Internet as a fund-raising tool. But a nasty Iowa ad war between Dean and Missouri Rep. Dick Gephardt sank both, and Kerry grabbed the lead.

1988: The early favorite, Colorado Sen. Gary Hart, withdrew after disclosure of the married senator’s weekend cruise to an offshore island with a young woman. At first, civil rights icon Jesse Jackson took the lead in a large field. Eventually, Massachusetts Gov. Mike Dukakis became the nominee.

1976: Jimmy Carter’s election was certainly the biggest modern electoral surprise until Trump.

Early Democratic polls showed a group bunched at the top: former Alabama Gov. George Wallace, Washington Sen. Henry Jackson; and former Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who never actually became a candidate.

Carter was well back, in single digits. But when the former Georgia governor won both Iowa and New Hampshire, he took a lead he held the rest of the year, despite heated opposition from, first, the Democratic establishment and, later, GOP President Gerald Ford.

In the end, Carter sneaked in by a total margin of about 18,000 votes in Hawaii and Ohio, even narrower than the 77,000 votes by which Trump unexpectedly won Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in 2016.

One wild card in any election is the fact that, in the preceding 12 months, anything can happen and often does, changing the fore-ordained electoral dynamic.

In November 1979, exactly one year before the 1980 election, Iranian militants invaded the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, detaining nearly 70 American diplomats. At first, Carter’s tough rhetoric buoyed his political standing, but his support dropped as months passed and he was unable to free them, including an ill-fated helicopter rescue mission.

Three years after President Reagan’s election, he was beset by a lingering economic recession and consistently trailed Carter’s vice president, Walter Mondale.

But the recession ended, the economy rebounded and Reagan abandoned some of his tough rhetoric toward the Soviet Union. Slowly, the polls turned around, and, on Election Day 1984, Reagan carried 49 of the 50 states, one of history’s biggest electoral landslides.

It’s a scenario Trump would love to duplicate. "

Even Trump's WSJ Angels are smiling :

" The Democratic primary campaign started in January, but it already feels as if it began in the late Jurassic period, and the first votes are still three months away.

Primaries are a lot like Christmas: The shopping season begins way before, and things rarely live up to expectations. (I mean this in the secular sense. I'm not talking about celebrating the birth of Jesus; I'm talking about pretending to be psyched about new socks or, say, Joe Biden.)

I still like Christmas, but I'm happy to play the Grinch with the primaries. We should get rid of them. If I could, I'd sneak into the Whovilles of Iowa and New Hampshire and steal the voting machines, ballots and bad coffee.

In the past, my Grinchiness was mostly reserved for the "first in the nation" Iowa and New Hampshire votes. Why should these two states have so much power? Two generations of political consultants have made their careers by knowing how to fill hotel rooms in Des Moines and whose palms to grease in Nashua. Scour the Federalist Papers and the Constitution and you'll find no mention of primaries, never mind the Hawkeye and Granite State Hegemony. And yet, if you win in either or both, you're statistically likely to become your party's nominee.

The Iowa caucuses are a particular affront. If it weren't for them, there'd be no ethanol subsidies, which are bad for your car, the economy and the environment. Iowa and New Hampshire are also very white places, if such things bother you, and I don't mean in the white Christmas sense.

But the proposed remedies -- rotating the primary states every four years, nuking Iowa from orbit, etc. -- don't really fix the underlying problem. We shouldn't have primaries at all -- and that goes for Senate and House primaries, too.

Primaries date back to the early 20th century, but they never mattered much until 1972, when the Democrats (with Republicans soon to follow) did something revolutionary: They voluntarily relinquished the ability to choose their own candidates. No other advanced democratic nation has done this (though the British have been heading in that direction, which is one reason their politics are becoming as dysfunctional as ours).

The argument for democratizing the selection of candidates was justified with the preposterous notion that there's nothing wrong with democracy that more democracy can't fix. (It's this potted thinking that leads people to argue for lowering the voting age to get more electoral input from teenagers.)

Those infamous "smoke-filled rooms" -- among my favorite kinds of rooms, by the way -- were supposedly bad because they allowed party bosses to impose their choices on voters. There's no doubt mistakes were made by those party fat cats and fixers, but those smoke-filled rooms also gave us Lincoln, Coolidge, the Roosevelts, Eisenhower, Truman, Kennedy, et al. I don't love all of those guys, but it's not obvious to me primaries would have given us better. And you can hardly argue that they weren't democratically elected. (We can talk about JFK's election shenanigans another time.)

One of the paradoxes of democracy is that it depends on healthy institutions that are fundamentally undemocratic. Families don't put everything to a vote, nor do churches, the Boy Scouts or the Marines. Back before the parties were castrated by the primaries (and other subsequent "reforms"), they had the power to impose standards on candidates and to protect their long-term interests and principles.

James Madison was a better philosopher than Alexander Hamilton (though a worse rapper). He understood that parties were a necessary tool of democracy because they forced different factions and interests to compromise in order to win. Kindred groups were willing to sacrifice a few items from their wish lists if it meant their party would be able to deliver on most of its agenda.

Primaries blow all of that up. Candidates on the left and right promise purity in all things, and elected politicians are often more scared of a primary challenge than a general election contest. Pandering to the most passionately ideological voters is the direct result of democratizing party decisions.

This leaves the parties behaving like advertising agencies for whichever candidate happened to exploit outrage the best -- or lied most convincingly about the things they can deliver.

The Democrats right now are like department store Santas promising the kids jet packs and light sabers. Once elected, they'll be lucky to deliver socks. And the resulting outrage will restart the whole stupid cycle all over again. "

" This presidency as normally understood is over. The only way to comprehend what is going on every day now is in terms of the 2020 election campaign. The rest of the world won’t stop. Turkish invasions of Syria and the like will still happen. But here in the U.S., we’re done for the next 13 months. A war is on.

Like World War II, the Trump War—now in its third year with no end in sight—has been waged in several theaters. We have been through the Russian collusion theater, the obstruction theater and the Stormy Daniels theater. The allied Trump forces mostly prevailed but have taken many casualties, from hangers-on to generals.

It now appears the impeachment theater will host the decisive battles. Fortunately, the impeachment fights of the past few weeks have revealed the basic campaign strategies that Mr. Trump and the Democrats will pursue the next 13 months.

It is clear that Mr. Trump’s interest in Ukraine was to take out Joe Biden, whose campaign has been based exclusively on offering relief from the never-ending Trump political wars. Sensing the viability of this threat, Mr. Trump sicced Rudy Giuliani on Mr. Biden and the murk of Hunter Biden’s business deals in Ukraine.

Here, the obligatory political disclosure: I don’t think this is an impeachable offense. It is hardball politics, and the American people, with votes, will get their say about it next year.

If Rudy could dig up enough dirt to drive down Mr. Biden’s chances of being the nominee, Mr. Trump’s expectation was that the Democrats would default to the unelectable Elizabeth Warren. Faced with the prospect of voting for Sen. Warren and her lynch-mob politics, Mr. Trump’s rhetoric and personality would recede as issues.


Mr. Trump has begun to make this argument at his rallies. You may not like me, he says, but you’re going to have to vote for me to save your 401(k). Against Ms. Warren, whose “plans” are virtually alien to the idea of economic growth, this is a plausible strategy: It’s me or the deep blue sea.

For Democrats, impeaching Donald Trump is just one big bomb in a larger strategy for the long march back to power next year. Their plan is to make the country’s political life so intolerable that the American people simply run up the white flag on the Trump presidency. No más!

Democrats know the Trump base, maybe 40% of the electorate, will never surrender. They are targeting a less committed 10% to 15% in the expectation these voters will decide that making accommodations between policy and personality has become impossible and that four more years of this would be too much to endure, even accepting 401(k) losses as the price of deliverance.

This, too, is a plausible strategy. The Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll this week has 55% of respondents at least supporting a Ukraine-based impeachment inquiry. The presidential discomfiture index is rising.

Hats off, by the way, to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has emerged from her party’s internecine conflicts as supreme commander of its strategy for 2020. Most of the Democratic presidential candidates have begun to look like minor officers in the Pelosi divisions. Even Joe Biden fell in yesterday, saying for the first time that Mr. Trump should be impeached.

An intriguing question for the future is whether the Democrats could have run a successful Trump-exhaustion strategy without a formal impeachment, instead relying on guaranteed anti-Trump publicity from their oversight hearings. The Journal/NBC poll shows nearly 40% think Mr. Trump should be allowed to finish his term. By insisting on impeachment, the Democrats are forcing voters to confront an unsettling constitutional issue rather than just bloodless politics.

Even now, the Beltway press purports neutrality in this war, but it is about as neutral as Italy in 1939. It is now part of the Democratic alliance, which makes it hard to take seriously the media’s crocodile tears about how so few Republicans are abandoning President Trump over Ukraine.

If the Republicans pull down Mr. Trump at this stage, they’d obviously elevate Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren, and weaken their beleaguered incumbents in the Senate and House. How complicated to report is that? The press’s insistence that every GOP act of self-interest obliges moral denunciation is starting to look ridiculous to anyone beyond their Twitter compounds.

Still, wars are often won or lost on unchangeable realities, and one is that Donald Trump makes enemies too easily. He appears to have done that over Ukraine with most of the State Department’s permanent bureaucracy. His enemies are real enough, but he has never much cared about adding more, even from his own side.

Historians may muse one day on what it would have been like if the press had chosen in January 2017 to cover Donald Trump’s presidency, however unruly, as a matter of expectably intense policy disputes, rather than launch a permanent takedown project.

For now, get a helmet. World War Trump is on. "

Write [email protected].

We Never Get Tired of Winning !  :