Speaking of James Carville, here he is quoted at The Hill:

Longtime Democratic strategist James Carville went off on the current state of the party on Tuesday, asking why Tom Perez “is still the chair” of the Democratic National Committee.

“We gotta decide what we want to be,” the “Ragin’ Cajun” said on “The Beat” with Ari Melber on MSNBC. “Do we want to be an ideological cult, or do we want to have a majoritarian instinct — to be a majority party?”

In another part of the interview, Carville said Democrats need to “wake up” while avoiding being seen as the equivalent of the United Kingdom’s Labor Party, which has suffered a string of crushing losses recently.

“This party needs to wake up and make sure that we talk about things that are relevant to people,” Carville implored. “We don’t need to become the British Labor Party. That’s a bad thing. It’s not going well over there.”

“We’re, like, talking about people voting from jail cells,” Carville said at another point. “And not having a border.”

Maybe his instincts are all wrong. Maybe all that’s necessary for the a Democratic candidate, any Democratic candidate to prevail in November is Trump-hatred.

As I said in an earlier post, feel lucky, punk?

Well, here’s something different. A political scientist at Christopher Newport University has a heretical theory of American elections. At Politico David Freedlander writes:

What if everything you think you know about politics is wrong? What if there aren’t really American swing voters—or not enough, anyway, to pick the next president? What if it doesn’t matter much who the Democratic nominee is? What if there is no such thing as “the center,” and the party in power can govern however it wants for two years, because the results of that first midterm are going to be bad regardless? What if the Democrats’ big 41-seat midterm victory in 2018 didn’t happen because candidates focused on health care and kitchen-table issues, but simply because they were running against the party in the White House? What if the outcome in 2020 is pretty much foreordained, too?

Here’s her prediction:

And today her model tells her the Democrats are a near lock for the presidency in 2020, and are likely to gain House seats and have a decent shot at retaking the Senate. If she’s right, we are now in a post-economy, post-incumbency, post record-while-in-office era of politics.

and here are the details:

Bitecofer has already released her 2020 model, and is alone among election forecasters in giving the Democrats—who, of course, do not yet have a nominee—the 270 electoral votes required to claim the presidency without a single toss-up state flipping their way. She sees anyone in the top tier, or even the second tier of candidates, as strong enough to win back most of the Trump states in the industrial Midwest, stealing a march in the South in places like North Carolina and Florida, and even competing in traditional red states like Georgia, Texas and Arizona. The Democrats are likely to pick up seats again in the House, she says, pegging the total at nine pickups in Texas alone, and have a decent chance of taking back the Senate.

If Dr. Bitecofer is right, it doesn’t just mean that legions of political forecasters are wrong. It means that a lot of the savviest pols around, like Rahm Emanuel and James Carville, are not only wrong but have been wrong all along.

The opportunity of confirming or disproving Dr. Bitecofer’s theory will come soon enough, on Tuesday November 3, 2020. Whose base will be the most motivated to come out? She’ll either be hailed as a prophet or we’ll never hear from her again.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal summarize the outcome of the entire investigation, impeachment, and acquittal process this way:

In the bitter end, what has all of this accomplished? The House has defined impeachment down to a standard that will now make more impeachments likely. “Abuse of power” and “corrupt motives” are justifications that partisans in both parties can use.

Mr. Trump remains in office, but he will now claim vindication and use it as a rallying cry for re-election against what he will call an attempted insider coup. The partisan furies have intensified, and this election year will be even more bitterly fought. Mr. Trump’s political standing has even improved during the impeachment struggle, as voters concluded early on that his behavior was wrong and unwise but not impeachable.

I think it’s actually a bit worse than that. Democrats have actually improved the likelihood that Trump will be re-elected and both Trump and the Democrats have removed some of the last shreds of decorum from our political process. I don’t think this is an egg that can easily be uncracked.

It had to happen eventually. Finally, someone has posted something about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict I can agree with. In this case it’s Hussein Ibish at Bloomberg and here it is:

The stage is perfectly set for Abbas to present a bold new Palestinian vision for peace with Israel. The easy, and wrong, thing to do—and going by his track record, what he is most likely to do—would be to simply frame the Palestinian position as a vague, two-state formula based on UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, and the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative. This was exactly the position he took at the UN last year, but times have changed dramatically.

A reprise of that speech might be politically popular with Palestinians, where Abbas would be seen as sticking to their national talking points. But it would achieve nothing for them: the Trump plan has already altered the political landscape, and it may not be long before Israeli annexation irreversibly changes facts on the ground too.

I don’t entirely agree with his assessment of the Europeans or Arab League. Other than being a cause célèbre the Palestinians aren’t particularly popular with other Arabs and there have been some signs that Saudi Arabia would quietly support the Trump plan. I don’t think the Europeans care much one way or another. They’ll disapprove of anything that comes from the Trump Administration or, indeed, most American administrations.

We’ll now see if the Palestinians will live up to Abba Eban’s wisecrack about them: “They never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”

Staunch Democrat William Galston provides some advice in his Wall Street Journal column—stop Sanders!

The Vermont senator’s ideologically aware defenders will retort that he is not the scary kind of socialist who wants government to take over the means of production. Rather, they cast him as a warm and fuzzy social democrat who wants to use government to reduce insecurity and bolster opportunity for all. But Mr. Sanders has proposed not only the complete nationalization of the U.S. health-care system but also a $2 trillion federal takeover of electrical power production. Public support for Medicare for All plummets when people are told that it would eliminate private health insurance, a core feature of Mr. Sanders’s plan.

Because there are more conservatives than liberals in the electorate, Democratic presidential nominees cannot triumph unless they win a strong majority of moderate voters. But only 11% of these voters have a positive view of socialism, compared with 53% who oppose it.

Unless a Sanders candidacy could somehow reconfigure the political map, he would need to retake at least Pennsylvania and Michigan to have a serious shot at 270 electoral college votes. But the less-educated white voters who dominate these states’ electorates are hostile to socialism, even more so than whites with college degrees. Only 12% of white voters without college degrees are favorable toward socialism, while 63% disfavor it—and 54% view socialism in a very negative light. Whatever the case in Vermont, socialism is not a winner in the Midwest.

Mr. Sanders claims his uncompromising message gives him a unique opportunity to translate popular passion into votes. If so, the NBC/WSJ poll results don’t show it. Only 13% of voters report being “enthusiastic” about his candidacy, compared with 43% who are “very uncomfortable.” (The comparable numbers for Joe Biden are 14% and 35%.) Among swing voters, 31% are very uncomfortable with Mr. Sanders, compared with only 19% feeling the same about Mr. Biden.

The longer all of the present Democratic field remains in the race, the smaller the plurality of delegates the eventual notional winner is likely to have, increasing the likelihood of campaigns that continue right to the Democratic Convention.

I’m quite confident Mr. Galston’s advice will not be taken. For one thing it’s just too late. The DNC should have called a halt to Sanders’s campaign long ago. Not doing so was a misjudgement on their part.

The great Italian composer Giacchino Rossini had a practice following the premier of one of his operas. He would send a drawing of a bottle to his friends, a small bottle if the opera went reasonably well, a large one if it went horribly. “Fiasco” means bottle in Italian.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal respond to the fiasco of the Iowa caucuses:

There’s no shortage of mordant fun to be had at the expense of the Democratic National Committee and Iowa Democratic Party after the fiasco of the inaugural 2020 presidential contest, which has yet to yield definitive results apparently as a result of coding errors in a tabulation app created by party insiders. The college of cardinals at least lets the world know with white or black smoke how the vote for pope is going.

Here the party that waxes sanctimonious about election security couldn’t secure its own election from itself. Here the party that has spent three years questioning the legitimacy of the 2016 election will see the legitimacy of its own custom-designed process questioned. Here the party that promises technocratic management of American health care, energy and finance proved less able to tally votes even than the ancient Athenians.

What is the worst aspect of the face-plant of the Iowa caucuses:

1. It may help Bernie Sanders.
2. It may hurt Joe Biden.
3. It provides a graphic demonstration of the fecklessness of present Democratic Party leadership.
4. The reactions by prominent Democrats to the situation.
5. All of the above.
6. None of the above. It went swimmingly.
7. Other
8. Pass the popcorn.

I think E but especially D.

In his latest Washington Post column George Will piles on the Democrats for their feckless performance in the Iowas caucuses:

The progressive party’s Iowa caucuses were a hilarious parody of progressive governance — ambitious, complex, subtle and a carnival of unintended consequences. The party that promises to fine-tune everything, from the production of wealth to the allocation of health care to the administration of education, produced a fittingly absurd climax to what surely was Iowa’s final strut as a national distraction.

He continues in a similar vein, critiquing the remaining Democratic presidential candidates.

I think that Democrats have made multiple errors with respect to the Iowa caucuses, by far the most serious of which is their reaction to the snafu. They should not have criticized the failure. They definitely should not have expressed the panic I heard from some quarters. “Keep calm and carry on” should have been the mantra. Instead, the entire debacle but especially their own criticisms will be fodder for the Trump campaign’s sharp criticism of all things Democratic from now until November. That will be a force multiplier to whatever other criticisms are lodged against them. No wonder Rahm Emanuel is panicking over what’s happening.

It’s still far too early to start trumpeting the outcome of the caucuses. What’s important is not just a minority of the precincts but which precincts they were. However, the reactions become news themselves and may mar the the campaigns of more than one of the candidates who are still standing but Joe Biden in particular.

David Ignatius hasn’t been the first to point this out and he probably won’t be the last. From his latest Washington Post column:

The “Chinese model,” as enthusiasts sometimes describe Beijing’s autocratic system for dictating policy, can look eerily successful — until you consider catastrophic events such as the recent coronavirus outbreak.

China’s response to the epidemic that began in Wuhan nearly two months ago shows some advantages of its police-state approach, and some severe disadvantages: Chinese authorities can commandeer resources to build a hospital in 10 days. But by stifling bad news and even arresting vigilant doctors, they create deep distrust at home and abroad, risking their ability to be effective.

Chinese people simply don’t believe their government. They know that government health data is suspect, just like China’s official economic numbers. And just as all success is attached to President Xi Jinping, so is every failure. China may be racing into the future, but its bungled response to the coronavirus outbreak is a reminder of how suddenly it can stumble.

It isn’t just hospitals. The Chinese authorities can muster the resources to cause whole cities to be built within a remarkably short period. What frequently goes unmentioned: those cities were frequently not built to whatever standards are in place and they may fall down as quickly as they went up.

He continues:

The public’s distrust of the government emerged in interviews conducted this week by an American business executive who worked in Shanghai for three years and who shared with me conversations with former colleagues there. These Shanghai residents expressed deep skepticism about official data, which as of Tuesday showed more than 23,000 cases and 490 deaths.

“I personally doubt the numbers are accurate. I believe there are lots of missing cases, especially in rural area,” said one of the Chinese residents. “I think there are definitely miscounted numbers as some people died before there were cases diagnosed,” said a second. “Don’t trust the official numbers,” bluntly cautioned a third.

That raises another question. If the Chinese don’t trust the Chinese authorities, how much should we? How do we maintain a trade relationship with China while mitigating the risks that inevitably brings with it?

He concludes:

China’s command economy, managed by a one-party dictatorship, has achieved miracles in recent decades. In comparison, an open and contentious democracy like the United States can sometimes seem like a losing proposition. But we’re now witnessing a striking reminder of the need for open sources of information and public officials who aren’t cowed by political pressure.

Is such openness consistent with continued rule by the Chinese Communist Party? I don’t see it. And I think the CCP would gladly trade economic growth for continued rule. China’s present economic “miracle” was largely a means to that end.

I honestly don’t know what to say about the Washington Post’s editorial on the State of the Union speech:

The broadest measures — gross domestic product growth, wages and labor force participation — all point in varying degrees in the right direction, with the most sensitive indicator, unemployment, at a 50-year low of 3.5 percent. The laws of politics decree that incumbent presidents take the blame for negative economic conditions and the credit for positive ones. In that sense, Mr. Trump’s posture, in an election year, is entirely conventional. But the true State of the Union after three years of this otherwise unconventional presidency cannot be measured so straightforwardly.

They go on to admit the economy is growing more rapidly than the one Trump inherited, question the degree to which that has anything to do with Trump policy, criticize Trump’s trade wars, and muse over the sustainability of the present growth.

Here’s their conclusion:

Mr. Trump overtly asserts his total innocence in all respects, even as he implicitly tempts Americans with a subtly different proposition: to accept his behavior, and his conscious efforts to divide the country, as somehow necessary trade-offs for prosperity. This is as false as it is Faustian; trust and consensus are essential ingredients of a modern, efficient economy, not to mention indispensable to a thriving, durable Union.

What would be the basis of such a consensus? Democrats have rejected Trump’s presidency since November 2016 and the first impeachment bill was submitted in the House in June 2017. They have insisted on Trump’s perfidy since the very start.

If there was one message that came through loud and clear last night it was that there will be no such consensus, at least not among politicians, as long as Trump is president.