Skeptic: Let’s Stop the Cuomo ’20 Nonsense Now
Ben Mathis-Lilley at Slate is skeptical of a recent Politico article promoting Gov. Cuomo as a strong Democratic presidential contender in 2020, provided he can “win over the left.” Why, he asks, would “a Democratic voting base that has spent the past six months getting jazzed up about aggressive resistance and unapologetically liberal policies” actually “nominate a moderate centrist triangulating triangulator?” He reminds us of the Moreland Commission, which Cuomo created “to investigate corruption in state politics and then shut down because it started investigating his own allies.” Candidate Cuomo would “combine the worst qualities of Jeb Bush (being a dynastic insider) with Chris Christie (being unpopular and famous for an act of brazen corruption in his own state).”
From the right: Can Dems Make Nice With ‘Deplorables’?
Democrats desperately seeking a path to victory are ignoring “the most important — and most challenging — item of all: solving the liberal ‘deplorable’ problem,” suggests Kay Hymowitz at City Journal. Because while white working-class voters who propelled Donald Trump to victory “may not always admire the man . . . they know that he doesn’t hate ‘people like me,’ in the pollsters’ common formulation.” But “they have good reason to think that Democrats, particularly coastal and media types, do hate them.” A few liberal writers have raised the issue, but they also “show why a solution lies out of reach” by understating “Democrats’ entanglement with the identity-politics Left, a group devoted to a narrative of American iniquity.” So Dems will have to hope they can regain control “without making any concessions to the large portion of the US population whom they appear to despise.”
Conservative: Right-Wing Scapegoat for Leftist Violence
The Washington Post has found a stunning answer for why “an angry Bernie Sanders supporter named James Hodgkinson opened fire on a field full of unarmed Republican lawmakers practicing for Congress’s annual charity baseball game.” As David French at National Review notes, the paper thinks he may have been influenced by “an angry right-wing shock jock whom Hodgkinson may never have even listened to.” In fact, the paper “doesn’t know how many people listen to this man. It doesn’t know who listens to this man. It doesn’t know if the shooter listened to this man. But it profiled him anyway.” That’s because The Washington Post’s “narrative demanded a right-wing villain, so a right-wing villain was what their reporter produced.”
Policy wonk: Health-Care Debate Is All About Money
A new report from the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services explains why Republicans “after nine years of opposing Obamacare, are having such a hard time repealing it,” says Doug Badger at Real Clear Health. The answer: “It’s pretty much about the money . . . not about providing Medicaid coverage to low-income adults.” Some moderate Republicans are “holding out for more federal cash for their states. And they just might get it — from Senate Democrats.” Indeed, they’re not “fighting for the poor; they’re fighting for a discriminatory [Medicaid] reimbursement arrangement that keeps federal dollars flowing.” So if Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer “manages to lure GOP moderates into his camp, it will be through the enticement of pork-barrel spending, not through an appeal to compassion.”
From the left: DNC Is Unpopular and Failing
Michael Sainato at The Observer finds it ironic that DNC Chairman Tom Perez just sent out a fund-raising e-mail referring to the GOP health-care bill as a “flaming dumpster fire” since “he has been presiding over the disaster that is the Democratic National Committee.” This past May was the DNC’s worst fund-raising month since 2003; the organization is now $1.9 million in debt. Seems “the party’s donors, lobbyists and PACs . . . have refused to prop up the failing brand.” Perez, says Sainato, “is a painful reminder that the Democratic establishment has suppressed reforms that would prove to voters that the party is prioritizing their interests.” Instead, party leaders are “doubling down on failed strategies and rallying behind unpopular, failing leadership.”
— Compiled by Eric Fettmann