Iconoclast: Democrats’ Debates Don’t Matter
Thursday’s Democratic debate was “lively” and “enlightening,” writes Damon Linker at The Week, yet “none of it will matter.” Yes, millions have watched the debates. But: “The effect? Not much.” Shaky performances haven’t cost Joe Biden his lead. Kamala Harris’ big hit on Biden led her to rise briefly — but now she’s out of the race. Elizabeth Warren climbed but has “fallen back.” Cory Booker, long said to be “overdue for a breakout,” never broke out. There just isn’t “much evidence” the debates have made much difference. Linker predicts Biden will hang on to his lead, Warren fade more, Sanders will remain the “left-populist alternative” and Buttigieg will “settle in” as the centrists’ fallback. “Another debate in the can,” he sighs. “Maybe it’s time to finally start voting.”
From the right: Voter-Purge Scaremongering
Last week, Mother Jones warned that Republicans were planning to purge “hundreds of thousands of voters” in Wisconsin and Georgia to gain “a crucial advantage” in those states. “None of this, of course, is true,” corrects National Review’s David Harsanyi, but publishing “cynical pieces of this genre” is “an election-time tradition at this point” because it lets Democrats “warn of widespread disenfranchisement” and give themselves “a baked-in excuse for losing elections and smearing Republicans.” Fact is, “both federal law and state law mandate the updating of voter lists,” and every registration Georgia canceled was for someone who was dead, had moved out-of-state or doesn’t want to vote. It’s “much the same” for Wisconsin. All of which shows that the voter-purge narrative is “nothing but destructive scaremongering.”
2020 watch: The Economy’s Boosting Trump
According to a new Fidelity Investments study, “82 percent of Americans say they’re in a similar or better financial position this year than last while 78 percent believe they will be better off in 2020 than they were in 2019,” Andy Puzder notes at Fox News. Those numbers are “daunting” for Democrats: Despite “talk of a looming recession,” Americans “seem more convinced by what they are experiencing than by what the left is telling them,” making “Democrats’ call for an immediate change in leadership” a “tough sell.” Voters know President Trump’s economic policies are producing “a historically robust job market, increasing wages, dynamic stock market growth and declining income inequality” — facts Dems can’t rebut. For most Americans, then, the 2020 election won’t be a tough choice.
Libertarian: McCainiacs Rally ’Round Amash
A new Super PAC formed by “former Republican campaign strategists” for John McCain and John Kasich is backing libertarian Rep. Justin Amash, who deserted Republicans to become an independent and voted with Democrats to impeach Trump, reports Reason’s Matt Welch. The group aims to help Amash “retain his swing-district congressional seat as an independent.” It’s an odd alliance of libertarians and “neoconservative-style interventionists” — only because Trump has driven both groups to “the outer margins of the modern Republican Party.” That’s why the new PAC will likely “amount to little more than a vehicle for spending the money of the anti-Trump conservative rich.”
Conservative: Ex-Intel Chiefs’ Media ‘Collusion’
Ex-intelligence honchos James Comey, Andrew McCabe, John Brennan and James Clapper have “lots of things in common,” observes Victor Davis Hanson in his Tribune Syndicate column: All four Obama appointees were “deeply involved in the ‘Russian collusion’ hoax,” “lied either under oath or in the public sphere,” wholly “detest the president of the United States” and are now “either paid cable news analysts or frequent guest commentators,” with “abject conflicts of interest” when talking about their own roles. As “the most powerful intelligence chiefs of the Obama administration,” these four have “routinely offered the nation their own warped theories about wrongdoing in high places that are as self-serving as they are contradicted by facts.” And their records underscore the “surreal collusion” between them and the media — in which they “sell their checkered government service to exonerate themselves while confirming the anti-Trump biases of their paying hosts.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board