Who Has the Juice?
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Take this New Yorker cover (which is right up there with “Hamilton” as one of the seminal works of American art in our young nation’s history):
….and add to it the immortal words of Homer Simpson: “It’s funny because it’s true”
And you get these two scientifically-generated charts showing the comparative areas of power within the two major political parties:
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As rock solid evidence for the two pie charts above, please see the following data:
It’s on!!
The Des Moines Register Thursday had these back-to-back Ron/Don scoops:
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis will make his eagerly anticipated Iowa debut next week with stops in Davenport and Des Moines as he flirts with an expected presidential run later this year.
An official familiar with the governor's planning confirmed the stops to the Des Moines Register, saying DeSantis will appear with Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds at both events March 10. DeSantis has been traveling the country discussing his "Florida blueprint" and promoting his new book, which was released earlier this week.
Polling shows that DeSantis has risen as an early favorite in the Republican presidential primary race, particularly as a possible foil to former president Donald Trump, who announced a campaign late last year. This will be DeSantis's first visit to the first-in-the-nation caucus state.
He will appear with Reynolds, who will host a pair of interview-style conversations at each event, the official said.
Former Republican President Donald Trump will travel to Iowa March 13, making his first appearance in the first-in-the-nation caucus state since announcing his candidacy late last year.
Trump is scheduled to give remarks focused on education policy at 6:15 p.m. at Davenport's Adler Theater.
Gotta love how both camps went old school in giving the Register the exclusives!
Show of hands — who is committing to visiting all of Iowa’s 99 counties before caucus day!!!!!
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This New York Times story about Ron DeSantis limiting his major interview appearances to the friendly precincts of Rupert Murdoch-owned outlets has this stunning section:
Mr. DeSantis’s interview in The Times of London was conducted by David Charter, the newspaper’s U.S. editor, a veteran foreign correspondent who is viewed as a straight-ahead journalist and not an opinionated pundit.
The two-page spread appears under a splashy quote rendered in British spelling: “Ron DeSantis: ‘Don’t we need a little more vigour and punch?’”
The article is presented as a feature, observing at one point that Mr. DeSantis has “a firm handshake and a neat crop of chestnut hair.” In the interview, Mr. DeSantis muses about a golf vacation with his wife to Scotland and Northern Ireland. He calls himself a “big supporter” of Brexit, although he offered a light critique of Britain’s pro-Brexit Conservative Party, saying the party “hasn’t been as aggressive at fulfilling that vision as they should have been.”
Asked if he had written his memoir because he wanted to be president, Mr. DeSantis demurred: “What I would say is, I was well known. I was, you know, kind of a hot commodity. And I thought that the book would do well, I think it is doing well. I think you’re gonna see it’s going to do very well. We’ve had a great, great response.”
Despite the seemingly cordial tone of the interview, Mr. DeSantis at one point became irritated with his interlocutor.
Mr. Charter writes that when he asked Mr. DeSantis how he would handle American relations with Ukraine, the governor referred “to Biden being ‘weak on the world stage’ and failing at deterrence.”
Mr. Charter pressed for more detail: How would a President DeSantis handle the conflict in Ukraine?
“Perhaps you should cover some other ground?” the governor replied. “I think I’ve said enough.”
One can see in the crevices of this passage the indications that Mr. DeSantis is (a) thin skinned; and (b) not ready to answer hard(ish) questions outside his comfort zone. Is there a path to the presidency if both those things turn out to be very true? Only time will tell, but probably not.
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Although a fresh Associated Press piece keeps up the alternative narrative (“How Biden leaves wiggle room to opt against reelection bid”), check out the Washington Post’s essential reading story that unfurls a tiny tip of the iceberg of how much Jen O'Malley Dillon & Co. have already done to lock down the nomination and the party infrastructure writ large:
President Biden’s team is moving quickly to build a “national advisory board” stocked with Democratic governors, senators and other political stars who will travel and speak on Biden’s behalf during his expected reelection campaign, an early effort to unify party leaders and minimize the chance of dissent.
The group, which will be housed at the Democratic National Committee and formally announced this month, is among steps Biden aides are taking to prepare for the president’s likely reelection bid, which he is expected to announce in April. In joining the operation, the political leaders will be asked to travel, attend events, appear on television and perform other duties as high-level surrogates for the Democratic Party, at first, and then Biden once he launches his campaign.
Biden aides said some Democrats are still being asked to join the effort, but they have already enlisted more than 20 national figures. They include such influential governors as Gavin Newsom of California, J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Wes Moore of Maryland, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Phil Murphy of New Jersey.
Of the last eight presidents, four have won a second term and four haven’t. Of that losing quartet, three faced serious nomination challenges (Ford, Carter, and Bush 41) and one did not have full control of his party (Trump).
Team Biden has studied it all and knows what to do to leverage all of its power to maximize the odds that there is a second term. And a Republican Party with many more power centers and the likelihood of a bruising nomination battle of its own is not in a position to do much of anything to disrupt the meticulous planning of Jen O'Malley Dillon.
Also, as November 2024 approaches, Team Biden will increasingly demonstrate that it knows what the traffic will bear when it comes to suburban voters:
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Peggy Noonan continues her eight-years-and-counting run demonstrating she understands Trump voters and the national mood as well as anyone, writing about the Democrats’ and the bureaucracy’s posture towards the lab leak view:
[I]t will have bothered you that month by month the highest scientific and medical authorities in the U.S. government seemed to be discouraging the conversation, or insistently directing it toward natural transmission. Anthony Fauci, we later found, dismissed the subject in internal emails a few months into the pandemic as a “shiny object that will go away.”
That was rather patronizing. People had a right to wonder and were wise to do so. The disease killed millions. It was a world-wide economic, societal and cultural disaster. Why it happened matters. Where and how it started matters. There could be another pandemic tomorrow. What steps must be taken to see that it doesn’t?
And there was a sense emanating from scientific and medical establishments that people who think it started in a Chinese lab think that only because they’re racist, they hate Asians, or because they’re conspiracists. At this you would have thought: No, buddy, I think it because I’m normal. Murphy’s Law. You have 1,000 safety protocols and one day you satisfy only 998 of them. That’s all you need for an accident.
And you likely thought something else: This isn’t politics to me, but I gather it’s politics to you. This began to poison things. Once lies and finagling walk out of the Lie and Finagle Lab, they contaminate everything.
If you don’t understand immediately the brilliance of Ms. Noonan’s column and how it explains the rise and staying power of Trump, you are not paying close enough attention.
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This New York Post story could be nothing – or it could be everything:
Two Russian billionaires who have managed to dodge US sanctions over Moscow’s year-old invasion of Ukraine went property shopping with Hunter Biden, dined with then-Vice President Joe Biden, and discussed “favors” they might swap, sources tell The Post.
New details of Joe and Hunter Biden’s association with Yelena Baturina and Vladimir Yevtushenkov flesh out tantalizing clues from the first son’s abandoned laptop. The sources spoke with The Post this week after the duo was yet again spared a fresh batch of sanctions announced by the Treasury Department Friday.
“I think it’s very fishy,” said one source who had firsthand knowledge of the business relationship between Hunter Biden and Yevtushenkov — who is sanctioned by the UK and Australia but not by the US.
“I think he should be sanctioned,” Michael McFaul, a former US ambassador to Russia under President Barack Obama, told The Post of Yevtushenkov — estimated by Forbes to be worth $1.7 billion. “I don’t understand why he has not been.”
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This Wall Street Journal story about Attorney General Garland’s passion for the music of Taylor Swift (and his invention of “Carpool Karaoke”) is, in fact, everything:
