Primarily Speaking

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Thursday, May 02, 2019
image of a cartoon version of me running inside a hamster wheel, pictured in front of a patriotic stars-and-stripes graphic, to which I've added text reading: 'The Democratic Primary 2020: Let's do this thing.'

Welcome to another edition of Primarily Speaking, because presidential primaries now begin fully one million years before the election!

Let's start today with someone who isn't running for president, and yet continues to show us why she is the best leader we'll never have:


While everyone else is busily pretending that we're just going to have a normal election — despite the evidence that our elections will be neither free nor fair, owing to some combination of foreign interference, bigotry wielded against marginalized candidates, Republican voter suppression efforts, inaccessibility of voting, gerrymandering, hacking, social media manipulation, vanity candidates and their catastrophic egos, purity leftists, wannabe spoilers, obvious Kremlin agents, bots, trolls, ratfuckers, and everything else that conspires to undermine our democracy — Hillary Clinton is out here warning us that, if we don't get our shit together, our election could become a proxy war for foreign interlopers.

And yet again, we will fail to heed her warning. To our own peril.

On that note, let me say once more that I have real complicated feelings about this series, because I am constitutionally averse to pretending like everything is fine when it isn't. And sometimes it feels like this series implicitly suggests we're going to have a normal election, even though I don't believe that. But I don't know how to proceed except with the desperate hope that something seismic will happen and meaningful changes are made swiftly to ensure a legitimate election.

I expect more, and prepare myself for the worst.

* * *


I love seeing Julián Castro connecting immigration policy to workers' rights. This is why I want him on that debate stage. To that end, he's getting very close to meeting the individual donor threshold, if you have money to donate and want to help him get there.

Likewise, Senator Cory Booker is close to meeting that goal. I just threw a few bucks his way. I am giving a little to each candidate whom I want to see on that stage.

I continue to be a fan of Senator Elizabeth Warren's straight-talking Twitter game:


Senator Amy Klobuchar is no Elizabeth Warren in that department, but she's no slouch, either:


A lot of the candidates are taking to cable news and social media to argue that Attorney General Bill Barr must be impeached, if he doesn't resign. See, as but one example, Senator Kamala Harris:


He definitely won't resign immediately, so let's get those impeachment proceedings rolling, Speaker Pelosi! Especially since Barr didn't bother to show up to the House Judiciary Committee hearing today.

* * *

Joe Biden, who naturally is going to run a foreign policy driven campaign (because that's kind of his thing), took a strong position (and the right one) on the United States' support of Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen: "'Vice President Biden believes it is past time to end U.S. support for the war in Yemen and cancel the blank check the Trump administration has given Saudi Arabia for its conduct of that war,' Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates told me. 'He urges Congress to override [Donald] Trump's veto.'"

In other Biden news...


Maybe that's projection. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Oh, dear: This is not a good headline for Beto O'Rourke: "Beto O'Rourke Blew It." And the subhead is even harsher: "Reacting to losing to Ted Cruz by running for president is like failing to land a role in a community theater production and deciding to take your talents to Broadway." Ouch! (But where's the lie?)

Um, Vogue — what are you even doing?


Meanwhile, Pete Buttigieg spent the day yesterday clarifying his position on vaccinations, which is about as softball a policy question as a presidential candidate is going to get.

If he can't knock a question about vaccines out of the park, he's going to struggle. He sure ain't a "policy wonk," folks.

A number of prominent people have already announced support for Buttigieg and arranged to throw big fundraisers for him, and I suspect they are going to be very embarrassed by that in short order, if they're not already.

Turns out, it pays to see if a candidate knows a single thing about anything that matters before going all in for him. WHO KNEW!

John Hickenlooper is still definitely running for president.

Talk about these things! Or don't. Whatever makes you happy. Life is short.
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