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Here’s the Post story.

The right thing to do on this is for all Democrats to condemn Russian interference. There are plenty of legitimate issues to bring up if Sanders isn’t your preferred candidate. One thing we know for certain is that any candidate on the debate stage on Wednesday would be terrible for Putin, especially compared to the current occupant of the White House.

Sanders Statement on Russian InterferencePost + Comments (19)

Breaking on a Friday afternoon:

In a reversal, former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg said Friday he will permit his company to release women who have accused him of sexual harassment from three non-disclosure agreements, after increasing pressure from his fellow presidential candidates.

Bloomberg also said that, after “a lot of reflecting,” he would not offer confidential agreements to resolve sexual misconduct claims going forward.

“I recognize that NDAs, particularly when they are used in the context of sexual harassment and sexual assault, promote a culture of silence in the workplace and contribute to a culture of women not feeling safe or supported,” Bloomberg said in a statement.

Bloomberg said the company has identified three non-disclosure agreements this would pertain to, and that if they’d like to speak about their allegations they may ask for a release.

Perhaps I’m cynical, but I’m doubting that there were only three. I mean, we all know that there were “a very few,” but I’m thinking two digits, minimum.

He has the best consultants money can buy. I was listening to Pod Save America’s debate review today, and they were pointing out that Bloomberg’s performance reflected a stubborn candidate who didn’t listen to the best consultants money can buy. To quote a song Betty might like, “Quizás, Quizás, Quizás” (Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps). My alternate theory is that, just maybe, the “best consultants money can buy” aren’t that good. This little gambit sure doesn’t seem like a genius move, but I guess even the best can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit.

¿Tres?Post + Comments (149)

I think Jennifer Rubin has been right about a lot of things in the Trump era, but she’s pretty wrong on this one. Her post-debate column barely mentions Warren, naming Biden (!?!) and Buttigieg (!?!) as the winners. Were she and I watching the same debate?

As we go forward, a bunch of never-Trumpers who have DC sinecures are going to lecture Democrats on who can win, why they can win, how they can win and so forth. We would be stupid to listen to them. Even if their advice is given sincerely (and I think in Rubin’s case, it is), their feelers are tuned to feel what an ever-shrinking group of moderate Republicans feel. In the real world, a lot of those moderate Republicans are already going to pull the lever for Trump because they can’t stomach voting for a Democrat. Some of them are going to vote for whichever Democrat makes the ticket (James Joyner at OTB is a good example). The rest of them may or may not vote. Rubin, Rick Wilson, David Frum and others like them just don’t represent a big enough constituency to be bothered about what they say. They’re great at criticizing Trump, but not so good on helping Democrats pick a candidate to beat him.

The Limitations of a Never TrumperPost + Comments (109)

Most of the first hour of last night’s debate consisted of each candidate taking a shit on Michael Bloomberg, and Elizabeth Warren aiming a shit cannon at him. I’ve watched a lot of debates, and I’ve never seen someone own a debate like Warren. She absolutely devastated Bloomberg in the exchange on non-disclosure agreements. When Warren — who was appropriately aggressive in demanding talk time — wasn’t speaking, one of the other candidates chipped in and threw a shot at Bloomberg. She looked strong, she looked smart, she was nimble, and she could beat Trump. A bravura performance.

As anyone could have predicted, Bloomberg was weak for the first hour because he hadn’t been debating on national TV for a year. He also came off, as predicted, like an out-of-touch plutocrat at times. His only moments of strength were when he was making technocratic points on areas of policy that he’s focused on, like climate change. “I am a manager,” the start of his closing pitch, couldn’t motivate a dog to walk across the kitchen floor to pick up a steak. His massive ability to advertise might stitch up some of the damage inflicted on him last night, but his electability argument took a big hit with the legitimate criticisms on stop-and-frisk, the mortgage crisis, and his issues with women. Referring to Warren as “the Senator standing next to me” was a moment where he took a massive hammer and drove home the nail that, despite his protests to the contrary, he has a big problem with women.

Klobuchar wasn’t as good as she was in New Hampshire. She seemed a little shaken in the first hour, and in the second hour, her pure, white-hot hatred for Pete was on full display, and the longest exchange they had didn’t do either of them any favors. However, it was some good TV, and Pete is lucky that she didn’t have a stapler on her podium. Unfortunately, she didn’t have a good moment when the Telemundo moderator asked her about forgetting the President of Mexico’s name, and that moderator had a good follow-up on Latin American policy that wasn’t kind to her, either.

Pete didn’t miss an opportunity to criticize anyone on the stage, to a fault. He often pivoted at the end of a response to criticize someone else. No nit was too small to pick for Pete, and I thought Warren made him look small when she defended Klobuchar for forgetting AMLO’s name after he had gloated over remembering it. He also continues to rely on platitudes. In his defense, as someone who has a message of unity and being an alternative to divisive politics, it’s hard to look good in the Bloomberg pile on that had to happen last night.

Bernie took a few more hits than he did in New Hampshire, but I don’t know if they did any real damage. One of the issues with attacking Sanders is that he’s held the same positions since Jesus was a baby, so when he gets attacked, he has a ready answer. What else is there to say about a completely known quantity? He profited from everyone’s desire to dunk on Bloomberg, because in another debate, they’d be dunking on him. It looked like Jane went to the Burligton Costco and got him a new shirt and tie after reading my assessment that he was dressed like a 1980’s business traveler in the last debate.

Biden was weaker than the last debate. He suffers from the need to pack 10 things into a period of time that can only accommodate 5. I don’t think I’m talking about his stuttering – I’m talking about him starting a sentence, and then driving off to make a point that may or may not be related, then going back to the topic at hand, then going somewhere else. He made a lot of statements about all the foreign leaders he knows, which I think is weak sauce. There were very few “Good Old Joe Biden” moments.

I realize this is sounding a bit like movie criticism, but with the combination of the need of the candidates to tamp down Bloomberg, and the “hey let’s you and you fight” questions from the (mostly, and predictably) awful moderators, it was a pretty fighty and shouty affair. If you haven’t watched it, I can’t really over-emphasize how Warren took over. In the last debate, she was really good at staying on message, and articulating her programs. In this debate, she wasn’t as concerned about staying on message. Instead, she showed us that she was the best lawyer on the stage – she was on message where appropriate, and attacked when necessary. I thought her run down of why she could win rather than every other candidate was well done. She was gracious while Pete was petty. She was confident and composed while Klobuchar seemed a little shaken. She was coherent and focused while Biden rambled. She was a capitalist while Bernie was defending socialism. She was deft while Bloomberg was clumsy. I hope it does her some good, because she deserves it.

Non-Consensual ConsentPost + Comments (118)

My God, this little tidbit from a story in Politico about the Nevada Caucus is the opposite of hallelujah (not linking to Politico, read it via LGM):

Party officials scrambled to streamline their vote reporting system — settling on Google forms accessible through a saved link on the iPads — after scrapping a pair of apps they’d been planning to use until a similar app caused the fiasco in Iowa two weeks ago.

Again, any process that runs once every four years is really hard to test, and therefore a major technological and human factors challenge. Add to that the fact that it is a new process that someone dreamed up in a couple of weeks, which has to be executed by harried, poorly trained volunteers, and you have a failure waiting to happen. At least they’re using iPads that they control, and Google Forms probably won’t shit the bed on caucus night, but other than that, Titanic II.

Some kind of verified (multiply witnessed) paper record, along with a process to call the results in to a phone bank, and a pre-stamped envelope to send that record to the party via certified/registered/whatever mail, is the right technology for a caucus. But that just avoids the obvious fact that the right solution for picking a candidate of a party is a fucking primary election.

Hurry Up and Fuck UpPost + Comments (45)

Atrios posted this clip today and I decided to listen to it instead of relying on the summary. It’s somewhat out of context – it sounds like Bloomberg is in the middle of giving a short history of work, starting with farming, moving to the industrial revolution, and ending with the information age. His point was that most of the work done today requires a lot more skill than farming 300 years ago.

This is just bog-standard business conference stuff. Does he sound a little condescending? Yeah. Is this going to sink his battleship? Probably not.

Just as pure political strategy, I think attacking stuff like this for being “out of touch” is a political mistake. If you get this riff into context, Bloomberg probably has some solution that may or may not work to address the legitimate issue of what to do about an economy where a lot of people are locked out due to lack of technical skills. My guess is that his solution was unworkable, but he’s identifying a problem that resonates in “the heartland” — high tech skills and high tech jobs are few and far between in rural areas.

Frankly, the answer to this problem that is sometimes given by “moderate” Democrats’ – turning miners or assembly line workers into coders or network engineers – is just as vacuous as most of the conversations at business conferences. I spent a lot of time in “the heartland” last year, and the only “coder” I saw was when I looked into the mirror, because there are essentially no coding jobs in rural areas. What I did see was two paramedics in their late 50’s or early 60’s, men who had other jobs prior to retraining, who were now working in the only technical field in most rural areas, medicine. There were also a lot of nurses and aides, and home health care workers. Those home health care workers worked for agencies charging what, for that rural area, is a lot of money (like $25-35/hr), but I doubt that the aides saw a fraction of that. I also saw closed down nursing homes, and families struggling to take care of their elderly parents and grandparents at home when they really should have been in an assisted living facility or a nursing home.

A solution that really could help these rural areas is a huge infusion of money into Medicaid (which pays for most nursing home care, in the end), more assistance to pay for home health aides, and adding a requirement that aides and paraprofessionals be paid a much better wage. Then, retraining programs could be for medical jobs that actually exist in rural America, not IT jobs that exist in New York. But if you stand in front of a bunch of unemployed farmers or factory workers and tell them that, they’ll think you’re trying to sell them crappy jobs, because, today, those jobs don’t pay shit, and they’ve seen a lot of those jobs leave town.

The information economy is real, but so is the healthcare economy. The biggest employer in a lot of small towns is the hospital and/or nursing home — if they’re lucky enough to still have one or both of those facilities. That’s the reality in the heartland. Maybe Democrats could start addressing that if they want to win over a few voters in those places.

There’s plenty of other stuff that Bloomberg is terrible on – just attack him on that.

Straight Outta ContextPost + Comments (101)