Why Not Switch Again?

Donald Trump spent most of the last year attacking President Biden and his handling of the country.  Part of a campaign is defining your opponent and outlining how you would do things differently.  When Biden withdrew from the race, all the effort spent defining the opposition went away.  It was no longer important.  Biden's not the nominee.  Flush all that opposition research and campaign strategy.  A fresh nominee, largely untouched by Trump's long campaign against her predecessor, suddenly surged in the polls.  Where Biden was headed toward almost certain defeat, VP Harris is currently polling in the toss-up range.  Dumping Biden was strategic brilliance by the Democrats.  That astonishingly early presidential debate now looks like a Democratic ploy to sink Biden rather than inform the public.

It has been less than three weeks, and the Harris-Walz Campaign has stalled.  It's still in toss-up territory, but the Republican criticisms are sticking.  Walz may not have been the best choice for VP.  Harris is dodging the press, not having done an interview since her ascension to the top spot on the ballot.  What if she starts sinking?  She was such a weak candidate in 2020 that she withdrew from the campaign before the voting even began.  She is not a strong nominee and is only doing as well as she is because she's not Biden.  What if she is just a place holder, another false nominee for the Republicans to waste their ammunition on?

Are Joe Biden's delegates committed to Harris?  When the Democratic Convention convenes and the delegates vote, what is to stop them from picking someone else?  We are in uncharted waters with this nomination.  Do the rules say that the VP nominee automatically gets the delegates if the Presidential nominee drops out?  If not, it could be a free for all.  Here is another opportunity to dump a candidate that the Republicans have spent a month attacking.  A new nominee would clean the slate yet again.  With the election then less than 3 months away, the Republicans would have to once again adapt their strategy while the Democrats have been attacking the same person all along.

I think it is 50-50 that the Democrats choose a different nominee at the convention.  They need someone with less baggage than either Kamala Harris (Willie Brown's most favored mistress) or Tim Walz (the Afghanistan veteran who didn't go to Afghanistan).

Rigged Election!

"Court Admits DNC and Debbie Wasserman Schulz Rigged Primaries Against Sanders"

Michael Sainato, Observer

This is both funny and sad.  Some upset Bernie supporters filed a class action suit against the DNC and Wasserman Schulz in 2016.  Though the judge finds that the plaintiffs are right on every count, he dismissed the case because it isn't the place of the courts to tell the DNC how to run their primaries.  Awesome.  Even as unpopular as Donald Trump is, this going to be hard for the DNC to overcome.  How do they run a primary in 2020 and have the voters trust the results?  Bernie won 43% of the vote in the 2016 primary and it is now a fact that the DNC put a thumb on the scale to favor Hillary.  What do those 43% (13.2 million voters) do in 2020?  There is talk of the Republicans splitting thanks to Trump's following vs. the Never Trump wing.  The Democrats have a similar problem that isn't getting the same media attention.  The Green Party may see a big boost come 2020 with disaffected Democrats switching parties.

 

Also, this really hurts the rigged election claims by the Democrats.  If it was okay for you to cheat against Bernie, why isn't it okay for Trump to cheat against you?  Who cheated first?

Master of Distraction

Everyone here is talking about why John Podesta refused to give the DNC server to the FBI and the CIA. Disgraceful!

Donald Trump, Twitter

 

I do not believe for a second that 'everyone' is talking about that.  I suspect you could count the number of people talking about it on one hand and still have four fingers remaining.  This is a silly claim.  However, it puts Podesta and the DNC back in the news.  The President has tweeted and that is automatically newsworthy.  Looking at it from that perspective, it's plain wrong.  Podesta had no role over the DNC server; he was Hillary's campaign manager and not in any way in charge of the DNC server.  Debbie Wasserman Schultz was in charge of the DNC when it was hacked by Russians or others.  The released emails showed that the DNC had put a thumb on the scale for Hillary in the primaries, not the sort of news that pleased Bernie supporters.  The DNC did not allow the FBI to examine the server but instead hired a company with no discernible biases:

 

The Russian expat leading the fight to protect America: In a war against hackers, Dmitri Alperovitch and CrowdStrike are our special forces (and Putin's worst nightmare).

Esquire

 

Why have US law enforcement investigate a crime at taxpayer expense when we can spend donor money to have a private company reach a convenient conclusion for us?  What happened with Podesta is that he fell for a phishing scheme and accidentally granted access to his email to another hacker, perhaps Russia.  Those emails exposed collusion between various media sources and the Clinton Campaign.  The CIA has nothing to do with all this and it is baffling why he mentions it.

 

And there you have the crazy like a fox brilliance of the tweet.  In exposing Trump's apparent ignorance of the issue, the DNC and John Podesta are again painted in a negative light.  While the left keeps the Russian collusion story alive, Trump keeps the DNC and Podesta email story alive.

 

Meanwhile, while the media gape at his latest tweet, Trump is meeting with Vladimir Putin at the G20 Summit!