San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Iowa caucuses’ biggest loser? Democratic Party
Joe Biden, the former vice president and perceived frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, came in a distant fourth in the cornfield caucuses.
And he wasn’t even the biggest loser in Iowa. That would be the Democratic Party.
The parade of screwups that led to there being no clear Iowa winner highlighted a ridiculous decision by party leaders — letting a farm state that has little in common with the rest of the country, either politically or demographically, set the course of the Democratic nomination.
They got what they deserved.
The caucus system is basically an allnight tugofwar between activists, with a point system that
makes rankedchoice voting sound simple. Add in a neverending series of repetitive candidate debates, toss in another unrepresentative state contest right after Iowa (New Hampshire), and you have a recipe for turning off all the voters who actually matter to the Democrats.
It all reinforces the impression that we have no idea what we’re doing.
Republicans no longer have to work to suppress the vote. We do it to ourselves.
Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders both claimed victory in Iowa, and who knows which one really got the most votes? But the real winner was Mike Bloomberg — the race is still so fractured that there’s a chance he’ll be a player when the states where he’s competing start voting. The only way Bloomberg can actually get nominated is if no one has enough delegates heading into the convention to win on a first ballot. I know there hasn’t been a brokered Democratic convention since 1952, before many of you were born. But a lot of things have happened in the past four years that we haven’t seen before.
Rip it up: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s pagebypage tearup of her copy of the State of the Union address will go down as the most memorable moment of the 80minute Tour de Trump. It’s the closest I’ve seen to her using the Fword.
As for the speech, like it or not, it was President Trump’s strongest performance. A carefully paced and choreographed show, where he hit every mark, word and pause for ultimate effect.
He went back to being a reality show star. And he stuck to the script and dramatized the speech by adding everything from a very sick Rush Limbaugh to a mother with a saved child to the reuniting of a combat soldier in full dress uniform with his family.
The content was heavy on the fictional side, but that’s what you get in the State of the Union speech, anyway. And it was accurate enough on the economy and unemployment on every point but one.
The recovery started with President Barack Obama, not Trump.
It was all made for TV, and I suspect we are going to see it on TV ads for his reelection.
Movie time: “The Last Full Measure.” Chances are you haven’t heard of this movie, which is based on the true story of a group of Vietnam veterans’ effort to have a longoverdue Congressional Medal of Honor awarded to the medic who saved their lives in an ambush. Great performances by Samuel L. Jackson, Christopher Plummer, Ed Harris, William Hurt and the late Peter Fonda. How’s that for a cast?
“The Rhythm Section.” I mistakenly thought this was a jazz musical. I’m glad I saw it anyway, because this is one heck of a movie. Blake Lively stars as a druggie prostitute whose family was lost in a plane crash. I won’t spoil the various plot twists, but it turns into “Atomic Blonde” without the tech or hair dye.
Parting shot: You might want to think twice before messing with former state Sen. Roderick Wright.
The longtime Democratic lawmaker was honored at an NAACP fundraiser the other day in Sacramento, where he talked about his 2014 felony conviction for not living in the Los Angeles district where he owned a home, something a lot of lawmakers were doing at the time.
Wright served a total of 71 minutes in jail and was pardoned in 2018 by Gov. Jerry Brown as he was headed out the door.
“Let me tell you, getting that pardon was a relief,” Wright told the crowd. “I owned 12 guns when I was convicted, and it really hurt to have to give them up,” Wright said. “And the minute the governor signed the pardon, I went and got them all back.”