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It's Time for the Third Debate

Joe Heller


All the major Democratic candidates will be on stage tonight in Houston for the third Democratic debate. For the ones not on stage tonight, this is probably the end of the road, with the exception of billionaire Tom Steyer, who will be on stage next time and could still be a force (mostly, by endorsing one of the others after dropping out and giving $100 million to a super PAC supporting his choice). The candidates making the cut this time are Joe Biden, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), Mayor Pete Buttigieg (D-South Bend), Julián Castro, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), Sen. Amy Klobuchar (DFL-MN), Beto O'Rourke, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Andrew Yang.

The debate will be co-hosted by ABC and the Spanish-language network Univision. It will be located at Texas Southern University, a historically black university, and will run for 3 hours. The long length could be a factor that helps the younger candidates, who might be more physically and mentally fit in that last hour. The longer format will also allow the candidates more time to answer questions (75 seconds vs. 60 seconds last time). The hosts will allow opening statements but no closing statements. The moderators will be George Stephanopoulos (ABC), David Muir (ABC), Linsey Davis (ABC), and Jorge Ramos (Univision). It is a reasonably diverse crew. Stephanopoulos and Muir are white, Davis is black, and Ramos is an immigrant from Mexico.

This will be the first time Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris will be all on stage together. It is likely that the three senators will be gunning for Biden, either politely or less so, in hopes of getting him to say something that haunts him later on. It isn't the content of what he might say that matters, necessarily. It is the potential image of him looking like an old geezer well past his prime that could hurt. In that sense, it doesn't matter if Warren and Sanders come after him for not supporting Medicare for All, which they support, as long as he sounds like he understands the material well and forcefully defends his own health-care plan (a public option). If he wants to go on the attack, he can ask each of them if they want to abolish private health insurance. If they are honest, they will each say "yes," even though that is actually an unpopular position with the voters.

A subplot here is how Sanders and Warren will interact. So far, they have refrained from attacking each other, even though each is the other's biggest obstacle, at the moment. Probably they will continue their truce for the time being.

For the lesser-known candidates it is not yet do-or-die because all of them have qualified for the fourth debate, but polling at 1-2% indefinitely is not a good road to the nomination. Still, one of them could say something clever that gets repeated endlessly tomorrow.

Reuters has a list of five things to watch for in the debate:

How will Biden, Sanders, and Warren interact?
Can Biden go 3 hours without a gaffe?
What does Harris stand for?
Will any of the low-polling candidates break out?
How will the health-care issue play out?

Of course, these are merely the known unknowns. There could easily be unknown unknowns as well.

Taylor Jones



Taylor Jones has been drawing caricatures, political cartoons and editorial illustrations for a rather long time. He does very little else except fidget, drawing for the Hoover Digest.

Bob Englehart



Bob Englehart is a free lance cartoonist.

John Darkow



John Darkow has been a professional cartoonist for over 30 years, he now draws for the the Columbia Missourian.

Tim Ryan ends 2020 presidential campaign



(CNN) Rep. Tim Ryan dropped out of the 2020 presidential race on Thursday, ending a campaign that failed to gain any traction in a large field of better-financed and better-known Democrats.

Beto Says "No Más"



There are a number of Democratic presidential candidates who seemed very promising heading into this cycle, but who never gained any real traction. Exhibit 1A is Beto O'Rourke, who seemed as if he might be the next Jack Kennedy, but performed more like the next Jack Fellure. His original strategy of "be charismatic, and make good YouTube videos" did not work out, so he shifted to "threaten to seize people's guns." To nobody's surprise, his polling numbers kept dropping, and he was in serious danger of missing the next debate. On Friday, O'Rourke finally bowed to reality and ended his presidential bid.

In the e-mail announcing his decision to supporters, O'Rourke said he will not run for any office in 2020. So, he won't challenge Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), though Cornyn will still have all he can handle in the general election from MJ Hegar. There is no U.S. Senate race in Texas in 2022, so unless O'Rourke decides to make a run for the governor's mansion or some other statewide office in that year, or he attempts a return to the House of Representatives, then we won't be hearing from him again until 2024 at the earliest. In that year, however, he could attempt a rematch of his close-but-no-cigar run against Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), this time with a bluer Texas and a presidential-year electorate. It would not be a surprise if that is what O'Rourke has in mind.

Of course, by then he will be out of the public eye for 5 years and what people will remember is his dreadful presidential run, not his almost-successful Senate run in 2018. This goes to show you just how blinding the presidency is. If the day after the 2018 election O'Rourke had announced that he was challenging Cornyn in 2020, every Democrat in the country would have cheered him on and money would poured in. Now his political career is probably over. Moral of the story: Maybe, just maybe, a 50-50 or so shot at a lifetime job in the Senate is better than a 1 in a gazillion shot at being president (Yes, Steve Bullock, we are looking at you).

Tom Stiglich


Michael Ramirez

Former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick has been talking for the last several days about throwing his hat into the Democratic presidential ring, and on Wednesday he officially took the plunge.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/13/politics/deval-patrick-2020/index.html

Dave Granlund

If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, does it make any noise? Technically, yes, because sound is a pressure wave, and it occurs when a tree falls, even if nobody is there. Now let's try the political variant of that. If a candidate who nobody knew was even running drops out, does anyone notice? In this case, the answer is probably no, and it certainly applies to the completely pointless campaign of Miramar Mayor Wayne Messam, who dropped out of the Democratic primary just before the start of the latest debate to which he was not invited.

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/471267-Wayne-Messam-suspends-Democratic-presidential-campaign

Kamala Harris ends 2020 presidential campaign



Sen. Kamala Harris ended her 2020 presidential campaign on Tuesday, in an abrupt departure for a candidate who was once seen as a leading contender for the Democratic nomination.

Steve Bullock Exits Democratic Presidential Race



Another day, another Democratic presidential candidate down. On Monday it was Gov. Steve Bullock (D-MT), who—as a curious blend of economic conservative, social liberal, and folksy populist—never had much of a lane, and never gained much traction. He made a grand total of one debate cut (the second one), was averaging 0.5% in national polls, and raised less than $5 million (a.k.a., about as much as Michael Bloomberg has in the cushions of his couch). With winter upon us, he apparently didn't much relish the thought of freezing his Bullocks while trying to scrape together votes in Iowa. So, he's out.

Bullock's departure from the race might have been very happy news for the Democrats, as he is now available to run for the U.S. Senate against Steve Daines (R-MT), against whom the Governor would probably be even money. The problem, however, is that Bullock—despite being plenty young enough at age 53 to wait out the 15-20 years it takes get seniority in the Senate—is just not interested. That means that Daines will almost certainly get to keep his job, and the Democrats will have to look elsewhere for the three or four seats they need in order to recapture the upper chamber. Since Bullock will be ineligible for the Montana governor's mansion for eight years once his current term is completed in 2021, his political career is presumably nearing its end. He has a J.D. from Columbia University Law School (with honors), so it seems unlikely that he would want to become a simple country lawyer, but maybe he has something else in mind.

Joe Sestak, We Hardly Knew Ye



While the third-tier Democratic candidates try desperately to make the next debate stage, a fourth-tier (or maybe fifth-tier?) candidate has decided to throw in the towel. Former Pennsylvania representative Joe Sestak figured out that it's quite difficult to win with approximately 0.0% of the vote, and issued a statement announcing his withdrawal from the race.

Sestak's main selling points were his successful military career (he would have been the highest-ranking naval officer, and the only admiral, to serve as president, had he won) and his willingness to do the hard work of retail campaigning, often staging "walks" where he would trudge across a city, a county, or a whole state over the course of days/weeks, pressing the flesh with voters. The problem is that while his approach worked for his races for the House, it did not scale well in two races for the Senate, and it definitely did not scale as he waged a late-to-the-party presidential bid. Not only did he fail to make any debate cut, he raised virtually no money, and never got above 1% in any poll.

The departure of Sestak, Steve Bullock, and Wayne Messam from the race leaves Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) as the longest shot left in the Democratic field, if you only count candidates that pollsters actually ask about. He is averaging 0.4% in national polls. If you count candidates that pollsters no longer bother to ask about, then the longest shots left are former representative John Delaney and author and faith healer Marianne Williamson.

Harris Has Her Kamala to Jesus Moment

Dave Granlund


Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) had a bit of a surge after the first Democratic debate. After challenging Joe Biden over his friendly relationship with segregationists, she was rising in the polls, and her grand strategy of being the "sorta centrist, sorta progressive" candidate seemed like it might be working. But she never again had so strong a debate performance, and she sagged in the polls, particularly in the two states she was really counting on: California and South Carolina. If that was not enough, her campaign was beset by internal turmoil, and she was burning through money like it was going out of style. The writing was so obviously on the wall that we wrote her campaign obituary over two weeks ago. On Tuesday, she finally decided to take that writing to heart, and ended her campaign. She becomes the latest Democrat whose 2020 presidential campaign did not actually make it to 2020.

In the short term, this will leave her with plenty of time to serve as one of Donald Trump's jurors in his imminent impeachment trial. In the long term, someone who launches a White House bid after just two years in the Senate does not seem likely to be a Congressional lifer. Indeed, she might leave the Senate before her senior colleague, the 86-year-old, in-her-fifth-term Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA). Harris is not an obvious VP candidate, as she's not a "Washington veteran" type that might pair with a Washington newbie like Mayor Pete Buttigieg (D-South Bend), she does not appear to be especially popular with black voters, and the Democrats don't exactly need help winning California. However, a cabinet seat in a Democratic administration (probably the AG post) makes sense. Alternatively, she might take a shot at the California governor's mansion when Gavin Newsom is term-limited in six years. Or maybe she will pull a reverse Feinstein and go from the Senate to the mayoralty of San Francisco.

Tom Janssen



Tom Janssen is a Dutch editorial cartoonist, working for the Dutch national daily Trouw and the Netherlands Press Association.

Tom Stiglich


Tom Perez is apparently accomplishing what he wanted to with the structure of the Democratic debates: to gently shove non-viable candidates out the door. The latest casualty is Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), who—about to miss his second debate in a row—bowed to reality on Monday and dropped out of the presidential race.

Booker, of course, never gained any real traction. What went wrong? Well, part of it was that, as a black man, he expected—despite abundant evidence that it doesn't work this way—to attract significant black support. An even bigger part of it, however, is that his campaign was, for lack of a better term, kind of vacuous. On Monday, in an e-mail to supporters, he wrote:

"Nearly one year ago, I got in the race for president because I believed to my core that the answer to the common pain Americans are feeling right now, the answer to Donald Trump's hatred and division, is to reignite our spirit of common purpose to take on our biggest challenges and build a more just and fair country for everyone. I've always believed that. I still believe that. I'm proud I never compromised my faith in these principles during this campaign to score political points or tear down others. And maybe I'm stubborn, but I'll never abandon my faith in what we can accomplish when we join together. I will carry this fight forward—I just won't be doing it as a candidate for president this year."

What "fight" is he even talking about? This is an entirely meaningless collection of platitudes. And therein lies the rub. Booker is an impressive fellow—smart, charismatic, with a track record of success as an urban mayor. However, he never stood for much of anything. We all heard a hundred times that he's a vegan, and that he made a point of moving to the poorest part of Newark so he could "understand" the plight of folks there. But the main planks of his policy agenda, and the basics of his case for the presidency were never clear. With such a crowded field, a failure to differentiate is a fatal flaw, and so it is that Booker 2020 is no more.

https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2020/Pres/Maps/Jan14.html#item-6

Biden campaigning in a watering hole in Iowa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterloo%2C_Iowa
you go there by tour bus

Pete B is next door in the metropolis of Cedar Rapids, which has some 9 Starbucks stores. Counties that have ZERO Starbucks stores are known to be 80-90% republican. In the middle of the USA here. In California, a Starbucks has much more power, just one store marks a vast Democratic stronghold.



The senators can jet there easily for a weekend, a major airport in Iowa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eastern_Iowa_Airport

That's about right. The candidates will come out with "my 31% is better than their 32%" and blame it on the app.

Thank goodness a bunch of candidates have now dropped out from the race.

Walt Handelsman


Daryl Cagle


Gary Varvel

Why isn't Bernie pointing out that Canada has
Medicare for all and it did not lead to socialism?