Campaign 2020: The Biden VP Mystery
A presidential candidate’s running-mate choice “hasn’t really mattered much beyond political cosmetics” for a long time, but now it does, argues McClatchy’s Andrew Malcolm: If he wins, Joe Biden will be “by far the oldest person ever to undertake” the demands of the presidency, and even Democrats worry about his “occasional confusion and frequent nonsensical syntax.” He has promised to pick a woman and is “studying a short list with senior aides, hopefully more competent than the ones who have been running the teleprompter in his basement recently.” Besides gender, “race, personal compatibility, ideological leaning, elective and media experience, donor base, age, job resume” play major roles. Will he pick Kamala Harris? Elizabeth Warren? Amy Klobuchar? What about Michelle Obama? True, “Biden has not generally dealt in surprises” — but in this unusual year, who knows?
Lockdown watch: The Job Haves and Have-Nots
The coronavirus crisis has given us two Americas: “those still getting a paycheck from government, corporations or universities, and those who are unemployed or seeing their small businesses suffer due to shutdowns,” notes Glenn Harlan Reynolds in USA Today. “And the America still getting paid” isn’t “showing a whole lot of sympathy for the America that isn’t.” The “smugness and authoritarianism” of the “political/managerial class” has led to “growing public protests,” as shutdowns lose “moral authority,” thanks to “news story after news story of officials going after people whose actions pose no danger of contagion.” Americans “don’t appreciate being lectured and condescended to and bossed around” — and they “especially don’t appreciate being urged to sacrifice by people who make no sacrifices themselves.”
Foreign desk: An Iran What-If
For President Trump’s critics, Iran’s speedboat maneuvers around American warships are “proof that the US ‘maximum-pressure’ sanctions campaign isn’t working,” observes Bloomberg Opinion’s Bobby Ghosh. But “imagine how much more dangerous and provocative Iran would have been” absent them. “Iran’s rulers would by now have had access to tens of billions of dollars in assets and revenues from trade,” and “much of this windfall would have gone into military spending”: The country boosted its military budget between 30 and 90 percent after the nuke deal. That possibility “should loom in the minds of Europe’s leaders, who have been disgracefully silent on Iran’s reckless provocations.”
Conservative: How the Right Failed America
“The Chinese state has unleashed a plague” and in the process, J.D. Vance writes at The American Mind, exposed the weaknesses of “an American economy built on consumption, reliant for production on regimes either indifferent or actively hostile to our national interest” and sharply divided between “knowledge economy” elites and “low-wage servants.” We’ve “shut down health-care facilities” to “preserve face masks and rubber gloves, because we don’t make enough in our own country for a time of crisis.” The right has heretofore refused to confront these realities — because “the donors who provide an overwhelming share of the capital to conservative campaigns and institutions have quite literally gotten rich off of the ‘Washington consensus’ of neoliberalism and globalization.” Let’s reform the system to “do damage to Chinese leadership — and the American elites who profit from them.”
From the right: Lay Off Victoria Coates
A RealClearInvestigations piece claims Team Trump staffer Victoria Coates is Anonymous, the purported administration-insider author of a blockbuster book lambasting the president. But Coates is the “wrong target,” insist Dan McLaughlin and Erick Erickson at National Review. For starters, “Coates’s authorship has been denied on the record by the book’s agent and disputed by every named source.” Then, too, “this White House — so concerned with anonymous internal leaks — has continued to employ her in a sensitive and responsible position.” More important, “neither sympathy for the Left nor an embrace of the Times or the White House press corps are at all characteristic of Coates,” but they are of Anonymous. Bottom line: “Blaming the wrong person makes it harder, not easier, to stop the leaks.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board