The Abbreviated Pundit Round-up is a daily feature at Daily Kos.
More on New Hampshire in subsequent days (it all happened last night!) Story of the night: Bernie won but didn’t run away with it. Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg are non Bernie placeholders and fought it out for second (and a late surge for Amy may have prevented a Pete win and vice versa). All three have a claim on winning something, and/but they still has to prove they can win elsewhere. Everyone else just flat out lost (Andrew Yang suspended his campaign last night). Now on to more diverse Nevada, Feb 22 and South Carolina, February 29. And Mike Bloomberg is circling out there.
Meanwhile, the DOJ political intervention in the Roger Stone case is also an important evolving story. So big, in fact, that it cut into NH coverage on cable last night and shared the top story slot.
Not just me looking at NH this way:
But big picture:
Keep in mind Bernie and Pete are more organized than Amy and have more staff. And while I love Elizabeth Warren, it was a very bad night for her (and bad for Joe Biden, who has no money and organization).
This is everything:
So, Bernie has to grow and the non Bernie vote being carved up helps him. And Mike Bloomberg remains the wild card.
Meanwhile, the other story:
In other news...
Ron Brownstein/CNN:
Today may mark the end of the Iowa-New Hampshire monopoly
In this year's presidential campaign, the distorting effects of providing such power to two virtually all-white states in an increasingly diversifying party have grown impossible to ignore. The vote-counting meltdown in Iowa's antiquated and haphazard caucus system -- a process used partly to circumvent New Hampshire's law requiring it to hold the nation's first primary -- has further underlined the flaws in the existing order.
Doesn’t matter that it’s bogus. Just understand what’s coming. Trump is already starting on Bloomberg.
Nathan Gonzales/Roll Call:
RIP, election night
Vote-by-mail and close races could delay when the real story of 2020 is known
It’s time to retire the term “election night.”
The semiannual national tradition of staying up a few hours past bedtime to know who will control our government is over. From close races to “vote by mail” to human error, it’s becoming clear that counting votes no longer fits neatly into prime-time television windows. Reporters and politicos should prepare to practice patience when handling and digesting the results.
The recent chaos surrounding the Iowa caucuses was just a taste of what’s to come. Due to the lack of results, there was no clear winner, which created confusion rather than clarity in the search for a narrative on election night. But while the Iowa crisis might have been avoided with a working app, the 2020 elections won’t be as easy to uncomplicate.
Looking beyond the 2000 presidential election (which wasn’t decided until more than a month after Election Day), the 2018 midterm elections were a prime example of how the narrative of a cycle can evolve beyond election night.
Gabriel Leung/NY Times with an excellent piece:
The Urgent Questions Scientists Are Asking About Coronavirus
Let’s start with what we don’t know.
What do we most need to know next? For epidemiologists who track infectious diseases, the most pressing concerns are how to estimate the lethality of the disease and who is susceptible; getting detailed information on how it spreads; and evaluating the success of control measures so far.
No. 1 is the “clinical iceberg” question: How much of it is hidden below the surface? Because the outbreak is still evolving, we can’t yet see the totality of those infected. Out of view is some proportion of mildly infected people, with minor symptoms or no symptoms, who no one knows are infected.
A fleet of invisible carriers sounds ominous; but in fact, an enormous hidden figure would mean many fewer of the infected are dying. Usually, simple math would determine this “case fatality” ratio: divide the total number of deaths by the total number of people infected. In an emerging epidemic, however, both numbers keep changing, and sometimes at different speeds. This makes simple division impossible; you will invariably get it wrong.
Another excellent piece from NY Times:
Inundated With Flu Patients, U.S. Hospitals Brace for Coronavirus
Resources are already stretched during flu season. With so much medical equipment and drugs made in China, public health experts are anxiously watching the global supply chain.
The mask shortage highlights just how dependent the United States health care system is on goods from China. Premier was told last week that a Taiwanese factory it had a contract with was halting shipments to the United States. In addition, Chaun Powell, the group vice president of strategic supplier engagement for Premier, said masks that are made in China are being diverted for use there. As a result, “there’s not as much supply to ship,” he said.
Policy Tensor:
THE EVIDENCE FROM IOWA (SO FAR)
So, who should we bet on to oust Trump? If the pattern evident in Iowa holds, Biden and Sanders may both be viable against Trump. Biden is viable because he is working class and working class folk can tell that he is one of their own just by the way he talks — recall that class is passed on at your parents dinner table. As I suspected, the Biden tendency is the shadow of the class war on the Democratic primary. Sanders is viable because he does well in communities that are struggling. If you think that Trump is in the White House because large parts of the country are in trouble, and he has done little to help them, Sanders is your man. If you think that only a man who can out-blue collar Trump can oust Trump, Biden’s your guy. If progressives want Sanders instead of Biden because the former can be expected to demolish the neoliberal political economy, they must begin by losing the Boasian scold.
Ultimately, the governing question is whether culture or economics is more important to the meaning-making of the working class. For at issue in what Lind calls the New Class War, is not just the vertical and spatial polarization of value-added, income and wealth, but the concentration of symbolic production and the cultural desertification of vast swaths of America. Intellectuals have for too long paid attention to the former at the cost of the latter. It is time to pay attention to the historical sociology of the white working class — the dominant strata of American society. And to bring geography back to the center of political analysis, where it belongs.
Dana Milbank/WaPo:
Trump’s budget reveals a tremendous fraud
Trump promised to balance the budget, retire the debt, protect and enhance entitlements, and grow the economy at a rate far beyond anything we’ve seen. But he did none of that, and now he asks: “Who the hell cares about the budget?”
The fraud is in the open.
And more on our corruption story (not the DOJ):