We begin today’s roundup with Eugene Robinson and his analysis of the Democratic primary:
Somebody, eventually, is going to win the Democratic nomination. If the candidates are sincere when they say this is the most important election of our lifetimes and ousting Trump must be the top priority — and I believe they are — then how does it make sense to generate so much fodder for Trump campaign ads in the fall?
Look, I know that politics ain’t “Kumbaya.” It would be insane to go through the grueling experience of running for president without trying to win, and that means convincing voters you’re the best for the job. There’s a difference, though, between making the most effective case for yourself and arguing that your opponents are so flawed as to be disqualified for office.
John Cassidy has seven key questions for Mike Bloomberg:
1. If you win in November, will you sell Bloomberg L.P., which employs more than twenty thousand people and reportedly has annual revenues of more than ten billion dollars?
Bloomberg has called Donald Trump corrupt, but he hasn’t fully spelled out how he would differentiate himself from the incumbent President, who held onto his business empire after the 2016 election and merely transferred day-to-day control of it to his sons. When Bloomberg became mayor, he removed himself from day-to-day control of Bloomberg L.P. but maintained ownership and retained the right to take part in major decisions involving the company. In 2007, when he had already been mayor for five years, the New York Timesreported that he still spoke regularly with senior executives at Bloomberg L.P. In December, 2018, Bloomberg intimated that if he was elected as President, he might sell Bloomberg L.P., saying, “I think at my age, if selling it is possible, I would do that.” But he has also raised the possibility of maintaining ownership and placing the company in a blind trust.
Former Obama speechwriter Sarada Peri explains at The Atlantic that Donald Trump is going to cheat, and Democrats have to be prepared:
If past is prologue, Trump will say absolutely anything necessary to attract and maintain support, including patent untruths. His pathological lying has been well documented and yet never ceases to stun. [...] How can Democrats run against a candidate who will simply deny his unpopular positions and make up nonexistent accomplishments? No amount of fact-checking can counter his constant stream of mendacity, which has become white noise in our political culture. [...]
Electability, ultimately, cannot rest on the shoulders of whomever the party nominates, talented though that person may be. Electability does not depend, simply, on the nominee’s ability to earn the votes of a wide array of Americans in a few battleground states. It depends on all Americans’ willingness to demand an election that is, indeed, free and fair.
Former Republican Governor Mark Sanford calls out Trump for exploding the deficit:
President Trump’s abandonment of fiscal responsibility will prove disastrous — whether we think about it or not. His State of the Union address underscored his own thinking; it was long on pander and did not address our country’s bleak financial state.
Yet amazingly, conservatives who I have long respected somehow look the other way.
What if it were President Barack Obama allowing the national debt to grow by a trillion dollars a year, despite the booming economy? What if other Republican presidents had abandoned the idea of trying to get to a balanced budget over the next 10 years? We would hear howls of protest. But now? Crickets.
Donald Ayer, who served as U.S. Deputy Attorney General under George H. W. Bush, calls on Bill Barr to resign:
Indeed, given our national faith and trust in a rule of law no one can subvert, it is not too strong to say that Bill Barr is un-American. And now, from his perch as attorney general, he is in the midst of a root-and-branch attack on the core principles that have guided our justice system, and especially our Department of Justice, since the 1970s.
And on a final note, over at New York magazine, Gabriel Debenedetti describes Barack Obama’s take on the primary:
The truth of Obama’s silence on the 2020 primary is that it’s not just about his obvious wish to stay out of the spotlight, but it also reflects a choreographed strategy. With the race looking more and more likely to grow bitter and messy, and maybe even wind up in a contested convention, the former president and those around him are increasingly sure he will need to play a prominent role in bringing the party back together and calming its tensions later this summer, including perhaps in Milwaukee, where the party’s meeting is scheduled to be held in July. So he is committed to not allowing his personal thoughts to dribble out in the meantime, directly or via leaks, conscious of how any sense that he’s taking sides in intraparty disputes could rock the primary in the short run and potentially undermine his ability to play this larger role in the months ahead.