WaPo:
Medicare-for-all v. Medicare-for-less: Trump’s proposed cuts put health care at center of 2020 race
Democratic strategists and officials argued Monday that Trump’s budget proposal exposed how little credibility Republicans have in debating health care, and showed signs of confidence that it would sharpen the contrast Democrats are seeking to make in the run-up to the 2020 election.
“It totally eviscerates any integrity to their already pretty flimsy attack,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said. “This assault on Medicare lays bare the real Republican agenda, which is to destroy the health-care safety net. They have no shred of intellectual underpinning or integrity to their attack on Democrats if they make this kind of proposal.”
Jen Rubin/WaPo:
Why 2020 must be a referendum on Trump
Democrats have two tasks. First, avoid picking an obvious target for Trump to shred, either someone far to the left or someone who seems shaky, uncertain, equivocating or weak. He’s got his “socialist” tag ready for the first category. With regard to the second concern — gravitas, strength, leadership abilities — Democrats should consider how their nominee will stand up to Trump. Does he or she have the focus, humor and self-discipline to avoid being dragged down to his level, and does the nominee know where he or she wants to take the country. Trump’s simplistic nostalgia is wrong and misguided, but it is comprehensible. To project strength, the Democrat is going to have to be able to punch through the Trumpian noise and make the case that voters are at risk if Trump gets reelected.
The last consideration — casting Trump not as their protector but as a menace — will be key. Telling voters he’s an awful person may be totally ineffective; they know that already. Telling them that he’s going after their Medicare and Obamacare, hurting farmers with a tariff war, making the gap between rich and poor worse, and endangering the planet for them and their children by willful ignorance over climate change is quite another. The more concrete and immediate the threat (e.g., extreme weather, loss of health-care coverage), the more impact the message may have.
Greg Sargent/WaPo:
Trump’s emerging reelection strategy: Double down on failure and lies
“There’s a lot of anxiety,” one GOP donor said, largely due to Trump’s evident inability to grasp how deeply his relentless focus on his base has alienated moderates and independents.
We are now learning new details about Trump’s reelection strategy, and there is zero indication that his team is taking these concerns seriously. It looks as if Trump’s operation is only leaning harder into that base-only strategy — in no small part because this strategy is being set by Trump himself.
Elite school admissions fraud (aka a rigged system):
John Harwood/CNBC:
- Democratic primary contenders struggle to answer basic questions as traditional guideposts fall to wayside.
- When a television interviewer invited centrist candidate John Hickenlooper to embrace capitalism, he didn’t know what to say.
- He’s not the only Democrat trying to find their footing in a changing landscape.
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A recent Monmouth University poll showed 56 percent of Democrats prefer a candidate who would run strongest against President Trump over one who shares their views on issues. Electability represents Biden’s central argument.
An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, however, found something different. In that survey, 56 percent of Democrats preferred the candidate whose views come closest to their own.
It also found that 55 percent want a candidate seeking larger, costlier changes over smaller steps easier to move through Congress. That augurs well for Warren, who backs a new wealth tax, a breakup of giant technology firms, and “Medicare for All,” or longshot Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington, who has centered his campaign around action to slow climate change.
Biden, 76 years old, and Sanders, 77, lead Democratic polls. But nobody knows whether their standing reflects a floor or a ceiling. In the NBC/WSJ poll, six in 10 Americans expressed unease about a candidate older than 75.
Conor Sen/Bloomberg:
Why Andrew Yang’s Presidential Campaign Matters
A failed bid isn’t always futile: Ideas from Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders have gone mainstream.
Yang’s signature issue is a universal basic income, which he calls a Freedom Dividend, in response to fears of mass labor automation. But his brand of politics differs from most politicians these days because stylistically he’s not big on outrage, and his campaign website has policy pages for literally dozens of issues ranging from “the NCAA should pay athletes” to a proposal to repurpose dead and dying malls
While Yang, 44, isn’t well known even in political circles yet, it’s likely that this week he’s going to qualify for the first Democratic presidential debate in June. One of the ways of making the debate stage is by amassing 65,000 unique donors by May 15, and on Monday he passed that threshold. It’s possible he could have hundreds of thousands of donors by June, which could put him close to the top tier of Democratic candidates by that measure.
WaPo:
Why can’t Fox apologize? It won’t back down even amid Pirro, Carlson controversies
The Carlson flap blew up almost concurrently with the bitter aftermath of Fox host Jeanine Pirro’s on-air comments about Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). Pirro said on her Saturday program that Omar, an observant Muslim, was effectively disloyal to the United States as a result of her religious beliefs. This prompted the network to come closer to the edge of contrition: It said it “strongly” condemned Pirro’s comments, while adding that they “do not reflect those of the network and we have addressed the matter with her directly.”
Yet Fox issued no apologies to Omar, Muslim Americans or anyone else who objected, including a Fox News producer who is Muslim. It declined to say how it addressed the matter with Pirro.
This tracks with other controversies involving Fox. It remained largely silent, for example, in the wake of promoting a discredited conspiracy theory involving Seth Rich, a young staffer at the Democratic National Committee who was killed in 2016. …
But Terry Sullivan, a Republican strategist who was Sen. Marco Rubio’s (R-Fla.) presidential campaign manager in 2016, believes the current controversies do nothing to damage Fox’s reputation among its loyal viewers. “They are still ranked number one and have amazing viewership,” he said. “The media is a business, and if it was hurting viewership and the bottom line, it would stop tomorrow.”
NZHerald:
The girl who executed Nazis after seducing them in bars dies aged 92
A World War II heroine who used her harmless appearance to gain the trust of Nazis before executing them has died in The Netherlands, aged 92.
Freddie Oversteegen was born in Haarlem, near Amsterdam on September 6, 1925 and raised by her communist mother.
She was just 14 when she joined the Dutch resistance, the Daily Mail reports.
Together with her older sister Truus and their friend Hannie Schaft, she blew up bridges and railway tracks with dynamite, smuggled Jewish children out of concentration camps and executed as many Nazis as she could, using a firearm hidden in the basket of her bike.
Andy Slavitt/USA Today:
Gottlieb took on drug and tobacco companies. Will Trump's next FDA chief protect consumers?
Against this backdrop, last week’s surprise announcement that [Scott] Gottlieb had tendered his resignation is a setback for consumers and potentially a bad sign for the future. Gottlieb was unusual in this administration for his repeated willingness to stand up for the American public against powerful pharmaceutical, tobacco and vaping companies and has been unafraid to stake out new regulation as an important part of that effort.
He was hardly abandoning his conservative credentials. But early in his tenure, as data mounted about the dramatic increases in teenage nicotine addiction from vaping, Gottlieb saw the makings of what he described as an “epidemic,” and he became something of an accidental activist regulator. He issued more than 1,300 warning letters and fines for those who sold e-cigarettes to minors and even took the rare and admirable step of publicly adjusting his prior views when faced with new information.
He had begun the process of sharply curtailing the sale of flavored e-cigarettes targeting minors, had announced support for banning menthol cigarettes, and was on a path toward reducing nicotine levels in cigarettes.
And this: