Cockburn is introducing the Donkey Dow: a round-up of the hustlers racing to face up against Donald Trump. Here’s how the candidates and contenders fared over the last few days.
Winners
Pete Buttigieg, Donkey Dow Week 2’s big star, is showing vim. ‘Mayor Pete’, as he’s called – a ‘millennial, Midwestern mayor’ is packing crowds in cities from Le Mars (Iowa) to Lyme (New Hampshire) to the Low Country (South Carolina).
Indeed, it may be the Hawkeye State – if anywhere – that begets a President Buttigieg. It gave rise to Barack Obama, where the young dynamo filched the inaugural contest of 2008 from Hillary Clinton. Mayor Pete may need to be similarly plucky – an Iowa-or-bust mentality. So far for MP, the news is…kind of good. For a guy no one had heard of three months ago, he’s actually in third in the state, according to a recent poll.
Cockburn and many others have traditionally doled out a battering to poor Sen. Cory Booker. But this week, we have this to say for him: he’s in the thick of it. Despite paltry press coverage, minimal buzz and a widespread media impression that his campaign is astroturf, the former Newark mayor is hanging in there: top five nationally by many polls. That’s not nothing. Is it enough for him to join the ‘three ‘B’s’ – Biden, Bernie and Beto – or the four, if you extend to Mayor Pete? Probably not. But he’s hanging tight; Cockburn can’t believe he’s saying it – don’t sleep on Mayor Cory.
Speaking of Beto O’Rourke, Cockburn is also long on this establishment grandee – even if indicted, one-time Spectator USA contributor Michael Avenatti is not. That being said, if Beto going to reject the left, he’s also got to know a tankie when he sees one:
https://twitter.com/cnnrgldn/status/1110010060439203845?s=21
Losers
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand. She staged a Trump Tower campaign launch event on Sunday, which was totally overshadowed by the Mueller report. This remains a disaster!
https://twitter.com/jakewilkns/status/1110017538199572480?s=21
Sen. Kamala Harris. A longtime Washington watcher told Cockburn months ago ‘the fix is in’: California’s junior senator is the illuminati pick for Dem nominee. Maybe so. Steve Bannon, the auteur of President Trump’s 2016 campaign, thinks a Harris/Beto ticket is most formidable.
Again, maybe so. But lately it’s been feeling like Beto, not Harris, is the top-of-a-ticket, kind of commodity. Critics might say the Three ‘B’s or the Four ‘B’s or the Five ‘B’s are manspreading themselves all over this primary. And maybe they’re right.
It may be tough to stand out in the Democratic field…but John Hickenlooper decided to talk about how he watched porn with his mom. Please by all means stop!
Neither here nor there
Yangmentum continues apace.
As Cockburn noted last week, Andrew Yang, the upstart, entrepreneur candidate has done about all he can do, thus far, with cellar-dwelling name-recognition: put himself in position to qualify for the debates. But any gains were negated by a strange interview with The Daily Beast in which he restated his stance against ritualized circumcision. ‘It’s sort of pushed on parents in many situations,’ he said. O…K…
Sen. Bernie Sanders. After a turbulent life, and a convulsive political career, it may be odd that the Vermont senator is the relative paradigm of stability. But if Cockburn knows anything, he knows this: this cat’s in it to win it.
New faces
Mike Gravel……sort of. The 88-year-old who was Alaska senator in the 70s made waves by announcing he was exploring the possibility of running. A Twitter account in his name is dealing out body blows to the other contenders. Get the popcorn, it’s worth a watch.
Still waiting
As Spectator USA’s own Matt McDonald recently observed: if Joe Biden is so manly, why can’t he just admit he’s running? And count Cockburn a skeptic of his rumored plan to pair up with Stacey Abrams, the defeated Georgia gubernatorial nominee. As Biden is a skeptic himself, reportedly, of his advisers’ push to get the septuagenarian to pledge only a single term. Why admit such vulnerabilities out of the gate?
The record for preemptive tickets is not a strong one. Remember Cruz-Carly? Yeah, we’d rather not, too. Abrams may be the darling of liberal Kalorama saloons, and the HuffPo comment boards, but most Americans will rightly ask: who?
