"Another alternative is for Biden to win the primary delegates needed for the nomination, then announce at the August convention he’s dropping out."

"That would set off a scramble where party bosses and delegates anoint the nominee. It would be the most backroom and least democratic maneuver since the primary system became paramount, but it would override a [Kamala] Harris claim of being next in line because she wouldn’t have a prayer of getting a majority of delegates...."

Writes Michael Goodwin, in "Kamala Harris’ vow that she’s ‘ready to serve’ is a reminder of how much worse she’d be over Biden" (NY Post).

Too undemocratic? The primaries already feel undemocratic this time around, but it's too late now to use the primaries to select a Democratic Party nominee other than Biden. It does seem that Biden will need to follow through the primary season and collect his delegates. Then it's a question of when he drops out and what sort of process will be used.

Goodwin envisions "a scramble where party bosses and delegates anoint the nominee." But the people could be included in that decision-making process. I'm thinking of polls and even debates. Or there could be a very quick realization that it simply must be Kamala Harris. Don't scramble at all. Harris is next in line. A democratic process led to the selection of Harris in 2020. Let her rise to the open position when it becomes vacant.

Even if they could persuade Harris to step aside because she's not a good enough candidate and they need to swap in somebody else, no one will believe she wasn't pushed aside, disrespected, humiliated.

Goodwin ends his column imagining Michelle Obama as the swapped-in replacement for Harris. I know Michelle Obama is ahead of Harris in the betting markets. The betting markets are not like polls. They don't show what people want, just what people believe will happen. And the various gamblers are trying to predict what would result from a party-boss scramble in the backroom. 

"It’s not until the 24th paragraph that the story mentions e-mails involving Hunter Biden and his associates in those deals..."

"... followed by these two sentences: 'Those emails were obtained by The New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop. The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.' Heart be still. It took the Gray Lady nearly 17 months to grudgingly concede even a fraction of what New York Post readers learned in October 2020. Of course, Times readers would have learned all that too if their paper was still in the news business instead of being a running dog for Democrats...."

Writes Michael Goodwin in "The New York Times hates to say The Post told you so" (NY Post).

MEANWHILE: "It’s sad, because the baby looks like him, with blond hair," said the lawyer for Lunden Roberts, quoted in "Lawyer for mother of Hunter Biden’s child says he expects president’s son to be indicted" (NY Post).

"[S]ingling out Trump for the turmoil engulfing the country is possible only if you disregard the No. 1 contributor: the refusal of Democrats and most of the media to accept the results of the 2016 election...."

"That refusal has become, among many on the left, borderline psychotic. Nothing else compares to the damage it is doing to our ­nation’s fabric and global image. Trump’s irritating foibles and unorthodox ways pale in comparison. The continuing challenge to his legitimacy is a cancer on the republic."

Writes Michael Goodwin in "Madness of leftist zealots" (NY Post). I strongly agree with that opinion.  I am not a Trump supporter, but I have stood firm since the election on this point: Trump won, his supporters prevailed, and they are entitled to what they won. That's why we go to so much trouble over the election.

We're currently troubling ourselves endlessly over the 2020 election, but why should we if the new game is to destroy whatever victory is achieved? Do Democrats think they can sell the idea that when they win, they get to keep what they won, but if the other party wins, it's a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham?

I don't accept it, and I'm a moderate swing voter in a swing state.

I went to Drudge in the hope of seeing a picture of one of the boys emerging from the hours-long underwater escape from the Thai cave, and I saw this...

She looks like she's underwater and about to surface, no?

The link goes to "Is Hillary Clinton secretly planning to run in 2020?" (Michael Goodwin in the NY Post).

Five times in the last month alone, she sent e-mails touting her super PAC’s role in combating President Trump....

[T]he day after Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement, Clinton introduced a newly minted resistance partner. Called Demand Justice, it promises to protect “reproductive rights, voting rights and access to health care” by keeping Senate Democrats united in opposing any conservative Trump nominee.

The instant, in-house nature of Demand Justice was reflected by the name of its executive director: Brian Fallon, Clinton’s campaign press secretary....

With the Democratic Party locked in a battle between its far left wing and its far, far left wing, no single leader has emerged to unite it. Clinton is trying to play that role by being a mother hen to the fledgling activists drawn to politics by their hatred of Trump.

A mother hen to the fledgling activists.... yeesh.  Too gendered. And even if you like highly gendered metaphors used on women, Hillary isn't motherly. I can't picture her nurturing the new generation of "activists." If she's still active, I think she's keeping alive her own selfish ambition. If she wants the new people to flourish, she should get out of the way and let them have the stage, not swan about one last time. (Continuation of the avian metaphor intended.)

Goodwin says his liberal-Democrat friends are horrified at the idea of Hillary running in 2020. And here's how he assesses her chances:

First, because there’s no clear front-runner for the nomination 18 months into Trump’s presidency, Clinton remains the closest thing to an incumbent...

Second, a crowded, diverse field diminishes the chances of anyone knocking her off. Recall how Trump outlasted 16 GOP rivals by having a committed core of supporters that grew as the field shrunk. Clinton could be in a similar position — unpopular among many, but also unbeatable by a single opponent.

Third, looking ahead to the 2020 primaries, she sees no reason to fear the favorite daughters and sons in key blue states. She would almost certainly beat Sen. Kamala Harris in California, Sen. Cory Booker in New Jersey and Gov. Andrew Cuomo in New York....

Fourth, money is not an issue....

This sounds very similar to how Jeb Bush was talked about in the 2016 race, and it's how we got Trump. But is there some Trump-like person among the Democrats who could stand his/her ground while Hillary, with money and name-recognition, squelches the rise of a bunch of medium-sized Democrats? Only one name occurs to me, but she said no, no, no, not me, it would kill me.

"Dad... Trump tweeted about your column, but he included your email instead of the column link."

Said Michael Goodwin's daughter, quoted in "This is what happens when POTUS tweets out your email address."

Goodwin — who'd written "We’re still better off with Trump than Clinton" — got thousands of emails. (Only thousands, not millions.)

Some were looking to him to send the column so they could read it. Some of these were anti-Trumpers:

“Please forward the full article that the dumbest president in the entire history of dumb states of America was alluding to in his recent tweet about himself... With apologies in advance for being the gazillionth person to ask.”

Some wrote to say "Fuck you," like the guy (named by Goodwin) who wrote "FUCK YOU!" 75 times and: “The buffoon actually posted your email address on his Twitter. I hope you get 3 million hate emails."

And: "I was subscribed to gay websites, and penis images were attached to a number of emails sent my way. All of which struck me as mighty strange. Here are these so-called liberals who still think the greatest insult is to call someone gay. Their homophobia is out of the closet."

Trump's "enormous consensual presidency."

Trump tweeted a typo that's amusing people. Yahoo reports:

The screwup appeared in a Sunday night tweet in which Trump praised a supportive column in the New York Post. Writer Michael Goodwin lauded Trump’s “enormous consequential presidency,” but Trump referred to it in his tweet as an “enormous consensual presidency.”

We've seen Trump typos before. Last May came the delightful "covfefe." I said I found it easy to see the intended word (it was "coverage"):

And "covfefe" is comedy. I'm not going to say it was comic genius to type it, but it's pretty interestingly comical not to explain it and to run with it and encourage us to "Enjoy!" like he's serving up a big plate of tasty food....

"Consensual presidency" is funny too. Not that I think he did it on purpose. But tweeting (like blogging) includes the risk of error, and it's the free, rough-draft feeling that makes readers feel they're getting something straight from the writer's mind.

That's why we're interested in "Freudian" slips. We think we're getting a look at what's really in that head. So then what about "enormous consensual presidency." Does that leak some greater truth? If so, "consensual" sheds a kindly light on this man who's often accused of being a sexual molester. In hin secret thoughts, he's into consent.

And then there's democracy. Of course, he's our consensual President. As a country of states, we voted him in.

Now he's put out another one of his very sticky phrases. "Enormous consensual presidency." We're seeing — over and over — that his presidency is "consensual" and "enormous." "Enormous" is an especially good word from his point of view. He loves bigness, and we already associate him with at least 3 bigness words. "Huge," of course. "Big," as in "big league" (often misheard as "bigly") and "big, beautiful wall." And "great," as in "Make America Great Again." Add "enormous."

And now, this tweet is getting even more attention than his tweets usually get, and it's causing me to want to look at Michael Goodwin's column. Did he really write "enormous consequential presidency" (and not "enormously consequential presidency")? Man, it's hard to find the column, because there are so many articles about the typo!

Here it is: "We’re still better off with Trump than Clinton."

[R]eports of his imminent demise have been near-constant ever since he came down the Trump Tower escalator in June of 2015. Those predictions have been nonstop — and always wrong.

Of course, this time could be different. Or maybe the next time will. Or maybe not.

Meanwhile, his is turning out to be an enormously consequential presidency....

Oh! So it is "enormously." Doesn't it always seem to be that when you go after somebody else's typo, you make one yourself?

ADDED: Obviously, most of the news covfefe of the typo gets the typo "right." It's "enormously consensual presidency." Of all the news sites on the web, I had to walk into the one that typo'd the typo. Yahoo [passing along something by Mary Papenfuss at HuffPo]. So the sticky phrase in question, let's be clear, is "enormously consensual presidency."

So now it's not that the presidency is enormous in addition to being consensual. The thing that huge is not the presidency but the consent. What is enormous consent? Isn't consent just a yes-or-no option? No, there can be very enthusiastic consent — not just yes, but yes, yes, YES!!!

UPDATE: HuffPo and Yahoo have corrected their "enormous" typo.

"I like Steve, but you have to remember he was not involved in my campaign until very late."

"I had already beaten all the senators and all the governors, and I didn’t know Steve. I’m my own strategist and it wasn’t like I was going to change strategies because I was facing crooked Hillary.”

Said Trump, quoted by Michael Goodwin in a NY Post column titled "Trump won’t definitively say he still backs Bannon."

What struck me most was not that Trump is distancing himself from Bannon or — as I would put it — showing his own sensitivity over accusations that Bannon is somehow Trump's brain. What got me is that he's still saying "crooked Hillary." He's President of the United States. She's reduced to simple citizenship and resorting to posing in pink shoes to get attention. Why is he still hurling the epithet? Maybe it's part of the overall argument that nothing can change him....

I've got to be me was big campaign theme. The old Sammy Davis Jr. song just started playing in my head. I google Trump I’ve Gotta Be Me and get an article titled "Trump: 'I’ve Gotta Be Me'":

“You know, I am who I am. It’s me. I don’t want to change. Everyone talks about, ‘Oh, well, you’re going to pivot, you’re going to.’ I don’t want to pivot. I mean, you have to be you.”

That seemed like a perfect quote to add to this post, and then I kept reading the linked article and was amazed to see that he said that on the day he added Steve Bannon to his staff:

Later in the day came an announcement about the shake-up of his campaign staff.

Donald Trump, following weeks of gnawing agitation over his advisers’ attempts to temper his style, moved late Tuesday to overhaul his struggling campaign by rebuffing those efforts and elevating two longtime associates who have encouraged his combative populism.

Stephen Bannon, a former banker who runs the influential conservative outlet Breitbart News and is known for his fiercely anti-establishment politics, has been named the Trump campaign’s chief executive. Kellyanne Conway, a veteran Republican pollster who has been close to Trump for years, will assume the role of campaign manager.

Paul Manafort – who was ostensibly brought in to “professionalize” Trump’s campaign and image – will apparently stay on, but will obviously be boxed in by these changes....

So remember, Trump brought Bannon in because Trump wanted to be Trump and Manafort had been trying to change him. In that light, reread Trump's new statement. It's the same point: Trump is Trump and no one else's creation. Is that a failure to say he backs Bannon or just a restatement of what Bannon always was to Trump — a man who reinforces Trump's determination to be Trump?

"My gut tells me much of the contempt for Trump reflects contempt for his working-class white support."

"It is one prejudice gentry liberals and gentry conservatives share. It is perhaps the last acceptable bigotry, and you can see it expressed on any primetime TV program. The insults don’t all seem good-natured to me. I grew up in central Pennsylvania, surrounded by the kind of people supporting Trump, and I sympathize with their worsening plight. For generations, they went all in for the American dream. Their families fought the wars, worked in the factories, taught school, coached Little League and built a middle-class culture. Now they are abandoned and know it. Nobody speaks for them. The left speaks for the unions, the poor and the nonwhite, even shedding tears for illegal immigrants and rioters and looters. The GOP speaks for the Chamber of Commerce, big business and Wall Street. Trump alone is bringing many of these forgotten Americans into the political system.... I would be delighted to support a more conventional candidate who has Trump’s courage and appeal, but we don’t always get to pick our revolutionaries. And make no mistake, Donald Trump is leading a political revolution that is long overdue."

Writes Michael Goodwin in The New York Post.

Hillary Clinton is a schoolyard bully.

Says Michael Goodwin:

It's a gang-girl taunt when she tells a big rally she will go anywhere, anytime for a throw down.

She offers to [debate] without a moderator, just the two of them asking and answering questions. Stripped of her gauzy spin that it could be like Lincoln-Douglas, she's really challenging him to a bareknuckle punchout. On TV.

It's what a schoolyard tough would do: Knock on a rival's door and dare him to come out and fight on the street. Right here, right now. No rules, just a slugfest, you and me.

And that's a good thing, right? I want this in my President. Don't you?

IN THE COMMENTS: Somefeller said:

The Goodwin article is further evidence of a certain wussy factor among many of Obama's supporters. I don't know if Goodwin is an official supporter, but he sounds like a standard Obama press fanboy. I was going to use another word that ends in "ssy" to describe this phenomenon, but I didn't want Ann to say I was sexist.

I'll say it: sissy. Obama should debate.

Drew W said:

The nastier Hillary gets, the more I like her, I agree.

Me too.

Maguro said:

This is a lot better than the crying schtick. You go, girl!

Exactly.

Fen said:

Iran is a bit of a bully too.

Maybe Obama can ask his teacher to speak with Ahmadinejad's parents.

Owie. That hurt.