Matt Lewis reports that he’s seen a poll in which Gabbard is up over 5% and has overtaken Kamala Harris, ending her run at the nomination. 3rd party run? Bill Scher is skeptical, pointing out that Gabbard hasn’t actually said that. Both agree that she’s not going to get the Democratic nomination.
Bill at about 48:24:
I honestly don’t have any idea why Tulsi Gabbard exists! I don’t know what she’s trying to accomplish. I don’t know if she has a thought-out endgame, if she’s just building a list to help her dad’s quasi-religious organization. I don’t know. Nothing about it adds up in any way.
Matt: So, in the old days she would have just been a fringe candidate that would have been forgotten. Doesn’t it seem like she is in a sense a rock star that has everything going for her except a constituency?
Bill: She’s such an enormously, she’s an enormous raw talent. She’s young, military veteran, first Hindu in Congress, speaks eloquently and passionately. If she didn’t have completely bonkers political views, she’d be a golden candidate.
Matt: Don’t you think the bonkers political views though are part of the appeal?
Bill: Well I mean the fact that she has...But even the bonkers views don’t add up. She has a constituency of people, it’s a small constituency, but it’s a constituency of anti-interventionists anti-imperialists. [[me! me! me!!]] But even that she’s not consistent about it. She was very militaristic and talking about radical Islam [[can’t have everything]] and she is Biden’s wing man in attacking Kamala Harris. [[So?]] She does things that don’t square with the thing that makes her most appealing to her own constituency, and if you’re constituency is not that big in the first place...So that’s why I say things like I don’t get, if she was just simply an ideological warrior for anti-interventionism, anti-imperialism even pro-Putinism [[where’s that come from? Hillary?]] you know I’d say ‘I get it’ but she does other things that don’t square with that. [[Could it be that she’s not square?]]
Matt: I think that’s what makes her so intriguing, is that we don’t know what she’s up to. That’s in a way an intriguing, she’s an enigma. [...] Does she just fade away, or on we on the cusp of like something, like is there gonna’ be a Tulsi moment? [...] I think the fact that she’s named Tulsi is contributing to this. It’s a cool name.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
Is Gabbard a great soul? I do not know. But I’m thinking that maybe she’s in the running.
BTW, I love Google’s speech-to-text technology. That is, I assume that’s what’s powering the subtitles/closed caption option on YouTube, which I used for the first time. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good and certainly makes transcription easier.
Addendum: Gabbard up in New Hampshire
Eric Boehm, Reason, 10.30.19:
A new CNN poll conducted by the University of New Hampshire and released this week shows Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D–Hawaii) with 5 percent support from likely voters in the state, which is scheduled to hold the nation's first Democratic primary on February 11. That level of support is good enough to put Gabbard in fifth place, trailing only Sen. Bernie Sanders (21 percent) of Vermont, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (18 percent) of Massachusetts, former vice president Joe Biden (15 percent) and Pete Buttigieg (10 percent), the mayor of South Bend, Indiana. Tied with Gabbard at 5 percent are Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and entrepreneur Andrew Yang.
The CNN poll is perhaps the best signal yet that Gabbard—whom Hillary Clinton nonsensically smeared as a "Russian asset" two weeks ago—is experiencing a bit of a polling bounce, especially in New Hampshire. She's risen by 4 percentage points since the same pollsters' July survey while Biden has fallen by 6 points and Sen. Kamala Harris of California has fallen by 9 points. Nationally, Gabbard has experienced a small but noticeable bump in her poll numbers in recent weeks too, though she continues to sit in the third tier of Democratic hopefuls.
Over the last several decades the only people I hear ever saying the right things about military policy have either been self-described gadflies and lone wolves or else long shot "wacko" candidates like Gabbard. But there seems increasingly to be enough deep dissatisfaction with the status quo to make the Democratic frozen orthodoxy no longer viable. People like Scher should open their eyes and try to keep the Dems from committing suicide with the standard pro-war pro-finance positions.
ReplyDeleteYes. I've been just a bit surprised at the really strong hostility toward Gabbard that I've heard from mainstream Democrats. They don't like Sanders at all, but Gabbard, Gabbard just makes them so mad they babble loud nasty gibberish. She's a real threat to their worldview.
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