Dick Morris says that Hillary Clinton is preparing for another presidential run in 2024:
Morris, a former aide to President Bill Clinton, said Hillary is setting herself up to enter the race as a “moderate” choice for Democrats in two years for what would be her third shot at the White House.
“I see more and more signs that Hillary’s going to run,” Morris told John Catsimatidis on his WABC 770 AM radio show in an interview that aired Sunday, noting that she has been remarking that Americans “do not believe in open borders.”
“These are all signals that she is going to be the moderate candidate for president. She’s going to say after the election, ‘See, the left cost us the House and the Senate. If we stay with a left-wing candidate in 2024, we’re going to lose the White House. I’m the only one who will tack to the center and give us a chance at victory,’” Morris said.
I don’t know whether Dick Morris is officially a Republican, but it has been a long time since he has had much to do with the Democratic Party. Still, he has a point: Hillary is right about open borders, and her ambition is likely as boundless as ever.
And if not Hillary, who? The pickings are slim:
“Once Biden pulls out, the polling will show that the Democrats are leaning toward some crazy radical like Gavin Newson, Bernie Sanders. Maybe even AOC herself,” Morris said, referring to progressive lightning rod Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Who knows? Maybe Ilhan Omar will throw her hijab into the ring, too. The scenario Morris lays out is actually not unlikely, up to a point. But by November 2024, Bernie Sanders will be 83, much too old for a presidential contender. (Joe Biden will be just shy of 82.) Hillary herself will be 77.
The Democrats plainly need to find someone younger–preferably someone who is not a Bolshevik–but who? One of that party’s problems is that its governors mostly preside over failed states.
Still, all of that said, who would bet against Hillary making one more run? And the sad reality is that if she does run in 2024, she will indeed be the most moderate–least crazy–candidate in the field. Which shows how far her party has fallen in a few short years.
The usual election spin has begun. “Biden’s not really so bad. Democrats will retain the House and Senate. Newsom will step in for the ’24 presidential election. Dems will win everything…”
Only it’s worse this time. The spin began the moment Trump won in 2016, and it has never stopped. It began with the Russia-gate hoax, then the two false impeachments, the Jan. 6 committee, the raid on Mar-a-Lago, and now it culminates with the confident predictions that Dems will retain the Senate and the House.
Nate Cohn, writing in the New York Times, suggested that “this time may be different” and the party in power may actually gain seats. Or as CNN’s Chris Cillizza put it in early September, “Democrats have the edge in the fight for Senate control.” Or as Newsweek’s Jack Dutton had it back in the summer, “Democrats favored to win Senate for the first time as polling improves.” And again and again, from MSNBC to CBS to the Washington Post, “Democrats will win.”
Don’t believe it.
The midterm elections are only three weeks away. In almost every midterm election since 1934, the party out of power gains seats (in the House, the exceptions were 1998 and 2002, when Democrats picked up 4 seats under Bill Clinton and Republicans won 8 seats under George W. Bush), and in times of dissatisfaction, they gain a lot of seats. Barring a miracle, Republicans will take the House, and the Senate is up for grabs.
Biden’s popularity is low, and dissatisfaction with the Democrat-controlled Congress is greater than ever (60% have an unfavorable opinion of Nancy Pelosi). The media will try to cover it up, but the public is angry. The events of Jan. 6 were a symptom of that anger, and things have gotten worse since then. Inflation is not going away, the border is out of control, and foreign policy is a disaster.
As Michael Barone wrote on Sept 30, “usually, in midterm elections, the president’s party loses a few seats if his job approval is above 50% and many seats if it’s below.” As for the Senate, Barone notes that recent polls show GOP candidates just slightly behind in Wisconsin, Georgia, and Nevada (other polls show Johnson and Laxalt ahead in Wisconsin and Nevada), but he stresses that “Wisconsin is only one of many states in which polling has consistently shown Democrats running far better and Republicans far worse than they actually have when the results were counted.”
In other words, the polls always lie.
If polls show Republican Senate candidates practically tied with Democrats, it means that the GOP candidates are actually ahead by a convincing margin. If either Laxalt or Walker win and other seats remain with the same party, Republicans will retake control.
And even some of the polls that always underrate Republicans’ chances now show GOP candidates pulling ahead. As of Sept. 24–29, GOP candidates lead in Wisconsin and Nevada and are close in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire.
Every election, the left-wing media confidently predict that Democrats will take everything — just to discourage the conservative turnout. This time it’s as if Republicans won’t win a single seat, and Democrats can look forward to winning even bigger in ’24.
None of that will happen because the American public is at a boiling point. That anger with progressive politicians will come out at the polls. Expect a massive turnout of conservatives and huge gains in the House and Senate — perhaps 60 seats in the House and a turnover in the Senate.
There is already evidence of a Red Wave in turnout numbers from the midterm primaries. As the New York Post reported back in May, “Republican primary voters showed up in droves to take part in Tuesday’s contests, a good early sign for GOP hopes to regain the House and Senate this fall.” Early voting trends are not yet available, but circumstances are similar to those that produced a Red Wave in 1994 and 2010, when Republicans picked up 54 and 63 House seats, respectively. The Democrat margin in the House is currently 6 seats.
The historical record for the party in power is equally bleak with regard to retaining Senate control, especially for Democrats, who have picked up Senate seats only once in midterm elections since 1934 (4 seats under JFK in 1962). In other years, Republicans picked up 2 seats under Nixon in 1970, 2 seats under George W. Bush in 2002, and 2 seats under Trump in 2018. It would be highly unlikely for Democrats to pick up Senate seats, or even a single seat, in 2022 since they have done so only once since 1934.
And this is especially so since Biden’s popularity numbers are now among the worst of any president in modern American history. Fifty-four percent of Americans disapprove of Biden’s job performance, and a full 43% of Americans polled strongly disapprove. Those are the kind of numbers that translate into voters going to the polls. And yet liberal media and polling continue to insist that Republicans can’t win on Nov. 8.
Liberals base their predictions on nothing more than what they wish to be true. I am confident not just because I wish conservatives to win, but because Democrats have governed so poorly that there has to be a response from the American people. There always has been, when things have gotten this bad. And things are bad, what with war abroad, global inflation, and predictions from Larry Summers and many others of a serious recession ahead.
I am looking forward to the Nov. 8 election and have already invited friends over. I have no doubt that the predictions of GOP losses are false. And I can’t wait ’til ’24, no matter what the media say about the “new Biden.”
Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture including Heartland of the Imagination (2011).
There’s always some mystery in the news that provides a blank page for fantasy thinking. This week’s mystery has initiated a storm of speculation: What happened to cause leaks in Russia’s Nord Stream 1 and 2, designed to send gas to Germany? The speculation runs from rational to delusional.
A good example of more rational speculation is by Jed Babbin at the Spectator: He thinks Russia is the most likely suspect:
Germany, Sweden, the United States, and other NATO nations would not have attacked the pipelines. There has been some speculation among U.S. conservatives that we were responsible for the pipeline attacks. That’s clearly wrong for two reasons.
First, we have no motive for doing so, despite President Joe Biden’s February statement claiming: “If Russia invades Ukraine… there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”
Destroying Nord Stream 2 only hurts our European allies. There’s no reason to do so.
Second, Biden is too gun-shy to order any such strike. He and Secretary of State Antony Blinken would certainly consult with Germany and France before doing so, and they would have vetoed the move.
We may never know which nation did it, but Russia is — despite its protestations — the most likely suspect.
n one sense I think he’s correct. In another, I think he’s wrong. That is to say, I think Russia is at fault but not because it deliberately caused the leaks which may render the pipelines at worst, irreparable, or, at best, out of commission for months.
You see, I’ve seen firsthand the incompetence and lack of maintenance when I worked in the USSR and you’ve seen it too, if you watched the Russian invasion of Ukraine with poorly designed and maintained equipment. A blogger named LawDog with pipeline experience sets out a very plausible scenario to me:
Two explosions, 17 hours apart. No military is going to arrange for two pipes in the same general area to be destroyed 17 hours apart. Not without some Spec Ops guy having a fit of apoplexy. One pipe goes up in a busy shipping lane, in a busy sea, and everyone takes notice. Then you wait 17 hours to do the second — with 17 hours for people to show up and catch you running dirty? Nah, not buying it.
The Nord pipelines weren’t in use. To me, that means it’s time for maintenance! Hard to maintain pipes when product is flowing.
Pipelines running methane, under saltwater, require PMCS [Preventative Maintenance Checks and Services] quicker than you’d think, and more often than you’d believe.
I would bet a cup of coffee that any of the required weekly and monthly checks and services since the Russians took over have been pencil-whipped. (See Andreev Bay 1982.)
He notes they twice shut the pipelines down for maintenance — in July of 2020 and July of 2021. Both times they had issues restarting it. Moreover, there were four major disruptions in gas flow from December 21 through April 22.
He concedes “hostile actions are a possibility” but lists how many things can cause a rupture in an undersea pipeline: The most significant to him is the formation of “hydrate plugs” which under certain circumstances are formed from the natural gas/methane in the pipelines and preventing them requires constant work “requiring vigilance, expertise, diligence and constant water removal.” If they are not removed, the solid hydrates can cause cracks and fires. To clear these plugs in pipelines this size requires weeks of “Slow depressurization from both ends simultaneously.”
In 2000, he notes, the Russians tried to remove a hydrate plug from a pipeline in Siberia using a butane torch and they ruptured the pipe and destroyed “several miles of very expensive pipeline.”
Both Nordstream pipelines were fully charged with natural gas and just sitting at the bottom of the sea — ‘Hundreds of millions of cubic meters of explosive “gaseous hydrocarbons being transported by Russians, and subject to Russian maintenance.”
This theory, while not definitive in the absence of evidence, is persuasive enough to me that the finger pointing at everyone else should take a long pause. It’s pure speculation, while the need for constant maintenance of undersea gas pipelines and Russian incompetence is not.
On the other hand, we do have some evidence to support our suspicion that the federal government used and still uses social media to censor anti-administration news.
The administration gave millions in tax dollars to four private groups which worked with social media to censor “massive amounts of social media posts they considered misinformation” during the last national election:
The consortium is comprised of four member organizations: Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and social media analytics firm Graphika. It set up a concierge-like service in 2020 that allowed federal agencies like Homeland’s Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and State’s Global Engagement Center to file “tickets” requesting that online story links and social media posts be censored or flagged by Big Tech.
Three liberal groups — the Democratic National Committee, Common Cause and the NAACP — were also empowered like the federal agencies to file tickets seeking censorship of content. A Homeland-funded collaboration, the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, also had access.
In its own after-action report on the 2020 election, the consortium boasted it flagged more than 4,800 URLs — shared nearly 22 million times on Twitter alone — for social media platforms. Their staff worked 12-20 hour shifts from September through mid-November 2020, with “monitoring intensifying] significantly” the week before and after Election Day.
I do not know of a single conservative poster on Facebook right now who has not received warnings, had posts blocked, have had their feeds restricted until well after the midterms, or were outright banned.
The administration’s unconstitutional misuse of federal funds to target their opposition continues in other ways as well. The odious, highly politicized Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is also involved.
The CDC awarded a Soros-backed pro-migrant nonprofit $7.5 million under the guise of pandemic-related support for “LATINX ESSENTIAL WORKERS AS HEALTH PROMOTERS,” and aimed “to reduce the spread of COVID-19 and mitigate impacts among Latinx and Latin American immigrants,” according to an analysis by the Daily Caller.
The group, Alianza Americas, is currently suingFlorida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and other Florida officials over migrant flights to Martha’s Vineyard earlier this month.
The group has also received nearly $1.4 million from George Soros’ Open Society Network.
Alianza Americas is “focused on improving the quality of life of all people in the U.S.-Mexico-Central America migration corridor.” The membership-based group, which Soros’ Open Society Foundations network (OSF) sent almost $1.4 million to between 2016 and 2020, was awarded a $7.5 million CDC grant in February 2021, according to a grant listing reviewed by the Daily Caller News Foundation. — Daily Caller
The CDC funds were distributed under a program called “Protecting and Improving Health Globally: Building and Strengthening Public Health Impact, Systems, Capacity and Security.”
It seems to me that an administration with a well-considered agenda that warrants popular support would not have to go to such lengths to block contrary views. I hope the predictions of a Red Wave at the midterms will result in severe penalties for those who used our tax revenues to shut up the opposition. And I remind you that the best definition of fascism, in my view, is a coordinated state-corporate system which works to silence all opposition to an autocratic government.
Normally we’ll just run The Daily Chart on weekdays, but the chart that the Wall Street Journal includes in today’s feature article “Where Democrats’ Grip on Minority Voters Could Slip in Midterm Elections” ought to be giving Democrats nightmares and thus deserves a special notice today.
MN Prager Discussion Group 
You must be logged in to post a comment.