From the left: The Foolish Quest to Be the Next Obama

The voter coalition that Barack Obama assembled to win the 2008 Democratic nomination “is a tantalizing one,” observes Bill Scher at Politico: He “put together African-Americans with young voters and white liberals who live near Whole Foods.” No surprise, then, that every prospective 2020 Democrat wants to replicate it. But “there’s a big problem” with trying to recreate Obama’s success: African-American voters “are far less likely to function as a monolithic bloc.” That’s why South Carolina, the first majority-black 2020 primary, is “garnering increased attention” over Iowa and New Hampshire. And while early polling is not always predictive, it does suggest that black voters “are not rushing” unanimously, or even overwhelmingly, toward any one candidate’s bandwagon.

Foreign desk: Exiled Judges Guard Venezuela Democracy

For the past 18 months, reports Bloomberg’s Eli Lake, the Venezuelan ­Supreme Court has presided “through the miracle of cloud computing.” That’s because the 33 jurists live in the US, Panama, Colombia and Chile. Nevertheless, they hold court every 15 days via teleconferencing. Now they have urged Juan Guaidó to assume the interim presidency, a move that may win international recognition of the exiled “Skype court.” The court, whose judges fled into exile in 2017 when then-President Nicolás Maduro threatened to arrest them after unilaterally rewriting the constitution, “is guiding a democratic transition in Venezuela, using a constitution amended to consolidate the Chavista revolution.” Which, as Lake notes, “makes for a precious irony.”

Conservative: ‘Doomsday Clock’ Is Liberal Angst Meter

The headlines were predictably overwrought: The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved its “Doomsday Clock” to two minutes to midnight, the closest the risk of global nuclear war has been since 1959. But as John Merline notes at Investor’s Business Daily, this supposedly reliable indicator “is more about politics than any sort of scientific measure of the risk of ­nuclear annihilation.” It routinely counts down under Republican presidents and back up under Democrats. And the latest click toward Doomsday is explained by the BAS as a result of “nationalist leaders and their surrogates” having “lied shamelessly” and branded the truth “fake news.” That’s not science — it’s a screed against President Trump. Yes, the left fears Trump as an “existential threat to mankind.” But “that doesn’t mean there’s any scientific basis for those fears.”

Ex-prosecutor: Probers Should Come Clean on Collusion

Andrew McCarthy at The Hill maintains that the indictment of Roger Stone only makes clear “what has been apparent to the public for a year and therefore must have been known to prosecutors and the FBI for much longer: There was no criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russian government.” That is, the Kremlin’s election cyber-espionage wasn’t coordinated with the Trump campaign. The indictment ­includes “20 pages of heavy-breathing narrative” about the theft of Democratic e-mails — “but the big wind produces no rain,” only “a couple of pages of process crimes” involving the investigation, not “an espionage conspiracy that did not exist.” It’s time, says McCarthy, for the FBI and the Justice Department to say flatly whether they still suspect the president and his campaign of being clandestine agents of Russia.

Media critic: Twitter Is the Crystal Meth of Newsrooms

For journalists, Twitter has become like crystal meth — a drug “that insinuates itself into our vulnerabilities, only to leave us toothless and disgraced,” declares The Washington Post’s David Von Drehle. Reporters are under intense pressure to produce “quick takes” on the news in order to drive Web traffic, and so they have become addicted to Twitter. Too many, he points out, “covered Twitter’s reaction to Trump, instead of covering the ideas and impulses of the voters he was reaching.” Now journalists are busy asserting “that ‘the world’ was rattled by a minor confrontation at the Lincoln Memorial, proving only how deeply they’ve confused the bot-infested echo chamber of Twitter with the world at large.” That’s “addiction talking,” he warns, and it’s time to “just say no.”

— Compiled by Eric Fettmann