Eye on 2020: Bloomy’s Unlawful Run
“Michael Bloomberg isn’t actually running for president,” argues The Federalist’s Christopher Bedford. Sure, he has hired 1,000 staffers and spent $250 million on ads. But he has said he will spend $2 billion “for any campaign to defeat Trump,” even if he loses the nomination. “This magnanimity in defeat doesn’t seem to square with Michael Bloomberg, cut-throat capitalist billionaire,” notes Bedford, “So why declare?” Bloomberg “gets a lot more for his money as a candidate than he ever could as a donor or even as the operator of a super PAC.” After all, “there are limits to what a donor can give a campaign, and $2 billion is way out of the question.” And campaigns have “access to the best rates the market has to offer” for ads, while super PACs pay top dollar. “He doesn’t like the man voters put in the White House, so he’s going to spend billions of dollars to undo it” — and “skirt” campaign-finance laws in the process.
Foreign desk: Don’s Game-Changing Peace Plan
Administration officials told Ian Bremmer, reporting for Time, that they consider President Trump’s Middle East peace plan “an opening bid,” and Bremmer notes it won’t “lead to peace in the coming weeks or months or maybe ever.” But he still thinks “it might open a process that will reduce tension in the region.” In a “startling turnabout” for an administration that “moved the US embassy to Jerusalem,” Trump “has declared support for an independent, sovereign State of Palestine with a capital on the outskirts of East Jerusalem.” It is America’s “most pro-Israel proposal ever,” but “more geopolitical honesty might change the game.” Indeed, “Arab-Israeli normalization is only a matter of time, and the Palestinians are at risk of missing that train” if they don’t respond with “a constructive counteroffer.”
From the left: Nominating Bernie Is ‘Insane’
With Bernie Sanders leading in Iowa and New Hampshire, New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait has some straight talk for Democrats: “Sanders is an extremely, perhaps uniquely, risky nominee”; choosing him “would be insane.” Sanders has proudly put his collection of “unpopular program specifics in the unpopular packaging of ‘socialism,’ ” giving Republicans an “almost insultingly easy way” to brand him too “radical” for America. A “majority of the public” thinks the economy is doing well under President Trump — so Sanders’ “radical economic agenda” would “play directly into the president’s message” of not upsetting the apple cart. Indeed, “political science has generally found that, all things being equal, the electorate tends to punish ideologically extreme candidates.”
From the right: The Hillary Show Carries On
At some point, “one or more of Hillary Clinton’s many handlers, advisers or consultants” must have told her to laugh more — forgetting, snarks National Review’s Kyle Smith, that she is “sour, dour and without a humorous molecule in her body.” In the new documentary “Hillary,” Clinton “presents as an inveterate scold” but acts like “Arthur Fleck in a pantsuit.” Worse, she blames “all the forces” President Trump “unleashed” for her 2016 election loss. In fact, “she got as far as she did solely because of her husband’s success,” but she’ll never give up on her “aggrievement and entitlement.”
Crime beat: There’s No Race War Coming
At Commentary, Wilfred C. Reilly debunks several racially inflammatory and distorted takes on crime trends. Center-left media play up stories of “tough whites attacking blacks and other people of color for trivial reasons, while a substantial cottage industry on the far right focuses on sensational depictions of black crime,” he notes. In reality, though, most crime isn’t interracial: In 2018, Justice Department stats show, “blacks made up only 15 percent of those who criminally attacked whites in the United States,” and whites were just 11 percent of those who attacked blacks. It’s most obvious in homicide stats: “Figures from every recent year indicate that roughly 85 percent of murders of whites and an astonishing 91 to 95 percent of murders of blacks are intra-racial” — that is, a same-race crime. Bottom line: “There is no current or upcoming race war.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
