2020 presidential nomination

Many in Congress are concerned about Trump's seriously deteriorating mental health.

In his latest public service announcement, Robert Reich begins by saying he's hearing a lot about socialism lately, "mainly from Donald Trump and Fox News." I guess he doesn't get out much. The "menace of socialism" is in every GOP message, from every Reoublican candidate running anywhere and everywhere-- and from the rotgut Republican wing of the Democratic Party. Did you hear the booing when former Colorado Governor Frackenlooper tried using socialism as a punching bag last weekend at the California Democratic Party convention?

Joe Biden-- Status Quo by Nancy OhanianChange Research is the best polling firm for the 2020 cycle, at least so far. You should follow them. They just released a pre-convention poll of California voters.

The other day, I noted how there are six 2020 presidential candidates actively campaigning, each of whom has so little support than none of them even tops half a percent in the polls. One, former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, went to the California Democratic Party convention over the weekend to extol capitalism and undermine Bernie. This is what happened to the clueless asshole. Frackenlooper wasn't the only candidate to be booed at the convention.

Last Friday, former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau interviewed Marianne Williamson on his podcast, Pod Save America. Among other things, Marianne told him that "there are two kinds of Democrats, aren’t there? And that’s being played out in this campaign. There are two categories here. The two categories is the incrementalist who say we can have it both ways. We can take [corporate] money. We can take tens of thousands from some security investment firms. We can take tens of thousand from Big Pharma.

One of the reasons Kirsten Gillibrand almost never gets beyond 1% in any national or early-state polling is because Democratic primary voters know her mostly as an opportunist who stabbed Al Franken in the bank to advance her own mediocre career. That factor isn't likely to matter much to TV viewers tonight who tune in to see her Dubuque Iowa town fall on Fox. Fox viewers were never Franken fans.

Imagine that Mr. Obama's Rib wins the primary and then the general and gets inaugurated. How many hours before Mr.

Charlie Cook, an avatar of centrism, asked yesterday if Democrats can grab the center now that Trump alienated it from the Republicans. As he says, the electorate is made up of two sides and a big mushy middle. Sometimes it's a third, a third and a third.

Last night I had a  long working-dinner with a world-famous author and neuroscientist whose new book on the aging brain is coming out early next year. He was explaining to me why the average person reports that their happiest years were around 80, if they live that long. There were quite a few reasons but one big one had to do with a tendency to shut out negativity and to focus exclusively on good news and happy memories (or happy manufactured memories). This is working out extraordinarily well for Biden, whose support among extremely old Democrats is overwhelming.

In this MSNBC promo-video, Chris Hayes says something worth remembering when you decide who to vote for: "Who will they fight for? What will they fight for? Can they be trusted to do what they say? Everything else is noise." A few days ago, writing for CNN.com, Jill Filipovic asserted that the biggest 2020 mistake the Democrats could make would be to nominate Status Quo Joe.