A daily roundup of the biggest stories in right-wing media.
On Tuesday, conservatives continued to assess the Democrats’ electoral prospects in 2018 and beyond. Several outlets ran posts on the skepticism rising from the party’s left wing, highlighted in a Mic article Monday, about Sen. Kamala Harris of California as a 2020 presidential candidate. Breitbart’s Joel Pollak:
RoseAnn DeMoro, executive director of National Nurses United, a union that supported Bernie Sanders in 2016 and is often to be seen at left-wing protests in the state, told the New York Times last month: “She’s not on our radar. … In terms of where the progressives live, I don’t think there’s any ‘there’ there.”
Others, according to Mic.com, are skeptical of the fact that Harris has courted Wall Street donors — including Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin, who donated to her 2016 campaign for U.S. Senate. They cite Harris’s decision not to pursue a civil enforcement action against Mnuchin’s OneWest bank when she was California’s attorney general.
The Daily Caller cited criticism of the Mic article from MSNBC host Joy Reid among others. “These early scuffles are likely going to be emblematic of how Democrats choose a candidate for 2020,” the Caller’s Justin Caruso wrote. “Many see a split in left-leaning voters between those who think lefty identity politics is key, and that liberal economics don’t need to tack too much further to the left, and those who think that economic policy must be taken much further to the left, while identity politics is seen as somewhat less important.”
The Daily Wire ran a post on reports that Obama advisers are encouraging former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick to run. “Patrick has been piling up money working as a managing director at Bain Capital, the same company Democrats vilified when they attacked Mitt Romney,” the Wire’s Hank Berrien noted. “After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1982, he failed the State Bar of California twice before he passed on his third try.”
The Daily Wire also puslihed an item on polling from the Democrats’ House Majority PAC that suggests the party may continue having trouble with white, working-class voters. The Wire’s John Nolte:
Despite all of the GOP’s troubles over the last half year, among blue collar voters, the Republican Party beats Democrats 43% to 33% in what is known as the generic ballot. Disapproval of the Democrat Party sits at a breathtaking 61%, while only 32% approve. Trump’s job approval number in these pivotal swing districts is a healthy 52%. In worse news, compared to Republicans, when it comes to improving the economy, Democrats face an incredible -35 point deficit.
There is no question that much of this collapse has to do with the Democrat Party’s insane embrace of a number of insane cultural issues — allowing men to use women’s bathrooms, cop-hating, gun control, the war on women, gays are always right and those who disagree are bigots, apologizing for Islam while trashing Christianity, anti-science gender issues …
This echoed criticism Monday night from Fox News’ Jesse Watters of statements made by CNN’s Fareed Zakaria partially attributing Trump’s win to racism and xenophobia:
Watters: I think Trump won not because of white voters but because of people like Fareed Zakaria who were so out of touch the last eight years and said everything was going so great in the economy and everything was doing well and they kept on talking about bathrooms and, you know, Occupy Wall Street while the rest of the country was saying, “Hey, we’re getting hammered over here. What about us?” Trump spoke to those people and that’s why he won.
In other news:
Some outlets ran posts assessing new White House Chief of Staff John Kelly in the wake of the firing of Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci. The Washington Free Beacon’s Cameron Cawthorne cited the widespread and respect for Kelly. “John Kelly has received bipartisan praise from both Republicans and Democrats since President Donald Trump announced Friday that he would replace Reince Priebus as the new White House chief of staff,” he wrote. “Kelly, a no-nonsense, whip-cracking retired Marine general, developed a reputation during his tenure as secretary of homeland security in the Trump administration as someone not afraid to stand up to Trump when he needed to offer some ‘tough talk,’ the Associated Press reported Tuesday.” In National Review, Elliot Kaufman expressed concern about the penetration of military men like Kelly into Trump’s inner circle:
My worry is not John Kelly. It is that there will not be a substantial civilian presence to advise Trump on military issues, and think differently from the military brass, subordinating military objectives to larger American political interests. In such circumstances, groupthink will become even more dangerous than it usually is; when everybody thinks the same, nobody thinks anything at all.
Already, Trump has shown incredible deference to his generals, delegating control over troop levels in Afghanistan to Mattis and the Pentagon. Some may mistakenly find this abandonment of civilian political control reassuring, but they forget that “War is too important to be left to the generals,” as Georges Clemenceau once put it.
