New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, is having a bit of a moment. Cuomo's state, and in particular his state's crown jewel metropolis, has emerged as ground zero of America's fight against the Wuhan coronavirus. The Empire State has been devastated by the epidemic, accounting for nearly half of the nation's confirmed cases and mortalities alike. Sadly, one of the most recent confirmed cases was Cuomo's own brother and CNN primetime anchor, Chris. As the virus has wreaked havoc, Cuomo's near-daily press briefings have emerged as a fixture of our 24/7 coronavirus media coverage. They are the closest Democratic Party equivalents to the ratings bonanzas that are President Donald Trump's own White House Coronavirus Task Force briefings. And they, along with Cuomo's robust policies in response to the virus, have garnered significant acclaim. Popular Fox News primetime host Sean Hannity even praised Cuomo on-air while interviewing Trump. Accordingly, Cuomo's stock in the Democratic firmament is on the rise. Popular political market website PredictIt now pegs Cuomo as the second-most likely candidate to win the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, despite the fact he has not even announced his candidacy. There is no small amount of chatter that Democrats may seek to replace the increasingly bumbling Joe Biden with Cuomo at their nominating convention this summer. Such a boneheaded move would be a boon for Trump's reelection chances. It is difficult to see how Cuomo could viably compete against Trump across the Rust Belt. Between two gruff, straight-talking New Yorkers, voters would stick with the incumbent. But Cuomo is also undeserving of all the praise he has been receiving. Many justifiable policy responses aside, much of Cuomo's recent rhetoric has highlighted his own galling hypocrisy -- and moral incoherence. Cuomo captivated many across the country when he accompanied his statewide lockdown order with the soaring oratory that "if everything we do saves just one life, I'll be happy." But taken at face value, this is an unserious statement. In the history of government, it is unlikely that there has ever been a single political theorist or statesman who has sincerely held such an untenable conviction. To govern is to make value judgments about necessary tradeoffs, and perfunctory decisions like raising the speed limit or legalizing alcohol evince a tradeoff made not on the side of saving "just one life" at any cost whatsoever. But it is truly rich for Andrew Cuomo, of all people, to trumpet a purported commitment to humanity in such brazen fashion. Last year, Cuomo signed into law New York's new Orwellian-named abortion statute, the Reproductive Health Act. Despite this anodyne name, the Act completely removed abortion from New York's criminal code and legalized the procedure up until birth "when necessary to protect a woman's life or health." The word "health" is conveniently not defined, thus paving a clear path for gruesome second- and third-trimester on-demand abortions. So much for the moral imperative to save "just one life." Cuomo, echoing others, has also repeated the well-worn refrain that "we're all in this together." Normally, channeling such a solidaristic spirit would be welcome -- especially in a time of true crisis. The unity of any people ultimately depends upon the mutually interdependent bonds of citizenship that alone can bind us together. But for Andrew Cuomo, such rhetoric, welcome though it may be, is hypocritical in the extreme. Though initially elected as a relative pragmatist, Cuomo has consistently governed New York as a cultural darling of the woke left. In 2014, Cuomo infamously bellowed that "extreme conservatives" who are "right-to-life" and "pro-assault-weapon" do not belong "in the state of New York, because that's not who New Yorkers are." That this is now the same man earning plaudits for his attempts to unify all New Yorkers is simply risible. With Biden seemingly more gaffe-prone and unintelligible than ever before, Democrats may be on the lookout for a last-ditch convention savior this summer. Supporters of President Trump should be quite pleased if Democrats turn to moral ignoramus par excellence Andrew Cuomo. Source: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/

The coronavirus pandemic has thrown the nation’s health, economy, and presidential election up in the air. Until the virus struck and the nation shut down, President Trump was a strong favorite to win a second term. The betting markets put his odds at close to 60%.  Those odds are about even now, and changing by the day. They depend on how well Trump and his aides handle the health crisis, the economic reopening, and the massive dislocations workers and firms will suffer. Right now, the public approves of what Trump is doing. But today’s polls matter far less than what the public thinks after the crisis subsides.  Older models of election forecasting, developed and tested over the years, tell us it is very hard for a president to win reelection during a recession. And one is now likely this summer, economists say.  But those old election models may prove irrelevant this year. This shutdown and its economic impact are truly unprecedented, and swing voters understand that. It is clear even to media outlets that openly loathe the president -- The New York Times, The Washington Post, MSNBC, and CNN, for example -- that no administration could have avoided this shutdown. It was caused by devastating foreign shocks, beginning with the outbreak of the virus in a wet market in Wuhan, China. The virus was transmitted by travelers from China and then travelers from Europe who had been infected by those from China. The Chinese Communist Party is directly responsible for this crisis, not because its leaders wanted to spread an infection but because they wanted to keep it secret to preserve their domestic control.  Still, the Trump administration will be held accountable for how it handles the crisis, and rightly so. Was it swift and competent? How did it manage the economic reboot, which must begin before the contagion is gone? If there is a second wave of infections because we threw open the doors too soon, decision-makers will face the fury.  In a few weeks, if the crisis ebbs, voters and pundits will begin to ask more pointed, partisan questions: Could some victims have been saved if the administration, governors, or public health agencies had acted sooner? Did the stimulus package relieve financial pressures on the most vulnerable? Was it too big, too small, or misdirected? Did businesses die that could have been saved? Did we bail out fat cats who didn’t deserve it? Did the economy reopen too soon -- or too late? Did our political leaders play partisan games in a time of national crisis? The answers, plus the strength of the economic rebound, will determine Trump’s fate and that of his party this November.  In that contest, Trump has two tremendous advantages. One is incumbency. The other is that he is very likely to face Joe Biden. The former vice president has effectively sewed up the nomination, barring some dramatic, unexpected event. Unfortunately for Democrats, Biden has seemed utterly irrelevant during this crisis. Worse, he has resurrected his familiar image as the bumbling Mr. Magoo, the image he had before Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) performed life-saving CPR on his campaign just before the South Carolina primary and Super Tuesday.  Once Biden built a prohibitive delegate lead, he became nominal head of his party, or at least the co-head alongside House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. While Pelosi and Schumer worked behind the scenes, making legislative sausage, Biden had a golden moment to show his stature, competence, and gravitas. He failed. He couldn’t show them because he doesn’t have them.  Nor does he have administrative experience. He’s a talker, not a doer. Alas, when his time came to talk, he literally couldn’t find the teleprompter. His media team, showing their own incompetence, didn’t pre-tape that humiliating opening. That self-inflicted "pie in the face" wasn’t his first. It came days after Biden’s live question-and-answer episode, when he faced sideways and then wandered off camera. It was not a good look. Biden seemed less like a commanding, presidential figure and more like someone mom and dad referred to when they said, “Kids, come on now, it’s time for us all to go visit Uncle Joe where he’s living now.”  The Democrats’ emerging leader on the ground is Gov. Andrew Cuomo. New York City and its environs are currently the contagion’s epicenter, and Cuomo has looked calm, informed, and trustworthy during the crisis.  Cuomo’s rise is an unalloyed benefit for his state and the nation’s largest city, but it is not an unalloyed benefit for his party. To almost any sentient observer, it looks like the Democrats have picked the wrong guy to oppose Trump this fall. But the Democrats have painted themselves into a corner. They can’t simply stride out across the wet paint now that Biden has effectively won the nomination. He won it in open primaries, with settled rules, and there’s no way to change them.  Biden won’t offer the party an easy escape. He won’t suddenly renounce the prize he has sought his entire adult life. And even if Uncle Joe woke up with a horse’s head in his bed and backed out, Bernie Sanders would say, “Hey, I’m next. No cutting in line.”  In that unlikely scenario, the Democratic Party would undoubtedly reject the hardline socialist at their convention in Milwaukee, but doing so would enrage his staunch supporters and fracture the party unity necessary to defeat Trump.  So why not nominate Cuomo for vice president and hint that Biden would step aside after one term? That’s certainly possible, but it risks a fatal head-on collision with the Democrats’ deep commitment to identity politics. A Biden-Cuomo ticket would be made up of -- gasp -- two older white men. Where is the woman on that ticket? Where is the African American? How exactly did they get pushed aside in a party that is built upon the rock (or is it sand?) of identity politics? Moreover, Biden has actually promised, in public and on tape, that he will select a woman for his running mate. Cuomo walks into the wrong bathroom.  For Biden to jettison his gender-based promise is more than a matter of flip-flopping. Politicians do that all the time and sometimes get away with it. That’s not so easy this time because the excluded groups get a say -- in November. They might not vote for Trump, but they might not vote at all.  This election will ultimately hinge on how the Democrats solve the vexed problem of Biden’s weakness and how Trump solves the twin problems of public health and economic reemergence. The Democrats will try to make it a referendum on Trump. The president will say, “Look at the alternative. Good heavens, just look.” Democrats must be wondering, as Cuomo rises and Biden bumbles, how they will answer that challenge. Source: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/

Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, who has positioned himself as a moderate, sparked a pro-life movement firestorm over the past 24 hours after a town-hall audience member Sunday confronted him on whether he is open to making language in the party platform more inclusive of pro-life Democrats. The uproar is not dying down after the Buttigieg campaign on Monday declined to say whether the candidate supports a controversial 40-week abortion bill backed by Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam and Northam’s stated support for allowing abortions to take place after an infant’s birth. The Buttigieg campaign refused to say if Buttigieg's position differs from that of Gov. Northam or New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who signed a bill last year that expands access to late-term abortions if the health of the mother is at risk or doctors believe the fetus in not viable. Northam faced a backlash over his comments, and both governors’ positions -- considered the most extreme abortion policies in the country, according to pro-life groups -- stirred weeks-long controversy in their respective states. Asked directly whether Buttigieg’s abortion position is any different than that of Northam or Cuomo, campaign spokesman Chris Meagher said only that “I think he made his position clear in the town hall last night” and provided a transcript of Buttigieg’s exchange with Fox News anchor and moderator Chris Wallace. Buttigieg’s comments Sunday night in Des Moines, Iowa, did not specifically address the laws expanding access to late-term abortions in Virginia and New York. Instead, pro-life Democrat Kristen Day asked Buttigieg if he wanted the support of “people like me” and whether he would back a change in the Democratic Party platform language to show that it’s a “big-tent” party that welcomes pro-life members. While he didn’t address the party platform question directly, the former South Bend, Ind., mayor said he supports the party’s existing position, which “unequivocally” supports all woman’s access to “safe and legal abortion” and explicitly states that the party will seek to overturn the Hyde Amendment, which bars the use of federal funds to pay for abortion except to save the life of the mother or if the pregnancy arises from incest or rape.  “I’m not going to try to earn your vote by tricking you. I am pro-choice, and I believe a woman ought to be able to make that decision,” Buttigieg said. “The best I can offer is that if we can’t agree on where to draw the line, the next best thing we can do is agree on who should draw the line, and in my view it’s the woman who’s faced with that decision in her own life.” Wallace, recognizing that Buttigieg was not addressing the party plank issue, asked if Day was satisfied with that response, and she clearly wasn’t. “He didn’t answer the second part of my question, and the second part was: The Democratic platform contains language that basically says, ‘We don’t belong, we have no part in the party because it says abortion should be legal up to nine months, the government should pay for it,” Day said. She then pointed out that in 1996 and several years afterward there was language in the Democratic platform that said “we understand that people have differing views on this issue but we are a big tent party that includes everybody . . .” Buttigieg then indicated that he would not stray from party orthodox on abortion. “I support the position of my party – that this kind of medical care needs to be available to everyone, and I support Roe v. Wade framework that holds that early in pregnancy there are very few restrictions and late in pregnancy there are very few exceptions.” The answer did not sit well with pro-life leaders, fresh from late last week’s March for Life in Washington, an annual event that President Trump attended this year, the first president ever to participate. Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the anti-abortion nonprofit group, Susan B. Anthony List, accused Buttigieg of “doubling down on abortion extremism.” “Last night Mayor Buttigieg could not identify a single instance where he could limit abortion or even acknowledge room for debate on this issue within the Democratic Party,” she said. “The modern Democratic Party is the party of abortion on demand through birth, paid for by taxpayers, even infanticide.” Abortion opponents point to recent polling, showing that seven in 10 Americans, including 44% of Democrats, back abortion restrictions after the first three months. That polling, produced by the Marist Institute for Public Opinion and funded by the Knights of Columbus, surveyed 1,237 American adults earlier this month. Carl Anderson, the CEO of the Knights of Columbus, penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed about the poll’s findings last week titled, “Waiting for a Moderate Democrat on Abortion.” The most recent survey finding, he wrote, is consistent with others over the past decade that show t the vast majority of Americans oppose late-term abortion even if they want it to be legal at other points in pregnancy. Nearly half of those who identify as pro-choice — 47% — support such restrictions, Anderson pointed out. Fewer than four in 10 Democrats support abortion at any time and for any reason, while 62% want some limitations on abortion and roughly half, or 49%, would limit abortion to the first three months of pregnancy. After Buttigieg’s Sunday town hall, March for Life President Jeanne Mancini tweeted that she is “really saddened to see how out of touch D candidates are with mainstream America on life.” Grazie Pozo Christie, a policy adviser with the Catholic Association, said the Democrats’ “aggressive stance on abortion makes them the party of exclusion, leaving countless Americans with moderate views in the cold.” After the town hall, a Twitter storm ensued, with some abortion-rights proponents arguing that Democrats who personally wouldn’t get an abortion are welcome in the Democratic Party as long as they don’t impinge on the rights of others to have abortions or the party to expand access. “Anyone, regardless of personal beliefs is and always has been welcome in the party as long as they are not trying to exert control over others, with massive damaging effects,” tweeted Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America. “Pete said as much in his answer.” The abortion rights controversy comes as Buttigieg fights for votes and the fate of his underdog campaign just days away from the pivotal Feb. 3 Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary nearly a week later. Buttigieg is in third place in both contests right now, behind Sanders, who’s in the lead in both states, with Biden following in a close second place in Iowa and more distant second in New Hampshire. After Buttigieg declined to distance himself from Northam and Cuomo on late-term abortions, Biden is the only candidate in the field who has signaled support for legislation barring certain types of late-term abortions, according to the March for Life Action scorecard of the 2020 field.  Others have said Biden’s position on late-term abortion is unclear after he surrendered to pro-choice activists last year and reversed his 40-year-long support for the Hyde Amendment, which he has said led him to vote no fewer than 50 times against federal funding of abortions. In his 2007 book “Promises to Keep,” Biden said he’s been “stuck in the middle-of-the-road position on abortion for 30 years.” Biden early last year tried to reaffirm his support for the Hyde Amendment, but some of his 2020 opponents for the Democratic nomination denounced him for it. “There is #NoMiddleGround on women’s rights,” Sanders tweeted. “Abortion is a constitutional right.” “No woman’s access to reproductive health care should be based on how much money she has. We must repeal the Hyde Amendment,” declared California Sen. Kamala Harris, who ended her presidential campaign late last year.Source: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/