Andrew Yang drops out

Andrew Yang has dropped out of the 2020 primaries.

He wasn't my candidate. When I endorsed Pete Buttigieg, I dismissed Yang with a single parenthetical in the last paragraph.

But Yang brought a fresh approach to the primaries which made the debates more interesting.

Here are some highlights from Yang in my live-blogs of the debates:

June 2019:

9:18 — Andrew Yang — wearing no tie! — is asked how he'd pay for his plan to give a universal basic income of $1,000 a month to every American adult. He says companies like Amazon are paying no taxes, and he'd fix this by creating a value-added tax (VAT), creating "a trickle-up economy."

10:57 — Yang says he'll build "a broad coalition" including "libertarians" — the only time they're mentioned by any of the Democratic candidates.

July 2019:

8:22 - Andrew Yang: "We need to do the opposite of what we've been doing now. The opposite of Donald Trump is an Asian math nerd. So let me share the math…" This segues into explaining how he'll give all Americans $1,000 a month.

8:45 - Yang says when he told his wife he wanted to run for president, her first question was: "What are we going to do about our health care?"

9:00 - Yang says Democrats shouldn't only be talking about the most "distressed" immigration stories; they should talk about people like his dad, an immigrant who got a lot of patents in the US.

9:33 - Yang is asked why he'd be the best president to heal racial divides. Shockingly, Yang's answer is … he'd give everyone $1,000 a month.

10:41 - Yang goes meta: "We're up here with makeup on our faces, saying prepared attack lines, playing roles on a reality TV show."

September 2019:

8:10 - Andrew Yang makes a splash with his opening statement: "In America today, everything revolves around the almighty dollar.… We have to see ourselves as owners and shareholders of this democracy, rather than as inputs into a giant machine." He offers to give $1,000 a month to 10 families who go to his website and submit essays about how they could use the money.

10:07 - Yang points out that every candidate has proposed to solve climate change by curbing the influence of money. "But money finds a way! … The answer is to wash the money out with people-powered money."

10:30 - Yang talks about his first business failing and remembers "how isolating it was — it feels like your friends no longer want to spend time with you."

October 2019:

8:34 - Andrew Yang is asked, since he wants to give $1,000 a month to all Americans, whether he supports Bernie Sanders's "federal jobs guarantee." No, Yang says: "Most Americans do not want to work for the federal government." Yang imagines the Sanders plan will lead to "failed retraining programs and jobs that no one wants," while Yang's plan of simply handing out money would empower individuals to make the best choices for them.

8:57 - Yang says Warren's principles are right, and a wealth tax sounds good in theory — but numerous countries that have tried it (including Germany, France, and Sweden) have repealed it because it didn't work.

10:18 - Yang says we should be getting money back for the data we give to companies like Facebook.

November 2019:

9:45 - Yang: "There are only 2 countries that don't have paid family leave for new moms, and those are the United States and Papua New Guinea.… We need to get off that list as soon as possible!" Yang brings up the importance of young children hearing a large number of words, but he doesn't say whether he'd support Biden's proposal to address that need with record players.

10:31 - Yang makes a powerful statement about the need to reach out to alienated young men so they don't turn to hate and violence.

(Photo of Yang in August 2019 by Gage Skidmore, via Wikimedia Commons.)

8 Thoughts on Tuesday, March 15

1. Marco Rubio's loss of his home state by almost 20 points to Donald Trump wasn't just fatal to the Rubio campaign; it also dealt a devastating blow to the idea of Mitt Romney as an influential Republican elder statesman.

2. Tonight was also not a great night for the idea that betting odds are a better predictor than polls. For most of the time (since mid-October, which is the earliest time that website goes back to), betting odds have said Rubio is the most likely Republican nominee. (Full disclosure: Those links go to Election Betting Odds, which was co-created by my friend Maxim Lott.)

3. John Kasich is saying he might go to the Republican convention with more delegates than anyone else. And now, I'm afraid all the remaining Republican candidates might be mentally ill.

4. Losing Ohio could help Trump.

5. Alex Knepper explains why we should expect Trump to stay in the lead:

Presumably the only way to stop Trump at this point would be to look toward a Cruz-Kasich ticket, but the upcoming primaries are mostly friendly territory for Trump — Cruz will win Utah and Kasich might have a shot in Wisconsin, but Trump will likely sweep the Mid-Atlantic states on 4/19 and 4/26 — New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and so forth. Even without Ohio, Trump still has a perfectly viable path to a majority, and nobody else does.

6. I find it interesting that Trump made a point, in his victory speech, to congratulate Rubio on running a "tough" campaign, called him "smart," and said he'll have a great future. I don't think Trump said a word about Jeb Bush when he dropped out on the night of South Carolina.

7. Did anyone predict, before the voting started, that the Republican race would come down to Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and John Kasich? Anyone at all, in the whole world?

8. Since Hillary Clinton seems to have won all 5 primaries and Trump won everything except Kasich's home state, we can now see that this Reason piece was right: "letting Trump speak is not merely the morally correct, philosophically consistent course of action: It's the tactically sound one as well." That article had prescient words the day before the primaries:

When the left stops Trump from speaking, Trump wins. He gets to tell his people that the forces of far-left activism and political correctness are trying to silence him. Implicitly, he is suggesting to his followers that when he becomes president, the tides will turn: see his promise to make it easier to sue newspapers for criticizing him. Trump supporters adore this shtick. Stop giving them ammunition.

As Bill Scher said on Twitter in response to the primary results:

Speculation: The visual of Bernie supporters disrupting Trump rallies offered a dismal picture of a Sanders-Trump general, fueling [Clinton] . . .

Takeaway: spend more time knocking doors for your candidate than protesting the other party's candidate

Jeb Bush: What went wrong?

I remember when I first saw a minute of one of Jeb Bush's speeches last year, before any of the debates, I instantly sensed that he didn't have what it takes. He stumbled over practically every sentence as if he were reading the text for the first time. I instinctively turned off the speech — it isn't fun to watch someone who seems uncomfortable and forced.

There's a reason Obama, as a candidate in 2008, got so much acclaim for his soaring speeches. No matter what you think of Obama, you can't deny the political reality that his oratorical talents mattered.

While live-blogging the last Republican debate, I wrote: "Bush says America has to get more aggressive against terrorism — but he sounds lackluster when he says this. That's Bush's problem: his style doesn't match his substance. For instance, he's called himself a 'disrupter' — but he seems as conventional as anyone."

I always found it hard to imagine anyone was supporting Bush out of genuine enthusiasm rather than grudging duty. Bush may have earned the respect of many while generating excitement among no one.

Lindsey Graham drops out

Lindsey Graham has dropped out of the presidential race. Slate remarks:

Graham’s campaign . . . will be remembered most—if it’s remembered at all—for the time that Donald Trump doxxed Graham during a campaign rally by giving out his personal cell phone number. The South Carolina senator never made it onto the main debate stage and while he turned in a few entertaining performances in the undercard events, winning those JV games never translated into a noticeable bounce in the polls.

Graham was one of my favorite of the Republican candidates because of his emphasis on being open to compromising with Democrats.

I was also touched by a moment in this interview (starting at about 6:30 in the video below), when Frank Luntz asked Graham what he'd say to his parents if they were alive and sitting in the audience. After his parents died within a year of each other when he was in his early 20s, Graham adopted his orphaned sister, Darlene, who was only 13. Instead of mentioning anything about being a Senator or running for president, he immediately said: "that Darlene turned out really good."

Herman Cain drops out

With about as much dignity as he could have mustered, given the circumstances:

As of today, with a lot of prayer and soul searching, I am suspending my presidential campaign. I am suspending my presidential campaign because of the continued distraction, the continued hurt caused on me and my family — not because we are not fighters, not because I'm not a fighter. It's just that when I went through this reassessment of the impact on my family first, the impact on my supporters, . . . as well as the impact on my ability to raise the necessary funds to be competitive, . . . we had to come to this conclusion, that it would be best to suspend this campaign.

Fark.com has a different take:

Herman Cain suspends campaign to spend more time with your wife

Thank you, Hillary Clinton!

I can finally say: I support you.