Unbalanced Lines

As A$AP Rocky said, "everybody plays the tough guy 'til s**t pops off". For Mike Bloomberg, the corollary might be that every candidate is inevitable until the moment they aren't. Maybe Bloomberg can buy himself the nomination, but he had even Joe Biden smelling blood in the water. He looked remarkably out of his depth and, for large stretches of the debate, was a complete non-presence. One gets the arch impression that beyond being a huge asshole he just does not care about Democratic values so much as getting himself elected. It was an historically poor performance. Maybe he can buy himself the nomination, but no Democratic constituency will enthusiastically vote for him, and that's fatal. (See under Clinton, Hillary.) When you spend a decent chunk of the evening either not engaging or defending NDAs for your sexual harassment accusers, you are having a bad time. I thought Bloomberg's presence would accrue to the benefit of a progressive candidate, ...

Lost in the aftermath of the Chernobyl-level Iowa caucus debacle is a crucial point: Even if the count were not fucked up , we'd still be questioning Iowa's primacy in and centrality to our process of choosing a president.  For years, the counts Iowa reported on election night were not raw vote totals but "state delegate equivalents": a somewhat abstracted figure representing the total number of delegates to the state party convention  awarded to a particular candidate using a specific mathematical formula. (Not the number of delegates to the national convention, i.e. the count that matters; just the number pledged to the state convention.) In 2016, Hillary Clinton edged Bernie Sanders in this count by 0.3%, giving her a nominal victory. Bernie's crew maintained that he had won more caucus-goers, and if that  total were reported, he could reasonably have claimed a victory of his own (or a split decision at worst). But this was ultimately speculative, since the ...