Unpacking Michigan
Plus: Why Tucker Carlson’s unhappy you think he’s a shill for Putin.
Quite the accomplishment for Rep. Dean Phillips in Michigan yesterday, as the longshot presidential contender somehow managed to come in fourth place in what is now a two-person Democratic primary. Phillips finished behind not only Biden and the “uncommitted” vote but also behind Marianne Williamson, who suspended her campaign earlier this month.
Happy Wednesday.
Last Night in Michigan
No surprises out of Michigan last night: On the Republican side, Donald Trump breezed past Nikki Haley, 68 to 27 percent. We’re now through the early states where Haley campaigned hard and spent heavily; from now on, it’s essentially a national race, and she’s unlikely to replicate her New Hampshire high-water mark anywhere else.
On the Democratic side, Joe Biden collected 81 percent of the vote. But his biggest rival in the contest wasn’t a gadfly candidate. It was the 13 percent of Democratic voters who pulled the lever for “uncommitted”—the seeming result of an activist effort to punish Biden for his administration’s ongoing support of Israel in its military campaign against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Biden has faced substantial backlash from his party’s progressive wing over the conflict; a Virginia “Restore Roe” campaign event, for instance, went off the rails last month when anti-Israel protester after anti-Israel protester leapt to their feet to shout him down. Michigan, with its outsized Arab population, was widely seen as the first test of the electoral breadth of that anger.
Team Biden plainly had an eye on it too. The president dispatched senior aides to meet with Arab and Muslim leaders in the state earlier this month, and said this week that he believed talks for a medium-term ceasefire in the conflict were nearing fruition.
“We know it’s been a difficult time,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters yesterday. “The president cares about that. He cares about what that community is feeling, very deeply. And we believe it’s important that they feel that they are able to express themselves and voice their feelings and their concerns. And so, look—you heard [National Security Council spokesman John Kirby] talk about the hostage deal, the temporary ceasefire. That is why it is so critical and important to get that done.”
That charm offensive may have paid dividends, as the ultimate outcome was positive for Biden: 13 percent “uncommitted” isn’t a tiny fraction of the Democratic electorate, but it’s well within historical norms. (The last Democratic incumbent president, Barack Obama, took 89 percent of the Michigan primary ballot in 2012, with nearly 11 percent voting “uncommitted.”)
Of course, the whole situation also highlighted the fraught media territory Biden will have to continue to navigate as he approaches a general-election rematch with Trump. Conservative media, to nobody’s surprise, hasn’t been quick to give Biden credit for his pro-Israel stance that has so infuriated some progressives. But they were plenty quick to denounce his attempts to rebuild bridges. The Breitbart headline yesterday cited the chair of the Michigan Democratic Party: “Biden’s Ceasefire Remark Was Telling Left What ‘They Wanted To Hear.’”
—Andrew Egger
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The Un-Americans
Little things are often revealing.
Tucker Carlson isn’t happy with those who accuse him of being a flack for Vladimir Putin. After all, he said yesterday on the Lex Fridman podcast, “my relatives fought in the Revolutionary War. I’m as American as you could be.”
You can see the moment here, or at the 1:02:00 mark in this video:
It might seem that you’ve shamelessly prostrated yourself before a brutal and hostile foreign dictator. But hey, my ancestors fought in the Revolution, so I can’t be criticized.
If only nature worked that way: If your ancestors were engaged in an honorable struggle, you too must be a person of honor.
But it’s not how things work. History is replete with well-born scoundrels. Even well-born traitors.
So Carlson’s appeal to ancestry is foolish. But it’s also revealing of a certain mindset. What would one call it? Old World? How about un-American?
A great American, Abraham Lincoln, rejected the claim from ancestry in his “electric cord” speech of July 10, 1858:
We have besides these men—descended by blood from our ancestors—among us perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men . . . or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here. . . . If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none.
But, Lincoln continues,
When they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration. And so they are. That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.
That is the true meaning of America: The sons and daughters of immigrants are as American as the sons and daughters of the American Revolution.
That conviction is fundamental here. It’s embodied in American law. It makes America exceptional. It’s gone a long way to helping make America so admirable.
Tucker Carlson rejects it.
In his casually tossed off disdain for such a view, he highlights how un-American is the movement for which he’s a leading ideologue.
It turns out that those who do nothing but boast of being American are some of the least American among us.
—William Kristol
Catching up . . .
Super PAC supporting RFK Jr. says it has enough signatures to put him on ballot in Arizona, Georgia: CNN
Navalny’s widow fears ‘bloody mobster’ Putin will carry out purge at funeral: Politico
Biden meets with top Hill leaders as partial government shutdown looms: CNN
Biden to issue executive order aimed at protecting Americans’ sensitive data from China and other ‘hostile countries’: NBC News
After asking ‘Where’s Hunter?’ for years, Republicans will question Biden’s son: New York Times
Teamsters to meet with Biden in mid-March ahead of possible endorsement: Politico
Young voters say their discontent goes deeper than Israel and Gaza: New York Times
Quick Hits
1. Who Blinks First?
Here’s a fun game you can play with what remains of the GOP primary: Who blinks first, Nikki Haley or Mitch McConnell? The New York Times reports:
Donald J. Trump and Mitch McConnell haven’t said a word to each other since December 2020.
But people close to both men are working behind the scenes to make bygones of the enmity between them and to pave the way for a critical endorsement of the former president by the highest-ranking Republican holdout so far, according to three people familiar with both teams’ perspectives who were not authorized to discuss the situation publicly.
Assuming it happens, Mr. McConnell’s endorsement of Mr. Trump would have enormous symbolic value to the former president, giving him the embrace of the last holdout of Republican power whose rejection of him represents the final patch of unconquered territory in Mr. Trump’s march to the party’s 2024 presidential nomination.
The support of Mr. McConnell, the Republican senator from Kentucky and the chamber’s minority leader, would also carry huge value in signaling to an entire class of donors and Trump-resistant Republican elites that it’s acceptable to get behind the party’s expected nominee—no matter their misgivings.
This endorsement unquestionably will happen. McConnell, the consummate party man, will back his party’s nominee, never mind that stuff he said about how Trump inspired the January 6th attack on the Capitol and pals around with white supremacists. The big question is when. With his second-in-command John Thune having bent the knee and endorsed Trump this week, McConnell is now the last member of Republican leadership still holding out. Will he continue to do so until Trump completes his takeover of the RNC on March 8? Until he racks up enough delegates to clinch the GOP nomination, which could happen as soon as March 12? Could McConnell hold out as long as the convention this summer?
2. GOP Rethinking ‘Life Begins at Conception’?
Will Saletan leads The Bulwark today with some insightful commentary on House Speaker Mike Johnson’s former career as a lawyer in the pro-life movement, and how some of the positions he took then come into conflict with his pro-IVF stance now in the wake of the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling that frozen embryos should be considered human beings:
Several pro-life organizations, including ADF, Live Action, Students for Life, and Americans United for Life, celebrated the ruling. Speaking for ADF, senior counsel Denise Burke thanked the court for affirming that “unborn children created through assisted reproductive technology are children under Alabama law and therefore protected” from “the moment of conception.” National Right to Life News observed that the Alabama case “underscores one of the most significant problems with IVF, as countless embryonic preborn children are created and then discarded when they are deemed unfit or unwanted.”
But Johnson declined to issue such a statement. Instead, like other Republican politicians, he did what GOP strategists recommended in polling memos: He endorsed IVF and called on Alabama lawmakers to solve the liability problem so the clinics could get back to work. In a statement, Johnson declared: “I applaud the Alabama Legislature for immediately working to protect life and ensure that IVF treatment is available to families throughout the state.”
Johnson didn’t specify what he was applauding. But apparently, he was referring to a bill proposed by Tim Melson, the Republican chairman of the Alabama Senate Healthcare Committee. On Thursday—the day before Johnson issued his statement—the Alabama Reflector reported that Melson was preparing legislation to shield IVF clinics from wrongful-death liability. Melson, who has previously voted to ban abortions even in cases of rape, told the paper that an IVF embryo is “not going to form into a life until it’s put into the uterus.” The draft text of his bill decrees that under Alabama law,
any human egg that is fertilized in vitro shall be considered a potential life but shall not be considered for any purposes a human life, a human being, a person, or an unborn life unless and until the fertilized egg is implanted into a woman’s uterus and a viable pregnancy can be medically detected.
That’s a direct repudiation of everything Mike Johnson has said about embryos, fertilization, and implantation.
3. Mike Johnson vs. Everyone Else
Punchbowl News always owns the Capitol Hill blow-by-blow beat, and there were plenty of blows exchanged at yesterday’s White House “Big Four” meeting, which featured Joe Biden, Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer, and Hakeem Jeffries ganging up on Mike Johnson for singlehandedly jamming Congress on additional Ukraine aid:
It was a somewhat heated meeting, mostly because the entire room ganged up against Speaker Mike Johnson over his unwillingness to bring the Senate’s $95 billion foreign aid package up for a vote.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, the Republican Party’s biggest booster of Ukraine aid, said time is of the essence, and Johnson’s only option is to bring up the Senate’s bill, which includes new aid for Kyiv, Israel and Taiwan. Johnson kept trying to return the conversation to the migrant crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. The Louisiana Republican insisted that securing the border is of greater importance than approving billions of dollars for Ukraine.
McConnell quickly cut Johnson off, told him to set the border argument aside and suggested the speaker focus on Ukraine, Israel and the need to pass a foreign aid bill.
McConnell asked House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries if the House can break up the supplemental. Jeffries said no. McConnell said the House cannot waste time coming up with its own bill given the urgency of the situation in Ukraine . . .
At the same time, Schumer was arguing that it would be a historic mistake for Johnson to stall on Ukraine aid. Publicly, Schumer described the Ukraine conversation as “intense.” McConnell was viewed as the pragmatist in the room because he was emphasizing Ukraine’s dire battlefield situation.
Cheap Shots
I wish people would stop calling them "pro-life" groups when they don't give a single shit about actual living people. They are anti-abortion groups, period.
The entire "pro-life" movement has turned out to be one huge disaster after another, and ironically, quite pro-death. Johnson's 180 is completely meaningless. He fully endorses making women second class citizens and helping conservative courts take a hammer to the establishment clause.
Also, Carlson fails to mention which side his ancestors were fighting on. If they were fighting at all and not paying someone to take their place.