Newsletter in the Strict Sense of the Term

 

Rep. Andy Kim (D-NJ) in the Capitol just after midnight, January 7, 2021, helping to clean up the garbage left by the marauding Yahoos. Photo by Andrew Harnik/AP via NBC News.

Unbelievable torrents of news over the last few days, as if coming down on us from one of those "atmospheric rivers" they have in California now (of which I have a mental picture like a Dr. Seuss drawing, with foamy, roiling blue waves at the border of the stratosphere and lots of careless but energetic fish doing aerial maneuvers).

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In New Jersey, First Lady Tammy Murphy dropped out of the Democratic primary race to replace the abominable Senator Robert Menendez, now under indictment for (among other things) representing Egypt instead of New Jersey on the foreign affairs committee, though he still claims to be running as an independent. The presumptive nominee, Rep. Andy Kim of the suburban district 3 east of Philadelphia, filed immediately after Menendez's indictment, but Murphy seemed inevitable, with her husband's political might behind her and the special Jersey trick known as the County Line, where 19 of the state's 21 counties print their own primary ballots with a top line which the voter can pick to vote for all the candidates endorsed by their party machine at one blow, which generally always wins.

Phil Murphy has been a very good governor, if not as excitingly progressive in his second term as he was in his first, and Mrs. Murphy is clearly a perfectly nice and smart lady and a better than competent political operative, as she's shown in her husband's campaigns, and it's entirely possible she'd have made a perfectly good senator, but New Jersey Democrats just didn't feel good about allowing Phil to make the decision for everybody. Resistance began to make itself shown, as my correspondent @Dick_Nixon was explaining—in the county nominating conventions, Tammy would win except where there was a secret ballot, when people could vote for Kim without fear of reprisal. Kim himself filed a lawsuit claiming that the County Line system violates the state constitution, which has been backed by the state's attorney general.

Anyway, Tammy Murphy has seen that it's not working out, and withdrawn with a gracious statement, and I somehow feel really good about it. Kim will continue his suit against the County Line even though he now benefits it, having inherited all Murphy's top lines—he still thinks, correctly, that the system is not right. It's the democracy, like water, finding its level. Maybe she can run for governor next year when Phil is term-limited out.

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Or maybe she could be a pundit on NBC News. She's plainly far better qualified for that than Ronna Romney McDaniel, whose punditing career came to grief after maybe three days. Everybody's mad at NBC for giving a job to such a wicked person, and a participant at the Michigan end in the famous 2020 fake elector scheme, but I've been looking at the interview she recorded with Kristen Welker for Meet the Press, and I want to know what the hell they thought she was going to do on TV—she's a terrible performer, smug, dreary-voiced, repetitive, defensive, evasive, and obviously dishonest. What Welker should have done (and might have done if the network had given her more time to prepare), as Emptywheel says, just grilled her relentlessly on the details of the phone call where she pressured two Wayne County supervisors to refuse to certify the county vote, until she ran away. Still, the interview Welker did is enough to show that McDaniel is not entertaining and she's not well informed. She makes Meghan McCain look like Christiane Amanpour.

Business Insider reports she's got a good lawyer, and is trying to get the money she signed up for, $600,000 for a two-year contract, plus damages. Looks like that interview, the only work they'll ever get out of her, will end up costing NBC at least $30,000 per minute.

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It was heartening to hear about the Bloomberg poll of six swing states that found Trump's apparent lead over Biden in those states has been dimimishing or disappearing in the Rust Belt three (Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania), though it clearly doesn't prove anything. I was more excited by another piece of it that got less publicity, the questions on tax policy

suggesting very strong majorities for Biden's central proposals on income tax, if not on corporate tax, and weak for Trump's stupid tariff proposals. Now if there was only some way for voters to find out what Biden's proposals on income tax are! A poll out today from CNBC  putting Biden ahead of Trump in the head-to-head nationwide 45-42 as they start feeling better about the economy, even as they give Biden no credit for that, suggest their overwhelmingly favorite thing about Biden is his position on corporate tax (if and only if they think that's an important issue, which just around half of them did), even more than abortion; on income tax, the pollster didn't ask about billionaires or people with incomes of $400K+, and respondents may have remembered imagining that Trump cut theirs, and of course never found out they were wrong:

Anyway, it would be nice to have some way of keeping voters in the loop on stuff like this.