NYT's Bizarre Double Presidential Endorsement Should Be Good News for Trump Re-Election
President Donald Trump had to love it.
When The New York Times unveiled its Democratic primary endorsement on Sunday, it summed up the divisions driving the campaigns for the party’s 2020 nomination and showed just how badly Democrats are lacking leadership in their effort to unseat the president.
The result was a bizarre, embarrassing, intellectually indefensible endorsement of two candidates — both female, liberal senators representing liberal, Democratic states — and neither with a snowball’s chance of defeating Trump in November.
For the record, the “newspaper of record” decided the best Democratic bet in 2020 was actually two different bets — Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar.
This was the most cowardly endorsement the NY Times has ever made. They’ve never taken both sides.
Are they feeling the financial squeeze from President Trump’s attacks? Is the Democratic Party really that broken?
Will their endorsement(s) mean anything? https://t.co/VtQWjH4SXT
— JD Rucker (@JDRucker) January 20, 2020
The Warren half of the endorsement was more stirring, if only because it kicked off with such a whopper of a “truth.”
“Senator Warren is a gifted storyteller,” The Times noted.
True enough.
First, there was that story about being an American Indian, which Warren maintained for as long as it benefited her career to keep up the pretense.
She dropped it, of course, when the miracles of modern DNA testing made a mockery of the idea.
Then there was that story about being fired from a teaching job because she’d gotten pregnant. That was another Warren statement that had trouble standing up to scrutiny.
Then there was her story Friday that she is the only contender for the Democratic nomination with experience on the “executive side” of the federal government. While no sane person wants former Vice President Joe Biden back in the Oval Office as the nation’s president, there’s no denying he’s been on the “executive side” of things and is still in the running for the Democratic nomination.
Meanwhile, The Times introduced the Klobuchar half of the endorsement by saluting her “Midwestern charisma, grit and sticktoitiveness,” which would sound great if a Doris Day character were the presidential ideal.
The Times then claimed Klobuchar’s “lengthy tenure in the Senate and bipartisan credentials would make her a deal maker (a real one) and uniter for the wings of the party — and perhaps the nation.”
Left unmentioned is the fact that despite Klobuchar’s “lengthy tenure in the Senate” (she’s been there since 2007), it’s a good bet that virtually no American outside of Minnesota would have recognized her name before the primary process started.
That’s not exactly a recommendation for national leadership.
Obviously, what was important to The Times editorial board was maintaining the newspaper’s unchallenged position as the leader of the liberal media – and in this case, that meant pandering to the liberal instinct of identity politics.
With no serious black candidate remaining in the Democratic field (former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick is still technically in it, believe it or not), the newspaper’s editorial board was more or less forced into choosing a woman — and even then it couldn’t decide, so it chose both.
But what The Times really did was highlight just how hard it is to pick a Democrat who can match the record Trump has established over the past three years – with a humming economy, unemployment at historic lows (notably among and Hispanics) and foreign affairs as manageable as they can be expected to be.
This sums up the last three years ↴
President Trump working overtime to defend America.
Democrats working overtime to defame the president.
— Kevin McCarthy (@GOPLeader) January 20, 2020
To say The Times’ decision to “endorse” two candidates was weak-kneed would be complimenting the editorial board for courage it didn’t demonstrate.
The endorsement itself even bordered on incoherence on occasion, with paragraphs like this:
“The history of the editorial board would suggest that we would side squarely with the candidate with a more traditional approach to pushing the nation forward, within the realities of a constitutional framework and a multiparty country. But the events of the past few years have shaken the confidence of even the most committed institutionalists. We are not veering away from the values we espouse, but we are rattled by the weakness of the institutions that we trusted to undergird those values.”
But the real message of the dual endorsement was that not one of the candidates in the Democratic primary field to replace Trump was worthy of the full-throated support of the premier liberal “news” operation in the country.
If even The Times — based in deep-blue New York City — couldn’t bring itself to support one of the Democrats for president, how can anyone expect millions of Democrats throughout the country to do so?
Could anyone expect that dishwater Democratic field to win over substantial numbers of Republican voters, given Trump’s record?
Of course not.
If nothing else, the endorsement from The Times just highlighted how weak the Democratic effort in 2020 is going to be — and how strong the president’s prospects really are.
Donald Trump — and his re-election team — had to love every word.
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