23 Democrats Are Running for President. Do Any of Them Know What They?re Doing?

“But now they’re saying something new about polls,” she said.I first met Williamson, who is 66, five years ago, during her only previous foray into electoral politics. And so now Williamson was doing what every Democratic politician or candidate, successful or otherwise, seemed to be doing in 2019: running for president.I had seen four of them in Iowa in the previous 36 hours, and Pete Buttigieg over the border in Minnesota two nights earlier: Elizabeth Warren in Ames and Iowa Falls on Friday, Amy Klobuchar in Des Moines on Saturday morning, Bernie Sanders in Ames that afternoon and Klobuchar again in Iowa City that evening before I returned to Des Moines to drop in on Williamson. “I’ve voted for many moderate Democrats in general elections,” Ayers told me, including Clinton against Trump. Given Clinton’s defeats in previously blue Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, it has become imperative for candidates from the Midwest (Klobuchar, Buttigieg) to remind everyone that they possess this geographical fairy dust.“I think you all know, I announced my candidacy in the middle of that snowstorm,” Klobuchar told the crowd in Iowa City. “Yep, I could’ve gone inside, but is that what a good Midwesterner would do?” (“Nooo!”) In a Fox News town hall a few days later, Klobuchar tried to give herself the nickname Heartland Amy, though it appears to not yet be sticking.As voters are sounding more like TV pundits, candidates seem more willing than usual to talk like political strategists. For instance, Democrats clearly need to nominate a candidate who is not a white male and who is from the Midwest, preferably from a purple state, and someone whom enough Republicans are down with — or so says the future President Klobuchar.“Hillary Clinton ran a strong race,” Klobuchar said at her rally in Iowa City, drawing cursory applause. He was talking about authenticity, which as a political notion has become an obsession in the Trump years.“Now, interestingly, even though the president is fake in some ways, it is true on another level that what you see is what you get,” Buttigieg said. “And I want to make sure that it’s the one thing I have in common with him.” Robby Mook, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign manager, later told me: “The big idea about Trump was that he was talking plain and telling it like it is, even though he was lying all the time. “This president,” Buttigieg said, “like all grotesque things, is hard to look away from.” It’s important to try, he went on. “We know that it gets in Trump’s head, and Democrats should be all over that,” Plouffe said, adding that appearing on Fox News could be a centerpiece of any “psy-ops” strategy against Trump. “Good to see you, man,” Biden said, patting the shoulders of a guy in a Boston Bruins cap near the entrance.Like the Democratic field he leads, Biden’s stump speech, at the multiple rallies where I heard it, was an unruly mess. When a woman in the crowd whom Biden called on fumed about Trump that “he is an illegitimate president in my mind,” Biden replied: “Would you be my vice-presidential candidate? In 2019, barely anyone noticed — or they noticed much less than they did a few weeks later when the speaker of the House reportedly said she would like to see the president of the United States in prison.It made me think of something that Marianne Williamson used to talk about when she was running for Congress in 2014, about how things that used to be considered exotic have now been incorporated into the political mainstream.