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Oct. 16, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
46:45
Ep. 433 - Are Democrats Finally Moderating?

As Biden crumbles, a couple candidates try their hand at moderation. Then, a new poll shows Democrats clamoring for a candidate who isn’t even running, impeachment falls apart, and we celebrate International Pronouns Day! Date: 10-16-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Democrats open rhetorical fire on Liz Warren at last night's presidential primary debate, which clashed with Beto O'Rourke's promise to confiscate, or rather, mandatorily buy back every gun in America.
But as Biden crumbles, a couple candidates try their hand at moderation.
We will examine the winners and losers.
Then, a new poll shows Democrats are clamoring for a candidate who isn't even running.
Yet!
Impeachment falls apart and we celebrate International Pronouns Day.
Yes, we do.
All that and more.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Michael Knowles Show.
For the record on this International Pronouns Day, our preferred pronouns are we, us, and Matt Walsh taught us this because we realized that when everyone refers to us as us, then nobody can ever disagree with us because we are one.
And that is our pronoun.
We have got to get to this Democratic presidential debate.
It was a surprisingly interesting one.
Not really on the surface.
On the surface, it was kind of the same petty sniping as always.
But the central feature of this debate was the crumbling of the Biden campaign and a number of people leaping to try to catch that moderate or more moderate lane.
We will examine if anyone can do it and if there's even such thing as a moderate in the 2020 Democratic presidential Primary.
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The Democratic Party is trying to figure out who it is during these presidential primary debates.
The big clips, the big highlights that you see, we'll go through some of them.
It's all the sniping, Amy Klobuchar and Liz Warren, and Kamala Harris gets some shots in there at Liz Warren.
A lot of people going after Liz Warren.
Then you got Buttigieg and Beto going after each other, and that's all very interesting.
The central fact of the debate is that Biden is falling apart.
His polling is collapsing.
His ability to stand on stage is collapsing.
Bernie Sanders had a heart attack a week and a half ago.
He seemed much, much more lucid and vibrant and energetic than Joe Biden did.
And to our knowledge, Joe Biden hasn't had any heart attacks.
This was all about Joe Biden.
He was saying things that didn't make a lot of sense.
He was kind of losing his train of thought.
He was pushing different analogies together.
It just didn't inspire confidence that this is the guy.
At one point, Biden was explaining his economic plans, and he said he was going to stop people from clipping coupons in the stock market.
What I talked about is how you get things done.
And the way to get things done is take a look at the tax code right now.
The idea, we have to start rewarding work, not just wealth.
I would eliminate the capital gains tax.
I would raise the capital gains tax to the highest rate of 39.5%.
I would double it.
Because guess what?
Why in God's name should someone who's clipping coupons in the stock market make, in fact, pay a lower tax rate than someone who, in fact, is, like I said, a schoolteacher and a firefighter?
It's ridiculous, and they pay a lower tax.
So none of that is true.
Nothing, he said, even comes close to approaching truth.
I don't even know how you judge the truth value of the statement, clipping coupons in the stock market, because people do not clip coupons in the stock market.
I guess they would be really...
Just really good, frugal stockbrokers, like if there were some coupon to get a better price on some portion of a company.
It doesn't make any sense.
I think what he was trying to say is people gambling in the stock market.
That's a frequent analogy you hear from the left.
And that it's unfair that people who are gambling are paying a lower tax rate than their secretaries.
This is a line Warren Buffett's used, this line, it just isn't true.
It is not true at all.
Where does it come from?
It's because the capital gains tax rate is lower than the income tax rate For some people, actually.
For people who, you know, if you're talking about your secretary or you're talking about the janitor is paying a higher tax rate than the stockbroker or the hedge fund manager, that perhaps isn't true anyway, even on the income tax rate.
But what happens is for a lot of people who work in finance, they get a salary, but then they get most of their money as a bonus or...
When you're talking about the millionaire-billionaire class, they're paying capital gains taxes on their investment income.
So you're not even talking about bonuses, you're not talking about income, you're just talking about money that's in the market, that's in investments, and then the money that you make out of those investments, you pay a lower tax rate.
Even on that, that is money that has already been taxed at the corporate level.
So even that argument is not true.
But the way this gets interpreted is that Billionaires are paying less money in taxes than their secretaries.
That is never true.
That's not even close to true.
The wealthy in this country pay virtually all of the taxes.
The top 10% pay the vast majority of taxes in this country.
The top 1% pay a lion's share of taxes in this country.
I mean, half of the country doesn't pay any taxes at all in terms of federal income taxes.
So this whole argument is bogus.
The problem with Biden is not that he's making a bogus argument.
Everybody was up there.
It's that he wasn't even making the argument well, and he was confusing his words.
And then here's the knockout punch.
They brought up Ukraine.
Anderson Cooper brings up Ukraine, and Joe Biden incredibly lies on camera again and says he never discussed Ukraine with his son.
Mr.
Vice President, as you said, your son Hunter today gave an interview, admitted that he made a mistake and showed poor judgment by serving on that board in Ukraine.
Did you make a mistake by letting him?
You were the point person on Ukraine at the time, if you can answer.
Look, my son's statement speaks for itself.
I did my job.
I never discussed a single thing with my son about anything having to do with Ukraine.
No one has indicated I have.
We've always kept everything separate.
Even when my son was the Attorney General of the state of Delaware, we never discussed anything.
So there'd be no potential conflict.
Okay, there's a lot of confusion here.
First of all, he says, he's doubling down on a statement that he made that no one has ever suggested that Joe Biden talked with Ukraine, or talked with his son about Ukraine, and there's no evidence of that at all.
The trouble is, someone has suggested that.
The person who suggested that was Hunter Biden in a New Yorker profile in July, and he actually reiterated that statement on Good Morning America on ABC News two days ago.
Did you and your father ever discuss Ukraine?
No.
As I said, the only time was after a news account.
It wasn't a discussion in any way.
There's no but to this.
No, we never did.
What?
Hold on.
Hold on.
You say, did you ever discuss Ukraine?
He goes, no.
Just one time.
There was one time we did.
Oh, shoot, they told me not to say that.
No, there's no but.
It wasn't even a discussion.
Sure, I said something, he said something, we were talking about it.
But that's not, I wouldn't call that a discussion.
It was more of a discourse.
It was more of a colloquy.
Next question, please.
Pass.
Next question.
Joe Biden, even in his answer, by the way, he says, we never talked about Ukraine, even when my son was the Attorney General of Delaware.
That's not the son we're talking about, Joe.
His son, Beau Biden, his late son, Beau Biden, was the Attorney General of Delaware.
The son who was on the Ukrainian Energy Board was Hunter Biden.
And Hunter Biden says he did talk about it.
And Hunter Biden goes on, because Good Morning America, to their credit, actually pushed him on it.
They said, hold on, you're saying you didn't talk about it, then you're saying you did talk about it.
By the way, what were you doing on the board in the first place?
Your dad said, I hope you know what you're doing.
I hope you know what you're doing.
And you said, I do?
And I said, I do.
And that was literally the end of our discussion.
Why?
Because my dad was vice president of the United States.
There's literally nothing as a young man or as a full-grown adult that my father in some way hasn't had influence over.
Because it does not serve either one of us.
When he said, I hope you know what you're doing, what did he think you were doing?
Well, he read the press reports that I joined the board of Burisma, which was a Ukrainian natural gas company.
And there's been a lot of misinformation about me, not about my dad.
Nobody buys that.
But it buys this idea that I was unqualified to be on the board.
What were your qualifications to be on the board of Burisma?
Well, I was vice chairman of the board of Amtrak for five years.
I was the chairman of the board of the UN World Food Program.
I was a lawyer for Bois Schiller Flexner, one of the most prestigious law firms in the world.
You didn't have any extensive knowledge about natural gas or Ukraine itself, though.
No, but I think that I had as much knowledge as anybody else who was on the board, if not more.
Yeah, this is not going well for Hunter Biden, because he's right.
He probably didn't have any less knowledge than anyone else on the board.
This is a crooked board.
Generally, that's what boards are, certainly in oligarchic countries like Ukraine and corrupt countries like Ukraine.
They say, what previous experience did you have?
What qualified you to be on the board of this Ukrainian energy company while your father was vice president?
He goes, well, I was on the board of Amtrak.
You know that other company that has a relationship to the federal government that my father famously travels on so much that they call him Amtrak Joe?
Yeah, I was on that.
So what are you calling me a nepotistic crook for?
Yeah, and before that I was on another board and, hey, look, I did have one real job.
I worked for Boyd Schiller, which is maybe the most famous Democratic lobbying law firm in the country.
Okay.
All right.
Doesn't acquit himself very well here.
So Biden collapses.
On stage in real time.
Two ways to respond to this for the Democratic Party and for the candidates.
They can either remain hardline progressives or they can try to take Biden's place in the moderate lane.
Because that moderate lane now is falling apart, so there is an opening here.
I was wondering, I thought, why on earth was the LGBTQ town hall on Friday?
What was the purpose of this?
And then it occurred to me, people were tweeting about this, They had that LGBTQ crazy town hall on Friday because then it allowed the Democrats to look more moderate at this debate just a week later, less than a week later, while not having to discuss any of the LGBT issues and the pronouns and the genders.
So there was a real opening, and I think the Democratic Party tried to make sure it looked this way.
An opening for a moderate.
Now, some candidates can't take that.
Bernie Sanders is never going to be a moderate.
He went full bore leftist last night.
He said on the leftist issue par excellence, climate change, he said it's the greatest threat that the planet has ever faced.
This planet faces the greatest threat in its history from climate change.
And the Green New Deal that I have advocated will create up to 20 million jobs as we move away from fossil fuel to energy efficiency and sustainable energy.
All right, the weather, which may or may not increase in temperature slightly a little bit over the next century, is the greatest threat the planet has ever faced, says Bernie Sanders, the man who probably never heard of the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction event, three-quarters of life on Earth wiped out.
He probably hasn't heard of that one, so he's just, it's a little historical ignorance for him.
That's the far left, that's about as far left as you can go with Bernie Sanders.
Beto O'Rourke, Also trying to play into that left lane.
Beto's campaign is falling apart.
I mean, there's pretty much no reason he should be at this debate anymore.
And so he's been trying to signal that he's as left as they come over the past few months.
This is after a career where he played himself off mostly as a moderate in Congress.
And so he obviously doesn't believe in anything, but he felt leftism was going to bring him all the way.
It looks like that's not going to work.
So he's one last try.
He's going to How exactly are you going to force people to give up their weapons?
You don't even know who has those weapons.
Look, we're going to make sure that the priority is saving the lives of our fellow Americans.
I think almost everyone on this stage agrees that it's not right.
And as president would seek to ban the sale of AR-15s and AK-47s.
Those are weapons of war.
They were designed to kill people effectively, efficiently on a battlefield.
To be clear, exactly how are you going to take away weapons from people who do not want to give them up and you don't know where they are?
If someone does not turn in an AR-15 or an AK-47, one of these weapons of war, or brings it out in public and brandishes it in an attempt to intimidate, as we saw when we were at Kent State recently, then that weapon will be taken from them.
If they persist, there will be other consequences from law enforcement.
Other consequences.
So we're going for it.
I'm Beto.
Hell yeah, we're going to take your AR-15.
We're going door to door.
We're going to get the cops to come and steal all your guns and completely undermine the Constitution.
One thing that really bothers me, this was probably the highlight of the night in terms of Orwellian language.
Every aspect of this gun debate is dishonest, so there's no such thing as a mandatory buyback.
The government didn't sell you your gun in the first place, so it's not going to buy it back from you.
I guess you could try to buy guns from people if you're the government, but if it's a mandatory buyback, then you ain't buying it.
It's not like it's a free exchange where money is changing hands.
It's the government confiscating your weapons.
Mandatory buyback.
Absolutely outrageous.
Same thing with weapons of war.
All weapons are weapons of war.
All of military or all of firearm technology advances because of war, because of armed conflict.
That is the impetus for improving firearm technology.
That's been true since the dawn of time and will remain true in the future.
And then the other one is assault weapon.
All weapons are assault weapons.
All weapons are assault weapons.
They are designed to assault you.
If a weapon is not designed to assault you, it's not a weapon.
Like this leftist tears tumbler is not a weapon because it's not meant to assault you.
It's meant to receive the leftist tears after you have been assaulted by facts and logic.
So that language just goes on and on throughout the entire debate.
Beto is running on it.
It's not going anywhere.
He probably won't even be at the next debate.
Pete Buttigieg, however, sees Bernie's going hard left.
Beto's going hard left.
Liz Warren doesn't know exactly where she wants to be.
So Buttigieg sees an opening because at the early part of this primary, he was doing pretty well.
He was getting some press because he was the reasonable one.
He was at least pretending to be a Christian.
He was at least pretending to be moderate.
He was at least pretending to be a good old boy from the Midwest.
And so Buttigieg takes on Beto O'Rourke head-on and pretty much wipes the floor with him on the question of guns.
Let's follow their inspiration and lead and not be limited by the polls and the consultants and the focus groups.
Mayor Buttigieg, your response.
Let's do what's right before we have time to do what's right.
Mayor Buttigieg?
The problem isn't the polls.
The problem is the policy.
And I don't need lessons from you on courage, political or personal.
Everyone on this stage is determined to get something done.
Everyone on this stage recognizes, or at least I thought we did, that the problem is not other Democrats who don't agree with your particular idea of how to handle this.
The problem is the National Rifle Association and their enablers in Congress, and we should be united in taking the fight for them.
Poor Beto.
You can see it in his eyes.
He just thinks, oh man, I totally walked into that.
Because he's saying, we need the courage to steal people's guns and undermine the Constitution.
And there's Pete Buttigieg who comes in.
He's one of two people on that stage who's ever served in the military.
So I don't need lessons from you about courage.
Totally wipes the floor with him.
So Buttigieg trying to take that moderate lane.
The other person on stage who was gunning for that moderate lane was...
Amy Klobuchar.
And Amy Klobuchar showed up to this debate with one goal in mind, and that was to destroy Elizabeth Warren.
Warren Delenda Est.
Warren must be destroyed.
She even showed up wearing the exact same outfit that Liz Warren was wearing, which was a little coincidental and slightly creepy.
And she just kept up her attacks on Warren all night long.
I want to give a reality check here to Elizabeth because no one on this stage wants to protect billionaires.
Not even the billionaire wants to protect billionaires.
We just have different approaches.
Your idea is not the only idea.
I appreciate Elizabeth's work.
But again, the difference between a plan and a pipe dream is something that you can actually get done.
And we can get this public option done and we can take on the pharmaceutical companies and bring down the prices.
Get her!
Drag her, Amy!
Yes, Queen!
I don't know all this lingo, but that's basically what I was feeling when I saw this happen.
Especially because Amy Klobuchar is about as lame a candidate as you can possibly get.
She tries to make these same jokes over and over.
She doesn't know how to deliver them.
She's got this voice that doesn't sound really inspiring.
And she speaks in a really kind of realistic way, at least relative to the Democratic Party.
So she's almost certainly not going anywhere, but she did have a relatively good debate.
And she's hitting Warren on the unreality of her proposals.
She's hitting Warren on Warren not being honest about how she's going to pay for everything.
At the same time that Warren's getting hit from the left on not being honest about how she's going to pay for everything.
So it's a good time.
She's vulnerable and Club HR is trying to take that lane.
Warren herself, for that matter, I think I'm going to go.
left, she's seeing it more on the moderate side.
And so she gets into an exchange with Kamala Harris, Kamala, who's running far to the left, Kamala, who's a total joke.
And she's saying that we need to kick Trump off Twitter.
It's a matter of national importance that Twitter, a company, kicks the president of the United States off of its platform.
And are you Senator Warren going to go for that?
Liz Warren backs off it and Kamala just tries to nail her on it.
Because here we have Donald Trump, who has 65 million Twitter followers, and is using that platform as the President of the United States to openly intimidate witnesses, to threaten witnesses, to obstruct justice.
And he and his account should be taken down.
Okay, so she's, you gotta do this, you gotta go after her, okay?
It was a good hit.
It made Kamala look like the tougher, more leftist one.
Liz Warren didn't want to respond to this.
The trouble with Kamala, though, is when she thinks she did something sort of well, she just hammers it ad nauseum until it seems disingenuous and she loses any credit that she would have gotten for the hit in the first place.
She goes on.
So, look, I don't just want to push Donald Trump off Twitter.
I want to push him out of the White House.
That's our job.
Join me in saying that his Twitter account should be shut down.
Let's figure out why it is that we have had laws on the books for antitrust.
You can't say your corporate responsibility if it doesn't apply to everyone.
So, she's pushing for that.
Liz Warren is moderating.
And then Kamala really...
Really just shows herself to be the weak candidate that she is.
On paper, Kamala Harris could have been a killer candidate.
She could have been a real top-tier contender.
But she's just not good at presenting herself with any kind of sincerity to the American people.
Everything feels contrived.
Everything feels like she's trying to be a little too cool.
And her conclusion, her big inspirational statement of this debate was, with regard to President Trump, dude gotta go.
This is a crisis of Donald Trump's making, and it is on a long list of crises of Donald Trump's making, and that's why dude gotta go, and when I am commander-in-chief, we will stop this madness.
Dude gotta go.
You have nothing to fear but fear itself.
We will go to the moon, not because it is easy, but because it is hard.
Mr.
Gorbachev, tear down this wall!
Dude, gotta go!
One of these things is not like the other in the great history of presidential rhetoric, and that would be Kamala Harris' attempts.
So she's not a serious candidate.
She needs to go home and work on her skills for four or eight years, and maybe she can try again.
She's got a good resume, but she's really bad on stage.
Then you had, you had to ask yourself this question.
They're trying to moderate Amy Klubuchar, Pete Buttigieg, even Elizabeth Warren.
They're trying to moderate.
Are they moderate?
And you realize, no, the parties are actually too far apart now.
The conservative movement and the Republican Party is now much more conservative.
The Democratic Party is much more leftist.
So we're thrilled when a candidate says, hmm, maybe, maybe one of the biggest tech platforms shouldn't censor the president of the United States.
We're thrilled.
We're like, oh, thank you so much.
How great.
We're thrilled when a candidate says, maybe we shouldn't steal all of Americans' guns.
We think, oh, you're so moderate.
Tulsi Gabbard has been getting a lot of credit for being the moderate in the race.
She's not.
She's not.
She came out last night and supported the universal basic income, which is a massive, massive expansion of the welfare system like you've never seen before in America, and that would get every single American hooked on the teat of government.
She endorses it just flippantly last night.
I agree with my friend Andrew Yang.
I think universal basic income is a good idea to help provide that security so that people can have the freedom to make the kinds of choices that they want to see.
That's the moderate.
Welfare for all.
That's the big moderate.
And then it's not just on economic issues.
Tulsi Gabbard's getting a lot of credit because she's a moderate on abortion, according to today's Democratic Party.
But today, a moderate on abortion is just Hillary Clinton in 2008.
It's even a little more radical than that.
Tulsi Gabbard is saying that maybe we shouldn't kill babies after...
26 weeks after they're so obviously babies and after they can obviously survive outside of the womb.
But before that, fair game.
You can kill whoever you want.
This is often one of the most difficult decisions that a woman will ever have to make, and it's unfortunate to see how in this country it has for so long been used as a divisive political weapon.
I agree with Hillary Clinton on one thing, disagree with her on many others, but when she said abortion should be safe, Legal and rare.
I think she's correct.
We see how the consequences of laws that you're referring to can often lead to a dangerous place as we've seen them as their past in other countries where a woman who has a miscarriage I do, however, think that there should be some restrictions in place.
I support codifying Roe v.
Wade while making sure that during the third trimester abortion is not an option unless the life or severe health consequences of a woman are at risk.
Okay, so hey, look, that's something.
All the other candidates support abortion basically up until the minute you're born.
The law in New York, signed by Andy Cuomo, is that you can kill a baby as it's being born, and that's perfectly legal.
And in Virginia, the governor of Virginia said you can kill a baby after.
He's been born.
So, I guess Tulsi is relatively moderate on this, but that's not moderation.
It's also, I love this argument.
This is what they always say.
Abortion is one of the most difficult decisions a woman will ever have to make.
First of all, the vast majority of women don't get abortions.
But plenty of women do get abortions.
I know people who have gotten abortions.
Good friends of mine have gotten abortions.
Most of them, to my knowledge, deeply regret it now.
That's another story for another time.
But it's not a decision that a woman has to make.
You don't have to kill your baby.
It's like saying not killing your mother-in-law is one of the most difficult decisions you ever have to make.
It would be maybe convenient, maybe you have somewhere an impetus to do it, but it's always wrong.
It is always wrong.
And it is just as ridiculous to talk about the difficult decision and the right to choose to kill your mother-in-law as it is to talk about the difficult decision and the right to kill your own child.
It's actually, I think it's probably less ridiculous to talk about the mother-in-law thing.
That is a ridiculous and silly argument.
If you can't kill the baby at 26 weeks, if it's wrong to kill the baby at 26 weeks, long after it can live outside the womb, by the way, because technology has advanced so much, you've got babies living outside the womb at 20 weeks now.
So you're talking six weeks after that.
That's a lot.
But if it's wrong to kill the baby at 26 weeks, why is it right to kill the baby at 25 weeks?
Well, Michael, it's so blurry.
It's just, it's a great mystery of when life begins.
No, there's no mystery.
We know when life begins.
The little thing in there is moving around.
It's got a heartbeat at 10 or 15 days.
Well, it's just, but when, you know, it's just so complicated.
It's not complicated.
It's the same little baby at 26 weeks as it is at 25 weeks.
How about 24 weeks?
23, 22, 21.
You know, one of the most insane lines of the night, Cory Booker, I don't even want to give Cory Booker airtime, Cory Booker said that the right to an abortion, the right to kill babies, is one of the most sacrosanct ideals in the country.
Those are his exact words.
He said the right to kill a baby is a fundamental ideal.
He said sacrosanct, sacred, to kill a baby.
And I thought, is there any way you could make that argument?
If something were a sacrosanct ideal in this country, obviously it's never sacred to kill a baby, only in really awful, terrible pagan religions, but...
Where do we get our sacrosanct ideals?
Well, often we look to the Declaration of Independence, which says that we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they're endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
It doesn't say that men get those rights at 26 weeks, or 27 weeks, or 25 weeks.
It says they are created with those rights.
When are you created?
You're not created at 26 weeks.
At 26 weeks, you're the same entity, the same being that you were at 25 weeks.
24, 23, 22.
You are created at your conception.
That's what the words mean.
Not that they've read the Declaration of Independence any time recently.
We've got a lot more to get to.
We've got to get to a secret candidate in the race who's polling better than anybody right now in the entire Democratic primary.
Then we've got to get to impeachment.
And then, of course, we have to get to International Pronouns Day.
But you've got to go to dailywire.com to do that.
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You get me, you get the Andrew Klavan show, you get the Ben Shapiro show, you get the Matt Wall show, you get to ask questions in the mailbag.
You get Another Kingdom, which is now the third episode is out, just was released this Monday.
Subscribers get it on Friday.
It's really good at getting a lot of good reviews, and thank you for the notes, for those of you who have sent in nice notes about it.
You get everything, and you get the Leftist Tears Tumblr.
Go to dailywire.com.
We'll be right back with a lot more.
Who won the debate?
There's no real winner, I would say.
Liz Warren did very well.
She is still leading in the field.
Of the people who really helped themselves during the debate, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar did a lot of good for themselves.
I think Amy Klobuchar is still so unlikable.
She's still so distant from the electorate and the audience that she doesn't really have a chance.
Pete Buttigieg is excellent on the campaign trail and really understands how to connect to people.
And I think he's the biggest jerk in the whole race and a scold and a heretic and an absolute jerk.
But credit where credit's due, he's a pretty good candidate.
So he helped himself a lot.
Nevertheless, these candidates, and Bernie helped himself by looking very energetic, which he did.
None of these candidates are the clear cut winners.
None of these candidates are None of these candidates are obviously the person who's going to get the nomination.
And the reason I know this is because of a recent poll came out from Boston Herald and Franklin Pierce University survey.
This was released on Monday.
It showed a three-way tie for the top spot in New Hampshire.
More or less a three-way tie.
Elizabeth Warren at 25% support, former Vice President Joe Biden at 24%, Bernie Sanders at 22%.
So mostly a tie, though Liz Warren is at the top of that.
There was a candidate, however, who came in at 26%.
The reason that candidate didn't register right away is because the candidate is not running for president.
That candidate is, drum roll, Michelle Obama.
Michelle Obama, if she jumped into the race, according to this one poll in New Hampshire, she would get 26% of support from likely Democratic primary voters in New Hampshire.
And Warren and Biden would be at 20% and Sanders would be at 15% if Michelle Obama got into the race.
This has long been floated as a possibility.
Michelle Obama is very well liked.
She comes from an era that Democrats more or less enjoy and are nostalgic for.
She checks intersectional boxes, which is apparently important to the Democratic primary voters in 2020.
Now, if she actually did jump into the race, those numbers would drop very quickly because all candidates are better hypothetically than they are in reality.
It's like that Paul Simon song, Kodachrome.
Everything looks worse in black and white.
That's always the line.
And when I think back on all the girls I knew in high school, if I put them all together for one night, I know they'd never match my sweet imagination.
Everything looks worse in black and white.
And so if you get the candidates who are now in this vivid color in your imagination, when you put them on the campaign trail, everything's black and white.
Everything's very stark.
Everything's very clear.
And so Michelle Obama's numbers would drop.
But what it suggests that voters, at least in New Hampshire, are yearning for her Is that there is a sense, they're starting to come to their senses, that you need a more moderate candidate.
You don't really want candidates who think there are 750 genders, and Julian Castro who thinks that we should have abortion rights for men, and Beto O'Rourke who says we're going to take away all of your guns, definitely not New Hampshire.
You don't really want that.
It's like, people do this in meetings.
People do this in group settings sometimes.
They just go with the madness of the crowd.
So if everyone's talking in a particular way, you just want to fit in.
I mean, you want to be a part of that and so you kind of go along.
Even though you don't really believe it, maybe the guy who's telling you doesn't really believe it, maybe nobody really believes it.
I think you're starting to see that with the leftism of the Democratic Party.
You're seeing them very slowly.
It takes them a long time.
But very slowly coming to the realization that this is not going to play in Peoria.
And we wouldn't really want it to even if we could.
That creates a yearning for somebody like Michelle Obama.
But...
It's a yearning that it's looking for a real candidate.
It's not really looking for Michelle Obama.
It's looking for a real candidate to come in and fill that lane.
So far, no one has.
A lot of people are comparing this election in 2020 to the Republicans in 2016.
On the surface, there are a lot of similarities.
You know, there are so many candidates.
In 2016, there were 17 Republicans.
Now, we're down to 12 Democrats, but there are so many more who are running.
And The idea being that in 2016 the Republicans thought they could beat Hillary Clinton and in 2020 the Democrats think they can beat Trump and so everybody is running.
But I don't think that comparison holds at all.
In 2016 you had really good Republican candidates.
Almost all of the candidates were really top-tier candidates.
Trump kind of came out of nowhere for most political observers, but Ted Cruz, top-tier candidate.
Marco Rubio in any other election would have been a serious contender.
Even John Kasich was a very successful governor, kind of annoying personality on the campaign trail, but successful governor.
Chris Christie, one of the most popular governors in the country.
The list goes on and on.
Who do we have in 2020 for the Democrats?
It's kind of a bunch of nobodies.
Julian Castro is like truly a nobid, former Secretary of HUD and a mayor of San Antonio.
Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, population 100,000.
Amy Klobuchar, Tim O'Brien, you remember Tim O'Brien?
Me neither.
Eric Swalwell?
Those are not comparable fields.
I actually think the greater similarity for the Democrats in 2020 is not the Republicans in 2016, it's Republicans in 2012.
2012, you had a lot of Republicans running.
Mitt Romney eventually got the nomination.
That went great, didn't it?
You had all the serious candidates stay off the table because they didn't think it was going to be possible to unseat Barack Obama.
The incumbent has a great advantage, and so it was mostly a clown show for 2012.
I think that's sort of what you're seeing in 2020.
And if certain Democrats want to get in the race, a Michelle Obama, for instance, or somebody like her, I think they're going to wait until they have a clearer shot in 2024.
And some of my evidence for this is the Democrats, again, like the madness of crowds, are trying to convince themselves that Trump is going to be impeached and removed from office.
This impeachment thing is falling apart right now.
Nancy Pelosi just gave a press conference in which she completely forgot the reason that she's ostensibly trying to impeach Trump.
Our founders had very deep suspicion about foreigners interfering in our government and, again, in our elections.
And the Imoluments Clause was put there specifically for that purpose, to protect us from any influence of foreign governments.
So the fact that we would be here in an inquiry that relates to the president asking a foreign government to help the president in his reelection By granting or withholding the timing of military assistance that had been voted on by the Congress has so many violations in it.
It undermines our national security.
We were sending that military assistance because of Ukraine needing that vis-a-vis Russia.
All roads seem to lead to Putin with the president, though.
Isn't it so?
All roads seem to lead to Putin.
No, no, no, Nancy, Nancy, that was the last time you were trying to impeach Trump.
Last time you tried to impeach Trump, you said he was colluding with the Russians and Vladimir Putin.
This time, you're saying he's colluding with the Ukrainians, who are Russia's sworn enemy.
And how did that happen?
I don't know, you haven't really explained that, but you've got to keep your impeachment stories straight, especially when the two stories contradict one another.
Yeah, Trump is cozying up to Russia.
Or is it Ukraine?
That's one of those two.
Yeah, he's cozying up to the US. Or is it the USSR? I forget.
One of those two.
Anyway, he's a bad guy.
We're going to impeach him.
That's what they're saying.
It wasn't Stormy Daniels.
He cozyed up to Stormy Daniels, quite literally, I guess, in that case.
It's falling apart.
I mean, even she can't keep the story straight.
Now they're saying that they might not take a vote on impeachment anytime soon.
And this is why I haven't taken the impeachment inquiry very seriously.
They are not following any sort of constitutional process right now in the House.
If you want to impeach a president, you got to vote for it.
You got to vote.
You got to go on the record.
This is why Nancy Pelosi isn't saying they're impeaching the president.
What she's saying is, we're launching a formal official impeachment inquiry to begin to inquire as to whether or not we should ask people to lunch to talk about taking a vote on whether to impeach the president.
That's not real.
That's not a real thing.
They want to get the credit for impeachment without actually having to go through the difficult political rigmarole.
There are polls out.
There's a Gallup poll out that shows the majority of people now support impeachment and removing Trump from office.
There was the Fox News poll that said the majority of people support impeachment.
So why aren't the Democrats moving full steam ahead?
I think the reason is they know...
They know how this is going to play out.
Public opinion moves back and forth very quickly, especially on highly politicized questions like impeachment, especially in the heat of an election campaign.
And they just know that it's going to put them in a politically vulnerable position because they don't have anything.
Maybe they'll find something.
I'm not saying that Trump is totally squeaky clean on everything.
I'm sure he's got, there's a lot of things they could get him on in his taxes or in this or that.
You know, you could indict a ham sandwich.
But does any of that rise to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors?
Does any of that become an impeachable offense?
And are they going to be able to say with a straight face to the American people, yes, we're going to impeach the president and overturn the 2016 election in the one year or less before another presidential election because the president had a phone call with Ukraine that you've all already read.
That is fine.
No, probably not.
So that's falling apart.
And this gets to not just a political question.
But a cultural question, which is the internal logic of our politics is falling apart because, more broadly, we have difficulty speaking to one another.
We have difficulty understanding our own history, our own constitutional processes.
We're just not as smart as we used to be in our self-government and in our republic.
This seems to happen to republics.
Republics and democracies become decadent.
They become a little soft intellectually and spiritually and institutionally and that seems to be happening.
You see it probably most clearly today because today is a holiday Today is International Pronouns Day.
You know every day on Twitter seems to be a different kind of day.
It's like Cheeseburger Day or Sibling Day.
Well, this month is the second month of the year dedicated to the LGBTQ sexual revolution movement.
And so we've now got a sixth of the year dedicated to 4.5% of the population.
Half of whom, I suspect, don't buy into any of this ridiculous nonsense.
It's International Pronouns Day, and maybe a lot of people aren't acknowledging it, but Julian Castro, Democratic candidate for president, sure is.
He put a tweet out.
He said, using someone's correct pronouns and giving your own isn't difficult.
I'm Julian Castro.
He, him, el.
Should be he, him, his.
But he made it L because he can't keep his languages straight because he's not so good at thinking.
He's not so good with the stuff between the ears.
He goes on, it takes one extra breath to help people feel seen and respected.
I think that's worth it.
Hashtag pronouns day.
What he said here, obviously everything is total nonsense, but what he said at the very top is explicitly incorrect.
He said using someone's correct pronouns.
Meaning, if you call a man who identifies as a woman, she, according to Julian Castro, that's correct.
But of course it's not correct.
He remains a he even if he puts on a dress.
So his correct pronoun would be he.
To misgender him would be to use the new politically correct transgender pronouns.
This is an argument over what truth is itself.
Is truth objective reality?
Or is truth your subjective feelings that change every single day?
That is now a debate.
This debate would have been unthinkable.
Unthinkable.
A year ago, or two years ago.
Now it is a debate that is being had at the presidential level.
International Pronouns Day, somebody put this together, has a website.
They say it seeks to make respecting, sharing, and educating about personal pronouns commonplace.
Fair enough.
They go on.
The International Pronouns Day website is actually much more honest about this.
They don't use really loaded terms like correct pronouns to refer to incorrect pronouns, but they explain the logic.
is basic to human dignity.
Being referred to by the wrong pronouns, right?
There we go.
Now you get that language.
The wrong pronouns, as you feel it, particularly affects transgender and gender non-conforming people.
Together we can transform society to celebrate people's multiple intersecting identities.
This is more or less an honest take, and it shows you the stakes of this.
They're saying that referring to people by the pronouns they determine for themselves is basic to human dignity.
That is not true.
true.
That's the opposite of true.
They're saying indulging people's fantasies and lying to people is basic to human dignity.
No, that's an affront to human dignity.
What is basic to human dignity is treating people with respect.
And treating people with respect means not lying to them.
And not treating them like children.
And not condescending.
And not patronizing.
But treating them as you would like to be treated.
Which is to be told the truth.
Together we can transform society.
That's what they want to do.
They want to transform society.
This is not just some kooks on Twitter.
This is not just some random website.
This is debate being had at the presidential level.
That is the stake.
Those are the stakes, rather.
The transformation of society.
Not just raising taxes or lowering taxes.
Not even just banning one gun and another gun.
Not even just saying we're going to protect human life at this week and not at that week.
This transformation will get down to the nature of reality itself and who has the right to define it and who has the right to pervert it and who has the right to declare that any sort of truth exists at all.
That's the stakes.
We'll see how that plays out in the next seven Democratic presidential primary debates, and then, of course, in 2020.
That's our show.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
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