From the left: Biden’s Record Is Dogging Him

Joe Biden “got some good news” with a major poll showing him “trouncing” President Trump by “a staggering 12 points,” yet he should still worry, warns Democratic strategist Max Burns argues in The Hill. Not about gaffes, but about his “ability to defend, or even convincingly explain,” his long legislative record, such as his support for the 1994 crime bill and the 2003 Iraq War authorization. Biden’s much-hyped “electability” is a “comforting myth,” Burns says: The 2020 wannabe fell flat in his past presidential runs, and his campaign staff “are already working with the media to lower expectations for his performance” in Iowa and New Hampshire. “Biden’s struggle to grapple” with a progressive shift in Democratic politics, Burns concludes, “shows how ill-prepared he is to stand a thorough re-examination of his record.”

Foreign desk: Who’s Afraid of Big, Bad BDS?

The anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions has “stalled,” Jonathan Marks argues at Commentary. While academic groups have been a key part of the movement, it “lost big at the American Historical Association in 2016” and even with the lefty Modern Language Association in 2017. This year, it failed again at the American Political Science Association meeting. Of course, “one shouldn’t be complacent”: BDS activists “could have won the day” on its APSA effort were it not for the hard and smart work” of opposing groups such as the Academic Engagement Network and Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.

Religion beat: Williamson ‘Gets It’ on Prayer

Marianne Williamson, whose 2020 campaign has been “widely mocked,” is “either leading or tied” in the polls with “two US congressmen, the mayor of New York and a Democratic power-playing billionaire,” Tiana Lowe reports in the Washington Examiner. Williamson’s “persistent grassroots support” suggests that, far from engaging in a “pie-in-the-sky vanity project,” she has “tapped into a void of representation in the Democratic Party.” When she tweeted that “prayer, visualization, meditation” could help push Hurricane Dorian away from land, “progressives pounced” — yet her “call to prayer” didn’t deserve “contempt or derision.” Prayer may not “literally push the path of a hurricane,” but like “hundreds of millions of religious Americans,” Williamson “understands that prayer posits a kind of power.” She “gets it,” insists Low. “The question is whether her competitors will.”

Campus watch: Colleges Need To Soul-Search

“Higher education is in the middle of multiple, massive disruptions,” observes former university president and current Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse at The Atlantic, but school leaders don’t seem to “grasp the magnitude of the waves of change breaking on their ivy-covered gates.” In an age where “the median American family faces deep uncertainty,” colleges should be asking themselves “harder questions”: Why does “tuition consistently rise faster than inflation?” “Are our students learning enough?” With “the emergence of high-quality, low-cost ways of learning online,” how do we mix “new forms of pedagogy with old”? Then there are “the questions they ought to have started with: What is our mission? Whom do we exist to serve?”

Libertarian: Uncle Sam’s Throwing Away Billions

“ ‘Nation building’ might have fallen off the front pages,” Eric Boehm writes at Reason, “but it remains part of the federal budget” and is helping to fuel billions in needless spending, as Sen. Rand Paul’s 2019 “Waste Book,” points out. Improper Medicare and Medicaid payments are a huge waste, but “taxpayer money” has gone for everything from Pakistani movies to studies of frog-mating calls. In Tunisia, the State Department “spent $2 million to ‘strengthen democratic institutions and processes,’ ” though it already spent “more than $1.4 billion trying to shore up Tunisian democracy” since 2011. “No single spending item is going to solve America’s $22 trillion national debt,” admits Boehm, but “every little bit of wasteful spending makes the tough problems difficult to solve.”

— Compiled by Karl Salzmann