Election Watch: From Russia to Racism

The Democrats don’t need to spend even “a dime” on the 2020 presidential election, snarks Frank Miele in RealClearPolitics. “They have almost the entire mainstream media doing free infomercials for them, and with just about” the same level of “reliability as you would expect from those ads for Miss Cleo’s Psychic Friends Network.” Having failed to frame the president as a Kremlin bot, the new line on Trump is that he is a racist. It may not have “the traction of the Russian-treason libel,” but it doesn’t need to. The media “know they just need the public to buy their lie about Trump being a racist for a little over a year” until they “add Trump’s scalp to their closet of Republican trophies.”

From the right: The BDS Movement’s Mask Falls Away

In The American Spectator, Ziva Dahl cheers how, “after 14 years of being lulled by propagandists into believing that their boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign (BDS) is a human rights movement, we’re finally waking up to the deception.” The US House, for example, last month “passed a bill opposing BDS efforts to target and delegitimize the State of Israel,” while the Senate passed a bill, not taken up by the House, allowing state governments and employees to boycott businesses that boycott the Jewish state. Even European governments are passing anti-BDS resolutions. Still, these victories are no reason to get complacent: “History demonstrates that Jews are the proverbial canary in the coal mine, and any country allowing anti-Semitism to flourish is one in which all freedom is imperiled.”

From the left: Bill Clinton’s Shrinking Legacy

In honor of Bill Clinton’s 73rd birthday, The Atlantic’s Todd Purdum digs into Democrats’ debate over the former president’s legacy, which is the “butt of attacks by the current crop of Democratic contenders.” How’s that for a thanks from the “modern Democratic Party” that Clinton “did so much to reshape and build”? Clinton “is no longer the party’s reigning ‘Secretary of Explaining Stuff,’ as Barack Obama famously dubbed him.” Yes Clinton left office with a “65 percent approval rating, the highest of any of his predecessors in a half-century.” But his reputation isn’t exactly the most sterling. “Revelations about the sometimes sloppy conduct of his post-presidential personal and financial life” while campaigning for his wife in 2008 “dimmed his luster further.” His “acknowledged infidelity and serious allegations of predation” make it “much harder to remember the real achievements for which Clinton was once so roundly hailed,” Purdum writes. Happy birthday, Mr. President!

Election desk: Come Home, Blas

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s presidential campaign has become a “dumpster fire” that’s “worth ending,” writes Amanda Luz Henning Santiago of City & State New York. Sure, it’s technically possible to turn around abysmal polling averages before the primaries, but perhaps Hizzoner should “just cool it with the presidential stuff and let, you know, the people polling above 1 percent decide the country’s fate.” Not only has the mayor failed to make the cut for the third Democratic debate, but he also has a lower approval rating than President Trump in New York. He has “become the butt of every joke,” and the jokes don’t “show signs of slowing anytime soon.” Henning Santiago asks the mayor: “So what do you say? Is it time for you to reconsider your run — and come back home?”

Science beat: Media’s Pointless Conservation Freakout

When President Obama watered down elements of the Endangered Species Act, the left and the media permitted him to finish his presidency with his reputation intact as a “caring steward of America’s natural endowments,” recalls Commentary’s Abe Greenwald. Not so for President Trump. Trump’s tweaks to line-item definitions in the law have spawned charges that he is weakening “wildlife protections.” But fact is, Trump’s changes were “a long time coming.” Prioritizing between threatened and endangered species, for example, skims off “gratuitous regulation,” while allowing regulators to factor “the economic costs” of adding a species to the list is also reasonable. Bottom line: The reactions to Trump’s reforms to the act have “far less to do with endangered species than with enduring political hysteria.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board