2020 watch: Tulsi’s Bad Omen for Dems

Presidential hopeful Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a liberal who supports banning assault weapons and “raising the minimum wage to $15,” is still “too moderate for today’s Democrats,” sighs David Catron at The American Spectator. Which goes to show that the party has “no chance of beating Trump in 2020.” Unlike Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren’s radicalism, Gabbard’s liberalism is “relatively rational.” She is pro-choice but opposes late-term abortion; worries the “secretive” impeachment investigation will polarize America even further; and refuses to “execute a flip-flop on the withdrawal of troops from Syria,” as other Democrats did. Her campaign is likely to prove a “canary in a coal mine” for Democrats: By embracing extremism, the party’s “headed for another disaster.”

Libertarian: Trump Thumps Never Trump

How big is President Trump’s fund-raising haul compared to those of his GOP primary opponents, Joe Walsh, Bill Weld and Mark Sanford? “If you stacked in $1 bills the combined $647,000 third-quarter fundraising haul of the ‘Three Stooges,’ ” muses Reason’s Matt Welch, “it would go up to about 230 feet, or 20 stories.” Do the same for the combined haul of the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee, and the bills rise would rise “more than eight miles high, the absolute upper altitude limit for commercial aircraft.” The lesson: The GOP “is unifying in support for its historically unpopular president.”

Crime beat: DC’s Gift to Bad Guys

The Washington, DC, City Council on Thursday held a hearing on a bill that “would turn the nation’s capital into a mecca for sex tourism,” warn Louise Shelley and Mary Leary at The Washington Examiner. The Community Safety and Health Amendment Act of 2019 might sound “benign,” but it will “deliver neither community safety nor improved health.” That’s because “violence is inherent in prostitution,” and “organized crime” is certain to rise. Plus, the “law is especially poorly conceived”: It would first abolish existing law, then establish a task force to “study” the problem of legalizing prostitution. And the proposed bill “does nothing to ­address the social and medical needs of the most vulnerable.” Society’s weakest lose; the criminals win.

Theologian: Kudos to Rubio’s Family Policy

“For many Americans,” Chad Pecknold worries at The Catholic Herald, “marriage has become something more aspirational than essential.” That’s especially bad for working-class Americans, most of whose children these days “do not enjoy the significant social and economic benefits of marriage.” Kudos, then, to Sen. Marco Rubio, who’s been working to understand and address the crisis. As Rubio has recently written, “stable, two-parent families have been the bedrock of all successful civilizations throughout all of history.” Government can’t force people to get married but it can, says Pecknold, shift “economic policy” to encourage and protect family formation. Laws to make workweeks more stable and expand child tax credits, for example, can help build “an economy which is bridled to serve the familial, political and ecclesial common good.”

Big think: The Return of ‘Geo-Economics’

At The National Interest, Michael Lind heralds the return of “geo-economics” — the idea that economic and national-security debates are ­really “a single dispute about relative national power.” Why? Because the rise of China has taught us that “there can be no simple dividing line ­between civilian and military production,” and “any country which hopes to be an independent great power must be able to obtain and maintain its own state-of-the-art manufacturing.” Beijing sees industrial development as central to its hegemonic dreams. And just as firms can achieve monopoly status, so can nations like China in military-industrial production — including by dominating key areas of global supply chains and cutting off our industrial development. “Free-traders and their libertarian allies” might see no problem with that, but “prudent national strategists will ­ignore” such voices. “From the point of view of national security, industrial interdependence is not a courageous step toward the utopian ideal of a borderless global market” — but “a dangerous risk that must be minimized.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board