2020 watch: Dems Memory-Hole Their Records

“Rarely have we seen an entire primary field of candidates scrambling to renounce all their past identities and agendas — and to do so unapologetically, abruptly and vehemently,” National Review’s Victor Davis Hanson writes of the 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls. Apparently, all of the candidates believe that the way to the top is to take back everything they once said they believed in when it comes to issues like immigration and law and order. The walk-backs by the likes of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and Cory Booker are often “quite stunning,” says Hanson. They and the others seem to think that “no one will remember what they once promoted anyway” and that “everyone will give them a pass when, if nominated, they run in the general election on some of what they just renounced in primaries.”

Conservative: Slavery Broke America’s Promise

The New York Times’ “1619 Project” attempts to chronicle America’s past through the “history, legacy and modern ramifications of slavery,” The Washington Examiner’s Philip Klein notes. But one undiscussed ramification is “the extent to which the legacy of slavery effectively made it impossible to limit the size and scope of the federal government.” Although “apologists for the Confederacy” argue that the Civil War was fought over states’ rights rather than slavery, this claim is a “pernicious myth” that southerners adopted to excuse their pro-slavery and pro-segregation views. They thus forever tainted the doctrine of states’ rights and limited government — a setback conservatives and limited-government advocates are forced to grapple with in 2019.

Urban beat: Where Has Frisco’s Money Gone?

San Francisco’s budget skyrocketed to $12.2 billion in 2019, up from $8.6 billion in 2009. The worst part: “San Francisco has squandered its fortune,” ­reports Phillip Sprincin in the City Journal. There’s a severe housing shortage, a subway system that remains unopened and a train station that serves no trains. So what has Frisco’s government done with the money? “Municipal employment has eaten up a large share,” with 45 percent of the budget accounting for salaries and benefits. Add “political indifference and bureaucratic mismanagement,” plus ill-conceived infrastructure projects, and you end up with such colossal waste. Sprincin concludes: “Given how little the city has done with its incredible windfall, year after year, it’s not clear what it values at all.”

Econ desk: Watch Out for the (Warren) Crash

Sen. Liz Warren thinks she sees another economic crash around the corner. Yet her own terrible ideas are the biggest threat to growth, snarks Andy Puzder in The Washington Post. For starters, her doom-and-gloom stance “is so 2016.” If Warren would look at recent numbers, she would see that “in President Donald Trump’s first two years, employee compensation increased by $672 billion more than it did during President Barack Obama’s last two, for a whopping 42 percent improvement.” Thanks to the president’s “tax cuts and deregulation, Americans’ incomes have increased dramatically, while costs — reflected in the low inflation rate — have gone up quite modestly.” Meanwhile, Warren’s platform, including “free — meaning government-funded — child care, early education and college tuition” and the like, might as well be titled “The Current Economic Boom — and How to Kill It.”

Iconoclast: Dems Need To Wake Up on Russia

Why did the data site FiveThirtyEight decide to avoid Russia when it surveyed the Democratic presidential candidates for “their views on key foreign policy issues?” asks Bloomberg’s Leonid Bershidsky. FiveThirtyEight claimed “it couldn’t formulate a provocative question,” but that doesn’t wash for Bershidsky. The problem, he says, may be that because “of a kind of Pavlovian reflex” that was “formed in American political circles since 2016,” FiveThirtyEight realized it wouldn’t get answers outside of an “associative chain” that “immediately drags up ‘Russian election interference’ and ‘Trump is a Putin stooge.’ ” While there are serious issues with Russia that any post-Trump administration would need to confront, including in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, Democrats remain mired in “unrealistic expectations from the Mueller investigation” and “hacking and propaganda” — none of which is “near the top of the list” of actual Kremlin-related foreign challenges.

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board