2020 watch: Warren Gets Frontrunner Treatment

Elizabeth Warren got the frontrunner treatment at Tuesday’s Democratic debate, reports Politico’s Ryan Lizza, from getting “pilloried for not detailing how she would pay for her most expensive proposal” to charges of naïveté and dishonesty. She declined (unlike Bernie Sanders) “to explain how she would pay” for Medicare for All, a refusal that Mayor Pete Buttigieg, among others, “turned into a cudgel.” This attack on Warren’s character is “a familiar script,” one Barack Obama used against Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primary, and shows what Warren will face going forward. After months of Joe Biden receiving “the scrutiny and criticism of a frontrunner,” now it’s Warren “being chased by a pack of much more aggressive rivals.”

Foreign desk: The Chinese Censorship Mystery

A “larger and more consequential question” hangs over the China-NBA flap, Zeynep Tufekci points out at The Atlantic: “Why is the Chinese government throwing a fit over things that are otherwise so minor?” Beijing canceled “the planned airing of several preseason NBA games” in response to Houston GM Daryl Morey’s pro-Hong Kong tweet, an “extreme reaction” for a regime usually known for its “strategic savviness,” and reacted equally extremely to pro-Hong Kong moves by other Western companies. Is Beijing making a big mistake — or is it “happy to take backlash now, in return for the longer-term goal of having companies self-censor without needing to be prodded?” It’s difficult to say for sure, but the answer to that question “will shape the fate of billions in the 21st century.”

From the right: Barr, Religious-Liberty Warrior

Attorney General William Barr’s “extraordinary” Oct. 11 speech at Notre Dame shows how, “by casting religion out” of the public sphere, “we are dismantling the foundation of our public morality,” notes Rod Dreher at the American Conservative. Religion, Barr observed, “trains people to want what is good” and “restrain vice” — a vital public good that no secular creed achieves. Yet, as Dreher puts it, religion now “is not jumping to its death; it’s being pushed.” Barr concluded by vowing that, as long as he is attorney general, “the Department of Justice will be … ready to fight for the most cherished of all our American liberties: the freedom to live according to our faith.” Religious conservatives should be thankful that “a man of William Barr’s convictions is heading up the Department of Justice,” Dreher writes, and know that “a Democratic president would likely choose his precise opposite.”

Libertarian: Bernie Is Too Liberal for Denmark

The American Left’s “dangerous” love affair with Scandinavian socialism is “pervasive,” sighs Sen. Rand Paul at National Review; witness Sen. Bernie Sanders, who praises Denmark’s “very different understanding of what ‘freedom’ means.” Ironically, though, “while American socialists want to become like Scandinavian socialists, Scandinavian socialists want to become more like American capitalists.” Danes are actually “squeamish” of the Vermont senator, insisting that they’re “not, in fact, socialist,” and their economic success is based on “free trade and low corporate-income taxes.” Danish economist Lars Christensen, in fact, says Sanders is “too leftist” even for the Danish center-left.

Culture beat: LeBron the Coward

The Federalist’s David Harsanyi finds it “galling”that NBA superstar LeBron James, a “purported champion of social justice,” called Houston GM Daryl Morey “misinformed” for supporting Hong Kong’s pro-democracy demonstrations. James and other US celebrities are “free to accuse the president of being a fascist dictator,” while dissidents in China literally have to “stand and fight” against a Communist regime. James, like another “constant social media commentator,” Warriors coach Steve Kerr, shows that he doesn’t care about China’s 70 years of “mass murder,” “famine” and “incomprehensible hardship” for its own people. It’s fine to export capitalism to China, but if the NBA is “adopting and enforcing” China’s totalitarianism, it’s “a huge ethical problem.”

— Compiled by Karl Salzmann