Clown Car 2.0: Matt Taibbi on the Democratic nomination race

Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi (previously) is one of my favorite political writers, with the style chops of Hunter S Thompson, but without Thompson's often juvenile politics (Taibbi having outgrown that phase, something Thompson never managed to do).

Taibbi's latest, a massive on-the-ground report from the Iowa campaigns of the Democratic would-be presidential nominees, is like having a bucket of ice-water dashed over your head by someone who's telling genuinely funny jokes about how terrible it all is, that ha-ha-only-serious mode that is becoming the motif for our era, in the long tradition of gallows humor in dire political circumstances.

Like Thompson, Taibbi's on-the-ground reporting from Iowa is marked out not so much by his insights into the candidates, but rather, his expert and nuanced reading of the animal sentiments they arouse in the crowds they address, and in Taibbi's long memory for other political moments in which similar candidates said similar things to exactly the same people (this being Iowa, which, thanks to a quirk of history, is the hot ticket of American politics).

Taibbi's read on the Democratic leadership race is that it is doubling down on the GOP's "clown car" blunder, which let Trump take nomination from a crowded field of political same-sames who were unable to confront Trump's "Throw the Bums Out" movement because they were the bums that the body politic wanted thrown out. He sees this as an indictment of the Democratic Party, which might be breathing its last gasp, along with America's commitment to democracy itself: "Lose to Donald Trump once, shame on the voters. Read the rest