An iconic West Coast political figure has weighed in on his party’s chances for unseating President Donald Trump in next year’s election.
This longtime insider was once one of the most powerful figures in California politics.
He knows EVERY candidate… inside and out… and even DATED one of them, once upon a time.
If anyone can calculate their strengths and hone in on their weaknesses, it’s former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown.
And he says it’s NOT looking good for the left!
“The first Democratic debates proved one thing: We still don’t have a candidate who can beat Donald Trump,” Brown wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle.
Then, he handicapped each of the candidates.
Or to put it more bluntly… he kneecapped them, even hitting Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) with a savage new nickname that Trump himself might’ve come up with.
“Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders came across as Rip Van Bernie, looking and sounding as if it were still 2016,” he said.
Brown had a four-decade career in California politics. Prior to being mayor, he was speaker of the state’s assembly – where he ruled for 15 years with such an iron fist that he called himself the “Ayatollah of the Legislature.”
He also has another unique piece of insight into this race that goes beyond politics: He famously dated Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), the candidate who emerged from the debates with the biggest boost in her poll numbers.
Yet he doesn’t think she has a chance, either.
In fact, he was pretty dismissive of her breakout moment.
“Harris got all the attention for playing prosecutor in chief, but her case against former Vice President Joe Biden boiled down in some ways to a ringing call for forced school busing,” he wrote. “It won’t be too hard for Trump to knock that one out of the park in 2020.”
Not that he thought Biden handled it well, either.
Biden, who entered the debates as the frontrunner but has been rapidly fading, argued against federal busing, which Brown called “a weird endorsement” of allowing local jurisdictions to segregate their schools.
“That’s the best argument he could marshal against busing little kids miles across town?” Brown said.
He did have some praise for Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), but it was pretty faint.
“Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren was dominant against a Night One lineup of pygmies,” he said, referring to the mostly B-list candidates she shared the stage with. “She might have the chops, but we can’t tell yet because the first debate was so tame.”
Polls show Biden fading and Harris rapidly rising in wake of the debate.
Biden plunged a full 10 percent overnight after the debate and is showing no signs of bouncing back.
A Quinnipiac University poll found Harris has risen from near the bottom of the pack to a near-tie with Biden: The former vice president has fallen to 22 percent, while Harris has climbed to 20 percent, with Warren in a distant third at 14 percent and “Rip Van Bernie” fading to 13 percent.
In even worse news for Biden, he’s fallen to third place in the latest poll of Iowa, which has Warren in the lead and Harris running in second.
Iowa will hold the nation’s first true contest of the primary with its caucus on Feb. 3 – now less than seven months away.
If Harris continues to rise, she may have to answer to more than just the criticism in Brown’s column.
She might have to explain her past relationship with Brown —because the former mayor previously claimed he helped fuel her meteoric rise through California politics in ways that some might find not exactly ethical.
“Yes, I may have influenced her career by appointing her to two state commissions when I was Assembly speaker,” Brown wrote in January. “And I certainly helped with her first race for district attorney in San Francisco.”
Brown, however, also defended her. He ticked off a list of political careers he helped to make, but said Harris stood apart for one reason alone.
“The difference is that Harris is the only one who, after I helped her, sent word that I would be indicted if I ‘so much as jaywalked’ while she was D.A.,” he wrote earlier this year. “That’s politics for ya.”
— Walter W. Murray is a reporter for The Horn News. He is an outspoken conservative and a survival expert, and is the author of “America’s Final Warning.”