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Dave Weigel Profile picture
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17 Feb, 4 tweets, 1 min read
I tackled this in the Trailer - Biden being president changes the calculations, but a lot of people lost their shirts after seeing "re-open" rallies at state capitols last year and thinking "this is the New Tea Party." (Including Trump!)
Link washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/…
Trump's message that Biden wanted to "shut down everything" was potentially effective, Biden beat it by saying he wanted to "shut down the virus."
We'd be in a different world if there wasn't a vaccine, but the vaccine is both 1) finishing off the last patience people had with lockdowns and 2) setting up a situation this year where Biden gets to say we're back to normal, like Trump wanted to if he'd won.

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More from @daveweigel

Dave Weigel Profile picture
18 Feb
Oh no. Oh no. Oh, no no no no no. ImageImage
Can't find tweet but I'm 99% sure I dunked on Adler with the "Mayor Quimby in Jamaica" screenshot.
Cruz has not been telling people "do not travel to Mexico" from a place in Mexico but Adlergate was a huge story, I'm legitimately surprised that it didn't affect his vacation/optics plans.
Read 5 tweets
Dave Weigel Profile picture
16 Feb
This thread captures the emerging “Reichstag Fire” theory that Pelosi purposefully rejected security so that the Capitol could be attacked. Unsure how her support for a 9/11 Commission-style probe fits into this
Honestly, this feels inevitable. If an event seems to benefit one party politically, a conspiracy theory develops that the party secretly planned the event. Same fever dreams happened after Oklahoma City bombing, and more famously after 9/11.
Conspiracy theories also work better if they seem familiar. Pelosi giving some sort of “stand down” order to let a riot happen — shades of the “did Clinton issue a stand-down order and let Benghazi happen.” It’s a cozy conspiracy blanket.
Read 5 tweets
Dave Weigel Profile picture
11 Feb
The original "Dean Scream" was Neil Kinnock shouting "we're all right!" a bunch of times at a rally before the 1992 UK election.

No, I don't know why you follow me, either.
It was considered a huge gaffe (Labour lost an election they were expecting to win) for Kinnock to be super excited.
I can never decide whether Kinnock was a great orator (the speech Biden plagiarized was very good tbf) or just Welsh. You want gravitas? Welsh accent, buddy.
Read 4 tweets
Dave Weigel Profile picture
9 Feb
The mismatch between what you can remove a president over (nothing, apparently) and what you can remove a mayor or governor or whatever is so vast. Rod Blagojevich was impeached and barred from holding any office again by his own party!
This really it's partisan; it's a function of a presidential system, where voters elect a quasi-sovereign who, in addition to governing, represents the nation like a king or queen. Same with Bill Clinton - a governor in his position would have quit so his LG could take over.
We all hate the "West Wing" now, but there is a very true plot point in an early season where a focus group finds that people would want their governor to resign if he concealed an illness... but, it turns out they're forgiving if a president does it.
Read 4 tweets
Dave Weigel Profile picture
1 Feb
It’s not *surprising* but it’s interesting to watch how the Georgia wins transformed the parties’ negotiating power and style. Just like seven weeks ago an emerging CW was that Biden would have to sacrifice Neera Tanden but maybe Susan Collins would let him confirm Blinkin
Rs spent two months assuming they’d have Senate, dictating limits for Biden. Then they lost the Senate but the expectations for what “working across the aisle” means haven’t fully reset. So you get takes like “Biden plan is DOA if moderate Rs balk.” But... it isn’t!
The missing piece here is that people are *also* used to a Dem House caucus where Pelosi needs to mollify Blue Dogs, and the House Dem majority is narrower than 2009. But it’s far more liberal, after bad cycles and maps for Dems removed all their conservatives.
Read 4 tweets
Dave Weigel Profile picture
11 Jan
Even if you want to take Turley seriously — doctors do not recommend this — the Trump campaign had actually used “peaceful” sarcastically for months. It reacted to media descriptions of “peaceful” BLM protests by handing out “PEACEFUL PROTEST” signs Image
The joke was that the media insisted BLM rallies were “peaceful” while impugning Trump voters.
There *were* some dumb looking TV broadcasts where hosts struggled to explain that a day of civil disobedience was followed by a night of riots. But this got shorthanded by Trump et al to: The media says BLM and Antifa are “peaceful” because they let them get away with stuff.
Read 4 tweets

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