2020 Presidential Campaign - It’s on

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How about not one extreme or the other.

Kamala Harris made headlines last week when she joked in a radio interview that of course she smoked marijuana in her younger years: “Half my family’s from Jamaica. Are you kidding me?”

But the crack didn’t go over well with at least one Jamaican: Donald J. Harris, her father.

The elder Harris sent an unsolicited statement to Kingston-based Jamaica Global Online, for which the emeritus professor of economics at Stanford University wrote a recent essay on his family’s history.

“My dear departed grandmothers (whose extraordinary legacy I described in a recent essay on this website), as well as my deceased parents, must be turning in their grave right now to see their family’s name, reputation and proud Jamaican identity being connected, in any way, jokingly or not with the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker and in the pursuit of identity politics,” he wrote.

“Speaking for myself and my immediate Jamaican family, we wish to categorically dissociate ourselves from this travesty,” he added.

In the interview with “The Breakfast Club” podcast, Kamala Harris cited her Jamaican heritage when asked to respond to those who believe she’s opposed to legalizing marijuana. “Are you kidding me?” she said.

Harris said she smoked a joint in college. “And I inhaled,” she added, a joking reference to former President Bill Clinton’s comment on the campaign trail in 1992 that he smoked marijuana but didn’t inhale.

Donald Harris, who did not respond to requests for comment, worked with the Jamaican website’s administrator when he was consulting and writing about the economy there in the 1990s.

In an email reviewed by POLITICO, Donald Harris indicated he wasn’t interested in discussing the issue further publicly: “I have decided to stay out of all the political hullabaloo by not engaging in any interviews with the media,” he wrote.

Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz of San Juan, an adversary of President Donald Trump, has signed on to be one of four national co-chairs of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign.

Her commitment to Sanders, the Vermont independent who announced his presidential bid on Tuesday, comes as the Democratic field is growing and competition for high-profile supporters is intensifying.

Cruz told NBC News in a telephone interview Thursday that she has working relationships with several of the senators who are running or may run. But she has been working with Sanders since 2016, “looking for a path for Puerto Rico.”

“A lot of the things he’s been fighting for all his life I’ve been fighting for all my life,” Cruz said. “Things like let’s not put wealth before health.”

She also named Sanders' efforts on education, collective bargaining, the rights of people in the LGBTQ and transgender communities, and other issues.

She said he has had a long commitment to being in the forefront of structural changes, even when they were not popular.

I sincerely hope not. A candidate with zero government experience is in the White House, and we all see how disastrous that's proven to be.

I want to see Clinton vs Trump again.

Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee announced Friday that he is running for President, launching a bid in which he intends to make combating climate change the central rationale for his campaign.

Inslee announced the bid in a video made public on Friday. He is slated to hold a news conference in Seattle at a solar panel installer to expand upon his presidential announcement. He will be surrounded by friends, family and business owners who the campaign says have benefited from his climate policies in the state.
"I'm Jay Inslee and I'm running for president because I am the only candidate who will make defeating climate change our nation's number one priority," the governor says in a more-than-a-minute-long video that highlights his decades-long focus on climate change and compares tackling the issue to President John F. Kennedy's focus on going to the moon.

"We're the first generation to feel the sting of climate change. And we're the last that can do something about it," Inslee adds. "We can do this. Join our movement. This is our moment."
The video ends with a string of straight-to-camera videos from voters and supporters saying, "Our moment." Among those featured is Bill Nye, the popular television star known as "Bill Nye the Science Guy," who often talks about climate change.

He will headquarter his campaign in Seattle, making his campaign the only 2020 operation to date to be based on the West Coast. He will follow up Friday's announcement with a trip to Iowa and Nevada in the coming days, an adviser added.

Inslee, who served as head of the Democratic Governors Association in 2018, traveled the country stumping for Democrats running for governor that year, but also used the trips to talk to Democrats about his platform focused on climate change. Inslee has told reporters and people close to him that he has been emboldened by what he has heard from those Democrats and believes there is a hunger in the country for someone with a singular focus on climate change.

Inslee has been in elected office for much of the last three decades. He was first elected to the Washington House of Representatives in 1989 and was first elected to the US House of Representatives in 1992. Inslee, though, lost his re-election bid in 1994, an election cycle called the "Republican Revolution" after the party picked up 54 seats in the House.
After a failed 1996 gubernatorial election, he successfully ran for Congress again in 1998, a job he held until he successfully ran for governor in 2012.
Inslee, by raising the minimum wage in Washington state, helping to pass a statewide paid family leave law and enacting a moratorium on the death penalty, has been an outspoken progressive executive since he became governor in 2013. But his profile truly rose after the election of President Donald Trump. After the President's inauguration in 2017, Inslee became a vocal opponent of the Republican leader, including by suing him after Trump tried to ban immigration from several Muslim majority countries.

Although Inslee has looked to make Washington state more carbon neutral during his time in office -- including by investing in a statewide fund that looks to help business go green in Washington -- the governor failed to enact a statewide carbon tax in 2018, delivering a stinging defeat for environmentalists after years of attempts to curb climate change through economic incentives. The proposal, which voters rejected by 13 percentage points, would have levied a tax of $15 per metric ton of carbon emissions, making Washington the first state in the nation to raise the cost of fossil-fuel-intensive activities.

Inslee's time as chair of the Democratic Governors Association during the 2018 cycle helped raise his profile, too. The year saw Democrats pick up seven governorships across the country, a fact that the governor has touted in the wake of the midterm elections.

Inslee has praised the Green New Deal, saying it is "raising people's ambitions" and "making what might seem impossible within the realm of the possible," but the governor has not outright said he would support the entire package.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/john-hickenlooper-2020-former-colorado-governor-announces-run-for-president/


I am currently torn between Hickenlooper and Klobuchar, though Inslee would be good as well.

John Hickenlooper, the two-term former Democratic governor of Colorado, entered a crowded presidential field Monday, casting himself as an experienced executive with a record of progressive achievement who can deliver on his party's chief objective: defeating President Trump.

“I’m running for president because we need dreamers in Washington, but we also need to get things done,” Hickenlooper said in a video announcing his candidacy. “I’ve proven again and again I can bring people together to produce the progressive change Washington has failed to deliver.”

The former geologist-turned-brewer brings the Democratic field to roughly a dozen, depending on which long-shot candidates count. He’s the second Western governor to join the scrum in the last four days as the announcement season, dominated early on by senators touting progressive policies, shifts to a new group of pragmatic moderates who emphasize leadership roles outside of Washington.

He enters the race with relatively low name recognition compared with potential rivals including Sens. Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren and former Vice President Joe Biden — and, unlike former Rep. Beto O’Rourke and Sen. Bernie Sanders, hasn’t much of a national fundraising list to draw on. But Hickenlooper, 67, is betting that his biography-driven campaign and carefully cultivated brand of progressive pragmatism will help him rise in a wide-open primary field.

“There is a lane for a non-establishment candidate from outside of Washington,” said Chris Lehane, a Democratic strategist who worked in the Clinton administration and on Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign. “Governors do have those traditional advantages of having been executives, and he's a very likable person in the conventional sense — people like spending time with him.

“But to really fill that lane, you're going to have to have a transcendent idea that underlines that non-establishment message and can line that up with an electability message,” he continued.

Rick Ridder, a longtime Democratic consultant in Denver, put the point more bluntly: “He comes across competent and capable and has a good little story,” Ridder said. “The key for him will be finding an issue that captures people’s attention and allows him to break out, and he doesn’t have that yet.”

Hickenlooper, who left office after eight years in January with a 59% approval rating, has never been confused for a liberal ideologue or policy wonk, and may be outside his comfort zone in a primary contest already concentrated around big progressive proposals. In the video, he emphasizes his ability to lead in a crisis by pointing to his performance as governor following fires, floods and shootings.

Some Colorado Republicans were known to joke during Hickenlooper’s tenure that he was the best governor their party ever had because of his conservative positions on some issues. At the same time, however, progressives in the state cheered him for enacting tougher gun laws, expanding access to healthcare and fighting for LGBTQ rights.

The main complaint from the left over his eight years in office was a perceived closeness with the state’s oil and gas industry — Hickenlooper once drank fracking fluid in a congressional hearing to demonstrate that it’s safe, an element of his biography that might not play well with progressive primary voters.

Born in Pennsylvania and educated at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, Hickenlooper wound up in Colorado working as a geologist but was laid off in 1986, long a biographical point of emphasis that’s now a key part of his pitch to blue-collar workers. He decided to open a brewpub in Denver's Lower Downtown area, a decision that helped to revive a once-dilapidated area and eventually catapulted him into city politics.

His unlikely political rise had less to do with specific issues than with personal charisma and a consumer-driven approach ingrained decades ago behind a Denver bar. More naturally at ease when talking about beer than delivering a speech at the state Capitol, he wears his personality quirks proudly.

As governor, he would often appear onstage with bands like Old Crow Medicine Show and the Avett Brothers during concerts at Red Rocks, the popular outdoor venue near Denver. His campaign has planned a launch rally and concert this week in Denver, featuring Nathaniel Rateliff, a popular Denver-based singer and songwriter.

Hickenlooper is almost certainly the only 2020 contender who once — accidentally — watched a porn film with his mother, a scene he described in his 2016 autobiography, “The Opposite of Woe.”

His unlikely political rise had less to do with specific issues than with personal charisma and a consumer-driven approach ingrained decades ago behind a Denver bar. More naturally at ease when talking about beer than delivering a speech at the state Capitol, he wears his personality quirks proudly.

As governor, he would often appear onstage with bands like Old Crow Medicine Show and the Avett Brothers during concerts at Red Rocks, the popular outdoor venue near Denver. His campaign has planned a launch rally and concert this week in Denver, featuring Nathaniel Rateliff, a popular Denver-based singer and songwriter.

Hickenlooper is almost certainly the only 2020 contender who once — accidentally — watched a porn film with his mother, a scene he described in his 2016 autobiography, “The Opposite of Woe.”

One of three final contenders to be Hillary Clinton's running mate in 2016, Hickenlooper spent much of his final two years in the governor’s office quietly preparing for a presidential run. He has sought to raise his national profile with several trips to Washington and New York and more appearances on cable news. Late last year, he hired Anna Greenberg, a prominent Democratic pollster, and named Brad Komar, who oversaw his 2014 reelection effort, to serve as campaign manager.

In 2017, Hickenlooper joined with Republican Gov. John Kasich of Ohio in offering a bipartisan proposal for improving the Affordable Care Act. That generated speculation about a possible joint ticket in 2020. If that gambit allowed Hickenlooper a brand-burnishing way into a national conversation, it also helped tee up questions related to political centrism that he now is more than happy to dispel.

Asked about a potential partnership with Kasich last month on his first trip to Iowa, Hickenlooper was ready with a reply:

“We're not ever going to run together. The guy doesn't support Planned Parenthood,” he said.

Former Rep. Beto O'Rourke (D-Texas) will reportedly announce a 2020 White House bid Thursday.

The ex-congressman confirmed his plans to enter the race officially in a text message to El Paso NBC affiliate KTSM, which reported that O'Rourke will make his official announcement Thursday morning.

News of his definitive plans to run follow a Vanity Fair profile of O'Rourke published Wednesday in which he strongly hinted at a desire to pursue a presidential run.

“You can probably tell that I want to run,” he told Vanity Fair. “I do. I think I’d be good at it.”

Speculation has swirled around the possibility of O'Rourke announcing a White House run since last year, when he narrowly lost a bid to oust Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) by single digits.