{"id":373342,"date":"2018-08-14T15:44:09","date_gmt":"2018-08-14T14:44:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=373342"},"modified":"2018-08-14T15:44:09","modified_gmt":"2018-08-14T14:44:09","slug":"swalwell-a-major-contender-for-u-s-presidency-in-2020","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/editorials\/swalwell-a-major-contender-for-u-s-presidency-in-2020\/","title":{"rendered":"Swalwell a Major Contender for U.S. Presidency in 2020"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

One of the most gifted politicians in the Democratic Party \u2014 and fastest-rising \u2014 is the 37-year-old Eric Swalwell<\/span><\/a>, whose first elective office was as a member of the Dublin, California<\/span><\/a>, City Council in 2010, and who stepped up from there to his current seat in the U.S. Congress, in 2013. His main financial backers<\/span><\/a> are the military industries, including Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Wall Street \u2014 and the nonprofits and service-firms that represent them.<\/span><\/p>\n

On Sunday, August 12th, Political Wire, which is the main news-aggregator for Democratic Party activists, headlined \u201cSwalwell Travels to Iowa\u201d<\/span><\/a> and reported that,<\/span><\/p>\n

Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) \u2014 who was born in Iowa \u2014 told the San Jose Mercury News that his visit to Iowa \u201cwas focused on helping Democrats retake the House in 2018, including by winning competitive races,\u201d but he also said he isn\u2019t ruling out a presidential run in 2020.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Said Swalwell: \u201cRight now my focus is to win at home, earn my way back to Washington to represent my constituents, help other candidates win so we can change the country, and then I\u2019ll make decisions after November about my future.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Swalwell is movie-star handsome; furthermore, his five-year record in Congress has shown him to be an extraordinarily resourceful career-builder and self-promoter, whose special leadership in the Party has been in their effort to impeach the Republican Party President Donald Trump and (though unmentioned) to replace Trump by the Republican Party Vice President Mike Pence, who is even more conservative than is Trump. <\/span><\/p>\n

Typical in this effort to place Pence into the White House, is an MSNBC youtube titled “Rep. Eric Swalwell: President Donald Trump Is ‘Perilously Close’ To Obstruction Charge | MSNBC\u201d<\/span><\/a>, in which the issue of whom the President would be if Trump gets impeached is very skillfully ignored entirely, both by the interviewer and by the interviewee. Billionaires control both Parties; and the ones who control the Democratic Party (and MSNBC) are apparently convinced (perhaps by private polling) that the Democratic nominee in 2020 will have a much better chance of winning the White House if Pence is the President, than if Trump is. For whatever reason, almost all of the discussions about impeaching Trump, on Democratic Party sites, avoid even mentioning Pence. <\/span><\/p>\n

But the same is true also on Republican Party sites. Swalwell is being heavily pumped by virtually all media that cover national politics. For example, on 21 May 2018, Fox News posted to youtube \u201cCalif. lawmaker makes his case for Russian collusion\u201d<\/span><\/a>, where Tucker Carlson debated Swalwell for 9 minutes, and though the actual subject was whether Trump should be impeached, none of the consequences of impeaching him (such as Pence replacing Trump) were even so much as mentioned. The billionaires in both Parties are apparently very taken with Swalwell, not only because he\u2019s phenomenally gifted (as is clear from his ability to hold his own even against the formidable Carlson in that tough debate), but because if any Democrat replaces Trump in 2020, Swalwell would seem to be their dream for achieving that \u2014 and he\u2019d probably be preferred by more of them in the general election than Trump would be.<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course, both Parties claim to represent the public and not the billionaires; and, in this regard, while the standard Republican Party tactic to appeal to the \u2018populist\u2019 vote is to promise to \u201creduce waste, fraud, and abuse,\u201d by eliminating or weakening the regulatory agencies (which the billionaires are determined to shrink or else eliminate if they can\u2019t outright control them), the standard Democratic Party tactic to appeal to the \u2018populists\u2019 is to try to build a coalition of feminists, LGBT, Blacks, Hispanics, and other groups whom Republicans treat as being inferior to themselves. Consequently, in order to win the White House as a Democrat, Swalwell has joined the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, and the Congressional LGBT Caucus<\/span><\/a>, neither of which minority-groups includes himself. Unknown, as of yet, is whether he has applied for membership in the Congressional Black Caucus, but according to Fact Check, as posted in 2008 and never since revised<\/span><\/a>, the Congressional Black Caucus \u201chas never had a white member in its 36-year history\u201d (and, today, that would be never in its 46-year history), so that if he were to apply to join and then be turned down by them, and this were to become public, then the resultant bad publicity for that Caucus would likely reduce, instead of increase, Swalwell\u2019s support by black voters. Consequently, he probably won\u2019t apply to join that Caucus. But perhaps he will seek to join the Bipartisan Congressional Women\u2019s Caucus<\/span><\/a>. They have never had any men, but, between 1981 and 1995<\/span><\/a>, their official policy was to invite male Representatives to join; so, if he were to give it a try, then perhaps they would allow him in, and he then would be able to say that he\u2019s the first-ever man to join the Women\u2019s Caucus. (In 2015, a Men For Women Caucus<\/span><\/a> was formed in the House, but it still hasn\u2019t announced an agenda, and it has done nothing<\/span><\/a>.) <\/span><\/p>\n

A prominent article on Swalwell\u2019s House website is “Russia: Not Our Friend\u201d<\/span><\/a>, in which is provided a timeline, since 2007, of 13 events that he summarizes outside their context (so his brief accounts there constitute propaganda instead of history), events in which the Russian Government did or was accused of having done allegedly bad things. Typical is the most recent event listed, which is<\/span><\/p>\n