Month: August 2020

Texas Hold‘em

Texas Hold’em Poker has become the game of choice for American casinos.  Players are dealt two “hole” cards only they can see.  Then a total of five “community” cards are placed up on the table.  Bets are placed after the hole cards, the first two community cards (called the “flop”), and then each of the last two community cards (the “turn” and the “river”).  That makes the stakes much higher.

At some point in the game, players determine when it’s time to bet their stake, their entire amount of cash.  They shove all of their chips into the pot.  It’s called going “all in”, and it’s the ultimate bet in poker.  “All in” means its win or go home.  “All in” might mean you think you have an unbeatable hand, but it might also mean you are bluffing to get enough money to get back in the game.  Win with the cards or win with the bluff, it’s about risking everything on one play.

Going to Kenosha

President Donald Trump announced that he is going to Kenosha, Wisconsin on Tuesday.  Kenosha is the town where Jacob Blake was shot seven times in the back by a police officer from point-blank range.  The policeman held the back of Blake’s shirt as he did it.   There have been protests in Kenosha every night since.  Last week, a seventeen-year old boy-vigilante came from out-of-state to “protect property”.  He was carrying a semi-automatic weapon, and killed two and wounded two more.  

Saturday night a man wearing the hat of a far-right protest group, “Patriot Pride”, was killed in Portland, Oregon.  This was after a night of clashes between Trump supporters and protestors against police violence, including assaults with trucks, protestors using pepper spray, and attacks with paint ball guns.

But President Trump will draw the focus to Kenosha.  He’s going there to “talk to law enforcement”.  

His presence in Kenosha will draw protestors from – everywhere.  The essence of the Trump position is that while there may be a few aberrant police officers, nothing is wrong with “the system”.  The alternative view:  there is acceptance in law enforcement of the arbitrary shooting of black men and women and somehow their lives are worth less than others.  And for proof of that theory – they offer a list of names of those killed by police that ranges back decades, and ends today at the shooting of Jacob Blake.  Tomorrow – it’s hard to say.

Gasoline on a Fire

So Donald Trump going into a city in crisis is likely to create trouble.  The Mayor of Kenosha and the Governor of Wisconsin, both Democrats, asked the President not to come.  The protestors against the police are already there, and Trump’s presence will bring more.  The Trump supporters are also there, and Trump’s arrival will bring many, many more.  It’s a law enforcement nightmare – whatever side of the crisis you support.  

It will be gasoline on a fire – and it will create a whole new crisis in a place already in turmoil.

As a twenty-year old Field Coordinator for the Carter/Mondale campaign in 1976, I was impressed with the number of federal agents that were mobilized for a visit by candidate Carter.  Not just the Secret Service detail travelling with Jimmy Carter, but dozens of local agents, and dozens more agents from other Federal agencies were part of the overall protective detail.  And when the sitting President, Gerald Ford came into town, those numbers doubled again.

Now forty-four years later, I’m sure those numbers have only increased.  

So a Presidential visit to Kenosha won’t cause a threat to Donald Trump.  The Secret Service won’t allow that to happen.  What they will do is put a cover of Federal protection on the fire for the time he is there.  But the Presidential presence is fuel is on the fire, and a Trump visit will draw gasoline from all sides to the streets of Kenosha.  While he’s there, the city will be locked down.  But when he leaves and the cover comes off:  it’s a recipe for disaster.

Place Your Bet

And maybe that’s exactly what the Trump Campaign needs.  No matter what they say, Americans recognize that their COVID-19 response has failed. The Administration even tried to mask the failure with a new CDC study showing that most of those who died of COVID had pre-existing conditions, as if to say the lives of 120,000,000 Americans are forfeit already, so get over it. 

The campaign that Trump wanted to run, based on a booming economy, has collapsed, regardless of the inflated Wall Street numbers.  The reality of COVID unemployment rates and losses in entertainment, travel, and other industries are still growing.  The sole strategy left for them is to try to convince Americans that only Donald Trump can control the violence in the streets, an echo of Richard Nixon’s “law and order” campaign of 1968.  

As ugly as it may seem, violence in the streets, in Portland, Kenosha and other American cities, is Donald Trump’s friend.  As his Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said in Meet the Press, there isn’t violence in, “Donald Trump’s America,” just in “Democrat” America.  The Trump Campaign is “all-in” for violence in America’s cities.  They are betting it mobilizes the suburbs to come out for Trump.

Of course, he is running for President of the United States, not just “Donald Trump’s America”.  And he has been President of the United States for the past three and a half years.  But Trump fails to take any responsibility for “Democrat” cities.  They, and their large minority populations, aren’t a part of his America.  

And that’s the problem.

Labels Matter

Labels matter:  don’t accept the “Democrat” insult.  I am a member of the Democratic Party, and that makes me a Democrat.  But the right wing insult – “Democrat” Congress, “Democrat” cities, is just a way to denigrate the party.  It is a Democratic House of Representatives, and Democratic controlled cities.  The right doesn’t get to label us they way they want to.  We know our name.

A Mess

There are several definitions for the word, blivet – but the one I grew up with was simple: ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag.  The vision is clear – and it is descriptive of the Trump Administration’s actions in the past three and a half years.

President Trump is quick to say that he has accomplished more in his term of office than any other President in history.  In one way, he’s absolutely right.  There have been so many outrages, so many illegalities, and so many of the norms of American government shattered, that it’s hard to remember them all.  It has truly been a blivet – and one that has been overwhelming for the American people.

Dictators

We are sixty-five days from the most important Presidential election in American history.  It isn’t hyperbole to suggest that the future of the American experiment in government may well be at stake in this vote.  President Trump demonstrates time and time again that he is attracted to the powers of despotism. Look at his love for Putin, Bolsonaro, Erdogan and Kim. And Trump has surrounded himself with men who drink from the some autocratic cup.  In Trump’s own cabinet, Attorney General Bill Barr is the critical lynchpin in this alteration of American norms.  

As we approach the election, it is important to remember what Donald Trump and his henchmen have brought to the American story since the election of 2016.  There’s so much, it’s easy to overlook what happened six months ago (impeachment) much less three years ago (fine people, on both sides).  So let’s review.

Foreign Help

Even during the election campaign of 2016, Donald Trump was accepting political aid from a foreign power, Russia.  The Republican controlled Senate Intelligence committee confirmed that “old” story once again last week.  The Senate report underlined what the Mueller Report portrayed, despite its obscurity, in 448 pages.  The Russians were helping Trump; the campaign welcomed the help, members of the campaign worked with Russians to coordinate, and all worked to hide their own involvement.  But Roger Stone’s sentence was commuted, Michael Flynn’s case dismissed, and “poor, sad” Paul Manafort is serving his sentence from the comfort of his home and hearth.

President Trump has done nothing to disavow Russian aid, and nothing to discourage their help now in 2020.   And the Mueller Report did nothing to stop him from soliciting more help from foreign nations.  The facts of his extorting Ukraine are clear, with only the lack of Senate Republican courage allowing him to stay in office.  Who knows what other nation he’s pressing for political aid today.

Lies

Then there are the lies – the Washington Post lists more than 20,000 of them in the 1267 days that Trump has been in office.  He has lied so much that it’s hard to find the truth.  His lies are so profuse that we have stopped calling them lies.  They are now, as aide Kellyann Conway stated to the public “alternative facts”. She did it right after mentioning the mythical “Bowling Green Massacre”.

In a single speech, the one accepting the 2020 Republican nomination, done in Mussolini-style from the balcony of the White House, he lied at least twenty-five times.  He’s lied so much, that it’s become normal.  He’s lied so much, that we’ve come to expect all of our government officials to lie.  When Postmaster General DeJoy testified to Congress that he did not restrict overtime hours for the Postal Service, even when there was a written documentation to the contrary, no one called out his perjury.  He was just following his leader.

Trump has lied so much that even his supporters recognize him as a liar.  They simply say, “that all politicians lie”.  That rationalization allows them to reject any truth that is brought up.  They say that if it’s against what Trump said, it’s a lie.  The truth is obscured for all.

Immigrants

Donald Trump has altered the promise of our nation of immigrants, America:  “Give my your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” He has put up an old historic shingle, “Whites Only”.   How white?  How about getting immigrants from Norway:  that’s what he said. He started with the “Muslim Ban”, quickly declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.  It continued with “shithole” countries, and on into the “family separation” plan, where American’s used children, even babies, to try to deter folks from immigrating to our borders. (If you need a better reminder of what happened, check out Jacob Soboroff’s new book, Separated). 

He agreed to take children away from their parents. He did so by making a “ticket” worthy civil offense, crossing the US Border without permission, into a crime.  Then he could call the migrants criminals, and take their children away from them, thousands to vanish into a maze of bureaucratic regulation.  Bad enough some were put in cages that looked like large dog kennels.  But worse, some were so lost that they couldn’t reconnect with their parents, even when a Federal Court ordered them to be, even when their parents were freed, and even when the parents were sent back to their original countries.

White Supremacist

And while we are talking segregation:  don’t forget Charlottesville, when white supremacists marched to save the statue of Robert E. Lee. Torchlight parades were intentionally reminiscent of the Hitler Youth, chanting, “Jews will not replace us”.  And when counter-protestors clashed with them, and one racist from Ohio drove his car into a crowd, all the President could muster was, “there were good people, on both sides”.  

He has doubled down on that stand since then.  From protecting Confederate statues to disrespecting Black athletes, the President has consistently taken the stand to favor those who believe in white supremacy.  Is he a racist himself?  It’s more likely that he knows that those racists vote for him, and he doesn’t want to lose their votes.  He’s got the same attitude towards the Q-Anon conspirators, who he blatantly signals in his speeches.   Maya Angelou said, “If someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time”.  The President has shown us who he is, over and over again.

But Mr. Trump said that Black unemployment is the best it has ever been.  And that was true, before his incompetence in the face of a pandemic flattened the economy.  Now, Black unemployment is over 15%.   National unemployment is over 10%.  While we can argue how much credit he should get for the “booming numbers” of 2018-19, we can be sure that he’s earned total credit for the handling of the national pandemic.  Our nation is in a self-made crisis, one that the President himself allowed to happen. 

The Nation

He has ignored the Courts.   He has disrespected the Constitution.  Our government has spent millions on golf trips and at Trump hotels, as he enriches himself and family at the government trough.  And he would have left many Americans without health care, vulnerable to extreme costs for pre-existing conditions, but for one of the final acts of an American patriot, John McCain.  And for that, the President disrespected that hero, even in death.  Today, he is lying to us about his so-called health plan.  It was two months ago, then two weeks ago, that he was going to reveal to us his alternative to the Affordable Care Act.  But it’s not been shown yet.

John McCain showed us political decency.  As the Republican Presidential candidate of 2008, McCain took the microphone away from a questioner who claimed Barack Obama was an Arab.  He told her what was up until them an American axiom:  that both candidates for President were patriots, but had differing views on how to better the nation.  But Donald Trump doesn’t see that in himself, and so could never see patriotism in an opponent.  He can only win through division, so he divides our nation into segments to be pitted against each other.

Decency

Trump claims Biden is a dupe for socialist/communists.  He claims Biden is demented.  And he uses old racist tropes of the 1960’s to try to strike fear in the “suburban housewives” he so desperately wants to vote for him.  “Black Lives Matter and Antifa” will be at your doors, as Joe Biden destroys the suburbs.  It is nonsense on so many levels.  How disrespectful towards our citizens to think they would fall for such appalling lies.  Sadly, in our age of “bubbles” of information, some will.

When you have a blivet, you’ve got a mess, five pounds of shit surrounding five pounds in the bag.  All you can do is get a shovel and throw it all away.  Sounds like a good place to start on November 3^rd.

Silence

When it comes to the COVID-19 pandemic, who to trust?  Do we trust the President, with the entire future of his administration riding on making the pandemic “disappear”?  Do we trust the scientists around him, beaten to a pulp by Presidential tweets and comments?  How about the ex-government scientists, the “formers” from the agencies?  They might be speaking for their silenced friends inside. But the message they send is so radically different than the “experts” on staff at HSS, FDA, NIH, or CDC.  Who can we trust?

It started with silence.  In the beginning, back in January and February, scientists outside of Washington were warning of a pending pandemic.  They were calling for national action, but their words were buried. The President assured us that everything was under control, and that the nation was safe.  Where was Dr. Fauci, or Dr. Birx, or all of the other Government “experts” ringing the alarm bells?  

We now know that they were banging those bells with hammers, but did not step outside of the administrative process.  Since those at the top didn’t want or agree with their warnings, the experts remained almost silent.  The scientists didn’t want this to happen, they warned the “top” that it would get as bad as we are now living. But they didn’t warn the people.  They spoke to the President, and when they were ignored and shouted down, they remained quiet.

Masks

In early March the COVID “toothpaste” was “out of the tube”. It could no longer be ignored, and those same government experts said that masks weren’t necessary for the public.  We now know they said that not because it was true, but because the shortage of masks for those who really needed them, the medical staffs soon to be overwhelmed with COVID patients, was extreme. The public couldn’t have masks; there weren’t enough to go around. 

But by publicly stating that general mask wearing was unnecessary, the “experts” set themselves up for questions. A month later they said it was NOW important to wear masks, in fact, it was crucial to reduce the spread of COVID. Everyone knew they “changed their minds”. Social media pummeled them with memes and videos of their flip-flopping. And while conserving the mask supply in March was crucial, the outcome of the “flip” in April was that distrust was created that can’t be undone.

You still see the social media posts, intentionally confusing the mask issue. “If you’re mask works, why do I need one?  If social distancing works, why wear a mask?” The answer is they all work some, and in combination of all, everyone masked, everyone social distancing; the spread of COVID is diminished.  But because we started from “we don’t need masks” from the experts, it’s easier to attack their use.

The “Plan”

The Centers for Disease Control came out with a strict step-by-step plan for states to reopen.  Two weeks at step-one, then move to step-two.  If statistics support lessened viral spread, maybe move to step-three.  But as soon as the CDC guidance came out, the President immediately attacked.  He pressured states to open without going through the “steps”.  He wanted the economy going again, and he couldn’t wait for control of the virus.  

So most Governors, even the ones who were trying to “do the right thing” like Mike DeWine here in Ohio, threw the CDC guidance out. States “re-opened” far too soon, and those in the government pressing for continued closures were silenced. Ask Ohio’s Director of Health, Amy Acton. On social media friends were lost, but more importantly, the short term benefits of a month of “closing down” were lost as well. But the public pretty much missed that fact, and still thinks today that we did “the best we could do”.

And the “experts” in Washington DC quietly let it happen. While they opined that it would have been better to stay closed longer, they allowed the shouted demands of politicians to overwhelm what they knew were the right answers. So America re-opened.

Schools

Everyone agrees that it would be better if public schools and universities were open, with kids going to classes and teachers doing their thing.  The American Academy of Pediatrics announced that in June, and those who are vested in regular school attendance have beaten us over the heads with it ever since.  And they aren’t wrong – take it from an old school teacher – lots of good things happen in school.  But the reality of today is that our schools haven’t had the resources to do much to prevent COVID transmission.  

They haven’t redone the ventilation systems, they have done little to create new classroom spaces, and, in the end, schools were crowded before and will only be a little less crowded now. But they also “changed the safety rules” to fit their financial reality. The six-foot “distancing” space that we see marked on the floor everywhere – well it’s three-foot in a classroom, measured from the center of one desk to the next. And yes, everyone will be wearing masks, and teachers will become masters of “Lysol-ing” their classrooms. But that’s about it.

So just like the states opening without regard to the CDC’s guidance, the schools are doing pretty much the same.  The outcome will be increased viral spread. We are seeing that now in many of the big universities; it’s preordained.

Tests

And now the CDC is telling us that we don’t need to test everyone, even those who might be exposed.  We just need to test those who exhibit symptoms, just like we said in March when there were hardly any tests around.  And why is this, after months of saying that we need to test and trace and quarantine?  Well there are two reasons I can think of.  The first is that the statistics created by tests are slowing production in the economy.  The President is on a “clock and a calendar” (thanks Congressman Collins).  He’s got to show that the country is getting back to normal, and it has to happen in time for early voting in October.  

President Trump has already stated that testing makes things look bad.  So if we stop testing, then things will look better – right?  It’s already working.  As testing slows, with fewer positive outcomes, other government agencies are quick to jump on and say we should “go back to (more) normal”.  Weekends and hurricanes are doing wonders for the testing statistics – a lot fewer people are testing positive.

And there’s the other point the CDC folks quietly make – we aren’t able to do the contact tracing and quarantining because we don’t have the resources to handle the numbers. So if we can’t get it done, then there’s not a great reason to test. And why don’t we have the resources? The same folks who want tests to go away failed to provide those resources.

Jaded

It’s really no surprise there’s so much doubt in America about COVID. Even though we demonstrably have the worst numbers in the world, with over six million infected and almost 185,000 dead, many Americans are still questioning what needs to be done. While Dr. Fauci and others have tried: they have been drowned out by politicians who need the economy booming to win re-election. And, we have to wonder if things might have been different if the Fauci’s and Birx’s of our government had resigned with purpose. That can be said of many who have been co-opted into supporting the President with the idea that they were “preventing harm”.

Confidence is an easy thing to lose, and a very difficult thing to win back. Even if the next President is Joe Biden, it won’t change the impact of the flips and flops of our scientists as well as our political leaders.

But it’s certainly worth the try.

The Congressman’s Office

In 1977 I was twenty years old and had the privilege of working for Congressman Thomas A. Luken of Cincinnati.  It started after finishing a three-month stint as a Carter/Mondale campaign Field Coordinator, the lowest level paid position in the successful Presidential campaign.  After the inauguration I went back to school, taking classes at American University in Washington, DC. I I also worked in the Luken Congressional Office part time as a paid intern. 

The job started with writing letters back to the constituents in Cincinnati.  On the major issues like abortion rights and taxes, there was a “form” letter that I personalized for each constituent.  This was before the days of office computers, but we did have typewriters that “remembered” a given letter.  It would stop at the appropriate times, and the operator would type in a name or location to personalize the document.  

But I also found that there were other issues with no office “policy”.  Then it was my job to research the issue, talk to relevant agencies or experts, and propose a response.  One of the best parts of my job was saying, “Hi, this is Martin Dahlman from Congressman Tom Luken’s office, could you…” on the phone.  Responses were usually quick and comprehensive.

Policy Counts

I created “micro-policy” for the Congressman on a variety of issues. Before any letter went out, it had to be approved by the Administrative Aide and the Congressman himself.  Tom Luken was a part of every decision, with an old Marine’s view of work.  Draft after draft of a letter would be “worked up”, but there would always be scribbled revisions to deal with before we reached a final version.

Eventually I worked my way to bigger tasks.  It was the year of the winter “energy shortage” that closed schools throughout Ohio, and I helped relay information about that. I began solving other problems for constituents as an outgrowth of the letters.  Then I got the chance to help write legislation for tax credits for energy efficient heating systems. And finally I got to author some minor Congressional speeches.  Somewhere buried deep in the Congressional Record, there is a Tom Luken speech that I wrote. Pretty exciting!

Later in the year, I came home to Cincinnati to work in the home office.  I served as the Congressman’s local scheduler.  My job was to build a schedule, then act as his staff for appointments and events while he was in town. I learned a lot working closely with him and I finished that summer with a true appreciation of his hard work.  I also felt like I was missing multiple body parts:  the Congressman had a Marine Corps skill of chewing his staff out.  Deserving or not, since I was usually nearby, I got it.

Politics and the Taxpayer

In the Carter Campaign getting the job done as quickly as possible was the goal.  Need signs:  we printed our own and stapled them to telephone poles in the middle of the night.  Need volunteers:  pickup the phone and call high school kids to come in and work – pizza usually did the trick.  The pressure of Election Day made everyday office procedures go out the window.

But in a Congressional office, the law placed a barrier between governing and campaigning.  The simplest way to understand it is the “franking privilege”.  By Congressional mandate, the United States Postal Service would (and still does) deliver mail with the Congressman’s signature on the envelope instead of a stamp.  All of those responses I answered with the automatic typewriters were “franked”.

But the Hatch Act, passed by Congress in 1939, specifies that campaign material cannot be “franked”.  In fact, campaign activities cannot occur in government offices, or by government employees on their paid time.  They had to be paid for by campaign funds, not taxpayer funds.  In fact back in Cincinnati there was the Congressman’s office in the Federal Building where I worked, and there was the Luken campaign office somewhere else.  Only the top aides interchanged between the two.

Hatch Act

As the Congressman’s scheduler, I would get requests from the “campaign” for time slots on his schedule.  That was usually as far as it went, though I did have the “honor” of driving Mr. Luken in the 1977 City of Cheviot Fourth of July parade.  It was my first experience driving a Jeep, and my goal was to shift smoothly so that the Congressman, standing and waving in the back, didn’t get knocked down.  I also wanted to avoid running over the little kids marching in front of us.  That “breaking news” would look bad in the Cincinnati Post the next day!  

But generally the Hatch Act restrictions were clear, and the office kept a distance from the “line”.  

Hubris

This week the President of the United States used the White House, Ft. McHenry, the United States Marines, and a United States citizenship ceremony as “props” for his version of the Republican Convention.  His Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, went even further, using his standing as the chief diplomat of the United States to make a speech supporting the President from the most famous hotel in Jerusalem, the King David.  

The carefully proscribed actions established by the Hatch Act to prevent the abuse of government property, resources, and the powers of incumbency, were thrown out the window.  It’s bad enough that Mr. Trump feels it’s appropriate to use Air Force One as the backdrop for his rallies, but now it’s the White House, and even the Marines.  And, to provide Mr. Pompeo with a brilliant backdrop, taxpayer funds were spent to fly him to Jerusalem and house him in the King David Hotel.

There seems to be no end to the “sins” of the Trump Administration.  The litmus test:  if Michelle Obama had addressed the 2012 Democratic Convention from the Rose Garden, the world would have ended.  But Donald Trump has erased all the legal norms.  He has pardoned his friends and prosecuted his enemies; employed his family members and personally profited from his government’s actions.     

As a twenty-year old budding politician learned, the law protects the taxpayers from paying for campaigns they might not support.  But what America has learned, is that Donald Trump sees himself as above this law, and many others.  There is only one-way to hold him accountable:  at the ballot box on November 3^rd.

Basic Rights

I’m not a Communist.  I’m not even a socialist, really.  I believe that America can be a caring nation, one based on a foundation of basic rights:  life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  The Declaration of Independence is not the sole possession of one political party or the other. The American people own it.  

The definition of life is simple:  the right to live and be healthy.  This is particularly relevant in our current COVID era.  In our modern society, it means that every person in America needs to have access to health care.  It shouldn’t be based on how much that person earns, or can afford.  Health care is a basic human right, one that we need to guarantee.  

And from a practical standpoint, we do guarantee some level of health care to everyone.  But we do it in the most expensive way possible, pushing the impoverished to use Emergency Departments for routine health maintenance.  And don’t think that those costs “go away”.  Nothing is “free”. The high price of all of our medical care includes the cost of caring for those who cannot pay.

National Health

A national policy that provides for everyone to have access to health care would reduce costs for everyone.  That’s not the same as “free” health care.  We all realize that someone has to pay. Whatever you want to call it, from universal health care to Medicaid to an expanded Affordable Care Act:  any of these will make health care LESS expensive, and fulfill America’s responsibility to care for everyone.  Everyone includes undocumented immigrants:  we can’t let them die in the streets either.  And, regardless of Republican talking points, we don’t let that happen now.  

That isn’t communism or socialism.  It’s the mandate that our Founding Fathers gave us. It’s what every industrialized nation in the world does now, except the US.  And it’s what we should do as decent human beings.

Liberty

Liberty means that we can do what we want, within the limits of not hurting others.  A national health care mandate would grant us that liberty, instead of the outdated and ridiculous concept of tying health care to employment.  American capitalism should include the freedom to take a chance on a new business, without giving up basic health care protections.  No one should be locked into a job just to keep health care.

Liberty and the “American Dream” means that people should be able to advance based on, as Dr. King said (and Senator Tim Scott quoted), “the content of their character”.  But that isn’t happening right now.  For black men and women it is as basic as being treated fairly by a common symbol of our government, the police.  It doesn’t take much digging to see that “black lives don’t matter” in far too many cases.  We are being asked by some to pretend that this isn’t an issue, that the “Dream” is available to all.  That’s simply not true.

This isn’t communism or socialism.  It’s basic fairness, rooted in the Declaration and the Bill of Rights.  

Happiness

Thomas Jefferson was a careful author.  He used language like an artist, describing his thoughts with precision.  John Locke was one of Jefferson’s philosophical predecessors and described the “natural rights of man” as life, liberty and property.  Jefferson adapted those terms to his own thinking. He added a “Creator” (…endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights) and changing the term property to happiness.  It wasn’t an abstract error, nor was it just a euphemism to avoid discussing slavery.

Jefferson saw beyond just having enumerated possessions as the key to “happiness”.  He looked to his own life, where he followed his passions, in science, in government, and in agriculture among others.  What made Jefferson happy was inquiry, and he saw the pursuit of knowledge as an inalienable right.  

In our world, financial well being and established position in society does make some happy.  But the Declaration of Independence, unlike Locke’s Natural Rights of Man, does not circumscribe happiness as only ownership.  In a nation where everyone has the right to find happiness, then obvious differences like race or gender shouldn’t restrict that quest.  Neither should the incredibly wide financial inequity of our nation, where the few own most, and the many own little.

If that sounds socialist or communist, then blame Jefferson.  He was a member of the landed class, and yet he saw that there was more to achieve than just possessions.  And so should we.

Education

In a nation where we are dedicated to human equality, and making sure everyone has the basis for life, then it is incumbent on the government to provide and protect for that equality and basis.  As part of the process of making “A more perfect union”, we have historically included more groups into our “circle” of equality.  It is time to recognize that there are still some “outside” the circle, and take definitive action to bring them in.  

Education has always been a key to the American dream.  Yet the financing of our public schools is often based on the wealth of those living in the school’s district.  So, in education, as in some many other facets of our nation, the rich get the best education that “money can buy”, while the poor are denied the resources. 

Here in Ohio twenty years ago, we came to the precipice of leveling the field and providing equal funding for education regardless of the financial status of the district.  In the DeRolph Case, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled for financial equity.  But the pressure brought to bear by the wealthy soon caused the Court to step back from its own decision, and the inequity drags on.  The rich continue to get richer and the poor are left to suffer.   Instead of solving the problem, some offer a solution:  let the poor buy a private education, with some government help.  They call it “school choice”, but it sounds suspiciously like “let them eat cake”.

Expand the Dream

It we are truly a nation defined by our Founding Fathers, then we must move past the old arguments of the 1950’s.  No political party is offering Communism or even Socialism as a choice in the 2020 election.  One party is offering a way to expand the American Dream to include more of our citizens.  And one is saying, “stay the course”, and let the chasm in wealth grow wider.  

It’s clear what Jefferson would want.

Constitutional Mandate

Why should the Postal Service be a financially “break even” operation?  Of all of the powers vested in the Constitution, (Article 1, Section 8, clause 7), why is this one power somehow expected to make money?  

The USPS is running a $20 billion deficit. That includes the total cost of anticipated health care of current employees for their entire retirement.  No reasonable company pays upfront for retirement insurance coverage costs, but the Postal Service does, by law.   And $20 billion, which sounds like a lot of money, is nothing compared to the $686 billion Defense budget, or even Education with $68 billion (and not mentioned in the Constitution).  Neither Defense nor Education turns a profit, nor raises revenue at all.

I question the entire premise that somehow the Postal Service should be making money.  The Postal Service is just that, a public service provided by the government.  It shouldn’t be a money making deal.  That’s not what government is supposed to be.

Public Service

The Postal Service has a function: to help unite America with communication.  That’s what the Founding Fathers intended when they specifically provided for Post Offices and Post roads.   Even though the means of communicating has dramatically changed since 1786, that function still exists.  

The Postal Service employs over 600,000 people.  If it were a private employer (it’s not) it would be the second largest in the United States, just ahead of Amazon.  And somehow, even in this era of electronic communication, those 600,000 workers still have a lot to do.  In fact they are so important, that changes made in the Postal Service procedures that disrupt deliveries creat a huge uproar.  Despite email and Amazon, people still depend on the Postal Service.

I listened to the testimony of Postmaster General DeJoy to both the Senate and the House of Representatives.  DeJoy, a private logistics industry executive appointed to the role, is directly responsible for postal delays in July and August.  They are a part of his economic reforms of the Postal Service.  DeJoy sees his responsibility as making sure the Postal Service is financially solvent.  He might not have a political agenda, despite Democratic legislators’ suggestions.  While he is a major Trump fundraiser, what he seems like to me is a man on a mission. 

Run on Time 

His mission is to cut costs.  His mission is to make the “trucks run on time”.  The problem is, his mission isn’t getting the mail through.  How else can he explain that he has trucks moving from one sorting facility to another, empty?  How else can we understand that personnel are sent home while thousands of pieces of mail remain unsorted?  And what conclusion can we draw from the removal of high-speed sorting machines, other than he does not want to pay personnel to run those machines?

All a stammering DeJoy could say to that was,  “…the plan was for the trucks to run on time”.  But the mail wasn’t on the trucks.  Democratic Congressman Connolly made the point that maybe this was all done “innocently”, not as some nefarious plot to disrupt mail service before the election. Either way, disruption happened.

Votes in Question

The reasons aren’t important. These actions are impacting the election of 2020.  The US Postal Service may return to ontime delivery before the elections, but the damage is done.  DeJoy’s actions have dovetails with the President’s ongoing message. The President reiterated that yesterday in North Carolina.  Trump said the 2020 election will be fraudulent; mail-in voting (unless in Florida) will be be cheated; and we can’t depend on the Postal Service to get our votes through. 

But there is a larger point, when it comes to voting.  Americans are concerned with our disaster in handling the COVID crisis.  They are so concerned that most will risk exposure to the virus and vote.  Americans will still vote absentee (by mail) but many more will don all the HAZMAT protection they can find and go stand in line.  They know that this is a critical election, so critical that it will be worth the unnecessary loss of life from COVID infection.  And make no mistake about this, lives will be lost on November 3^rd (Reuters). People are afraid their voices won’t be heard if they send a ballot by mail, thanks to the President, and to General DeJoy. So they will risk their lives and vote in person.

Future of the Nation

We should start over.  We should go back to the Post Office, a constitutionally mandated organization with a mission to unite America.  It shouldn’t be about some unrealistic bottom line, or Rand Paul’s fever dream of privatization.

But as far as this election is concerned, the undermining of public confidence in the Postal Service is done, another “box checked” on the list of Trump’s transgressions against US democracy.  The future of the democracy will be determined November. It will be loud and clear from the American people, whether they vote in person or by mail.  And that answer will determine the fate of our Republic.

The Trump Show

This is the week of the Republican National Convention. In a “normal” year, it would be a week of crowded convention floors in Charlotte, with funny hats and folks who spent last night (or even early this morning) “partying with the party”.  But it’s not normal times. America is in the middle of a pandemic, and even the Republican Party has been forced to recognize it.  So far in the United States, a little over 3% of those infected with the disease die.  That’s really the statistic that matters, one of the only “facts” of COVID that seems to have held true since the beginning.

So it’s the Republican turn to put on a “pandemic” convention.  The Democrats set a high bar with their “show” last week, and we’ll see what the response will be.  But there is one major difference. The Democratic Party held a convention, and they featured their nominee, Joe Biden.  The Republican Party of 2020 is not a political party sponsoring a candidate. It is the candidate himself.  We are watching the Donald Trump Show this week, with the President scheduled to speak every night, along with most of his immediate family (though clearly his sister and niece aren’t invited anymore).

Incompetence

We are in a polarized environment, when even the simple act of putting a political sign in your front yard has become an act of “aggression” against your neighbors.  Both political parties indulge in hyperbole:  like a buffet menu, you can choose the issue that energizes you.  And I certainly expect we will hear even more this week from Mr. Trump.  In fact it started yesterday, before the convention even began.  The President called an “emergency” media conference on Sunday evening, to tell about a miraculous advance in the treatment of COVID. 

The President announced that “convalescent plasma” (plasma derived from patients recovered from COVID) has a 35% cure rate, and that HE, the President, has ordered it administered nationwide.  The problem is that it’s already being used nationwide, and the best studies show that it’s helpful in about 3% of the cases.  But it was a great way to start out Convention Week.

And Donald Trump is absolutely right about one thing:  COVID is his greatest weakness.  The Biden Campaign would do well to hammer Trump’s incompetence; it’s something every American confronts every day.

Myths

We will hear a series of themes this week.  Joe Biden is weak a puppet. That he has been “radicalized” by the Sanders-Ocasio-Cortez-Socialist wing of the Party.  That Black Lives Matters means burning cites, and it’s coming to your town, your suburb, and your middle class white housewife neighborhood.   

So let’s bust some myths.  Let’s start with the one we’re likely to hear the most about: DEFUNDING THE POLICE.  There will be no police at all, and, to quote the Trump ad already running, there will be a five-day waiting line for 9-11 calls.  Joe Biden, Kamal Harris, and a host of Democratic leaders have disavowed the term, DEFUNDING. But they have not disavowed repurposing.

Down in Austin

We’re likely to hear about Austin, Texas and the city council that has become the “poster child” for the DEFUNDING movement.  You’ll hear that Austin City Council CUT $150 million from the police budget.  That’s really not quite true, and it is a great example for understanding what the defunding/repurposing movement really is about.

Austin had a $420 million annual police budget.  Austin city council cut their police budget by $31 million, mostly advanced license plate readers and a cadet class. They then took $120 million for police activities that weren’t direct policing functions, and moved them out of the police department.  Those activities will still continue, but not as part of the policing role.  And that’s what “DEFUNDING THE POLICE” is about.  Like public education, society has thrown more and more of its “ills” on the police department, from drug addiction to suicide prevention.  But those don’t have to be primarily police responsibilities, just as public health and nutrition don’t have to be public education responsibilities.  The jobs are still done, just repurposed to folks not wearing “blue”.

Stealing Insurance

We are going to hear about socialized medicine, and how Democrats want to take away your health insurance and make you pay for some freeloader.  And that’s not true either.  Joe Biden wants to expand the Affordable Care Act, and he would like to include a “public option”.  That means a government insurance that is purchasable by regular folks, rather than just the private insurance available on the “market place” today.  Public option insurance would increase competition in the insurance marketplace, driving costs down, especially in those places where few private insurance policies are available.

But Biden is not Bernie Sanders, and even Bernie is behind Biden’s health insurance plan.  Of course Bernie wants fully nationalized insurance, but his plan is NOT the Democratic plan in 2020.  Conflating the two is the goal of the Trump campaign, but it’s simply not true.  And by the way, you ARE paying for the “freeloader” without health insurance. You’re paying for them by increased costs of medical care, every time you pay a bill.  

The “Bad” Child

And finally, we’re likely to hear a lot about Hunter Biden, Joe’s son.  We are going to hear vague conspiracies about Joe protecting Hunter from prosecution in Ukraine, and about Hunter’s checkered past:  cocaine use, a Navy discharge, and high salaried board memberships.  President Trump’s own National Security Council has warned about Russia planting stories about Hunter and Joe Biden, but we will hear them anyway.  For a President who employed Paul Manafort and was a party animal himself, sometimes with Jeffrey Epstein, it will be a lot of “the pot calling the kettle black”.  

So it’s going to be a week of Donald Trump.  He’s going to speak every night.  And when it’s not the President, it’ll be the kid with the MAGA hat from Covington, or the couple with the guns from St. Louis.  

Maybe the conventioneers are right.  We should start drinking early.

Cash

Yep, that’s six trillion dollars, a six with twelve zeros behind it.  Need a visual:  if you laid dollar bills end to end at the equator, you would wrap around the world almost 23,000 times.  End to end you could go to Mars and back, eight times.  It’s almost one third of the total annual output of the United States, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP – $20.54 trillion in 2018).  Six trillion dollars is greater than the entire annual budget of the United State government up until 2018 and greater than the entire US debt until 2001. Bottom line – it’s a whole lot of money.  

And six trillion is the amount of money that the United States has spent so far this year to prop up the economy during the COVID crisis.  The Congress and the President spent three trillion directly in COVID relief:  programs like the payroll protection program (PPP) and direct aid to states, hospitals, and other institutions.  $1300 was directly sent to many individual Americans, and $600 in supplemental income was available each week to many who were on unemployment.

COVID Relief

It wasn’t just a safety net for individuals who lost their jobs.  All of that money went in with the idea that it would be spent, and continue to stimulate the economy.  Businesses were propped up so that folks would stay employed, but also so they would continue to produce and buy products and services, and keep “America Going”.  

And, for a brief month or two, it was to help Americans fulfill their “duty” to stay home, and stop the spread of COVID.  Other industrialized nations committed to long-term financial support for their citizenry.  They recognized that COVID wasn’t going to go away, and that money would be well spent to protect society until a vaccine was available.  The United States committed to a brief halt, and then tried to return to full life.  Who was right?  The statistics for national infection and death “tell the tale”:  the United States leads by far in both.

But direct aid programs are only half of what the United States is doing to prop the economy.

The Fed

The Federal Reserve is the “Bank of the United States”.  The “Fed” controls the circulation of money in the nation, and while they don’t actually print money (that’s the job of the Treasury Department) they do control how much money is in supply.  An increase in money available to banks, large businesses, and investors is like fuel for a fire.  Put more fuel on the fire, and it burns hotter and brighter.

So the “Fed” has reduced the interest rates to their best customers to ¼ of 1 percent.  They want banks and investment institutions to borrow the money, and put it in the investment markets.  And so far, it’s worked.  The Standard and Poor’s Index (S&P) hit a new high in the past few weeks, and the more familiar Dow Jones is near 28,000, almost fully recovered from the COVID crash.

It’s not just the “Fed” money that’s propping up the market.  COVID has been good for some industries.  Amazon, Apple, UPS, and all of the other companies that bring things to their customers homes are doing great.  Even the Postal Service staged a small financial comeback in the early summer, with COVID deliveries improving the bottom line.  

But the Federal Reserve and an additional three trillion dollars is the main pillar holding up Wall Street.  And with all the financial legerdemain the “Fed” can pull, ultimately there are limits to what they can do. Even they will run out of money.  And there has never been a clearer gap between Wall Street and Main Street.  As markets hit record levels, US unemployment is over 10%.  That divergence isn’t sustainable for long. 

Choices

So what are America’s choices?  

We can follow our current course, virtually ignoring the COVID pandemic, and try to go back to “normal”.  That will improve our economy, but the price will be continued infections, and increasing deaths.  It’s the “cold” moral choice that Americans are making now, the same one that Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick clearly outlined in April.

“… There are more important things than living. And that’s saving this country for my children and my grandchildren and saving this country for all of us. I don’t want to die, nobody wants to die, but man we’ve got to take some risks and get back in the game and get this country back up and running.”

Americans were horrified at that statement at the time.  Now, for many, it’s the “logical” choice, and America’s de facto national plan.

Or we can recognize that COVID is the problem, not the economy, and deal with it.  If that means closing things down again to gain control of the infection, than sooner is better than later.  The resources to prop up both Wall Street and Main Street are limited and are already being used.  If the goal is to keep things going and save lives until a COVID solution is available, then we need to do a lot better job of it than we are now.

It’s not just politics.  And it’s not just an economic choice.  It’s a moral choice, and a life and death decision for all Americans.

Soften the Target

While I was in high school, I became fascinated with the assassination of President Kennedy.  I found books about the “grassy knoll”, the difficulty of firing Oswald’s bolt-action rifle quickly and accurately, and all of the failures of the Secret Service leading up to the shootings.  I read parts of the Warren Commission report, itself controversial.  And I marveled at the “magic bullet”, found whole and pristine on the stretcher beside the President’s body.  And ultimately I saw the Zapruder film, with the motions of the tragically targeted President so discordant with the described attack.

How could one crazed man change the world?  How could Lee Harvey Oswald so dramatically divert our history?  And later, in 1968, James Earl Ray and Sirhan B. Sirhan would each do the same, pushing our nation away from “good” and into disorder.  Shouldn’t it take more than just one man to deflect the world?  There must be some conspiracy, some greater force behind these crimes, isn’t there?

Plausible “Facts”

I became a conspiracy theorist.  I looked for phantoms behind the grassy knoll.  It didn’t help that a couple of years after I graduated, the US House of Representatives established a committee to re-investigate the shooting.  They heard a fourth shot on an open police radio mike, “proving” that Oswald couldn’t have been a lone gunman.  I went down the rabbit hole: was it the Mafia, Lyndon Johnson himself, the FBI, the CIA, the Defense industry, the Cubans?  I looked forward to 2014 when “all” the information would be released – and then we would finally know.

Well “all” the information wasn’t released a few years ago, and we still don’t know.  But I’ve found that once you enter the contorted world of conspiracies it’s easy to slip farther into the trap.  “Facts” become fiction, theories evolve into “facts”. But, in the end, all of great “construct” of explanations are based in sand.  A single wave, and it’s all washed away.

There are other great historic conspiracies.  Did Franklin Roosevelt “allow” Pearl Harbor to be attacked?  What about Unidentified Flying Objects?  They all sound compelling, with just enough circumstantial evidence to make them seem real.

September 11

But after 9-11, a more insidious conspiracy theory crept into American life.  I think we were shocked that our nation was so vulnerable to terrorists with box cutters willing to die.   So we searched from some other alternative.  How could such great buildings, the twin towers, fall so quickly?  How could a single plane do such damage to the Pentagon?  Why didn’t our air defenses protect us from our own passenger airliners?

The answers were in the clear.  The buildings fell, because their design did not include a fully fueled plane striking them in the middle.  The nation’s air defense did not include a passenger airliner scenario, in spite of the Tom Clancy novel outlining that exact attack strategy on the Capitol Building.  We got caught, wide open and vulnerable.

After 9-11, there was a growing list of conspiracy theorists, all claiming some darker insidious force behind the attacks beyond Bin Laden.  And unlike my Kennedy obsession, you didn’t have to go to the library to find alternative explanations.  There was a new force, the Internet. It brought compelling theories into your home. Grainy video was enlarged, slowed, and perhaps altered, to demonstrate why “the theory” was really fact.  And you could watch them at your leisure, over and over again.

The 9-11 conspiracies became a business.  Advertising was linked to the presentations, and even more elaborate constructs were available by “just one more click”.  While most Americans continue to believe that Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda attacked us, a growing segment grew to doubt what they saw with their own eyes on that sunny morning in September.  They believed that their government was lying to them, was corrupted by the “unseen” forces for financial gain.

In Your Pocket

“Information” is now omnipresent.  We can access it at any given moment.  We stand in line and view it on our phones, see it on Netflix, hear it on podcasts.  Our main method of learning about the world has unlimited bandwidth, and is filled with what Kelly Ann Conway would call “alternative facts”.  It’s fed to us twenty-four seven.  And all of those “sources” are so sure, so “factual”, that it’s difficult to find the “real truth”.  

There is a natural desire to find an overarching “theory of everything” to describe the disparate things that happen in the world. Conspiracies “answer them all”, and simplify the complex nature of current events.  The Q-anon Conspiracy Theory has all of those answers, knitting child molestation with money and political power.  How convenient that Jeffrey Epstein “plugs right in”, and managed to die before his actions could be investigated.  

Coincidence

We don’t like coincidences (Gibbs’ rule 39:  there is no such thing as a coincidence). We want clear and clean answers, from the Creation Story to 9-11.  But with the omnipresence of Internet information, and the growing skepticism about “accepted fact”; minds have been “softened”.   They have been prepared to accept all sorts of fundamentally unfounded ideas that fit a “theory of everything”.   Our minds have become fertile fields for the growth of those ideas.

That growth creates a cynicism in many.  If there are dark unseen forces controlling events, then a single vote cannot matter.  If Donald Trump is leading a crusade against wealthy child molesters, whatever actions he takes must be justified.  After all, he’s protecting children. 

Perhaps there’s an even greater conspiracy here.  Maybe Q-anon is a product of Russian intelligence, or the Trump campaign?  Perhaps Les Wexner created it with Epstein. Maybe there’s another island.

I’ll create a new website, or maybe even a Joe Rogan podcast, for that one.

Madame Speaker

Nancy Pelosi wore a white pantsuit for her speech to the Democratic National Convention last night.  It wasn’t just a fashion choice:  the first woman to become the Speaker of the House of Representatives channels the history of American women in politics.  One hundred years ago, women seized the right to vote with the passage of the 19^th Amendment to the Constitution.  They wore white as well.  Nancy Pelosi was not only celebrating her own success, but honoring the women who came before.

You don’t have to agree with the Democratic Party platform.  You don’t have to accept that Joe Biden is the “best” candidate for President.  And you don’t even have to like what the Democratic Party stands for.  But what you cannot fail to recognize is that the Democratic Party is one where women have a dominant role.  

The Closers

It is the women of the Democratic Party that have closed the last three nights of the Convention.  The first night, Michelle Obama made clear America’s choice in the election of 2020.  The second night, Jill Biden opened her heart to show us the humanity of our husband, Joe.  And last night, the first Black woman to be nominated by a major party for the Vice Presidency, Kamala Harris, told her story and made her case to America.

It was powerful women who spoke for the Democrats, including former Congressman Gabby Gifford.  She was wounded in an assassination attempt, and yet continues to show her amazing determination to make a difference. And the first woman Presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, warned us to not make the mistakes of 2016.  As she said, “‘woulda – coulda – shoulda’ won’t cut it in 2020”.  Senator Elizabeth Warren, former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, and dozens of other women spoke to America about what the Democratic Party is all about.

Joe Biden has his work cut out for him.  Bad enough he has to follow Barack Obama, who clearly warned of Trump’s threat to our Democracy.  But to follow all of those powerful women is an even more daunting task.  But it’s not a competition.  Biden shouldn’t try to be more than he is.  He should just show us his heart, and demonstrate our choices in November.  That would be enough.

The Future

We are far from the old videos of white men crowded on a stage in historic conventions.  The smoke-filled rooms that go back to the nomination of Lincoln in Chicago of 1860 are long gone. We are almost as far from only sixteen years ago, when John Kerry and John Edwards, two “accepted-establishment white men” gained the nomination.  The Republican Party of Trump and Pence is still stuck in the past.  

The Democratic Party is one of color, of diversity, of movements looking to improve the world.  It is the place where climate change, LGBTQ, Black Lives Matter, Gun Law Reform, #METOO, Prison Reform, Immigration Reform and others all intersect.  But perhaps most importantly, the Democratic Party is one of powerful women, taking the reins to return our nation to its proper place.

2020

The election of 2020 is about many things.  But it comes down to two essential issues.  The first is the competency of the Trump Administration, particularly in light of their failure to control the COVID pandemic.  The Democratic Party is presenting a message of competence and strength, led by powerful women.

And second, is the issue of what America’s future will be.  Donald Trump is presenting a nation in fear:  too scared to fix the climate, or racial injustice, or the other multiple inequities in our society.  That fear is symbolized in Trump’s plan to prevent school shootings:  turn schools into fortresses, defended by armed guards against intruders.  It is a solution based in the inability to solve the greater problem of weapons and mental health.

Democrats offer solutions based in hope rather than fear.  The pandemic can be controlled.  The climate problem can be solved.  Our institutions can be altered to end discrimination.  And instead of fortifying our schools, we should fix the problems that create school shooters in the first place.  

Hope versus fear, the 21^st Century versus the 1950’s, America as a leader rather than cowering:  those are the choices we face in 2020.  Joe Biden will lead the Democratic ticket, but behind him there is something even more powerful:  the Women of Democracy.  And they will carry the day.

New Conventioning

I joined eighteen million other Americans who watched the “Virtual Democratic Convention” for the last two nights.  And I am impressed.   The “Big Tent” Party has so far managed to present an incredibly coherent message to the American people.  The message is clear:  we are in crisis, our current President neither cares nor is capable of handling it, and Joe Biden is both competent and compassionate.  And not only have they done it, but it’s been with an amazing array of both known and unknown speakers. The Democratic Party has also created a whole new medium, a whole process of “conventioning” with almost no hitches.

I mean: it is the Democratic Party! There’s not much we do that doesn’t get “messy”. But somehow last night, we managed to put Stacy Abrams, Rosalyn and Jimmy Carter, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bill Clinton, John Kerry, Colin Powell and Jill Biden on air with almost no hitches. And they all fit together. The production qualities are outstanding: even the fifty-seven state delegate vote went off with little hesitation. Way to go Pete Buttigieg, Northern Marianas, Vermont, and Delaware who “passes”!

Democratic Diversity

So what’s the substance of the “convention”?  The Democratic Party is the party of diversity.  We have “old white men”, like the candidates of the past: Clinton, Sanders, Kerry, and the present, Joe Biden.  But we also include young gay state representatives from Georgia, Native American delegates from South Dakota, and immigrants from the Philippines who are now citizens in Hawaii.  We have dynamic young Black men from Wisconsin and Philadelphia.  And we have Black women, lots of them, from Chicago and Atlanta and throughout the South.  And they are all bound and determined to see Joe Biden as the next President of the United States.

We saw familiar faces as well.  Maria Yovanovitch, who testified so eloquently in the impeachment hearings, spoke for Biden.  So did Sally Yates, who might well be the next Attorney General of the United States.  And Bret McGurk, who was instrumental in two Administration’s National Security apparatus, laid out the case for a Biden Presidency:  a case for leadership and competence, rather than confusion.  Or, as Bill Clinton said, it’s either: “Four more years of blame, bully and belittle…” or Joe Biden to “…build back better”.

Women

But perhaps most striking about the “virtual convention” are the powerful women.  Not only have the “masters of ceremonies” been women, but also we have heard from so many others.  The “closers” of the first two nights:  Michelle Obama and Jill Biden made the case.  Michelle Obama made the argument for competency:  Donald Trump is not, and Joe Biden would be.  The former First Lady laid bare her constant fears and anxieties of the last three and a half years.  And she told us how to cure that on November 3^rd.

And Jill Biden was convincing when she spoke of her husband Joe as the “healer in chief”, a man who could reach across the divides of our nation and bring us together.  Former Ohio Governor John Kasich said the same thing.  So did Colin Powell, and Chuck Hegel.  And so did Cindy McCain, the wife of Senator John McCain. 

California Exchange

Tonight is the night of California Senator and Vice Presidential nominee Kamala Harris (“Comma-lah” not “Kamm-ah-lah” as my Trumpian neighbor made sure to correct me).   She is the very face of the new Democratic Party:  Black and Southwestern Asian, California and Howard University, Prosecutor and Justice reformer.  She is the third woman to be a major party candidate for Vice President.  America’s destiny is as a diverse nation.  Joe Biden sees his role as the last of the “old white men”, the one to pass the baton to the new era of diversity and change.  And Kamala Harris represents the “out-going runner” for that exchange.   

But the real test of this convention won’t be about technical prowess and live feeds.  Everyone from old white men to young Latina women have told us about Joe Biden.  But Thursday, Joe himself will have to tell us his story, his goals, and his strengths.  It will be much more than getting “seven words” in order, the President’s simplistic test of competency.  Joe Biden must convince us that he’s got “the right stuff” that all of these other Americans have told us about.

Competency

Joe is no Barack Obama or even Bill Clinton when it comes to speech making.  We don’t need to hear soaring oratory.  What we need to hear is competence and compassion, and I have no doubt that’s what Joe Biden will deliver.  It is what has always been in his heart.

We have been in a dark tunnel of Trumpism since November 9^th, 2016.  For the past two nights we have heard from an amazing group of Americans, of all colors and genders, ethnicities and professions. They tell us that Joe Biden is the light at the end of the tunnel.  Donald Trump will spend next week trying to show that light as the westbound freight train to Chicago, about to smash into America.  

So Joe, show us the light of a new and better future, not the apocalyptic nightmare that Trump warns about, or that we are living today.  That’s the “low bar” for your message of Thursday night.

More Perfect

No matter what your political view or ideology – every American should believe in the right to vote.  It’s fundamental to the nature of our country. The citizens of the United States select their leaders by majority agreement.  It’s the American Way.

As a part of the United States becoming a “More Perfect Union” we have included more and more citizens in the voting process.  That’s been a major narrative in our nation’s story:  the fight for the right to vote.  I outlined that struggle recently in an earlier essay, The Arc of the Vote.  Any political movement that establishes itself as anti-voting is swimming against the current of American history.  And sadly, that is the story of the modern Republican Party.

REDMAP

As with many things in the GOP, it didn’t start with Donald Trump.  It actually begins in 2010 with the REDMAP project.  As a political party, the Republicans made a national strategy out of drawing district lines to gain the maximum power.  The idea wasn’t new. The term for it, Gerrymander, came from the actions of the Governor of Massachusetts, Elbridge Gerry, in 1810. 

But the REDMAP project took re-districting to an extreme, using modern technology and voting patterns to divide states in favor of Republicans by the city block.  An outgrowth of the project was to “pile” Democrats into a few districts where they would have an overwhelming majority. Other districts would slice Democratic communities into multiple districts so that their vote was diluted.

The ultimate results of successful “REMAPPING” was districts so partisan, that voters of the minority party were in fact, disenfranchised.  Their vote simply didn’t matter, and the elections became about which candidate in the Republican Party could be more partisan.  Districts like Ohio’s Fourth, represented by Republican Jim Jordan, snaked across the state.  Its boundaries extend from the Dayton suburbs to the Columbus suburbs, the Toledo suburbs, the Mansfield suburbs to the Cleveland suburbs.  It carefully avoids urban areas, making it the tenth most Republican District in the nation.

VOTER ID

The second part of the plan was to suppress Democratic voters, and therefore, suppress minority voters.  They did this by creating whole new barriers to being able to vote.  For centuries voting was a two-step process:  registration, and casting the ballot.  Registration required a proof of citizenship (birth certificate) and used a signature to identify the voter.  Voting was a process of matching the signatures, a quick and easy check, to cast the ballot.

In the Jim Crow South, Black Americans were harassed at both steps in the process.  To register they had to prove that their “grandfather” was eligible to vote,. That was something that the former slaves could not do.  Once that was stricken, they were required to pass “literacy tests”, or accurately guess the number of jellybeans in a jar.  And when those “tricks” failed to stop registration, then intimidation in the form of the Ku Klux Klan kept them from voting at the polls.

But modern voter suppression is more sophisticated.  Instead of creating barriers at registration, the Republican Party determined to make the actual act of voting more difficult.  Instead of matching signatures, they required state identification cards to be allowed to gain a ballot.  For most suburban white voters, a State ID was commonplace, a Driver’s License. But for minority and urban voters that “third step” in the process is more onerous.  In essence, a “poll tax” was added, a fee for the right to vote: the cost of a State ID.

Fake News

Before they could add in the VOTER ID requirements, the Republican Party had to generate a reason.  So they created an ongoing drumbeat of stories about voter fraud at the polls, even though the actual number of cases of fraudulent voting in the United States was miniscule.  By convincing voters that there was fraud at the polls, then VOTER ID laws could be justified.  So the Republican Party created a problem, and then they mandated a solution.

All of this occurred in spite of the Republicans Party’s own studies which called for them to expand their membership.  The 2013 “autopsy” of the losing 2012 Romney Presidential bid carefully outlined the steps that the “Party of Lincoln” could take to gain Black and Latino voters.  In over one hundred pages, it called for Party diversification. It depended on the strength of Republican ideas to draw voters to their cause.

But the “autopsy” was ignored.  The Party turned away from diversification both spiritually and literally. They fired Michael Steele, the first Black Chairman, and turned to Wisconsin’s Reince Preibus.  

Purge

The third “leg” of the Republican voter suppression campaign was in purging the voting rolls.  While the typical “suburban Republican” voted in every election, many Democrats voted only in the Presidential years.  If they missed one, then it would be eight years between votes.  So Republican Secretaries of State pushed through laws to purge the voting lists of those who failed to vote in six years.  It was simple statistics.  They would remove a lot more Democrats then Republicans.

REDMAPPING, VOTER ID, and LIST PURGING aren’t just strategies:  they are now our history.  The America we live in today is shaped by the results of these suppression techniques.

Consolidation

And now we are confronted with the final, more blatant, fourth leg of the campaign. The President making it harder for Americans to cast a ballot.  Even before the COVID pandemic, boards of elections were reducing the number of polling places in urban areas.  In locations where folks are less likely to have private transportation, polling places have been consolidated to make them farther away.   While the NBA’s offer to use their Coliseums as “mass” polling places is helpful, it also requires folks to travel farther from their own homes to vote.  What seems like a great idea to suburban voters used to getting in their cars and going, is just another barrier to urban voters.

In the 1950’s era of Norman Rockwell paintings, folks in small towns walked to their local school and voted together.  It is classic Americana, citizens deciding their government.   It is the way Americans voted for the history of our nation.  But the line of voters Rockwell painted was of all white people.  Now that more American’s of all races have the right to vote, that method isn’t “good enough”.  

Last, Best Chance

REMAP, VOTER ID, LIST PURGING, POLL CLOSINGS:  all of this isn’t coincidental.  As discovered in the notes of Thomas Hofeller, mastermind of the REDMAPPING strategy, it was done specifically to disenfranchise minority voters.  And now, in the midst of the pandemic, Donald Trump is placing the final obstruction to voting.  In a crisis when the MOST at risk from COVID are elderly minority voters, the President’s appointee has undercut the Postal Service.  At a time when commonsense would dictate voting by mail, the government is taking affirmative steps to make that more difficult.

None of this is by accident.  The Republican Party turned it’s back on diversification after 2013, now they have little left but to try to restrict the vote to their own supporters.  So what can Democrats do?

Vote:  Democrats must overcome every obstacle and vote.  Democrats must check their registration to make sure they aren’t purged.  They must vote early by mail if that’s what’s required.  Or they must risk infection and possible death (really) to line up and vote in person on Election Day.  There can be no stopping, no hesitation, no questioning of purpose.  If we don’t, Republicans will be rewarded with four more years in office. Who knows what barriers may be in place by 2024.  This is our best chance to follow the American Way, fulfill the American Dream, and move the arc of history towards justice.  

Vote.

Security

We live in a small town outside of Columbus, Ohio.  I’ve been here since 1978, when I moved into an apartment as a first year teacher at the local high school.  Since then, I bought a house near the library, got married, and put on an addition that doubled the size.  In all of those years (forty-two and counting) I’ve never felt unsafe in my home, even though I lived alone for all but ten of them.  

But in the “modern era” it makes sense to have some security.  When I worked I was scheduled “away” a lot, so we installed video cameras around the house exterior.  And now we have “Ring” cameras and doorbells.  No matter where we are, here or in Florida or wherever, when someone approaches the house, were notified.   And when someone rings the doorbell, we answer.

So if a notification popped up on my phone, showing someone lifting a dog trap from the back of the truck, or stealing my “Joe Biden” sign from the front yard, I’d do something about it.  I’d yell through the “Ring” (you can do that!!), I’d call the next-door neighbor, or I’d dial the police.  You don’t just let folks steal from you in “plain view”; it’s why you spent all the money for the “Rings” in the first place!

Post Office

The United States Postal Service is as old as the nation.  In fact, it’s enshrined in the Constitution as one of the core powers of the Congress.  Article I, Section 8, clause 6 states:  “…that Congress will have the power to establish post offices and post roads”. The Founding Fathers understood that to have a nation, you had to be able to communicate.  Post Offices and the roads connecting them were critical national infrastructures.  

And while there are now numerous ways in which we are “webbed” together (including the world wide web), the United States Postal Service still serves an important role.  It is the base communication that everyone can use, regardless of whether they can afford a computer, or a phone, or even a home address.  Everyone can still drop a letter in the mailbox, and everyone, even if they don’t have a street address, could have a Post Office Box (between $40 and $150 a year, depending on where you live) or even just have mailed delivered to the Post Office for them to pick up. It’s called  General Delivery.

Modern World

Email and other forms of electronic communication have taken over what was once done by “snail mail”.  But there are whole other categories of important products, including medicines and government documents that are hand delivered, daily, by the Postal Service. 

Could UPS or FEDEX do that?  Of course they could.  But it would cost a lot more, and those companies would have to expand their entire infrastructure.  They would have to become, well, the Postal Service, and we would have to pay a lot more for it.  The Postal Service isn’t a “for profit” corporation.  It is established as a government service, written into the founding document of the nation, and funded in part by the United States Government.  It is one of the founding pillars of our nation, like the military and the printing of money.  

De-Construction

So when the current Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, claims he is “revising the business model” of the Postal Service, he’s not fulfilling his Constitutional mandate.  In fact, he is fulfilling an original goal of Steve Bannon, the 2016 Trump Campaign Chairman.  Bannon didn’t believe in the “government” as we know it today.  He wanted it “deconstructed”.  And even though Bannon is long gone, the Trump Administration has done a pretty good job of fulfilling his “white board” list.  The State Department is hollowed out, a polluter leads the Environmental Protection Agency, and “acting” directors and secretaries now head multiple agencies and departments.  The Constitutional mandate of Senate “advice and consent” for Presidential appointments is ignored.

But all of this philosophical “deconstruction” really isn’t what’s happening at the Postal Service.  Nope, General DeJoy isn’t really engaging in “deconstructing”. He’s engaging in theft in plain view.  And he’s not stealing money (at least that we know of): he’s trying to steal the Presidential election of 2020.

We are in the middle of a global pandemic.  Over 170,000 Americans are already dead, and almost 5 ½ million are infected.  We have a long, long way to go before we reach some kind of equilibrium with COVID, some kind of vaccine induced herd immunity.  And meanwhile, we need to continue with our national life, including holding elections.

It’s common sense that if the virus is spread through crowds and contact, we ought to avoid crowding peoples together, particularly those most vulnerable to the deadly consequences of infection.  So we ought to have a way for folks to vote without creating that risk.  

Stealing an Election

Oh snap, we do!!  We vote by mail (or absentee to split the difference).  We’ve done it for almost one hundred and fifty years.  But somehow the President of the United States has determined that if that everyone that can vote, does, he will lose.  So his simple campaign strategy is to make it harder to vote.  And since he is the President, with seeming unlimited powers, why not “deconstruct” the Postal Service now.  That way when people try to vote by mail, it will be more difficult. 

Or even better, their ballots won’t arrive in time to be counted.  Or there will be huge stacks of ballots just laying around in Postal warehouses.  That way, when Trump loses, he can claim that the election was “rigged”.  And it will be, by Mr. Trump himself and his Postmaster General, Mr. DeJoy.

Nearly seven hundred sorting machines are being removed from Postal Service regional centers, right now.  Workers who sort mail are being told they cannot work overtime.  Carriers are not allowed to make additional trips back to the Post Offices to get more mail.  Mailboxes (the blue drop boxes) are being removed from street corners.  Unsorted mail is stacking up everywhere.  

In Plain View

The Postman’s Oath is: 

 “I believe: Neither Rain, Nor Sleet, Nor Dark Of Night Shall Stay These Couriers From The Swift Completion Of Their Appointed Rounds.”

But Postmaster General DeJoy and the President of the United States are doing their best to make sure that the mail won’t be delivered, and that couriers no longer make their “appointed rounds”.  The oath doesn’t say anything about political interference.  

The President and his henchman is trying to steal an election.  We don’t need “Ring” doorbells or surveillance cameras to see the thefts. It’s happening right out in public, in plain view to us all.  

The question is:  what are we going to do about it?

In the Market

We have a little investment account, setup with the Schwab Company. It’s been there for years though there’s not a ton of money in it. But it serves as an ultimate backstop if we would need finance. I’ve learned not to dwell on it. The stocks go up, the stocks go down; if you leave it alone in the end they trend to the good.

But with all of the tough economic news in the past few months, I’ve worried about where our investment has gone. Did the COVID crisis economy impact on our little nest egg? But, at least as of today, the answer is no: our shares are valued within a few hundred dollars of what they were in February, before COVID, and the crash.

Personally that’s nice to know, especially for two retired folks who also have pensions vested partly in the market.  But it raises a whole different issue:  what planet is Wall Street on?

By the Numbers

We are in the midst of a global pandemic.  Unemployment shot from three percent to fifteen percent, and now has eased back towards ten percent (BLI).  That means that one in ten people who need a job can’t get one.  But in mid-July, 51 million Americans were drawing unemployment (Forbes).  That’s a confusing number.  Last year the Pew Research Institute estimated 157 million Americans were employed, so if fifty-one million are drawing unemployment, that means that now almost a third don’t have jobs.  

No matter how you manipulate the numbers, either a whole lot more people are unemployed than the ten percent listed, or there’s a lot of the 51 million drawing unemployment who aren’t counted. (That’s true, by the way, because they aren’t looking for work. And before someone starts the nonsense elitist conspiracy theory about the lazy American worker, remember most of those on unemployment are waiting to get back on with their regular jobs, closed by the pandemic).

51 million is almost a third of the workforce.  So keep that in mind.  And among industrialized nations, the United States is demonstrably one of the worst in the world in handling the COVID pandemic.  We are on a scale with Russia, and Brazil, and maybe India and Bangladesh (Guardian).  We, the United States, have screwed this up. Many thousands have died as a result.  Even with all of our political blinders on, it’s difficult to argue that.

The Wall Street “Force”

But to paraphrase Star Wars’ Yoda, “…the blinders are strong on Wall Street”!  It’s a narrow tunnel of vision that lets them accept one of the highest death rates in the world, in order to keep on making money.  But if you can think about it in their way, it makes sense.  As long as Americans are working, and much of the workforce either doesn’t get sick or recovers, than the engine of the American economy keeps running.  And while the markets for products are subdued from COVID, many are still going strong.   It’s mostly the old and those with pre-conditions that are dying, and most of them weren’t in the workforce to start with.  If that sounds incredibly cold blooded – it is.

While Mom and Pop running the corner store are losing, Amazon and Apple and Microsoft are cleaning up.  Even if you can’t or won’t go to the local store, Amazon is lining up packages at your door.  And even if you don’t want to leave your property, there’s even more time to build that fence, or deck, or addition.  That’s why there almost no construction lumber left around (check you nearby lumberyard).   We’re all digging postholes, pouring Quikrete, and building fences.  If only we could find the pickets, we could all finish “good fences” and become “good neighbors”.

Folks aren’t invested in Mom and Pop Incorporated on Wall Street. But they sure are in Amazon, Apple, UPS, and all of the other industries legitimately profiting from the COVID crisis.  And that’s not even including investing in companies building ventilators, or developing pharmaceuticals.

Enter the Fed

And to add to all of that, the Federal Reserve is making sure there’s lots of “free money” around for investment.  The current Federal Reserve lending rate is ¼ of one percent annually (Bankrates). In non-mathematics, that means it costs 25¢ a year for each $100 you borrow.  Essentially then, if you can get the best Federal Reserve rate, they’ll loan you money for virtually nothing.  Even more realistically, right now the current thirty-year mortgage rate, something most homeowners understand, is 3% (Bankrate).

So there’s lots of money out there, and folks are using it to buy into the stock market.  More buyers mean that the share prices go up, and that keeps Wall Street “looking good”.  It also provides political fodder for the Trump 2020 campaign that proclaims the “health” of the economy based on the Dow Jones Industrial Average.  It’s now just a little over a thousand points below the record highs of the beginning of the year (Marketwatch).

Strategic Flaws

But there are two “flaws” to worry about if you’re the Trump 2020 campaign.  First is all of those 51 million drawing unemployment.  Most of them know why they aren’t working, and COVID is the answer.  If they draw the straight line from the COVID disaster to Trump, it’ll mean a disaster for Trump at the polls.  

And there’s a second, more existential moral question.  If the United States economy is rolling by ignoring the human toll of COVID, then what kind of nation are we?  I can’t say that Trump or his campaign is concerned about that, but I can hope that there are Trump supporters that are.  Certainly if they are mourning the loss of a loved one, those market numbers don’t create much joy.

It’s all in where you are economically. If you are doing well with money in the market, you’re doing even better. If you are unemployed, especially because of the pandemic, things are looking pretty grim. And if you are at risk from the pandemic with little being done to protect you from infection, well, Good Luck. You’re not the priority.

This is the eighth in the “Out My Window” series about life in the COVID-19 pandemic world.

Twilight Zone

Sometimes it feels like we’ve fallen into some old episode of The Twilight Zone. I go out and see folks going about their normal routines.  It’s like “The Before Times”; before we ever heard of the Corona-Virus.  They’re shopping at Lowes and at Kroger (they never stopped), and they are now even going into restaurants and bars.  For many, at least here in the Columbus suburbs, it’s “back to life”.  Maybe that’s why Franklin County (Columbus metro) is leading the state in confirmed COVID cases, almost 19000 to Cuyahoga’s (Cleveland) near 14000 (NYT). 

It just seems odd.  At least facemasks cover the workers and most of the shoppers.  And even in the restaurants, as I pass through to get to the patio, the people seated at the tables seem subdued, unsure of what they can or should do.  We went to a patio breakfast this morning.  An older couple sat at the next table, safely distanced from us.  They had their masks on, but there was the furtive, almost threatened look in the older man’s eyes that struck me as he glanced our way.  

It’s like a blanket been thrown on the world.  Many look at others as the “enemy”, or better put, the “infected”.  And their infection could be your own.  A cough, a sneeze, a random touch or even just proximity, and you too can be part of the growing millions of Americans diagnosed with COVID-19.

Inshallah

In some ways that’s a club I’d like to join and get it over with.  That way, the damage is done, and life in the “real world” can be less tenuous and threatening.  But, of course, that all depends on surviving the experience.  I’ve had long discussion with my friends, socially distanced of course.  Some of them take a laissez faire attitude.  In Arabic the word is “Inshallah”.  It means, “If Allah wills it,” as if to say that you have no control over what happens.  My younger friends tend towards that view.  Statistically they can afford to.

But I am a sixty-three year old with multiple “pre-existing conditions”.  Sure I’ve put hundreds of miles on my elliptical machine (especially since March), and added hundreds of pushups, sit-ups and other “ups” afterwards.  But it doesn’t improve the odds I have if I actually manage to contract the virus.  Those odds are still in my favor, but betting my life against a fifteen percent chance of dying ain’t a good bet, at least not for me.  And worse, the folks in my “circle” are at higher risk than I.  So while I can admire “Inshallah”, I don’t have the luxury of allowing only Allah to control my destiny.

I keep thinking of the stories in the hospitals, of those last few moments when you are running out of air, before the anesthesia and the ventilator.  Call you family, tell them you love them:  it may be the last chance you have.  I’m not looking to die, but concern about death hasn’t been threatening and omnipresent like this before. I’m not an “Inshallah” guy, I choose my risks and accept the responsibilities.  And I can’t see choosing this one for me, or my family.

History Rhymes

I went to a family gathering.  We are a Jewish, Irish, German agglomeration, so hugging is in our genetic disposition.  But we remained socially distant, wary of closing the gaps, of crossing the defined familial circles of contact.  It was nothing if not weird.  Who thought we, the United States, one of the most modern nations in the world, would ever be like this?

I read about the Flu Pandemic of 1918 (really, not 1917, and definitely not World War II, Mr. President).  While medicine struggled to treat the disease, they had a pretty clear idea how to prevent it.  Masks, hand washing, and social distancing:  102 years ago it was the same equation we are trying to follow today. 

While we are distant from that time, their struggles are echoed in our own tumultuous response to COVID-19.  There were “anti-maskers” back then.  And, amusingly I guess, there were compromisers then too.  There were the “gentlemen” who wore masks because they were required to, but punched a hole for their cigar or cigarette in the center of the mask.  Somehow, it didn’t prevent infection as well.  Who’d figure that?

It’s just like the guy at Kroger with the mask somehow framing his beard, but leaving his nose and mouth uncovered.  I guess we won’t be getting bed bugs or fleas from him.

Our Own Work 

So many life-altering decisions are occurring, many in contradiction.  The Big 10 won’t play fall sports.  Here in Columbus though, most people somehow have faith that “THE BUCKEYES” will take the field anyway.  They can’t imagine that life has really changed that much:  no football Saturdays, no tailgates, no family gathered around the TV singing Carmen Ohio.  All of them are “spreader” events for the virus.   Just like sending kids to school.

But the kids are still practicing at the local high school.  Whatever health officials say, the politicians aren’t willing to stand between a high school senior’s Mom and her child’s game, at least, not yet.

Inshallah is not the answer.  We’ve known what that answer is all along:  close life down, control the spread, open carefully, and wait until a vaccine can provide immunity.  But instead, we’ve gone into a political Twilight Zone, where common sense is overrun by campaign rhetoric. Allah may or may not be willing, but America will have to come to terms with the virus, or pay the price with the sacrifice of thousands more lives.  

There is another old phrase: “God protects fools, drunkards, and the United States of America”.  We’ve depended on that protection in this crisis, and it hasn’t worked.  As President Kennedy said: “Here on Earth, God’s work must truly be our own”.

The Announcement

Joe Biden announced his running mate yesterday – California’s Senator Kamala Harris.  The choice represents a first:  the first Black (and Indian-American) woman to be on the national ticket.  There have been two other women chosen as Vice Presidential candidates, Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 and Sarah Palin in 2008.  And, of course, Hillary Clinton led the Democratic ticket in 2016.

Senator Harris was the right pick from the start, back when Biden secured the Democratic nomination in March.  She fulfills the number one qualification for any Vice Presidential candidate – she is prepared to serve as President of the United States. Harris has three times won statewide election in California, the largest state in the Union.  Twice she was elected to the state Attorney General, administrating the largest Justice Department outside of the Federal government. And in 2017, she was elected to the United States Senate.

And since the death of Floyd George, and the ascent of the Black Lives Matter movement, the selection of a Black woman as Vice Presidential candidate is a statement by Biden and the Party.  Not only does Biden acknowledge the importance of Black women to the base of the Party, but he also recognizes the unique reality of our times.  He could have turned back, to a more typical candidate, a white man who would “fit in” with the other forty-eight pictures on the wall. 

Making A Statement

But Biden recognized the opportunity of making history, and making a statement to the American people.  He originally did that by pledging that his Vice President would be a woman.  Some say he cut the candidate pool in half, but in reality, he doubled his choices.  Consideration of women opened whole new opportunities.  

And he had great options.  But none of the candidates had the qualifications of Harris.  Not only was Harris tested in the hot spotlight of a national campaign, but she was also one of the few candidates to actually challenge Biden directly.  Because of that, Joe Biden was able to make another statement with his choice.  He wants people around him who are going to question, to challenge, and even be willing to oppose him.   This contrasts to the current President who only wants “yes” men and women around.

Biden has a unique perspective of the Vice Presidential role, having served eight years in the job.  The most important qualification for Biden was the ability of the Vice President to work with the President in governing the nation.  And in Harris, Biden chose a person he can depend upon to work with him.

Some say that Harris’s Presidential campaign failed, and that failure should disqualify her from the ticket.  But Joe Biden has a different view of that:  his 2008 Presidential campaign failed as well, but his selection by Barack Obama led to eight years in the White House.

Politics

So what are the political implications?

Harris is only slightly more progressive than Biden.  She was more aligned with him than with the Sanders/Warren wing of the Democratic Party.  So the ticket is moderate/progressive, even though the Trump Campaign will try to brand them as “socialists” or “communists”.   

The political danger of Harris is that the Sanders wing will decide not to support the ticket, as some did in 2016.  But Sanders himself has strongly supported Biden, much more so than he did Clinton.  And the Biden campaign has adopted some of Sanders issue positions, particularly when it comes to the environment.  So, while there will always be some dissatisfied with “moderation”, most will come along with the ticket.

And Kamala Harris is uniquely tied into the core base of the Democratic Party, Black women.  Harris is a graduate of Howard University, and a member of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, an important and historic link to Black women leadership.  Harris represents a new generation of Democratic leaders along with several of the other primary candidates for President.  Her obvious energy and enthusiasm will help energize the Party.  Both are critical for Democrats, the majority political party in the United States. It only needs to get its voters to the polls to win. 

The Campaign

Trump 2020 was already prepared with attack ads against the Biden/Harris ticket; some were running on social media last night. The current Trump narrative is that Biden/Harris is a “socialist” ticket, as if Trump was running against Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  But he’s not, and the American people recognize the difference.

Depend on things to get ugly, with personal attacks on both Biden and Harris.  The whispers will be that Biden is somehow “diminished” and that Harris is, well “a woman”.   But both Biden and Harris have shown they can take hits and come back strong.  And Americans are not going to fall for the old tropes that might have worked twenty, or even four years ago.

Biden made the right choice.  Harris has “the right stuff”. 

“Good Old Days”

I listen to folks talk about “the good old days”. That was when you could look at both political parties candidates for President and think that either one would take care of the nation.  Those days weren’t so long ago.  I didn’t agree with Mitt Romney, and would have been crushed if he won in 2012.  But it wouldn’t have created an existential political crisis.  And I felt the same way about John McCain, and even Bob Dole and George HW Bush. (If you see a space where George W Bush is, you’re right).

But even then, and far before, we have had politics of intentional divisiveness.  “Divide and conquer” has been an American political tactic for at least two hundred years.  What the modern era of high tech has done, is made “dividing” so much more effective, and dramatic.

Wille Horton

In 1988, the Bush campaign used the infamous “Willie Horton” ad to drive a wedge in voters.  Bush’s opponent, Governor Mike Dukakis of Massachusetts, was in office during a weekend furlough program for eligible convicts.  The program had great goals:  prepare felons for release and give them a reason to behave in jail.  And while generally the program achieved those goals, one prisoner on release committed an especially heinous armed robbery and rape. 

The Bush campaign pounded the “dog whistle” racist message of a black man raping and torturing, making it somehow Dukakis’ fault.  “By the time we’re finished, they’re going to wonder of Willie Horton is Dukakis’ running mate,” said Bush campaign manager Lee Atwater.  It worked.

Gay Marriage

In 2004, George W Bush was running for re-election against Democrat John Kerry.  Bush was running behind in the early polling, and needed to secure electoral votes in states like Ohio.  The problem for Bush was that after the contested election of 2000, it was likely that Democratic turnout in Ohio would be high.  Bush had to find a way to energize the Republican vote in the state to offset that turnout.  

The Republican Secretary of State of Ohio, Ken Blackwell, placed a state issue against gay marriage on the ballot.  It wasn’t really an issue for Ohio, but Blackwell determined to make it one.  It forced Ohio Republicans to face the possibility of allowing gay marriage. Their reaction pushed them to come out and vote against it.  And they did, voting for the marriage issue and George Bush.  It secured both Ohio and the Presidency for Bush’s second term.  

It was the “wedge” that polarized and energized voters to participate in the election.

Dog Whistle

You wouldn’t think that “wedges” would be necessary in the election of 2020.  Our nation is so polarized, that every issue seems to drive us apart.  Even the common sense reactions to world pandemic; wearing masks and social distancing, somehow have managed to force folks to “take a side”.   

But the ability to “wedge” and divide voters has come so far since the early days of television commercials and “dog whistle” speeches.  Now splitting American voters can be done with precision, as social media targets picked issues to reach the interests of a particular voter.  

It’s a carefully orchestrated attack, using social media to lay the groundwork, and then the campaign to “close the deal”.   Racism being used again. The Trump campaign is literally threatening suburban white women with “Black Lives Matter and Antifa” coming to burn their homes.  But that kind of “dog whistle” (or air horn) racist attack seems to be falling flat in that key demographic for the Republicans in 2020.

Child Trafficking

So there is another angle of attack:  disappearing children.

There is no “acceptable” number of children disappearing in America.  In social media today, you see numbers like “2000 children go missing in the United States every day”.  That’s actually a valid statistic.  But there’s a missing factor.  The vast majority of those missing children are found.  In fact in 2018 in Ohio, 19879 children were reported as missing.  But what is not reported as loudly, is that 19510 were ultimately found safe, 98% (Sandusky Register). 

Of those 19879 missing children, over 12000 were classified as runaways.  This is not to devalue the 369 children whose cases were not closed.  But in Ohio 2018, only six of the closed cases were “stranger abduction” cases.

But social media has conflated the highly visible Epstein case, with the huge missing child number (even though 98% are returned).   Then add that to the Trump “whisper” campaign that accuses Biden of an “improper” interest in children, and we have another “wedge”.  

It’s odd that the attack is made on this issue, considering of the two major Presidential candidates, Donald Trump is the only one with a direct connection to Epstein.  I’m not accusing the President of sexual impropriety with minors, but there’s so much more evidence for that possibility rather than of Biden doing anything wrong.

Voters Not Voting

But that’s the nature of wedge issues. And the demographic groups of white suburban women and younger “social media” voters are the ones in the crosshairs of this wedge.  The Trump tacticians hope that even if this doesn’t convince them to vote for Trump, perhaps it will prevent them from voting for Biden.

It fits in with the overall Internet “conspiracy” theme of many Millennials.  If everyone is guilty of everything, than why bother to vote at all.  And that idea benefits Trump.  Think about that the next time you’re checking out your chosen social media platform.

Golfing Tradition

There is a tradition in golfing, the Nineteenth Hole.  Sure a regulation golf course has eighteen. But it’s at the last stop, the Nineteenth Hole, that the “obligations” of the day’s competition are resolved.  If money was on the line, then it is exchanged at the Nineteenth Hole.  If drinks were bet on certain putts, then those debts are cleared at the Nineteenth Hole.  And if eighteen holes of golf weren’t enough time to conclude conversation or business, then the Nineteenth Hole is the place to be.

The stakes are even higher at a golf club where the membership fee is $300000, more than three times the median mortgage debt in the United States.  If you can sit in the Nineteenth Hole there, you can afford the bar bill, whatever it may be.

But for your $300000, you ought to get something more than a nice golf course, a good bar at the end, and the formal dinner club inside. If you’re paying six times more than the national median annual salary, you better be getting something great.  And at the Trump National Golf Club at Bedminster, New Jersey, you get a unique live show at the Nineteenth Hole.

Kings and Courts

It harkens back to the “days of old”, when kings held forth in front of the royal court in ancient palaces.  This King, stands in front of the “court” flanked with all of the trappings of his office.  There are the carefully tucked flags, the medieval seal on the podium, and the television monitors to display whatever information the King might wish to show.  Trumpets play his official anthem heralding his entrance; “Ruffles and Flourishes” followed by “Hail to the Chief”.  

And all of this in front of the Nineteenth Hole crowd at Bedminster.  After eighteen holes and a couple of blasts at the bar, the country club set get the best live entertainment money can buy.  The President of the United States, dressed for performance in his customary white shirt, blue suit, and overly long red tie, is putting on a show for the members, right around 5:30 in the afternoon, when the golfing’s done and the drinking has begun.

And it’s not just a visual spectacle; this show includes a participation phase.  The King stands before the assembled “court”. A small contingent of the hated “media” is placed carefully between the him and the golf crowd.  The “media” dare to question the King, maybe asking if he’s considered the fact he’s violating the Constitution by trying to legislate from the Bedminster Court.  Then the Nineteenth Hole crowd knows what to do.  They jeer and boo the ignominious reporters, and cheer every petty insult the King throws at them.  

Prosperity Theology

It’s like those Medieval Dinner Theatres, where you get dinner and a show with the “royal family”.  Food, jousting and sword battles with knights fighting for your honor are all a part of the price of admission.  But this is so much better, because it’s REAL.  This King really is trying to rule His “kingdom”. And he’s doing it for the benefit of those who can afford to drink at the Nineteenth Hole at the Trump National Golf Club at Bedminster.  What great early evening entertainment.  Afterwards, a shower in the executive locker room, and slacks, sports coats and ties to conform to the dress code for dining in the clubroom.

Donald Trump has spent his life trying to prove that he belongs in the “Bedminster Golf Club” class.  He believes in a secular version of the “prosperity theology”, the warped evangelical belief that God shows his favor by granting wealth and privilege.  It is the driving force behind televangelists like Oral Roberts, Joel Osteen and Jimmy Swaggart. They MUST have the houses, and the planes, and the limousines. It’s proof of God’s blessing for their mission.  

Prerogatives of Wealth

Donald Trump is selling a different version of “prosperity theology” to his voting base.   He’s doing it by performing for his “members” at Bedminster and showing his base how the “privileged” class deals with the hated media.  He’s also trying to use that privilege to prop up his failing Presidential campaign.  His message is:  we are the privileged, the blessed, those that can afford to be here.  Our wealth proves that we know how to take care of our nation’s problems.  Don’t dare question our authority or solutions, or we’ll jeer you off the premises.  The reporters don’t belong. If you want to, and you are blessed with wealth, you could.

The sad part is, the Trump really isn’t “one of them”.  He is the entertainment, almost the hired staff.  And even worse, he is using the Nineteenth Hole at Bedminster to desecrate our secular national scripture, the Constitution.  His self-proclaimed privilege is authoritarian, and is threatening the very foundations of equality in the United States.  

Now on TV

If you read  Trump World, it should come as no surprise that we watch a lot of MSNBC around here.  There’s a television in almost every room, and during the day wherever we are, it’s on.  During the pandemic it seems like our closest “peers” have been the hourly anchors.  We’ve gotten used to their foibles. Katy Tur cuts off questioners, Andrea Mitchell hints at inside knowledge she can’t reveal, Craig Melvin jovially asks the tough questions, and Joe Scarborough’s harangues are reminiscent of “I’m as mad as Hell and I’m not going to take it anymore,” from the movie Network.

And I know folks will say that listening to MSNBC will “rot your brain” or “grow hair on your hands”.  They’ll argue that it is Fox News inverted. Folks claim we only hear one side of an argument, just more confirmation bias for views we already have.  And there is some truth to that, except for the hair part.  But in the background there is NBC News.  They bring the latest breaking news and send their best to find out what’s going on.  For proof of that, check out Jacob Soboroff’s work on child separation on the border, or Julia Ainsley’s insights into national intelligence.

And we balance it with a large dose of print journalism.  Sure we read the New York Times and the Washington Post, but there’s also the Wall Street Journal and the daily Associated Press feed.  And there’s local television news too, delivered with a joke, a smile, and a right-wing bias from Fox and the ubiquitous Sinclair Broadcasting Corporation.  If that doesn’t tilt the scales to balance, nothing will.

News was News

I grew up with NBC’s Huntley/Brinkley News.  It wasn’t even a question in our house. Dad ran a television station that was an NBC affiliate.  Chet Huntley or David Brinkley told us the story of our times, from the Kennedy assassinations, to Vietnam, to the moon landing.  They were our bridge to the bigger world.

And that era led us to believe that the news we received was straight, an unbiased report of what was going on.  When CBS legend Walter Cronkite came out against the Vietnam War, it was so powerful because it was so unusual:  the anchor took a political stand.  

But we also knew television “personalities” that put their own views on the air.  Dad started the Phil Donahue Show at WLW-D in Dayton. Phil’s first show featured renowned atheist Madelyn Murray O’Hare, one of the named complainants in the Supreme Court case against prayer in school.  Phil was an unabashed liberal, and his show examined topics that weren’t part of the “polite” conversation of the time.  Dad wasn’t anywhere near Phil politically, a “Rockefeller Republican” himself, but knew good business when he saw it.  The Donahue Show grew to two hundred and twenty-five markets across the country.

It shouldn’t have been a surprise that when NBC decided to try to establish a cable channel to compete against Fox, they went for a “progressive” bias.  And Donahue, retired from his own show after twenty-six years, was one of the early MSNBC hosts.  He only lasted six months:  even MSNBC wouldn’t permit a host who was against the Iraq War.

Astride the Middle

There are the “crossover” hosts, the NBC News figures who came over to MSNBC.  While it might seem “natural” for Chuck Todd, the host of Meet the Press to have a daily show on MSNBC, it’s not an easy fit.  Todd is from the tradition of Meet the Press, the longest running television show in history at seventy-three years. 

 MTP has always been about tough questions by tough reporters, but without the more open “bias” that other MSNBC hosts show.  Chuck Todd stands in place of the legendary Tim Russert. Russert dominated political reporting in the early 2000’s from the NBC Washington news bureau, dying of a heart attack at his desk.  Tim was biased for only two things, the Buffalo Bills football team, and his father.  Todd has taken a similar approach, though his loyalty is to the Miami Florida teams and the Washington Nationals.

Todd is not popular with the “progressive” set.  They say he “softballs” the Republicans, and hits hard against the Democrats.  I disagree.  My evaluation is that he asks the “tough” questions of each side, allows everyone to have their say, and follows-up with insightful responses.  What he does do, is let folks from either side of the political spectrum tell their story.  That’s what the “progressive” side has a problem with.  They don’t want to hear it.

Room at the Center

Todd’s weekday show, Meet the Press Daily, has been moved from a prime slot at 5:00 pm, to one in the early afternoon.  MSNBC says it’s about MTP Daily’s falling ratings. They gave former Bush operative Nicolle Wallace two hours from 4 to 6 leading into the evening lineup.  And I’m sure that’s true.  I love Nicolle, and her brand of never-Trumpism.  But there’s no veil of objectivity there, she has made it clear that she is a “Lincoln Project” former Republican at the very least.

Todd remains the host of Sunday’s Meet the Press, going across the entire NBC network. But there’s a more important political phenomena going on, and it’s not just on MSNBC.  Chuck Todd represents the center, a newsman trying to allow both sides to have a say.  But the market for that kind of news, particularly on MSNBC,  is shrinking (or on Fox, ask Shepard Smith or embattled Chris Wallace).  

And that’s because the “middle” of the political spectrum is shrinking nationwide.  As our country gets closer to the seminal election of 2020, the battle lines are drawn.  Polarization;  forcing everyone to choose, is quickly squeezing folks out of the middle.  We see it at MSNBC with Chuck Todd, but we also see it in our daily lives.  The friends we have that were “soft” on President Trump, perhaps supporting him but willing to see his flaws, are now hardened.  They no longer question his actions:  Trump 2020 is now all about loyalty.

Choose

Elections are “binary choices” (excepting Jo Jorgenson and Kanye West).  Of course once folks make their choice, they become aggressive in defending it.  

But our current polarized world seems so much more than that.  Whether it’s the news channel you watch, wearing a mask at the store, or conversations you can have at dinner, everyone’s side has hardened.  Many of our friends disagree with us politically. But while we used to be able to discuss it, now, the best we can do is stay silent.  

Today’s world doesn’t favor those in the middle. Ask Chuck Todd.

Kitchen Techniques

There is a traditional way to check whether a pot of boiling spaghetti is done.  Take some of the noodles, and throw them up against the wall.  If it sticks, it’s done.  Of course, if it’s overdone and sticky, it still sticks to the wall.  So if you are into food tossing, start throwing the noodles early.  You don’t want sticky noodles!

There is an old political tactic that works much the same way.  Take everything bad you can possibly find out about you opponent and throw it up “against the wall”.  It really doesn’t matter whether it’s important or not, or even if it’s true.  If it sounds bad, if it could be construed as sounding bad, if a video image can be stopped at the one point where the opponent looks goofy, or stupid, or pornographic; then get it up on the wall.  See what sticks, what resonates with the voters, and then beat that idea to death in advertising, speeches, innuendos and “whisper” campaigns.

Matter of Truth

The George Bush campaign did that to John McCain in the South Carolina Presidential primary of 2000.  McCain and his wife adopted a baby from Bangladesh in 1991.  The “whisper campaign” in the 2000 primary run-up was that she was McCain’s illegitimate “dark-skinned” daughter.  The truth of the matter wasn’t important, if McCain could be forced to deny the rumor, it made it even stronger.  “The spaghetti” stuck to the wall.  Bush secured South Carolina and the 2000 Republican Presidential nomination.

We saw a more recent example with early attacks on Amy Klobuchar in the 2020 Presidential campaigns.  Rumors were floated about how angry she got, and how she mistreated her staff.  Whether the rumors were true or not wasn’t really the point.  Klobuchar was portrayed as losing control of her temper.  While in John McCain that kind of anger was seen as “endearing”, a “gruff old veteran”; the double standard of American politics struggled with accepting a woman with anger issues.  

Getting an Edge

So it shouldn’t be a surprise that the 2020 Trump campaign is throwing stuff up against the wall as fast as they possibly can.  Yesterday was a great example.  First, Joe Biden made the comment that the Latino community is “…diverse, unlike the African American community”.  On the face of it, the statement seems pretty reasonable.  The Latino community in the United States comes from the Caribbean, Cuba, Mexico, Central America, and South America.  Each has different traditions and beliefs, making it difficult to say there is a “Latino” point of view.

The Black community in the United States is mainly African American, descendants of slaves.  While there are many differing points of view in that community, there isn’t the diversity of culture and country of origin.  But the Trump Campaign, including the President himself, was quick to jump on the phrase.  Trump claimed that Biden, “…totally disparaged and insulted the Black community.  What he said was incredible, and I don’t know what’s going on with him, but it was a very insulting statement to make”.

Not only did Trump try to push a faux insult of the Black community, but it also was an attempt to further their whisper campaign that somehow Biden has dementia.  In the past few weeks, Trump even went so far as bragging about passing a dementia “test”, and tried to push Biden into responding.  It’s not a matter of what’s truth; it’s a matter of trying to see what might stick with the American voter.

Whose Side is God On?

But the President wasn’t done yesterday.  When he arrived in Cleveland, on a government paid campaign trip, he claimed that Biden was against God. Trump said Biden would: “Take away your guns, take away your Second Amendment. No religion, no anything.  Hurt the Bible. Hurt God. He’s against God. He’s against guns. He’s against energy.”

Biden responded later, and got the chance to emphasize three of his themes that are “sticking”.  He was able to emphasize his own personal compassion, something President Trump fails to display.  He also got to emphasize the Administration’s failure to control the COVID epidemic.  And, he showed himself as being “more Presidential”.

“Like so many people, my faith has been the bedrock foundation of my life: it’s provided me comfort in moments of loss and tragedy, it’s kept me grounded and humbled in times of triumph and joy. And in this moment of darkness for our country — of pain, of division, and of sickness for so many Americans — my faith has been a guiding light for me and a constant reminder of the fundamental dignity and humanity that God has bestowed upon all of us.  For President Trump to attack my faith is shameful. It’s beneath the office he holds and it’s beneath the dignity the American people so rightly expect and deserve from their leaders.” 

And by the way, Biden wasn’t talking about “diversity” anymore.  The President managed to “step” on his own campaign message.

Whispers

The whisper campaigns are out there.  There are pictures of Biden with his hands on the shoulders of little girls.  He could be just “grandfatherly” but the narrative is that he is some kind of pervert.  And there is the Epstein list.  Biden isn’t on it, but is Trump?

There comes a time where there’s so much spaghetti sticking to the wall, you can’t tell what’s done or what’s not.  And worse, some of it is just old stuck spaghetti.  All it really does is push voters to that “I don’t want either one” position.  And that too, might be an advantage to one candidate or the other.  

I just taste a strand of my spaghetti.  It saves cleaning the wall.