Month: October 2020

The Experiment

On Tuesday our nation will make a choice.  There are many reasons to vote FOR Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.  But the essence of the 2020 Presidential election is that we are holding a referendum on the four-year experiment called Donald Trump.

Like it or not, America embarked on this experiment in government with his election four years ago as President.  It was a near thing:  Trump lost the popular vote but won the Electoral vote.  In the Electoral College, less  than 1% of the popular vote in three states determined the outcome. Three states sealed his victory, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.  There was no popular “mandate”.  Nevertheless, he became the President of the United States.

His election was based on the idea that he could run America “like a business”.  He projected an image of a dynamic entrepreneur, a billionaire maverick that led us to expect that he might do things differently. We hoped he would “cut to the chase” and get the job done.  We knew he would speak his mind, both publicly and in social media.  And we thought he would change the way “politics” was done here in America.

So, after four years of the experiment, lets talk about the results.

Competent Businessman

The single “positive” factor in the election of Donald Trump was his competency.  Surely a billionaire must be competent.  But we now know, that competency wasn’t a prerequisite for gaining what he says are his billions.  What has he done?  He wasn’t even able to fulfill his primary campaign promise and get rid of the Affordable Care Act.  He never offered an alternative, only the negative. There is no Trump Health Care Plan, just a constant rain of criticism for President Obama’s plan.  It was a key part of his candidacy – but four years later, he is still unable to get it done.

Yes there is more border wall between Mexico and the United States.  Three hundred miles of wall were built, though two hundred and ninety-five miles of that replaced already existing structures.  That’s five miles of new wall.  And, as we now know, Mexico didn’t pay for it.  In fact Congress didn’t pay for all of it either.  Much of the money was taken from other sources, including Federal Emergency Management money earmarked for national disasters, $155 million that was made unavailable for relief. (Politifact).

And the President definitely did create a tax cut, one that saved a little tax money for many, and a fortune for the very wealthy.  He left the government with an additional trillion dollars of debt, which was magnified by the needs of a nation now in pandemic.  The deficit has grown six trillion dollars under Trump’s “competent” leadership (Statista).

Ultimate Crisis

But the real test of any President is in crisis.  George W. Bush proved his strength after almost three thousand died in the attacks on 9-11, and while we might not agree with his decisions, they were made confidently and moved the nation.   Barack Obama had no choice but to demonstrate competence from the beginning of his Presidency, faced with the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.  We are still enjoying the benefits of the Obama economic recovery today.

But when Donald Trump was faced with the pandemic, his first thoughts were not about the nation, but about getting re-elected.  The pandemic didn’t fit into his campaign strategy of running on a growing economy. 

So instead of “handling” the crisis, he first ignored it, then made sure that someone else (the Governors mostly) were “responsible”.  He took “all the credit” and “none of the blame” for what happened.  His own White House put out recommendations on what the states needed to do to reopen.  But when that science didn’t fit Trump’s need to get re-elected and the states couldn’t reach the recommendations, he undercut both the Governors’ messages and their authority.  Regardless of the virus, opening “the economy” was so much more important, especially to re-electing Donald Trump.

Since the virus wasn’t controlled, opening the economy just made things worse.  Just today, 80,000 Americans were diagnosed with COVID.  It’s not just about testing: hospitals all over the nation, from Fargo, North Dakota to El Paso, Texas, are full. And more sickness will ultimately result in more deaths.  About 1000 Americans are dying every day – a “9-11 level loss” every three days.  It’s been going on since April.  Over 233,000 Americans are dead, and their deaths are on Donald Trump.

Failure of Character

Incompetence has left us vulnerable to COVID.  But Donald Trump’s lack of character has set American against American. He has defended white supremacists, and ignored the legitimate concerns of minority Americans.  He claims to be the best “President for Blacks” since Abraham Lincoln.  But his economy, even before the pandemic, left minorities as vulnerable as they were before.  And since COVID, they are at greater threat from disease, and forced to risk their lives to work.  Being an “essential worker” has become for far too many a euphemism for being forced to risk infection.   

Mr. Trump accepted the immoral border plan, separating children from their parents.  And he takes no responsibility for the outcome of his plan: 545 children that cannot be reunited with their own mothers and fathers.  He led the United States to commit this atrocity. If any other nation acted that way, we would demand justice.

Donald Trump is lacking in character.  He is incompetent.  And COVID has magnified all of these flaws, placing them in full view for the American people.  He has failed the test, and the American people need to show him the door.  Sometime soon, when the vote count concludes, I believe they will.

In the Day

It’s six days before Election Day.  That has a different meaning now than it had in the “old days” when I was working campaigns.  Back then, in the 1970’s, the vast majority of Americans went to the polls and voted on “that day”.  It was the “Norman Rockwell – Saturday Evening Post” cover type of voting, as communities lined up to cast their ballots.  

As a political campaigner, the plan was to “peak” in the weekend before the election.  The last few weeks, the staff motto was “We’ll sleep after the vote”, and in the 1976 Carter/Mondale campaign I remember sleeping on the office floor for about a week.  Going home meant a quick shower and a meal, then back to the effort.

It made sense.  Perhaps 90% of the votes weren’t actually cast until Election Day.  You could change peoples’ minds, and get your voters out to the polls all the way until Tuesday.  And it really did make a difference.

Get Out The Vote (GOTV) was a Democratic specialty.  We had giant computer lists of voters, each carefully marked to highlight those who chose the Democratic ballot in the primaries.  We’d then reach out and try to contact each of those voters:  some by phone, and many by physically knocking on their door.  We sent “flying squads” of volunteers, mostly high school kids, into Democratic neighborhoods on the weekend before Election Day, using the “walking lists” of Democratic voters to encourage folks to vote.

Half the Vote

I’m sure all of that is still happening today.  But it has a lot less impact than it did back in the “old days”.  As of today, over 70 million Americans, more than half of the total vote count from 2016, have already voted.  They’ve done it in-person (like my wife and I did) in early voting sessions.  Or they filled out an absentee ballot and dropped it off at their local Board of Elections.  Or, in many states, they received mail-in ballots, and dropped it back in the mail to return.  

Somehow, the Postal Service has hit “a snag” in certain major cities.  The Service strives for a 90% “on time” arrival date for first class mail, one to three days.  In certain key cities: Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee and Cleveland, the “on time” rate has fallen to near 50%.  That means that in this critical week for mail-in voting, almost half the mail in four critical electoral states is delayed.  And Republicans are going to Court to try to get ballots post-marked by Election Day but delivered after that day disqualified.  Guess which candidate the vast majority of voters in those “delayed” cities are voting for?  It sure isn’t Donald Trump.

It used to be that Republicans voted absentee, and Democrats lined up to vote on Election Day.  Now that script has flipped:  Democrats make up a much bigger part of the early vote.  And that’s why President Trump is making such a big deal about “the mail-in vote” and possible fraud.  It’s simple math:  if more Democrats vote before Election Day, then anything a Republican campaign can do to disqualify those votes, “wins”.  

Ethics and Lawyers

Ethical considerations don’t have very much to do with that decision-making.  President Trump himself said that if everyone voted by mail, no Republican could ever win again.  He wasn’t talking about “cheating”; he was simply stating the obvious.  The more people vote, the more likely it is that Democrats will win.  So making voting “hard” helps Republicans.  That fact alone ought to make you stop and consider what the Republican Party stands for.

American Thing

President Trump has “softened the ground” for Court action after the election. If the “regular” Election Day vote is counted first (and in most of the controversial states it is) and the “other” vote, mail-in, absentee, and early voting is counted last, then Trump might well be “winning” on Election night. If he could get the counting to stop right there, he could claim victory. So if there is a big early Trump lead in Pennsylvania or Michigan or Wisconsin, don’t be surprised to see the lawyers descend on those states to try to stop the “illegal” counting. It worked in Florida in 2000. (And just to add a little more controversy, Supreme Court Justices John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett worked as lawyers for the Bush effort in Florida that year edited after publication).

The “antidote” to all of that is an overwhelming victory.  Some states: notably Ohio, Florida, Texas, and Arizona will have the vast majority of their votes counted on Election Night anyway.  If Joe Biden wins three out of four of those states, the outcome will be clear.  But if it’s close, Trump/Clinton close or worse Bush/Gore close, then we are in for a long Election week or month, of counting, lawyers, and courtrooms.    

If you haven’t voted – do it.  It’s too late for mail-in voting.  If you’ve got a ballot, drop it off at your local Board of Elections.  Or, you can vote early there.  Or you can wait, and vote on Tuesday – the good old-fashioned way.  But make sure you plan to spend some time – it’s going to be the biggest election in American History.  However you chose to do it, one way or another, make your voice heard.  It’s the American thing to do.

One Term Presidency

In 2008 Barack Obama became he first Black President in American history.  He was also the first Democrat to hold office in eight years, since the contested election of 2000.  That was when the United States Supreme Court, by a partisan five to four vote, ended the Florida count and make Republican George W. Bush President.  

After Obama’s election, Mitch McConnell, then Republican Minority Leader of the Senate, started with the one, singular goal.   He said:  “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president” (Politico).  John Boehner, then Republican House Minority Leader, had a similar view:  “We’re going to do everything — and I mean everything we can do — to kill it, stop it, slow it down, whatever we can” (Politico).

It was the “No Compromise” pledge:  that no matter what, the Republicans in Congress would do everything (“…I mean everything”) to stop the Democratic President from achieving legislative success.  McConnell and Boehner didn’t achieve their primary goal of keeping Obama from winning a second term. But they did manage to prevent legislation on issues like gun control, immigration reform, and climate change.  

There is a reason that the Affordable Care Act was the singular legislative highlight of the Obama Presidency.  The Democrats spent their entire legislative “power” to get it passed. That effort ultimately cost them control of both Houses of Congress.  It’s also why the Trump Administration has spent so much political capital trying to rescind “Obamacare”.

Who Ends It

There are long running arguments about “who started the fight”.  Republicans claim that then Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid “started it”. He changed the Senate rules to allow for a simple majority to pass lower level Federal judges.  This was because the McConnell-led minority filibustered most of the Obama appointees, trying to hold the seats open.  Democrats retort that the original “hard ball” began in the Florida recount of 2000.

Since Donald Trump became President, the Republican majority has expanded the “simple majority” rule to include Supreme Court Justices.

The election of 2020 is less than a week away.  Should Democrats win the House, the Senate, and the Presidency, there will be intense pressure for “paybacks”. That is particularly in response to Monday’s Barrett confirmation to the Supreme Court.  As Mitch McConnell said in his speech prior to the vote , all the things the Republicans did were within the rules of the Senate, and the Constitution. So that’s the new “McConnell Standard”, the “low bar” established.  Should Democrats regain majorities in both Houses and the Presidency, they only have to clear that. There is no reason to reach for any older “norm” of political civility.

The McConnell Republicans appointed almost twenty-five percent of the Federal judiciary in the past three and a half years. That includes three seats on the Supreme Court.   Now a brand of conservative Republican called “Originalism” is firmly entrenched in the Courts for a generation.  

Assuming the “gloves are off”, what options do Democrats have to respond to twenty years of obstructionism and “hard ball”?

The Courts

The Constitution establishes the Supreme Court, and that judges serve lifetime terms as long as they maintain “good behavior”.  But the Congress has the ability to establish how many judgeships exist, both at the Supreme Court and lower Court levels.  One response to the McConnell “court packing” would be a “Judicial Reform Act of 2021”.  This act could create additional Justices on the Supreme Court, raising the number from nine to thirteen.  Then a Democratic President could appoint four Justices to the Court right away, changing the balance. Now the vote stands at six “originalists” to three. It would become to six “originalists” to seven. 

It’s within the Congressional “rules” to do so, and also a power granted by the Constitution to the Congress.  The Congress could also create additional Appellate and District Court judgeships, in order to “dilute” the power of the Trump appointees.

The Filibuster

The Senate has always been the “debating society” of the United States government.  That “norm” was enshrined in the filibuster, the ability of any Senator to speak for any length of time, stopping all Senate business.  Originally it required sixty-seven votes for cloture, the parliamentary term for ending a filibuster.  Then the number was reduced to sixty.  Today the mere threat of a filibuster forces a “cloture vote” with a sixty-vote super-majority.  The actual “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” talk until you drop filibuster almost never occurs.  By “gentlemen’s agreement” the mere threat stops legislation unless a cloture vote can be passed.

But the days of “gentlemen’s agreements” are over.  The Senate should acknowledge that Senators can have their “say”, but should recognize that a majority of the Senate shouldn’t give their power away to the few.  The filibuster should be abolished, and the Senate should operate like any other legislative body, with a majority rule.

That will allow for the passage of legislation for the Democratic program beyond just the Judiciary.  The pressing issues in American life:  immigration reform, gun control, climate change, and voter protection: all demand action over the “will” of the minority.

The Senate

In addition there are two “wrongs” that need to be corrected.  The first “wrong” is the over 700,000 American citizens in the District of Columbia who are denied representation in the Congress.  The District should immediately be made a state, bigger in population than both Vermont and Wyoming. The “Federal Triangle” would remain as the national capital.  This meets Constitutional muster, and would create one new House seat, and two new Senate seats. Democrats would very likely hold all of those.  That’s just icing on the cake.

The second “wrong” is the over three million Americans who live in Puerto Rico.  Their status as a US “Commonwealth” has left them at a loss when it comes to disaster relief and Federal aid, and also without Congressional representation.  On the ballot next week in Puerto Rico is a request for admission to statehood.  

Should it pass, the Congress should consider accepting Puerto Rico as the fifty-second state (DC the fifty-first).  It would be thirty-first in population, ahead of twenty-one others.  That would mean four new Congressmen and two more Senators.  And while the political parties in Puerto Rico are aligned around the question of statehood, it is likely that their representatives will caucus with the Democratic Party in Congress.

That’s five new House members and four new Senate members, all likely Democrats.  And it all fits the “McConnell Standard”.  

Gloves Off

Joe Biden is a traditionalist, and is likely to resist this kind of Democratic “hard ball”.  But that’s the game were playing now.  The reserved and gentlemanly Senate where he served honorably for thirty years is trashed.  And like a fight in the hallways of a school, it really doesn’t matter who started it.  “It’s Bounce or be Bounced” now; and it’s time for Democrats to take their “gentleman’s white gloves” off and starting fighting. They should strive to follow the “McConnell Standard”, and do everything within “the rules” and the Constitution to exercise their authority. 

It’s not only the way to gain “power”, but it’s the right thing to do. Passing legislation, solving problems, giving representation to American citizens, and making the Courts represent the People, all are necessary and proper. Our government has been stymied for far too long.

And besides: it’s what the Republicans would do.

Similarities

So it’s Tuesday, exactly one week before the Presidential Election of 2020.  It’s hard to imagine:  four years since the last election.  The shock and disappointment of November 2016 seems so close.  But here we are, days away from what is clearly a pivotal moment in American history.

There’s an old Mark Twain expression: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes”.  The historic and political themes in American life come back, focused in different ways, but similar in their content.  The election we face in the next few days is no different.

I was twelve years old in the last election that was nearly as divisive.  In 1968 there was one trauma after another, and it wasn’t much of a surprise that Nixon won.  We suffered the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy and then the debacle of the Democratic Convention in Chicago (Now on Netflix – The Trial of the Chicago 7). The eventual Democratic nominee Vice President Hubert Humphrey was a “pro-war” (Vietnam) Democrat and there really didn’t seem to be much difference between his policies and Nixon’s.  Nixon squeaked into the White House.  We didn’t know what would happen.

I was sitting in my seventh grade math class (second row from the window, two seats from the front) when the announcement came over the PA system. (By the way, the election results were so close it took until the next day to announce the winner).  The halls of Van Buren Junior High School resounded with cheers.  Kettering, Ohio, a Dayton suburb, was Nixon country.  I put my head down on my desk.  Four years seemed like an eternity.

Secret Plan

We didn’t know that Nixon’s “secret peace plan” was, in today’s parlance, to “double-down” on Vietnam.  Within months we were expanding the war, across borders into Laos and Cambodia.  It turned out that Nixon’s “ peace plan” was to fight the war to the bitter end.

It didn’t work, and the war still raged four years later as the Democratic Party nominated a “peace” candidate, Senator George McGovern.  McGovern was no pacifist; he was a World War II bomber pilot.  But the “moment” where Americans were ready to end the war was over, lost in the social upheaval of the protests, civil unrest and the “tune in, turn on and drop out” generation.  Nixon proclaimed his “Law and Order” candidacy, and somehow painted McGovern’s South Dakota pragmatism as “the radical left”. Nixon won an overwhelming victory.

That was 1972.  I was now sixteen, a junior at Wyoming High School near Cincinnati.  I struggled to understand how the nation could survive “Four More Years” of Richard Nixon.  It wasn’t just about the war:  it was an entire attitude. The “silent majority” gave license to suppress many of our citizens.  It seemed the nation I loved had just “been fooled again” (couldn’t miss the Who reference). 

But it wasn’t four more years.  Nixon was gone before I left for college in the summer of 1974.  President Gerald Ford proclaimed, “Our long national nightmare is over” referring to Watergate, and the last troops left Vietnam in 1975.  But I would be a twenty-year old junior staffer for the Carter/Mondale campaign in 1976 before I actually felt we overcame the failures of 1968, and elected Democrat Carter as President.  

Differences

So here we are today, on the cusp of 2020.  It’s not 1968:  there is a clear difference between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.  No one can claim they are “the same” in the way we looked at Nixon and Humphrey.  And the reality was, Humphrey would have ended the war sooner, once he was out of the shadow of Lyndon Johnson.  So there was a difference then too.

And it’s not 1972 either.  Try as he might, Donald Trump has not been able to brand Joe Biden, the moderate from Delaware, as a “radical” leftist.  Not only do the real “leftists” know better, but so does the rest of the nation.  Democrats had that choice, and Bernie wasn’t nominated.  Joe Biden is “oil on the waters” (though he’ll “transition away from oil”), a calming force in our 2020 world of upheaval.   It’s what I think America wants, the Buddhist “Middle Path” of American political ideology.  I guess we’ll see.

Our War Today

It wasn’t just the Vietnam War that drove the 1968 election; it was the demands for social change.  The Chicago Seven marched against Vietnam, but they echoed the tactics of the Civil Rights movement.  Martin Luther King died protesting the need for Black people to be treated as economic as well as political equals.  It’s not so different:  today Black Live Matters demands that people of color be seen as equal in the eyes of law enforcement, as well as the supposedly “blind folded” legal process.

So while COVID is our “Vietnam” and the central issue of our time, we should not ignore all of the other issues that would be at the front were it not for the pandemic.  Our nation was divided long before the virus was introduced.  The social and racial infections were already here.

Our political leaders found the courage to stand up and stop Richard Nixon in 1974.  But today’s leaders have already proven they don’t have that same fortitude to stand up to Donald Trump’s acknowledged illegalities.  So it’s up to us, the voters, to do what our elected leaders could not.  We will change the course of American history next week, one way or another.  I believe in the courage and wisdom of the American voter. For the sake of the nation, let’s hope I’m right.

Play Hurt

I was an athlete for twelve years, and a coach for forty.  “Playing hurt” was the athletic tradition for as long as I was involved.  The stories became school legends. There was the wrestler who came off the mat with a finger out of joint, demanding someone “pull it” back into place so he could continue the match.  There was the football player who turned up in the wrong team huddle during the game after taking a shot to the head.  And then there was the pole vaulter who looked awesome in warmups, but an hour later couldn’t run.  His Mom shot his fractured foot full of numbing Lidocaine, and at wore off (no, I didn’t know). 

In the world of athletics we hold those stories up as examples of dedication and even heroism.  We sometimes question the outcome:  the wrestler won, but they laughed at the football player, and the pole vaulter didn’t clear his starting height.  But we always praised the effort.  They “wanted it” more, and were willing to sacrifice.

It’s an American athletic “ethos”.  Play hurt. Be dedicated. Don’t be a “quitter”.

COVID Age

So what happens in the “COVID age”?  In the “before time” if you had a sore throat, or felt lousy, you still went to practice, still played.  That was hammered into you from youth sports:  your team needed you to be there, to make it happen.  But now you can feel perfectly fine, but your seat assignment in history class means that you are “out” for two weeks, on quarantine for COVID.  The unintended result: it pressures everyone to follow a “code of silence”.  

In amateur sports and a high school world without real testing, I’m sure it’s happening.  And in an environment where politics determines belief in the reality of COVID, it’s easy for athletes and parents to justify taking the step of trying to ignore the disease. 

Show the Way

So it’s more than important that our national leaders present a good example to the public.  It’s not just Joe Biden emphasizing wearing a mask.  The headline in the right wing social media is “No one shows up for Biden Rally!!!”  But Biden isn’t having rallies. He isn’t putting people together to create “super-spreader” events.  That’s Trump’s strategy.  

In fact, the President has been the “example” of the old athletic ethos “playing hurt”.  He was diagnosed with COVID, and then made a “miraculous” recovery.  Within days, far too few days according to the Centers for Disease Control, he was back out on the campaign trail, maskless, drawing “his people” together in the biggest public events held in some states since March.

And now, Marc Short, the Vice President’s Chief of Staff has been diagnosed with COVID.  Short was for a long time the most “reasonable” member of the Trump team, the one who seemed to speak logically when others like Kelly Ann Conway were talking “alternate facts”.   Then he moved out of the direct “Trump” lineup, and took the “Chief” job with the Vice President, a job requiring frequent close personal contact with Mike Pence.

So Short has COVID.  Pence, according to the CDC rules on personal contact, should quarantine for fourteen days.  But, like that kid on the team in high school, Pence is ignoring that regulation.  He’s staying out on the campaign trail, declaring his politicking (not his job as Vice President) an “essential activity” that requires him to risk infecting – others. 

Contrast

Former Trump Homeland Security and Terrorism Advisor Tom Bossert describes the national COVID response with, “This is a team sport”.  If the “team” all gets on the same simple page: masks, social distancing, reducing contact; we can “win” by reducing the spread of COVID.  But the Trump campaign is playing only for their own “team”.  They are playing to win the election, regardless of the consequences to the American public.

And more importantly, Trump, and now Vice President Pence, are setting “glaring” examples of what NOT to do in a global pandemic.  When Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Kamala Harris was similarly exposed to COVID – she came “off” the campaign trail.   When Joe Biden walks onto the debate stage, he’s wearing a mask.   And finally, when former President Barack Obama “rallied” for Biden, it was in a parking lot with spectators separated into their own vehicles.  Instead of cheers, there were the honks of car horns.

So what are the President and Vice President saying to that running back who “can’t smell the coffee” in the morning (a sure sign of COVID infection)?  Get out there and “play hurt”, don’t tell your parents or coaches what’s going on.  Do it for your “team”, because it’s more important than slowing the pandemic’s spread.  

It’s not only what our national leaders say:  it’s what they do.

Unreachables

Five hundred forty-five children, separated from their parents at the border, cannot be reunited with their parents. It wasn’t in the middle of some natural disaster, and the parents didn’t commit some murderous act. No, by intentional policy of the Government of the United States, children were taken from parents. They committed the misdemeanor offense of crossing a “line in the sand”, and the Government failed to maintain adequate records to put them back together. Some were babies.

They are now called the “unreachables”.  The children went into the “system”, from Customs and Border Control in the Department of Homeland Security, to the Office of Refugee Resettlement in the Department of Health and Human Services. They were scattered throughout the nation.  Meanwhile the adults were deported to their home countries.  There was no tracking process to maintain a connection between the two, and those kids were simply lost to their parents.  

Policy Debate

There was a debate in the Trump Administration about the policy, the plan to “deter” migrants by taking their kids when they arrived in the US.  The “hard-ass” Trump appointees thought it would scare migrants into not trying to get here.  But the pros in the “deep state” that dealt with illegal immigration for year had a real understanding of the problem.  Conditions were so bad in Central America that whatever the “deterrence” offered by US Border Control couldn’t hold a candle to the gang violence and economic ruin there.

And the “pros” also warned that their system would be overwhelmed with the children.  Before it even happened, they said we would “lose” kids.  But the Administration went ahead with their plan, and for five hundred and forty-five kids, destroyed their lives.

If any other country did this, Americans would rise up in “righteous anger” over the crimes against these children.  But this is not some “war crime” committed in a far away desert or jungle. It happened in American towns like McAllen, Texas and Nogales, Arizona.  It’s happened under the “Stars and Stripes” in the “land of the free and the home of the brave”.  And we aren’t completely sure it’s not happening now.  We don’t seem very brave.  

Outrage

There are so many outrages committed by the Trump Administration that it’s hard to keep track of them all. He started his campaign for the Presidency by blaming “Mexicans” as rapists and drug dealers. His first days in office he tried to ban a religion from entering the United States, the “Muslim Ban”. And for the last four years the President has appealed to our worst fears, blaming “brown people” for a whole variety of “wrongs”. Trump incites and encourages the evil strain in America: from “fine people on both sides” at Charlottesville, to telling the “Proud Boys” to “stand back and stand by”, to pretending his doesn’t know what QAnon is.

But for these five hundred and forty-five children and thousands more, the Trump Administration has in the name of the United States, ripped them from their parents.  It doesn’t get any uglier than that.

Character

When they say that this election is about “character”, it’s not just about whether the President lies (over 20,000 times according to the Washington Post) or hides his taxes.  It’s not just about a President who constantly denigrates anyone who criticizes him, but seems to take particular pleasure in attacking women, from Nancy Pelosi to Leslie Stahl.  It’s not even about a man who says wearing facemasks will help control the pandemic then ridicules those who actually wear them.  

No this is the true “character” issue.  Donald Trump leads a Presidency that has no moral compass.  They are willing to do literally anything to pursue their policy goals.  They ignored COVID.  His White House has “cozied” up to the worst dictators in the world, from Putin to Erdogan to Duterte to Kim.  And they sat around a table and chose to drag innocent children out of the arms of their parents.  It was a vote, only Homeland Security Secretary Kirstin Neilsen, who was well aware of the consequences, voted no.  But the rest pressured her to change her decision.  

There have been so many mistakes, and there is so little time to correct them.

Exceptionalism

Americans are taught from an early age that our founding story, from heroic immigration to the Revolution, is exceptional. We were raised on Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on a hill” speech: the United States as the example of democracy to the world. We acknowledged the failures in our past, from slavery to internment camps, but vowed to be better in our present and future.

But there is nothing “exceptional” about tearing children from their parents’ arms. It is cruel, barbaric, and desperate. It represents the worst of us, not our better angels. And that is decision we need to make in the next two weeks. Americans need to decide what kind of “character” we want in the leader of our nation. More importantly we need to decide what kind of character we have ourselves.

I watched the debate last night. It looked like a Presidential debate – but the volume of the President’s falsehoods left me frustrated and angered. From a political standpoint Trump’s “new” behavior was better. But Joe Biden did better as well, able to actually lay out his ideas for America. Scorecard: Biden held his own, and Trump just spoke to the base – Biden wins.

Voodoo

As you might imagine, I become an “election geek” during Presidential contests.  That’s been true since Mom pinned a Kennedy button on my sweater in 1960.  I followed campaigns from “All the Way with LBJ” to my boss Jimmy Carter’s “Why Not the Best”, to Reagan’s “Let’s Make America Great Again”, to John Kerry’s “Let America be America” (or Bartlet be Bartlet) to Obama’s “Yes We Can”.

So I spend a lot of time with polls.  Getting a read on what American voters intend to do is important.  But there’s always a caveat, a statement of caution:  what about 2016?  The pollsters seemed to be so wrong then?  How can we trust their numbers now?

Well there are a couple of answers to that concern.  First, polling is science not voodoo. Pollsters take the opinion of a limited number of people, and project that into a conclusion on what everyone is thinking.  So how that limited number, the sample, is selected, will control the accuracy of the data that ultimately comes out.

Historic Mistake

There’s a famous picture of a smiling Harry Truman holding up the front page of the Chicago Tribune the day after the 1948 election.  The headline reads “Dewey Defeats Truman”.  Tom Dewey, the Governor of New York, was the Republican candidate for President, and as is apparent from Truman’s beaming smile, Dewey did not win. 

So what happened?  The Tribune did a last minute telephone poll that showed an overwhelming move by voters to the Dewey camp.  They were so confident in the result that they set the headline for Wednesday morning, and went to bed.  

The key to the poll’s failure was in the sample.  It was 1948, and not every American household had their own phone.  In fact, even when I moved to Pataskala thirty years later, there were still “party lines” where several households shared a phone line (I know, it sounds like Mayberry in the Andy Griffith Show).  So the sample that the Tribune spoke to was slanted towards people who could afford to own their personal phone line.  And that’s exactly the kind of folks that voted Republican.  It shouldn’t be a surprise that they were voting for Dewey.  But they weren’t a representative sample.

Sampling is critical.  And some of the sampling in 2016 was based on the Obama 2012 and 2008 election turnout.  Not surprisingly, Hillary Clinton didn’t generate the same kind of excitement as the first Black President did, and didn’t get the same kind of turnout, particularly in minority communities.  It wasn’t that she didn’t win those communities; she did, overwhelmingly.  But the numbers of people didn’t come to the polls.  Think about Detroit, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia: the lower turnout there changed the outcome of those state elections, and who ultimately became President.

Snapshot

Polls in 2016, like the current polling for Biden today, showed a strong Clinton lead through early October.  But that month in 2016 was tumultuous to say the least.  There was the Access Hollywood video, followed immediately by the Podesta email dump by Wikileaks, then the Comey letter reopening the Clinton email investigation, followed by Comey closing the investigation again.  

While we were distracted, the polls significantly narrowed.  And that brings us to the second point.  Polls are a snapshot of how people feel at that moment.  They don’t signify what they believed yesterday, or what they are likely to do tomorrow.  In the unstable political environment of October 2016, things changed.

Democrats remember a summer and fall when Hillary had a seemingly insurmountable lead.  Even the Trump campaign seemed resigned to defeat.  But all of the October craziness tightened the race.  What would have been an electoral landslide for Clinton in the first week of October (that snapshot) dwindled to a marginal lead in November.  Democrats then, and now, remembered the polling of a month or even week before.  But the snapshot changed.

Margins

Marginal is a significant word in polling.  Pollsters take maybe 1000 responses, and extrapolate the results over millions of voters.  There is always some room for mistakes, called the “margin of error”.  When we saw Clinton with 46% to 43% for Trump with a margin of error of 3.5%, it meant that Clinton wasn’t really ahead of Trump.  Within that margin Trump could be ahead of Clinton by ½ a percent or more.  

And that’s where we were when the actual snapshot was taken and we held the election.  Almost all of the polls except for the “national polls” were inside the margin.  And Trump won by a razor thin margin in the states he had to take:  Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.  By the way, the “national polls” were right – Hillary won the national popular vote.

Sample

So who gets polled is critical to the accuracy of the data.  The Rasmussen poll, for example, has been slanted towards Trump for the past five years.  It’s not because Rasmussen is a “Trumpster” (though he is), it’s that the way he selects the sample favors Trump.  So when you see Rasmussen polls favoring Biden (Arizona – Biden 48%, Trump 46% 3.5% margin of error) then you know that Biden is doing well under the “worst” polling conditions. 

Generally polls look at three major variables:  likely voters, registered voters, and adults of voting age.  “Adults of voting age” is the least important.  Only twenty-one states have “same day” voter registration, where you can register and vote on the same day.  The rest close registration early, so in those states, measuring unregistered adults is meaningless.  And even in the “same day” states, folks who haven’t already registered are less likely to actually vote.

Registered voters seems like a “good” sample.  79% of adults of voting age are registered to vote.  But in the 2016 election only 58% of eligible adults actually voted.  That means that 20% of voters who were registered still didn’t vote.  Even though a person is registered to vote, there still a one in five chance that they won’t.  And that’s the “turnout” question that Democrats and Republicans debate.  “IF” Hillary had a better turnout, she would have won.  “IF” Biden can motivate his “base” he will win.

And finally there’s the “likely voter”, the registered voter who consistently votes in election.  And that’s the sample that most pollsters like to survey. 

Political Geeks

Want to join in the “geekdom” of poll watching?  Nate Silver was one of the few who predicted a Trump victory in the last few weeks of 2016.  His website, Five-Thirty Eight, not only lists the latest polls, but rates their quality. “A” and “B” polls are regarded as high quality, “C” and “D” polls not so much.  If you want to quote polling, look for those “high quality” polls (sounds like Bobby Boucher from The Water Boy).

And if you want more of a cross section of polling, check out Real Clear Politics. While the editorial content slants conservative, their polling averages are right on.  Like most general elections, it’s likely the polls will narrow as Election Day approaches.   The “undecided” will make their choice, and this year, fully a third of the US vote will be cast before we even get to November 3^rd.  Their votes, like mine, are in.

As we used to say after the last hard track workout, “the hay is in the barn” for early voters.  And for the rest of you:  get “your hay in the barn” (go and vote) then watch the polls.   Then, in the days and probably weeks after November 3rd, we can sweat out the actual count.

You just slip out the back, Jack, Make a new plan, Stan
You don’t need to be coy, Roy, Just get yourself free
Hop on the bus, Gus You don’t need to discuss much
Just drop off the key, Lee.  And get yourself free   

Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover – Paul Simon

Retired

Life can get surprisingly busy when you’re retired.  What sounds like an almost unlimited amount of time, soon narrows to a few short hours. In those few hours, Jenn and I need to “make a new plan, Stan” – we need to figure out when we are going to vote.

I haven’t missed an election in my life, since I first became eligible for the November election of 1974.  This is my life, a political junkie.  I drove from Granville to vote in Cincinnati when I was an undergraduate, and from Cincinnati to vote in Pataskala when I was in law school.  When I was working, I was one of the first ten in line as the polls opened at the old Pataskala Fire Station, hanging out with a cup of coffee and the “6:15-am bunch” in the cold.

More recently I’ve dodged the wait and Jenn and I vote around 10:30 am with our fellow retirees.  And we have voted absentee a couple of times.  But this year feels different; we need to vote “in person”.  And I just can’t let it all come down to a single Election Day chance.  What if the car breaks down, or one of us gets COVID, or there’s a “dog emergency”?  We need to get this done, in person, and soon.  We need to make a new plan – Stan.

Gone to the Dogs

We have a recent addition to our canine family.  There was already the “big two rescues”:  Buddy, our eight year-old shepherd/border collie mix, and Atticus, the wild man three year-old Yellow Lab.  And then we decided to foster Keelie, a skinny one year-old female, at forty-five pounds a mix of Rottweiler and something else.  The foster “failed:”  she was too good and fit in too well.  She became the “sister” Buddy and Atticus never had and the third dog I didn’t think I wanted.  I was wrong. 

But that’s not the new addition.  Now we are rehabbing two year-old Louisiana, better known as Lou.  He’s a shepherd/Dane mix and was a rescue from the parking lot of the Louisiana State University Vet Clinic that Jenn and a couple of her Lost Pet Recovery (LPR) mates drove through the night to recover. They knew he had two broken legs, but only later discovered a broken hip as well.  Thanks to LPR he’s now surgically repaired, and hanging out in Jenn’s office on the mend.  We haven’t allowed him to meet the other three yet (they can be overwhelming) but he knows they are there, and everyone desperately wants a sniff and to say “hello”.

Lou requires a lot of attention.  There are drugs for pain, and separation anxiety from abandonment.  He’s a sweet guy (“Sweet Louisiana” – has a ring to it).  He wants to play and snuggle, but he’s still fragile from all of the damage and the surgeries.  Jenn can’t go too far, and when she does I’m only a slightly above average substitute. 

The Plan 

Jenn and I want to vote together.  This is the most important vote of our lives, something we want to share – just as we shared the shock of November 2016, and will sweat out the 2020 returns in a couple of weeks.  So balancing Lou, the rest of the crew, my growing addiction to pounding out 1000 words each morning, workouts, cross country meets and all the rest of life has somehow gotten complicated.

So, Stan (whoever Stan was) here’s our new plan.

Lou’s got a vet appointment in Dublin, Ohio at 8:30 am today.  Travelling with him, it’s best to have both of us, one to drive, one to snuggle with Lou.  The rest of the gang will be happy to go back to sleep when we leave at 7:30 am.  So it’s over to Dublin and hang out while they check out Lou’s progress – then head to Newark and vote in person at the Board of Elections downtown.

American Duty

We get it done:  no worry about the mail, or disaster on Election Day.  And the vote is actually “cast” – so no worries about when it gets counted.  Our two votes matter, and timing matters too in our time when we don’t know what “shenanigans” the Trump campaign or others may pull.  Police are worrying about armed Trump supporters in the parking lots of polling places.  Everyone should be worried about attempts to hack into our electoral process.  Russia did it in 2016, there’s no reason to believe they won’t try again in 2020. There is so much that can happen to disrupt the system.  

So I’ll hang out in the truck with Lou while Jenn goes and casts her ballot, then she’ll do the same for me.  And then, no matter what else happens in the next two weeks, we have fulfilled that most important duty for Americans.  We voiced our decision.  We took a stand. And we chose our future.  We voted.

That’s the new plan, Stan.

Post Script

I started Trump World in February of 2017.  It was going to be a once a week essay to help explain how to “Resist” the Trump Administration.  It’s become a six-day a week project, often writing about the events of the day and interpreting what comes next, but sometimes telling stories of family, or school, or life.  Anyway – today’s essay is number 900:  “Who would’ve thunk it”.  

How Much?

Back in the “before times” when we went out to dinner at restaurants, my wife and I always had discussions about how much to tip the servers.  I was pretty much a twenty-percent guy unless something extraordinary happened.  It seemed fair, and easy to figure:  move the decimal and double the amount.  No calculators needed.

My wife worked in the food service industry at one point in her life.  So she’d lobby for a bigger tip almost every time, and occasionally throw in extra no matter what I considered fair.  It was never worth too much discussion. We both realized that people worked hard so we could enjoy our meal, and more tip was better.

And when I coached I often had my athletes out to dinner. I made sure to discuss with them what an appropriate tip would be.  After the meal, I’d glance around the table.  If I saw that the server was shorted, I made sure to make up for my skimpy tipping charges.

Bad Service

But there were those rare times when things were awful.  The service, food, or the server: what should we do about the tip in that kind of situation?  If you didn’t leave a tip at all, then there was always the question, “did the customer forget?”  Some folks solve that problem by leaving the most insulting tip of all: one penny.  That way, the server knew the service was intolerable.  

It’s not how I would do it.  The manager and I would have already had a discussion before I reached the “penny tip” stage – waiting until the end is far too passive/aggressive.  Sitting through an entire meal frustrated and angry without complaint was not my style.  And as I got older, I got more than willing to voice my criticisms.  I guess I’ve become that guy (I think it was my Dad).

COVID Relief

The COVID pandemic created one of the worst economic crises in American history.  In spite of what the President continues to say, there are still over 11 million Americans who have not gone back to work.  And the number suffering is even greater, as restaurants try to survive at 50% occupancy, and millions have “left” the workforce and stopped looking for employment.  

The Congressional reaction to the pandemic in April was reasonable.  Money was put into the industries that were obviously damaged:  transportation, entertainment, and education to name a few.  Unemployment, usually half of what employment paid at best, was supplemented by a $600/week stipend.  And most Americans got a $1200 “tax refund” that wasn’t going to impact 2020 taxes.  It was all the right things to mitigate the damages done by a nation slowed to a crawl by pandemic control efforts.

But in May, it became clear that “the economy” was the only way that Republicans could win the November election.  The United States “had” to recover, and the only way was to force states to “re-open”, despite the risk of spreading the COVID-19 virus.  So Republican Governors opened their states, and Democratic Governors and Mayors were faced with Federal pressure to open, “or else”. 

Getting folks to go back to work in a pandemic required them to face financial pressure.  If they didn’t have other alternatives, any protective relief packages, then most would find a way to make money, COVID or no.  So the United States Senate, led by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, decided that there was no need for additional COVID relief. They adjourned.

The Democratic Plan

Meanwhile, Speaker Pelosi and the Democratic House of Representatives passed a massive COVID relief package.  The original plan was over $3 Trillion in spending.  That included more PPP (payroll protection plan), extended unemployment supplements, massive aid to public education institutions for COVID protection and testing and another “tax rebate”.  The Democratic plan was to spend enough to keep stimulating the economy, while making it safer for the “essential workers”, the ones working because they had to, pandemic or not.

McConnell found that at least twenty Republican Senators refused to negotiate any COVID relief at all.  That left him needing Senate Democrats to get any kind of relief passed.  Instead of negotiating with Minority Leader Chuck Schumer over the House passed package already on his desk, McConnell refused to even discuss the issue.  He passed the negotiating over to the White House.  Secretary of the Treasury Mnuchin, Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and Speaker Pelosi were left to find some solution, while McConnell reserved the right to “veto” any agreement they reached.

The summer dragged on, with no COVID-relief in sight.  Pelosi, in order to further the process, passed a slimmed down $2.4 Trillion package.  But the Senate still failed to take any action.  When the Senate returned in September, McConnell’s sole focus was getting the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Supreme Court seat filled.  That process has moved along at an extremely fast pace, with Judge Amy Coney Barrett likely to be approved by a narrow margin next week.  But as far as COVID-relief is concerned, the Senate remained silent.

Skinny Relief

Tuesday, two weeks before the election, Senator McConnell put a $500 Billion package on the Senate floor for consideration. He’s forced a vote “for the record”. Republicans can vote for this “skinny bill” and go home to close their campaigns. They can claim that “they wanted relief”. Democrats, knowing that it’s not enough, will have to choose. Either vote down the “skinny bill” and face charges of not caring about “common people”, or vote for a bill that simply isn’t good enough.

Leader McConnell and the Senate Republicans are offering a “penny tip”. They are making sure we know that they considered COVID-relief, but really aren’t interested in doing much about it. McConnell knows that $500 billion isn’t enough, and not likely to pass the House of Representatives anyway. It’s just another insult to the people who are really serving this country – going out in a pandemic world to do their job.

Senate Democrats and Speaker Pelosi are responding to McConnell’s offer.

Keep the penny.

And the Winner Is

Democrat Hillary Clinton won the Presidential Election of 2016 with 48.2% of the vote.  Donald Trump came in second almost three million votes behind Clinton, with 46.1% of the vote.  Just like Algebra 2 class back in high school, at least for me, the math of United States Presidential elections sometimes doesn’t make sense.  Why:  because as we all are very much aware, Hillary Clinton has not been the President of the United States for the past three and a half years.  

Donald Trump did not win the popular vote, but he was able to amass a majority of the Electoral vote, winning 304 Electoral votes to Clinton’s 227. (For those government geeks like me, who recognize that those numbers are seven short of the 538 total Electoral votes, seven electors were “faithless” and didn’t vote for either one). Without starting an “Electoral College” debate, this is how we elect the President now. So like it or not, this isn’t a national election. The Presidential Election of 2020 is actually fifty-one separate state elections for the number of Electors that state is allotted.

Electoral College

Each state is allocated one Elector (vote) for each Member of the House of Representatives of the state, and one for each Senator (two for each state).  The minimum a state could have would be three electoral votes (that is what the District of Columbia is also given).  The largest is fifty-five, California.  It all totals to 538 Electoral votes, so a tie would be 269. It takes 270 wins the Presidency.

Donald Trump didn’t need to win the popular vote.  He needed to win 270 Electoral Votes, and he did that and more.  To win the Presidency then, Joe Biden needs to win 270 or more Electoral votes, not just more popular votes.  

By the way, that’s why you don’t see Biden campaigning in California or New York.  Both of those states are going to go to the Democrat, no matter what. “Running up” the vote in a state does the Presidential candidate no direct good, though it might help elect other state candidates there.  The Presidential candidate just has to win the popular vote by the slimmest margin, to get “all” the Electoral votes.

And since it’s like Algebra, there are two exceptions.  Maine and Nebraska allow their Congressional Districts to individually choose electors.  So if the Omaha Congressional District votes for Biden, he will get that one electoral vote.  The rest of Nebraska is likely to be overwhelmingly for Trump, so he would win the other two Congressional Districts, and by winning the entire state count, the two “Senate” electors.  

So “endeth” the Electoral College 101 lesson.  Thanks for coming to class.

Sure Things

As noted above, there are some states that are going to go “Red” or “Blue” for sure.  Those are the states where you won’t see a lot of Presidential TV commercials, and the candidates aren’t dropping in for visits and speeches.  They are “in the bag”.  President Trump has a total of twenty states with 125 Electoral votes locked in, Joe Biden twenty states and the District of Columbia, totaling 232.  

So all Biden has to do is win thirty-eight more Electoral votes and he’s the next President.  That’s exactly what Hillary Clinton needed to do as well.  She didn’t win a single one beyond the “locked in” states.

181 Electoral votes are up for grabs, along with the Presidency of the United States and, not to get overly dramatic, the fate of the American experiment and the free world.

Degrees of Blueness

If you were alive on November 8^th of 2016, you remember the term “the Blue Wall”.  This was the “impregnable” Democratic bastion of Pennsylvania and the Northern Tier:  Michigan and Wisconsin.  That’s a total of forty-six votes, more than enough to win.  And Democrats watched as each of those states, one by one, went to Donald Trump.  Each was by the narrowest margin, a total of 77744 votes out of over 13 million cast.  (Want to delve into that more – here’s a Trump World post from March of 2017 about the count – 77744).

Joe Biden is in the same position.  And he’s also at the same point in polling that Clinton was about three weeks out from the election.  She had a commanding lead in the polls in each of those states, though she never broke fifty percent, and nationally as well.  So what happened?

Bringing Clinton Down

Three factors took Hillary Clinton down.  The first was over twenty years of calling both of the Clinton’s criminals even before Bill was impeached is 1998.  Hillary had the highest “unfavorable” ratings of any Presidential candidate, ever.  Six Benghazi investigations by a Republican House of Representatives just made it worse.  So she was already “softened up”. Joe Biden is running ten points ahead of Hillary’s “unfavorables” were of 2016.

The second factor was the Comey letter to Congress, re-opening the Clinton email investigation.  Whether you like Director Comey or not, his action created a whole new view of Hillary as a criminal, and also managed to tie her to the laptop of her senior aide’s husband, “serial sexter” Anthony Weiner.  It just made things a whole lot worse, and the undecided almost unanimously turned to Trump.

The third factor was the Clinton campaign didn’t recognize the shift caused by the Comey Letter, and failed to commit to defending in the “Blue Wall” states.  Trump campaigned there, and it made a difference. So Clinton lost.

Today

(All polling from Real Clear Politics averages as of 10/18/20)

Today Joe Biden is leading the polling in each of the “blue wall” states by more than six points over Trump.  And in all three he is close to fifty-percent, meaning that near half the voters are Biden voters.  The “undecided” would have to completely go for Trump to change the outcome.

But Biden also is running well in “second tier” states, states that weren’t really in play in 2016.  In North Carolina, Iowa and Arizona, Biden is carrying a two percent lead.  That’s close to the “margin of error”, but has been trending Biden all year.  All three of those states were Trump states in 2016.  

And then, for those with long political memories, there’s Florida, Florida, Florida.  Biden is leading by 4% in Florida.  Florida has 29 Electoral votes.  If Florida goes to Biden, it’s game over.

And, as they say on the TV ad – there’s more.  Hillary Clinton was never competitive in Georgia, or Ohio or Texas.  But Biden is polling well in those states, up by a percent in Georgia, tied in Ohio, and down by four percent in Texas.  If those states are competitive, that tells a whole different story than the 2016 election.  And if Biden wins Ohio, a state that will likely have an unofficial final vote count on election night, it would be another “game over” moment.

So if we give all the ties and “close calls” to Trump, currently Biden would earn 346 Electoral Votes to Trump’s 192.  Again, it’s “game over”.   

Two Weeks

But, there’s two weeks to go, and as we learned in 2016, a lot can happen.  National polls show Biden at 51% and Trump at 42%.  That poll will tighten as we get closer to Election Day, though it’s likely a third of the nation will have voted before November 3^rd.  Anything can happen – and the Trump campaign has already tried to create three “October Surprises” (the Durham investigation, the Unmasking investigation, and the Hunter Biden computer dis-information nonsense).  None have worked so far.

Democrats have to show up because Trump Republicans absolutely will.  There will be arguments about voter suppression, mail-in ballot counts, and who knows what else.  The only way to assure a “clear” victory is to gain a definitive one.  And it’s not just possible, it can really happen.

Get to work – and get to the polls.

Here are the numbers:

Save America

It’s been 1,368 days since Donald J. Trump was inaugurated.  1,368 days that began with lying about the size of the inauguration crowd and the “Muslim Ban”. It continued through “fine people on both sides” at Charlottesville, children separated from parents on our Southern border, the abandonment of America’s allies throughout the world, and Trump’s infatuation with “strong-men” dictators.  We learned that Russia backed Trump in the 2016 election, and that Trump tried to leverage the power of the United States to attack his political rival, Joe Biden.  

And then there was COVID-19.

We also learned that many of our other elected leaders turned their back on “the right thing to do”.  They were afraid of a “tweet”, of the power of the Trump base to remove them from office.  They grew silent at the continual stream of hate and invective and at a President who tried to rule by division instead of lead by consensus.

1,368 days gone, and now there’s two weeks left to put it to an end.  

No Stone Unturned

I was twenty years old and having the time of my life in October of 1976.  I was on the lowest rung of the “paid staff” of the Carter/Mondale Presidential campaign.  Southwest Ohio was my territory, and I was the “campaign contact” for efforts in five different counties.  But Hamilton County, Cincinnati, was the prize.  At the time the City was Democratic, but the suburbs were Republican.  In the last few weeks those of us who were campaigning outside of town, in Butler, Warren, Clermont, Brown, and Clinton Counties were told to get things in order, and come back to the “headquarters” in a rundown office building on Main Street north of Seventh in downtown Cincinnati. It was time for the final push, and it was “all hands on deck” in the big city.

My boss, a guy named Michael Jackson (a former Nebraska lineman) made it very clear what our goal was.  Not a pamphlet, sign, button or bumper sticker was to be left in the office.  Everything must go out into the community.  I was running targeted “litt drops”, groups of mostly high school kids going door-to-door leaving a full-color Jimmy Carter pamphlet.  The idea was to blanket neighborhoods, another “contact” from the Carter/Mondale campaign.  Those kids became expert at finding ways to make the “litt” stay on storm doors or doorknobs, and avoiding the inevitable dogs in the front yard.

They were prepared to talk, to make some key points about what Jimmy Carter could do as President.  But talking wasn’t really the goal – it was contact, that piece of literature, in as many doors as possible. 

Get Out the Vote (GOTV)

The last two weeks it was time to stop persuading.  While it was satisfying to discuss, to try to “talk” folks into voting for Jimmy Carter rather than Gerald Ford, with two weeks to go most had already made up their mind.  Beside that, the time it took to argue kept you from reaching five or six more who just needed to be reminded to go to the polls.

There’s the lesson:  stop arguing.  If someone wants to argue about “the good” Donald Trump has done, then they aren’t going to vote for Joe Biden.  All the argument will do is provide more motivation for them to go out and vote for Trump, the exact opposite of the goal.  Two weeks means energize your own voters.  

Phone Banks

In 1976 we had giant “continuous feed computer paper” sheets of voter rolls, sorted by address and precinct.  Beside each voter’s name was a series of letters – from RRR to DDD with a scattering of I’s in between.  Those letters indicated what ballot they asked for in the last three primaries:  Republicans were R’s, Democrats were D’s, Independents were I’s.  A blank space meant they didn’t vote.

So we had an old fashioned “phone bank”, a back room with twenty “new” push button phones around a table.  Volunteers were handed a precinct worth of sheets, and told to call the “triple D’s” and remind them to vote.  Back then in an age before caller-ID, people actually answered their phones.  If they had questions, like where they voted or could they get a ride, our volunteers had the answer.  If they wanted to know an official policy, the volunteer took their name and one of us staffers called them back. 

Today GOTV is much more highly refined.  The immense amounts of data from social media and former contacts allows for “micro-targeting”.  Campaigns can reach specific voters with specific messages directed at their personal concerns.  And, of course, voting now is so much more than just “Election Day”.  By November 3^rd it’s estimated that a full third of the vote will already by in.  So GOTV started on October 4^th, and it’s in full swing with two weeks left to go.

What Can You Do

But most aren’t a part of the campaign: what can they do to help end the Trump nightmare?  

1. Make sure you non-Trump friends vote.  Find ways to make sure they get to the polls if they’re voting in person, or get their mail-in ballot in the mail TODAY!!
2. Prepare for post-election issues.  It may be days before we know who has won the Presidency, and there will be pressure from the Trump side to stop vote counting and declare a winner.  It may require marches, demonstrations, and protests to keep the mail-in vote count going.  It’s COVID world, so many cannot and should not risk participating in such public activities.  But if you can, then go.
3. And most importantly – VOTE.  The 2016 election was decided by 77,744 votes out of more than 120 million.  Every vote counts; don’t let anyone tell you different.

Let’s do everything we can so that on November 4^th or 5^th or 10^th, we can look forward to the end.  To paraphrase President Gerald Ford:  

“…our long national nightmare will be over”.

Neutral Arbiter

Judge Amy Coney Barrett claims to have no preconceived decisions about the cases she might hear in the Supreme Court.  She says she doesn’t have an “agenda” when it comes to healthcare, women’s and voting rights, gun control or the power of corporations in the United States.  And yet, Democrats are continually claiming that she will find against the Affordable Care Act, overrule Roe v Wade, allow for voter suppression, and protect gun and corporate interests.

We also know that President Trump has made it clear he won’t appoint a Justice to the Supreme Court that supports the Roe v Wade decision, the Affordable Care Act, or would rule for those other things.  So who is right:  the Democrats, the President, or the Judge?  And if the Democrats and the President are correct, then is the Judge, an acknowledged legal “super-star,” lying to America?

Well, kind of.  The Judge states, over and over again, that she will be fair arbiter of the law, and determine each case as it is presented to her.  She repeats Chief Justice John Robert’s famous qoute. Barrett says she will be an umpire not a player, just calling “balls and strikes”.  She won’t make what she considers “policy decisions”, just arbitrate what “the law” means.

The Strike Zone

I’m not a baseball “guy”.  I coached other sports:  Track, Cross Country and Wrestling during my teaching career.  But rather than make my more familiar (to me) pole-vaulting analogies, let me use one that most Americans understand.  In baseball, the pitcher has to throw to the batter, and give the batter an opportunity to hit the ball.  If the ball goes through the “strike zone” and the batter fails to swing at it, or misses the ball, then the batter receives a “strike”.  Three strikes, and the batter loses his turn at bat, and is called “out”.  If, on the other hand, the pitcher either fails to put the ball “over the plate” or throws the ball too high or too low, then it is out of the strike zone, and the batter receives a “ball”.  Four balls and the batter is allowed to advance to first base.

The umpire’s job is to be the neutral arbiter of whether the pitch was in the strike zone or not.  Whether it’s a fastball, a slider, a curve or a change-up, it is the umpire’s role to call “strike” or “ball”.  And we all have a common knowledge where the strike zone is. It goes from above the batter’s knees to below his shoulders.  To quote that outstanding source of American sports rules, Wikipedia: “The strike zone is defined as the volume of space above home plate and between the batter’s knees and the midpoint of their torso”.

The Pitch

But baseball aficionados tell us, that different umpires have different perceptions of where that volume of space really is.  It might, for a particular umpire, start at the batter’s waist and go to his shoulders.  Other umpires see the bottom of the knees as the line, or the middle of the shoulders.  So while the umpire is the “neutral arbiter;” how that umpire defines the strike zone will effect every pitch in the game.  And since every pitcher and hitter are different, then each game will be shaped in part by the umpire’s both perceived and actual vision.

It doesn’t mean that the umpire is “taking sides”.  He simply would say, “I calls ‘em as I sees ‘em”.   And that’s what Judge Amy Coney Barrett will do.

Judicial Interpretation

In Constitutional Law there are those who call themselves “originalists” or “textualists”.  These judges see the written words of the Constitution by their plain meaning to the original men who wrote them.  The “text” is written with the “intent” of James Madison and the Constitutional Convention.  Judge Barrett sees the law through this Constitutional “lens”.  

There are also those judges who see the words of the Constitution in their plain meaning, but through the realities of today’s world.  The universe of the Constitution’s authors didn’t include gender or racial equity, or automatic weapons.  These judicial pragmatists see the words of the Constitution through the filter of today’s realities.  

For example, the Fourth Amendment states that: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated…”

Originalists see that as a right against illegal searches of a person’s body, their homes papers and effect.   Pragmatists see all that as true, but also the right to control what the government can do about physical bodies.  This, for example, is applied when a woman can choose to have an abortion, something the Founding Fathers didn’t directly speak to.  It’s a “right to privacy,” a pragmatic extension of the words. Originalists find that unacceptable.

The Framework

Every Judge and Justice has there own vision of the “strike zone”, the “lens” through which they make judicial decisions.  They may say that they don’t have an “agenda”. But if you know their “strike zone” then you can pretty much anticipate how they will make their “calls”.  Judge Barrett has stated over and over in her testimony to Congress that she has not “made policy decisions” in the Court, nor would she in the future.  But she has also said, over and over, that she will apply her judicial decision-making “framework” to the cases that she hears. 

That “framework”, her “strike zone”, will determine her decisions.  She is speaking truthfully when she says that she hasn’t made a decision about the contentious issues in front of the Supreme Court. But she is still being disingenuous.  The framework she espouses directs her thought process and determines the results.  So the Democrats and President Trump are right, and Judge Barrett is – well – being “judicial”.  The end results are the same.  To her, a “strike” is a “strike”, even though it’s a “ball” to someone else.

“He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” Donald Trump describing John McCain on July 4^th, 2015

Conquering Hero

It was a perfect situation for Donald Trump.  Fresh from his miraculous recovery from COVID-19, he refused to follow the Commission on Presidential Debates rule requiring that he debate Joe Biden “remotely”.  As Trump told Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo, “I’m not going to waste my time doing a virtual debate.” Instead, he called it a “joke” and an effort “to protect Biden”.

The Trump 2020 strategy is to make Biden look old and feeble.  In their first debate, Trump constantly interrupted Biden, trying to prevent him from making a coherent statement.  Now, after his “Superman” moment returning to the White House from the hospital, he didn’t want someone else to have a “mute” button.  

So he blew up the second debate.  Biden immediately scheduled a ninety-minute “town hall” interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, ending speculation that the debate would be rescheduled.  Trump then arranged his own Town Hall at the same time across all of NBC’splatforms (NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, and Telemundo).

Miami

So Trump had an hour in Miami last night to drag Joe Biden’s audience away.  And he automatically “wins” the ratings – ABC doesn’t have the broadcast reach (ABC and ABC 24 Hour News) of NBC.

But then there was Savannah Guthrie, moderator of the Trump Town Hall and NBC’s Today Show host.  During the hour on stage in Miami without a second candidate, Guthrie used the audience questions to “fact check” Trump in real time.  When the President used his usual “alternative facts”, Guthrie immediately responded with the actual facts.  Trump tried to “bully” his way through Guthrie’s responses, but she didn’t back down.  

This morning there is a hue and cry among the Trump loyalists.  Savannah was “out to get” Trump.  The President is a “victim” of an NBC hatchet job.  That “nasty woman” attacked him.  This Facebook post sums up their feelings:

“I’ve never seen such a disrespectful person during a town hall meeting literally your job is to moderate, not debate.  The answers were given but you didn’t believe him so you grilled him harder and harder thinking he would change his mind.  This meeting was for the people that needed answers straight from the man in charge yet you kept that from them, Savannah Guthrie you’re a dirt bag.  All these journalists need to leave their beliefs at the door and be professional during times like this.  It just shows how much pain biden (sic) supporters are if all they can do is attack trump. #Trump2020.

Philadelphia

Meanwhile in Philadelphia, George Stephanopoulos had a ninety-minute conversation with Joe Biden and America, with the topics triggered by audience questions.  Biden has never been a “smooth talker”, and he sometime searched for words.  But he had the facts and figures at hand, and a clear understanding of his own plans to repair the United States.  And Biden, as usual, took more time than most politicians to explain his answers.  He couched his programs in his own life experiences: we heard a lot about his father’s views.  But in the end he knows what he wants to achieve, and has a vision of his own for our nation.

Biden then spent another hour or so talking to the audience, after the cameras were off. 

Superman

Rumor has it the Trump considered wearing a Superman T-Shirt under his dress shirt on his return from the hospital, and then ripping the dress shirt off to emphasize the success of his recovery.  But Superman wasn’t a victim, and Mr. Trump can’t have it both ways.

In a broader sense the entire Trump “movement” is based on victimization. Republicans in the Senate set up an entire scenario where Judge Amy Coney Bennett would be “victimized” by Democrats for her religious beliefs. She wasn’t. Christians claim to be “victimized” by Courts that rule in favor of LGBTQ rights, but it’s difficult to see how granting equal rights to one group victimizes another. And folks are being “victimized” by being forced to socially distance and wear masks, the simple and effective responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. They can’t wear a mask, but fight like Hell for the right to wear their red “MAGA” hats.

The President has tapped into a sad side of the American psyche.  Instead of encouraging Americans to improve their world, he gives them solace for their perceived losses. He wants them to see themselves as “losers”. And, as we saw four years ago, there are a significant number of Americans who want to be – victims.

I like my Presidents who aren’t victims.

Consider the Source

The New York Post is a venerable old newspaper.  The paper was founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton. It lays claim to the title of,  “the oldest continually published daily paper in the United States”.  It started as Hamilton’s personal vehicle for furthering his political ideology.  After Hamilton’s untimely death, the paper continued to have strong political overtones, including the support of abolitionism, opposition to central banking (despite it’s Founder) and strong support of labor unions.  

Through the mid-twentieth century the New York Post was dedicated to liberal causes.  But in the 1970’s the NYP ran into hard financial times, like most afternoon papers in the United States.  Australian media magnate Rupert Murdoch of Fox News fame took over the paper.  Murdoch sensationalized it, increasing the circulation but definitely damaging it’s credibility.  It was in this era that the NYP led with the famous headline:

            “HEADLESS BODY FOUND IN TOPLESS BAR”.

More Headlines

But perhaps the NYP’s best covers were reserved to “sexting” addicted Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner.  As Weiner continued to fall to the lure of young women and his cell phone camera, the New York Post headline writers went to work.  “WEINER EXPOSED”, “POP GOES THE WEASEL” and “NAKED TRUTH” were some of the best.  And when Weiner was running for Mayor of New York and caught once again, this time resulting in jail time: “WEINER’S SECOND COMING” and “WEINER ROAST” (NYP).      

Today the New York Post is still owned by News Corps, a Rupert Murdoch company, and has a strong conservative “bent”.  It has been the vehicle to attack Democratic/Liberal ideas and candidates.  Hillary Clinton still is a particularly important target for the NYP, even now four years after her Presidential run.

So it should be no surprise that the NYP is the only “mainstream” news outlet carrying stories about Joe Biden, his son Hunter.

Hunter

The NYP has “discovered” a “whistleblower,” that found hidden Hunter Biden emails.  If that doesn’t harken back to Clinton, nothing else will.  The “whistleblower” is a blind computer repairman in Wilmington, Delaware. He is 99% sure that Hunter Biden dropped off a Macbook Pro computer for repair, and never returned for it.  (The definition of a “whistleblower” is someone inside an organization who speaks out about something that organization is doing wrong.  Since the repairman is not in any “organization” involving Hunter or Joe Biden, he doesn’t qualify as a “whistleblower”.  But the “whistleblower” title has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?)

Those emails include ones that “show” that Hunter Biden arranged for his father, then the Vice President, to meet with Ukrainians on the Board of the company, Burisma.  If the emails were true, then this is the “smoking gun” of the Vice President using his office to further the career of his wayward son.

Further emails show Hunter Biden’s involvement in lucrative purchases of Chinese energy companies.

According to the computer repairman, the emails are already in the possession of the FBI. Since he heard nothing about an investigation, he grew frustrated. So he gave them to the Johnson Senate Committee and Trump’s private attorney, Rudy Giuliani, who then gave the emails to the New York Post.

Provenance

Trump supporters are outraged that other mainstream media outlets refused to “cover” these discoveries. In fact, social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook have “taken down” stories relating to the New York Post’s articles, creating a whole new round of stories.  So what’s the problem?

First:  the computer repairman refuses to grant access to the hard drive, or even originals of the emails including the “meta-data” showing details of their transmission.  There is no way to verify any of the so-called emails really existed, or belonged to Hunter Biden.

Second:  one of the driving forces behind the publication of these emails, Rudy Giuliani, has been discredited.  Giuliani was a major player in the causes of Donald Trump’s impeachment trial.  US Intelligence has identified Giuliani’s main information source, Ukrainian Andrii Derkach, as an asset of Russian Intelligence.  Derkach is under sanction by President Trump’s own Treasury Department.  And the “discovered” emails align perfectly with the Russian disinformation campaign to disrupt the 2020 US elections.

Third:  the other person who brought the emails to the NYP is former White House advisor and Trump campaign manager Steve Bannon.  Bannon was the first to alert the newspaper to the emails “existence”, and then Giuliani provided the emails without confirming documentation.

October Surprise

The Trump campaign is desperate for an “October Surprise”. In 2016, the course of the election was turned “on its head” by FBI Director James Comey. He first announced that he was re-opening the Hillary Clinton email investigation, and then, at the last moment, announced that nothing new was found.  These actions stopped Clinton momentum in the polls.  Prior to the FBI announcement Clinton had a huge lead in the polls, much like Biden over Trump today.  After the FBI actions, Trump rapidly closed the polling gap to within the margin of error.

There’s no “surprise” in 2020 yet, but it’s not for want of trying.  Attorney General Bill Barr has failed to deliver on two different attacks on the Democrats.  First was the analysis of the original Russian election interference investigation, “Crossfire Hurricane”.  Led by Connecticut US Attorney John Dunham, Trump hoped the Dunham could reveal illegalities that would show FBI bias against Trump in time for the 2020 vote.  But Dunham has made it clear that there will be nothing coming from his work before November.

And Barr ordered another investigation, this time by Texas US Attorney John Bash. This was to determine whether the “unmasking” of US citizens in Obama Administration intelligence reports was legal.  Trump hoped it would show an Obama “plot” against his campaign.  But Bash returned his conclusions, finding that there was no “irregularities” in the actions by Obama Administration officials (NYT).

Not Surprising

So it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that after Barr’s failures, Giuliani and Bannon would step in with a “Hail Mary” play against Hunter Biden.  Trump is currently running more than twelve percent down in national polls, and behind in almost every critical electoral state.  He’s got to change the momentum, and if his minions have to use Russian dis-information to do it – so be it.

The Five Man Electrical Band – Signs

Small Town

Pataskala, Ohio, will never by confused for “Biden” Country.  Just a quick look at my little street, a block off the “main drag”, shows it.  On the corner, two Trump signs, and multiple flags favoring the President.  Two doors down, more Trump flags and signs.  They’ve been up since 2016.  Next door, just a simple Trump sign, also left over from the 2016 effort. 

There’s no question that my Biden yard sign, and the handmade sign made by my sister and brother-in-law carefully taped to my garage door, stood out.  But our neighborhood has been pretty cool about our differences.  The next-door neighbor and I laughed about our “dueling” signs, and the folks down the street still wave as we go by.  It’s Pataskala, we all know that there are different views, and, in general, we respect those views.

Rude Awakening

So when I was half-asleep, watching the end of the Rachel Maddow Show last night, it took a second to identify the noise at the front of the house.  Was it the storm door slamming shut?  But then it dawned on me, the ripping-sucking sound of duct tape getting peeled off a surface, fast.

I raced to the front door, to see a #25 jersey sprinting down the street, my sign in his hands.  His fellow thieves, who already had the yard sign in the front, were yelling at him to hurry up.  I hope I gave them a little bit of incentive, as I sprinted (well, probably not as “sprinted” as the old days) out the door and down the road behind them.  They jumped in a waiting car, and sped off, as I tried to get a license plate from the dark colored four-door sedan.  I was too late, or more likely, too slow.

It’s a high school prank, right?  I remember a whole lot of those from forty years in public education, from toilet paper to getting “forked”.  But I’m not working at a high school anymore. Amazingly, it’s been long enough now that there’s no one left who knew me from teaching or coaching there.  So it wasn’t targeted at “Dahlman”, it was targeted at someone who dared to put “Biden Signs” on their house and property.

Intimidation

I’m sure some folks would be intimidated.  A kid walked up to my house, in full view of the cameras, and ripped a sign off of the garage door.  But Jenn and I didn’t feel intimidated.  That didn’t even cross our minds.  We were — to say it nicely, angry.

What do you do about this?  Well, I called the Police, and got to see and old friend who had the swing shift patrol.  We caught up, and he let me file a report.  But the video isn’t that good, and without some other identification, old “#25” and his buddies probably got away with their theft.  But it’s “on the record”, and if the Pataskala Police happen to pull over a car full of Biden signs there’s a reason to do something about it.

And Jenn and I went on patrol as well, checking the places we thought kids might “get rid” of the evidence.  We didn’t have any luck, but we got some satisfaction checking the most likely dumpster sites.  

My Hope

And since this is a social media world, we posted the picture of “#25” on Facebook, and told our story.   The responses tell me that there is still hope for Pataskala, and maybe for America.  As of this writing fifty-four folks have reacted to the post, many of them Trump supporters.  And not one has said anything like “it serves you right” or “good for the kids”.  Almost everyone who commented has supported our right to voice our opinions, even though they don’t agree.

And a few gave advice on how to protect the next signs we put up.  And they are right: there will be more signs.  Intimidation is the last thing on our minds.  Jenn is trying to keep me from getting our camper and parking it in the driveway with  full-sized Biden sign on both sides.  

I won’t do that.  But there will be more Biden signs in our front yard; maybe installed in a more permanent way.  Because “#25” needs to learn a lesson from this old government teacher:  you can’t shut up the opposition by stealing, and you can’t win an election through intimidation. 

You just gave me the excuse to put more signs up.  

Pre-Ordained

It’s not often you’ve heard me say this, but maybe Rush Limbaugh is right.  He called for the Senate to “skip the hearings” and put the question of Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination straight to a Senate floor vote.  We all know that Mitch McConnell has the numbers to achieve his ambition:  a six to three majority of Federalist Society adherents on the Court.  Why go through all of the “theatre” of process: Committee hearings, speeches, and preliminary votes?

And the answer is in the question itself – theatre.  This is part of the price McConnell and the President have to pay for putting a Justice on the Court twenty-one days before a national election. (Well, kind-of before, though almost ten million Americans have already voted).  Both political parties see votes to be gained in the “spectacle” of the Senate Judiciary Hearings.  While Judge Barrett may be the subject of the discussion, in fact, she is merely the foil, the “strawman”.  The real targets are the voters.

Textualist

For the Republican majority, the object is to drive their base voters to the polls.  Amy Coney Barrett is, as President Trump constantly hammers, “a promise fulfilled”.  She is an arch-conservative jurist, cut from the mold of her mentor, the late Antonin Scalia.  Her judicial view of “textualism” is the vessel that will allow her to wind the nation back to an “earlier era”, when women, the poor, minorities, and LGBTQ folks had fewer rights.  “Textualists” propound that since the “founding fathers” didn’t envision rights for them, that it couldn’t be a “right” of the Constitution.

But her restricted view about “rights” isn’t really what drives the Republican leadership to her defense.  The “textualists” believe in the “rights” of corporations, and the power of wealth.  That drove the Court decision in Citizens United. In that case they found that restricting campaign spending is a violation of “free speech” of corporations under the First Amendment. Equating money to speech allowed for the unlimited spending in election campaigns we see today. That empowered groups like the Koch Brothers to exert intense influence on legislators.  

Drive the Vote

But for the “theatre” of the Senate Hearings, Republicans will present Amy Coney Barrett. She is a brilliant jurist, and a woman who balances career and family.  They will dare Democrats to attack her.  In fact, they will preview attacks themselves.  Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri warned of attacks on her religious beliefs. He claims Democrats would decry her Catholicism and her participation in “The People of Praise”.  Senator Marsha Blackburn further warned that Democrats couldn’t accept a “woman” who didn’t agree with them, and would attack her based on her gender and family.

The Republicans want Democrats to attack Barrett personally, as they did to Brett Kavanaugh.  An ugly fight over Barrett’s personal life would be exactly what Republican Senate members want.   It’s all to drive the Republican base to defend Barrett the only way they can, go out and vote for Republican candidates in the election. 

Slice the Suburbs 

The difficulty Republicans are having with that strategy is that the Democrats aren’t “playing ball”.  The Democratic strategy is to use the Barrett hearings as a forum for attacking the Republican agenda.  Yesterday the theme was the Affordable Care Act.  Democrats used Barrett’s statements opposing the Act to highlight the lack of any Republican replacement for Obamacare, in spite of a decade of opposition to the plan.  The emotional stories and pictures of people who would be in dire straights except for the Affordable Care Act were intense, aimed to drive Democrats to the polls, and to slice into Republican support among white suburban women.  

Expect that Democrats will carefully avoid any personal attacks on Bennett.  But they will continue to highlight her views on women’s health and particularly on a woman’s right to choose an abortion.  It won’t be about Bennett specifically though, it will be about Republicans continuing their “war on choice”.

But they will attack vulnerable Republican Senators up for re-election.  Thom Tillis and Mike Lee, both recently diagnosed with COVID infections, are appearing “live” in the Committee room.  Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham himself has steadfastly refused to have a COVID test, despite close contact with the President.  Democrats will use this to highlight the President’s failure to control the pandemic, and the politically vulnerable Tillis and Graham’s complicity in his decisions.  Democrats will claim that Tillis, Lee, John Cornyn of Texas and Graham have been frivolous and careless in the way they are handling COVID in the Committee.

The Outcome

Sometime before the election, Judge Barrett will become Justice Barrett of the United States Supreme Court.  Should Democrats gain a majority in the Senate and Joe Biden as President, they will then have to decide how to respond to that fact.  But in the meantime, the impact of the Barrett nomination will be felt in the most important American way:  it will help “encourage” more to go to the polls, and determine who they will vote for.  

And that’s why we will have the “theatre” in the Senate this week.

The Question

The Republicans screamed their talking point from Sunday’s news shows.  “Joe Biden won’t answer the question!!!! He won’t say if he’ll ‘pack’ the Supreme Court!”  

You can’t blame them for trying to change the conversation.  There’s not a whole lot of good news coming from the Trump camp.  Son Eric had a disastrous interview on ABC, coming across as strident and whiny at the same time.  Daughter-in-law Lara did better on the safer Fox Sunday venue. But neither could come up with straight answers to either the New York Times expose of Trump finances, or the President’s health. 

And the polls look terrible for Trump 2020.  It’s not just the “blue wall” states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. It’s Ohio, North Carolina, Florida, and Arizona, and even Georgia and maybe Texas that are trending to Joe Biden.  So Trump needs to change the subject – and “packing” the Court might help.

Biden has a convoluted answer. The former Vice President said that, “if he answers the question it will make it the lead story,” so he refuses to answer.  Biden wants to keep the focus on the President’s COVID response.  Anything else is “off the subject” as far as Democrats are concerned.  But his ticket needs to come up with a better answer than, “we don’t want to answer that question”.  So here’s a look at Congress, the President and the Court throughout history.

Judges on the Bench

First of all, Congress, not the Courts or the President, establishes the number of judges at all levels of the Federal Court system.  This includes the United States Supreme Court.  The original Supreme Court in 1789 had six Justices.  Eighteen years later that was increased to seven, then thirty years after than to nine.  During the Civil War the number was briefly increased to ten, then right after the war shrunk back to seven. That shrinkage was to prevent President Andrew Johnson from appointing any Justices at all.  With the election of Grant in 1869, Congress placed the number back at nine.

It’s been nine ever since.  In 1937 Franklin Roosevelt proposed to add a Justice for every serving Justice over the age of seventy for a possible total of fifteen Justices.  Congress didn’t go for that, but strangely enough, the existing Justices changed. They began to find the New Deal legislation Constitutional, ones that they were previously ruled unconstitutional.   While no one admitted that Roosevelt’s pressure impacted their decisions, the proof is in the results.

Trying to gain political control of the Courts isn’t just at the Supreme Court level.  The second President of the United States, John Adams, was a Federalist.  He was defeated for a second term in office by Thomas Jefferson, of the opposing Democratic-Republicans.  In the months before Jefferson was inaugurated, Adams made a concerted effort to place as many Federalist into lifetime judicial positions as possible.  One of those Federalist Judges was the Chief Justice John Marshall, but another created the famous Supreme Court case of Marbury v Madison, the last of the “midnight judges”. 

It is Politics

So seeing the Courts as an institution immune to political influence or control is naïve.  It’s been happening since the founding of the Republic.  In recent years, the Federalist Society, an organization of judges, attorneys, law schools and students, has made it their goal to gain a majority on the Supreme Court.  They’ve been working towards that goal since their founding thirty-eight years ago.  Today five members of the Supreme Court, including Chief Justice Roberts, are Federalist Society adherents.

Say what you want about Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and President Trump: they have had a single-minded focus when it comes to packing the present Judiciary with Federalist Society members.   There are a total of 870 Federal judgeships in the Court System.  In the past three and a half years, Trump and McConnell have appointed 206 judges, almost a quarter of the Judiciary.  That includes 151 District Judges, 53 Appellate Court positions, and, of course two (soon to be three) Supreme Court Justices.  All of those appointments are lifetime positions.

No one is talking about how all of those appointments, and particularly those at the Appellate level, will dramatically alter the Federal Courts interpretation of law.  If Democrats get the opportunity in 2021 to control the Congress and the Presidency, they might look to not only expand the number of Supreme Court Justices, but also the number of Appellate Court positions so they can “level” the field.

Biden’s Answer

So what should the “Biden Court Packing” answer be?  I think he should say the following:

First – Senator McConnell set the rules in 2016 – no Supreme Court appointments in an election year.  Whether that “rule” was good or bad is irrelevant, it’s the rule he set and we should expect him to honor his own rule, and not vote on a Supreme Court nominee until after the inauguration in 2021.

Second – If Senator McConnell decides to flaunt his own rule it’s obvious he has no concerns about the “norms” for judicial appointments.  “Norms” are only fair if both sides follow them, so if McConnell brings a Supreme Court nomination to a vote, then those norms don’t apply.

Third – Everything after that is hypothetical.  What happens next can only be answered after the real actions of Senator McConnell.  So if McConnell doesn’t want a Congress in the future to contemplate expanding the Courts, he should follow the rules that he set in 2016.

Biden and Democrats should place the decision right where it belongs:  with the Republican Senator from Kentucky who is done everything he can to “pack” the Courts with his own ideology.  If McConnell proceeds with the Barrett nomination, then he is opening the door to further politicization of the Court.  Biden isn’t the “Court Packer” (yet), McConnell is.  And if one Party is doing the packing, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the other Party will contemplate it.  

 It’s nothing new.

T.R.

Theodore Roosevelt or “T.R.” as his staff called him, wasn’t the kind of Republican we think of today.  He was a “Progressive” Republican, interested in conservation (he established five national parks) and in reducing the power of the massive business monopolies.  

He was serving as Governor of New York when President McKinley asked him to run for Vice President in 1900. McKinley needed to replace his first Vice President who died of heart failure in 1899. Roosevelt’s nomination also gave New York’s more conservative Republican Party the opportunity to get rid of him. T.R. gave the McKinley campaign the “spark” of youth (he was forty-one) and energy from his Rough Rider background. It helped win the state and nation in a tough election campaign against Populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan.

The hope of Republican Party leaders was that Roosevelt would disappear in the background like most Vice Presidents. But when anarchist Leon Czolgosz shot McKinley in September of 1901, everything changed. The President died a week later, and the Party was stuck with Roosevelt. As Ohioan and National Republican Boss Mark Hanna said: “Now look, that damned cowboy is President of the United States”.

Roosevelt served the remaining three and a half years of McKinley’s term, then earned his own overwhelming re-election in 1904. In 1908 he felt bound by Washington’s precedent of two terms and chose not to run. He threw his support to the Secretary of War, Cincinnati’s William Howard Taft, who defeated Democrat Bryan once again. T.R. soon left on a world tour that included a massive safari of Africa, and didn’t return to the United States for over a year. As Taft’s term progressed, he began to “stray” towards more traditional conservative Republicanism and Roosevelt tried to reorganize the Party to favor more Progressive ideas.

A Progressive Republican

In 1912 he ran against Taft for the Republican nomination.  In spite of Roosevelt’s popularity, Taft had the regular Party support and won the convention vote. T.R. then ran as a third party candidate for the Progressive Party, dubbed the “Bull Moose” Party in Roosevelt’s honor.  It was during that campaign that Teddy Roosevelt was shot.

On October 14, 1912, Roosevelt was scheduled to give a speech in Milwaukee. As he left his hotel for the engagement, a saloonkeeper named John Schrank fired a bullet into T.R. It passed through the fifty pages of his address and a steel reinforced eyeglass case before entering the former President’s chest. The assembled crowd grabbed the shooter. Only Roosevelt’s personal intervention prevented a lynching.

Roosevelt knew he was shot.  His staff wanted to transport him immediately to a hospital.  But Roosevelt coughed and realized that there wasn’t blood.  He assumed correctly that the bullet had not penetrated his lung, so demanded to continue with the speech.  

He stood at the podium as his staff waited for him to collapse.  Teddy delivered a new opening line, displaying the tattered speech and blood soaked shirt:

 “Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot, but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.”

He then proceeded to deliver the full ninety-minute speech, glaring at his over-attentive assistants.  Afterwards he went to the hospital where they used the newly acquired X-Ray machine to find the bullet lodged in his chest muscle.  It remained there for the rest of his life.

Risking Life

Saturday afternoon President Trump emulated Roosevelt, trying to show that COVID cannot kill a Trump. The problem is, that while Roosevelt was risking his own life on the platform in Milwaukee, President Trump continues to risk the lives of his supporters. More than 2,000 were invited, but only a few hundred, some paid to be there, gathered on the White House lawn to listen to a campaign speech delivered from the Truman Balcony. The one thing the President did prove is that he could maintain his coherence in a twenty-minute campaign oration. That improved on his rant and profanity laced two-hour radio interview with Rush Limbaugh the day before.

But he still gathered a crowd in defiance of COVID protocols, just as he did at the “super-spreader” Supreme Court Justice nomination.  And he also risked his own recovery, trying to prove that he is “a winner” over COVID.  Even those who don’t support the President still hope he recovers.  But he’s less than a week from leaving the hospital, and likely is still infectious.

October Surprise

But Donald Trump is desperate to get back on the campaign trail. And he’s also desperate to keep the spotlight on his candidacy, and not on the drip-drip-drip of news from his tax returns emerging from the New York Times. The “October Surprises” he was counting on seem to be waning. Attorney General Bill Barr says he can’t deliver a “Biden Indictment” from the Durham investigation. And the Johnson Senate Committee investigation of Ukraine and Biden was unable to turn Russian disinformation into any actual charges or evidence in an eighty page report.

Secretary of State Pompeo is now promising Hillary Clinton’s 30,000 lost emails before Election Day. That might have been an effective “surprise”: if Donald Trump was still running against Clinton. Since he isn’t – so what? But in all likelihood Pompeo is spoofing Trump along until after November 3^rd. That way he doesn’t have to endure the criticism that Barr is taking from the President.

Teddy Roosevelt “doubled down” on his image by delivering the Milwaukee speech.  It was exactly what the public expected him to do.  And while it was courageous, and reckless, and probably foolish, it made for great spectacle.  Donald Trump hopes to find that same spectacle in his “courageous” recovery from the COVID “plague”.  His visual of choice:  standing on the Truman Balcony overlooking his “admiring masses”. It has “Mussolini” overtones.  But to his base, he looks courageous and perhaps reckless.  The problem, of course, is to everyone else he not only looks foolish; he looks desperate.  And that’s not a “good” image for re-election. 

Roosevelt lost to Democrat Woodrow Wilson in 1912.  Taft came in third. Twenty-three days left until we learn of Trump’s fate.

Here’s the next in the “Outside My Window” series, chronicling life during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Politics

Last May we were at a crucial moment here in the state of Ohio.  We were on the cusp of ending the COVID “shelter in place” orders, and there was a great deal of controversy about what decisions should be made.  The Governor, Mike DeWine, seemed to be moving towards continuing restrictions, but the state legislature was making a lot of noise about restricting his powers and forcing the rules to be lifted.

The end result of the political infighting was that the Governor sacrificed his Director of Public Health, Dr. Amy Acton, to the political wolves.  She started as an icon of science-directed COVID policy, but became a lightening rod for all of the public protests demanding the economy re-open.  DeWine was all-in behind her — until he wasn’t.  She gracefully resigned, and DeWine caved in to the demands for an end to restrictions.  Politics won, science lost.

Argument

In the middle of all that, I ended up in a social media battle over the consequences of ignoring science.  One participant told me that since I was retired, I had no place making any arguments at all.  He told me I was getting my “pension” regardless, so I couldn’t understand the real life impacts the COVID restrictions were having.  

I countered that I too was feeling the economic impact of the restrictions, but also saw the real medical results of COVID sickness and death.  In May, and still today, we couldn’t move forward economically without dealing with the disease.  And besides, I put in my thirty-five and a half years to earn that pension, and I was actually teaching at the time. I had the “right” to my opinions.  The argument got ugly, and ultimately I took the social media equivalent of walking away from the discussion.  I blocked him.

Isolation

But there is one point that he made that was true.  As a retiree, I could insulate a lot of my life away from the social contacts that risk COVID exposure.  I didn’t have to go out that much:  get to the store and to the gas station, and spend any time in public outside.  The substitute teaching I was doing was online. What I mostly “lost” was direct physical contact with my family, travel Jenn and I enjoyed, and all of the Track and Field (Athletics) officiating and advising that I usually did.

So I missed learning one thing that anyone working in this world has experienced.  I haven’t spent a lot of time working with people while wearing a facemask.  

It’s Cross Country season now.  The mega-meets with hundred of teams that dominated the running schedule for the past the thirty years are cancelled, including the McGowan Invitational that I managed at Watkins Memorial High School for decades.  It was one of the three largest meets in Ohio:  but putting 5,000 kids and their coaches, parents and friends all in one place is the definition of a “super-spreader” event today.

So the meets are smaller, maybe eight or ten teams.  And as an official I am working some of those meets.  It’s all outside, spread out over a two or three mile running course, so it’s not too difficult to maintain “social distancing”.  And I am masked from the moment I step out of the Jeep, as are the coaches and most of the spectators.  Even the runners are masked before and after the competition.

Muffled

I have discovered that I feel “insecure” with the mask on. I coached Cross Country and Track for forty years, and I have officiated for a lot of that time, so why am I insecure now? After a lot of thought, I’ve found three reasons why this happens. The first is the obvious one, I feel muffled by the mask. It’s like talking with your hand over your mouth — like you’re not supposed to be loud. And, of course, because you have a mask on you absolutely need to be louder, so it’s finding the appropriate volume level that makes for insecurity. Too quiet, no one understands you. Too loud, you come across as obnoxious. Finding the balance (that was natural without the mask) is a new problem.

The second issue is that I am definitely a “sunglasses” guy.  Bright sunlight is wonderful for everything except my eyes.  But the mask fogs the sunglasses, seemingly no matter what I do.  I’ve tried to wear the mask in different positions and I’ve even bought the “wipes” that prevent fogging.  Neither works, so I have to wear a hat, which really isn’t my thing.

Reading 

Both of those things seem petty, and they are.  But last night it finally dawned on me what the real problem is.  As a teacher, administrator, coach and official I have always “read” the folks I deal with.  I read their “body language”, and more importantly, their facial expressions.  It was always the joke, that I could tell what kind of day a student was having from the moment they entered the classroom door.  But it wasn’t a joke:  I was able to “read” the kids coming in my door.  It was a part of my success in education.

But “the mask” cuts at least half of that away.  I can read people’s eyes, but not their face.  It cuts away a lot of how I approach interaction with people, and I’m sure I’m not the only one in education, or life, who has this issue.  Masks prevent us from “knowing” each other without words.  And as an educator who had the “privilege” of teaching through March, April and May (great time to take a long-term substitute job!) it makes a lot of sense why “online” teaching was so disconcerting.  Even face-to-face “Zoom” meetings aren’t quite the same, especially with students who chose not to turn the video portion on.  If you can’t read the kids, you can’t reach them.

Interaction

I’m not advocating we get rid of masks.  If I were back in the classroom (that still feels like a super-spreader event) I’m sure I would find a way to adapt, a new way of “reading” kids that would allow for better interaction.  But in an era where we are already pulled away not only by COVID, but by the devices in our pockets that soak up so much of our attention and our lives, it’s one more factor that isolates us from each other.

The “Out My Window” Series

Out My Front Window – Part One (4/21/20)

Outside My Window – Part Two (4/23/20)

Outside My Window – Part Three (4/26/20)

Outside My Window – Part Four (5/13/20)

Outside My Window – Part Five (6/3/20)

Outside My Window – Part Six (7/3/20)

Outside My Window – Part Seven (7/31/20)

Outside My Window – Inshallah (8/13/20)

Outside My Window – Part Eight (9/15/20)

Outside My Window – Part Nine (9/25/20)

Janis Joplin – Me and Bobby McGee

Vice Presidential Debate

I listened intently to the Vice Presidential Debates last night.  Unlike the week before, it was a “traditional” American political debate.  The candidates tried to make their points, pointedly ignored the questions they didn’t want to answer, and interacted only occasionally.  Vice President Pence, as the only man on the dais, was likely to be accused of  “mansplaining” no matter what.  But he consistently ignored moderator Susan Page’s cues that his time was up. And he was quietly condescending to his opponent the Senator from California. That proved the point anyway.  

The “fly” may have been the highlight of the night.  The fact that an insect could land on the Vice President’s head, and stay there for minutes, showed how unanimated the debate really was.  But for those parents who were horrified when their children watched the Presidential debates last week (it was only last week), this was one where the kids could at least hear a coherent difference of opinion.

My summary analysis is that the Vice Presidential debate probably didn’t change many minds.  Mike Pence did his “job” defending the President, and managed to get his “hit” lines out about the “Green New Deal” and Senator Harris’s “liberal” voting record.  And Kamala Harris did her job as well, explaining the Biden/Harris plan clearly, and showing the “gravitas” that the running mate of the seventy-seven year old Biden needs to have.  Just as Pence is a Vice President from “central casting”, so Harris definitely showed she could be the first woman to be next in line for the Presidency.

Super-Spreader

Somewhere buried in the Vice President’s syrupy responses was one regarding the COVID “super-spreader” event at the White House, when President Trump announced the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett for the Supreme Court.  In the very “traditional” Rose Garden ceremony, chairs were set close together and most attendees eschewed wearing facemasks.  Thirty-four COVID cases have been traced to the White House, with many of them sitting in that close packed crowd in the Rose Garden.

The Vice President said that the ceremony was “outdoors” as government scientists recommended.  He never really responded to the lack of masks, the shoulder-to-shoulder seating, or the casual handshakes, hugs, and head to head conversations that took place. 

But Pence did emphasize that the Administration believes in “freedom”. “We are about freedom and the freedom of the American people,” he said. His point was that Americans have the “freedom to decide” what they want to do about the pandemic, and the “government” shouldn’t regulate their behavior.

Just a Word

This fits completely with the Trump COVID strategy.  The President has spent the last six months undermining America’s faith in scientific findings.  He has forced the doctors “in charge” of the COVID crisis to change their public opinions. He even made them claim they made errors in judgment, in order to fit his theme.  Donald Trump has set a national example of ignoring precautions, including his latest theatrical display of ripping his mask off.  

He gave Governors the “freedom” to decide how to respond to the COVID crisis. But almost immediately began to criticize those Governors that took action to try to stem the spread.  He politicized their efforts, making COVID regulations into “Democrat” and “Republican” responses.  Even today, mask wearing and your choice for President are closely correlated.

And now Mike Pence argues that they are doing all of that for “freedom”.  Americans should be “free” to decide how they individually respond to COVID.  And when the White House held an event that violated all of the “rules”, it was the participants “free” choice to be there.  

Freedom Ends at My Face

The problem is that COVID is not a “free speech” issue.  It isn’t a “choice”.  The virus will do what the virus does:  spread, infect, sicken and in some cases kill.  The President is exercising his “freedom” to ignore quarantine rules, wandering the White House without a mask.  Workers there aren’t “free” to avoid the viral spread and do their jobs. The President is essentially forcing the virus on them.  Someone is going to die, and it’s dying for the “freedom” of Donald Trump.

And that summarizes what the Trump Administration wants America to do.  They want us to “be free” to go to restaurants, crowd into bars, buy the cheap cruise ship tickets. We should “be free”to essentially act as if the COVID pandemic isn’t here.  Like the non-existent Trump Health Care Plan, the President wants us to depend on a still non-existent “cure” and a non-existent vaccine. If we are “free” from the basic rules of pandemic, over a century old, then that will make the short-term economy better. And since short-term gains are the only thing left to get Trump re-elected, he demands that we be “free”.  

“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose”.  And that’s what the President and Vice President face today:  nothing left to lose in leading America to continuing pandemic disaster.  By using “freedom” as their guidon, their banner, they are leading us to more infection and death.  At least Americans are free to make that choice in November.