Category: Uncategorized

Madame Speaker

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

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

The Closers

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

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

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

The Future

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

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

2020

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

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

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

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

New Conventioning

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

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

Democratic Diversity

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

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

Women

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

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

California Exchange

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

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

Competency

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

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

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

More Perfect

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

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

REDMAP

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

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

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

VOTER ID

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

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

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

Fake News

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

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

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

Purge

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

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

Consolidation

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

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

Last, Best Chance

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

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

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

Vote.

Security

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

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

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

Post Office

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

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

Modern World

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

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

De-Construction

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

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

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

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

Stealing an Election

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

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

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

In Plain View

The Postman’s Oath is: 

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

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

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

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

In the Market

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

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

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

By the Numbers

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

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

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

The Wall Street “Force”

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

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

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

Enter the Fed

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

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

Strategic Flaws

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

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

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

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

Twilight Zone

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

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

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

Inshallah

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

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

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

History Rhymes

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

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

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

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

Our Own Work 

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

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

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

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

The Announcement

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

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

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

Making A Statement

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

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

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

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

Politics

So what are the political implications?

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

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

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

The Campaign

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

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

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

“Good Old Days”

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

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

Wille Horton

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

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

Gay Marriage

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

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

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

Dog Whistle

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

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

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

Child Trafficking

So there is another angle of attack:  disappearing children.

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

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

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

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

Voters Not Voting

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

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

Golfing Tradition

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

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

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

Kings and Courts

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

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

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

Prosperity Theology

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

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

Prerogatives of Wealth

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

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

Now on TV

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

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

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

News was News

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

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

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

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

Astride the Middle

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

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

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

Room at the Center

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

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

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

Choose

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

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

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

Kitchen Techniques

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

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

Matter of Truth

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

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

Getting an Edge

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

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

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

Whose Side is God On?

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

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

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

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

Whispers

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

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

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

Dog Days

It’s August.  In Pataskala, Ohio it’s the time for heat, humidity, thunderstorms and dust:  the dog days of summer.  Speaking of dogs, ours want to stay in the air conditioning, except for KeeLie, the new addition.  She has to go out and patrol the backyard, bark at the unseen neighbor on the other side of the fence, and peer through the gate at the dog next door.  

For thirty-six years August was a time of excitement for me.  After a summer of relaxation and coaching, August meant it was time to go back to work.  August meant going back to school:  planning, and preparing, and writing on the now obsolete chalkboard, “this is as good as it gets”.  On the first day, kids thought that meant “Dahlman’s” government class, but what it really meant was that this was “as good” as my handwriting would get.  It would deteriorate as the school year went on.

Those first days of school were always exciting.  It’s not many careers that let you have a clean slate every year, a chance to fix the mistakes of the previous year, and have the challenge of being better than you were before.  

Southwest Licking

I had the privilege of teaching in the same school system throughout my entire career.  It was a district on the far edge of Columbus, Ohio’s growth.  What started out in 1978 as a rural school, with “tractor day” in the parking lot and blue corduroy Future Farmers of America jackets in the hallway, changed over the years.  Now it’s a suburban district, where the few farmers left are hassled for driving slow combines on the roads, or fertilizing their fields.  

As a growing district in Ohio, the Southwest Licking Local School District was often strapped for money.  There were several years when we started school in August under a financial cloud.  Tax levies failed, cuts were threatened, and young teachers were unsure whether they would have a job come April.  The school district used the only leverage the really had by threatening to cut sports and bussing:  an empty stadium on football Friday night hung in the air.

Hope Springs

Kids are eternally optimistic.  And for thirty-six years they were absolutely right.  Even when sports were actually cut, back in 1980, the coaches ended up volunteering to do the jobs they should have been paid for.  The crisp, new dollar bill we “earned” that year is still framed on a bookshelf.  And in 2003 when the Administration decided to keep spring sports but only allow one coach for each, sending me out to supervise sixty boys in track and field alone, my staff jumped in and we split the one paycheck four ways.  

The kids haven’t changed.  Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, football players have run sprints in the heat, and the Cross Country runners have covered hundreds of miles on the roads.  They believe that somehow, the virus will not stop them from their chance to compete.  And their coaches believe:  my friends have spent the summer preparing the woods for the thousands of runners, even though they cannot visualize how it would be possible for three hundred to line up for the gun and maintain social distance. 

It’s August.  Here in Ohio many of the “big” school districts have already made the call to avoid contagion.  They are going to start school “online” rather than in person.  But even though they are keeping kids out of the hallways, they still are out on the fields, getting ready for a season they may not have. 

Going to School

Teachers at Southwest Licking report to school on Wednesday.  They will prepare their classrooms, already overcrowded from school growth, to keep “social distance” between students. The national “norm” of six feet has already been shrunk to three.  There isn’t enough Plexiglas in the world, and there’s a reason that a new school is rising in the fields nearby.  The Governor has ordered all students, kindergarten through twelve wear masks.  After decades with teenagers, I’m skeptical.  The halls will still be packed, and the adolescent “declaration of independence” will be made with full oral nudity!

Who is at risk?  The disease that proves over and over that it will spread, regardless of politics or religion, is still growing here in Ohio.  The chart for Licking County, our county, looks like the final approaches to Mt. Everest (Ohio).  We know that kids aren’t immune, despite the President’s assertions, but we also know they are at lower risk of serious illness.  Their parents and grandparents are not so lucky.  And neither is the school staff.

Into the Soup

There are few job positions that require adults to drop themselves into such a viral soup.  Medical folks certainly are at greatest risk.  It’s why we made a national emergency over getting them protective gear.  And prison guards are in “the soup”.  They have suffered along with the inmates in the enclosed cells and tight spaces of confinement.  In Ohio, 940 prison staff have been diagnosed with COVID, and more than 5000 prisoners (Marshall Project).

So teachers are torn.  They want to teach.  Most got into education because they love the profession.  Money helps, but they want to do their job.  And teachers know full well, that in person education is qualitatively so much better than online education.  But teachers also know that there often isn’t even enough money for the basics, dry erase makers and copies on the Xerox machine.  PPE might be on the list today, but will soon be too much to afford.   And teachers and kids both are doomed to fail to socially distance.  Ultimately, that kid that needs a hug will overwhelm the “rules” of COVID.

It is an oddity of our COVID world:  the kid on the football field or in the woods running is at less risk of viral infection there, than in the classroom.  And so are their coaches.  

The energy this August isn’t about excitement, it’s trepidation.  I don’t envy my friends this year, those coaching and teaching, and those making the decision about whether they go to school in person or in front of a computer.  It’s not just about the big race, or the football game, or the hallways.  

It’s a life and death call.

“We the People, of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union…” – Preamble, US Constitution

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” – Martin Luther King

More Perfect

It is an intentional grammatical error in the Constitution, where Madison sets the goal for the new Republic the Founding Fathers were creating:  forming a more perfect Union.  Madison didn’t make a mistake, nor was it a criticism of what they wrought in creating the government.  It was common sense, that while they were creating something brand new in the world, that from the birth they needed to strive to perfect it even more.  Newborns are almost always perfect, yet parents continue to make them “more perfect” throughout childhood.  So should the citizens of these United States.

And one of the most important “perfections” was in the right to vote.  As the Fathers sweltered authoring the Constitution in Philadelphia in 1786, in most of the states only twenty-one or older, white, male, Christian, freeholders (land owners) were given the franchise, the right to vote.  That only consisted of twenty percent of the population.  Voting was exclusive at the beginning of our representative democracy.

Freeholders

The first restriction to fall was the “freeholder” rule, but it took some time.  By 1828, and the election of Democratic Populist Andrew Jackson, the vast majority of states allowed twenty-one year old white men the franchise.  But it took until 1856 for the last state to abolish the property clause, North Carolina.  Other groups, women and free black citizens, were pressing for the right to vote, but generally were denied the opportunity.

The next great leap in broadening the vote was the Fifteenth Amendment, passed after the Civil War.  It supposedly granted suffrage (the right to vote) to black men, including those freed from bondage by the war.  But soon after, the “compromise” that resolved the election dispute of 1876 ended the Reconstruction era, and Jim Crow Laws were put into effect, taking away those rights.  Poll taxes, grandfather clauses (you could only vote if your grandfather could) and bogus tests (how many jelly beans in the jar) all served to make sure that black men couldn’t vote.  And for those who tried to anyway, there was always the Ku Klux Klan’s terror and murder to emphasize the point.

It would take until 1965, almost a century later, for the Voting Rights Act to be enacted by Congress, enabling the words of the Fifteenth to become action.  One of the prime motivators of that Act, Congressman John Lewis, died last week.  It isn’t ancient history. 

It was in 1887 that Native Americans who chose to disassociate themselves from their tribes could become United States citizens.  Prior to that they were treated as foreign nationals, though the US had little regard for their national rights.  But after 1887 Native Americans could technically vote. Then states established some of the same restrictions that the Jim Crow Laws placed on Black men.

Suffrage

In 1920 the Congress and States agreed to the Nineteenth Amendment, granting suffrage to women.  While this included both Black and Native American women, many states still applied the unfair restrictions.  But 1920 did effectively double the number of eligible voters in the nation.

In 1924 all Native Americans, regardless of tribal status, were granted citizenship.  And in 1943, in the middle of World War II and the Nisei Internment camps, Chinese immigrants who attained citizenship were granted the right to vote as well.

1961 saw the passage of the Twenty-Third Amendment, granting the District of Columbia electoral votes in Presidential elections.  Prior to that, Washington DC residents had no say in the choice of President.  However, the District was only granted three votes, the minimum for any state, and symbolic representation in the Congress only.  There still are no Congressmen or Senators from Washington, DC.

The Twenty-Fourth Amendment banned the poll tax, taking away the strongest tool in the Jim Crow toolbox.   The 1965 Civil Rights Act put teeth in laws guaranteeing minority voting rights, and the Supreme Court ruled in Harper v Virginia Board of Electors that paying taxes could not be a qualification for voting. 

And finally, in 1971, the voting age was reduced from twenty-one to eighteen.  This was in response to the Vietnam War protests with the slogan, “old enough to fight, old enough to vote” resonating with the American people.

Reversion

In this century, the United States has taken a different direction.  While the laws remain on the books, the trend has been to make voting more difficult.  Dozens have states have instituted voter identification laws, aimed at solving a voter fraud problem that doesn’t exist.  In recent times, the number of actual voting frauds has been miniscule.  Here in Ohio there have been fifty-one convictions for voting violations out of the many, many millions of votes cast in the last two decades.  And there have been zero convictions for fraud at the polls (Heritage). But because one political side claims, “fraud is widespread”, many states require state identification cards to vote.

For suburban white America, Voter ID Laws don’t seem like an onerous requirement.  Doesn’t everyone have a Driver’s License? And if they don’t drive, they can surely get a State ID card.  But both the license and the ID card require fee payments, ranging from $8.50 (Ohio) to $29 (California).  And it also requires time, time to go the Division of Motor Vehicles, wait in line, and apply for the card.  And for those who live in the city and don’t own a car, it requires finding public transportation to the DMV or getting someone else to drive.

Lining Up

But if you really don’t want to let people vote make them wait in line for hours to cast their ballot.  And the easiest way to do that is restrict the number of polling places, especially in the urban areas. Ask the voters of Atlanta.  That way folks have to miss work, find childcare, and stand in the weather to vote.  Somehow, by the way, that doesn’t seem to happen in the suburbs.  Or in Kansas or Kentucky or Wisconsin, simply close all of the urban polling locations, and put one big one in a location accessible only to those with private transportation.  

Mail-In Voting

So the mythical voter “fraud” problem is used to keep folks who live in urban areas and are less likely to drive from being able to vote.  It is no mistake that those folks generally vote for one political party over the other.

That same mythical problem is now being used as a cudgel to try to prevent mail-in balloting.  That’s been used in the United States since the Civil War.  We call it absentee voting, here in Ohio. There have been a total of seven convictions in Ohio for absentee ballot fraud in the past twenty years (Heritage). It’s just not a thing.

Some will argue a “difference” between mail-in balloting and absentee voting.  President Trump just yesterday argued that mail-in balloting in Florida is safe, but in other states is not.  But in the state of Oregon, the entire election process is done by mail.  Voters register with the state, and as part of that process give a signature.  A few weeks before the election, those voters are mailed the ballot.  Those ballots are then filled out, signed and returned, either by mail, or dropped off an official drop box (Oregon).

Oregon has had a total of fifteen voting offenses in the past twenty years (Heritage).

Here in Ohio we don’t have “mail-in” balloting.  We have absentee balloting, requiring the registered voter to send a request for a ballot, then get the ballot, then return the ballot.  But in Ohio, even the act of sending every registered voter an application to return to get an absentee ballot is seen as “political”.  It’s as if somehow folks should “try harder” to get the ballot, but what it really smacks of is voter suppression.

Arc

The arc of American History moved for almost two hundred years towards greater inclusion and more voter participation.  But in the last twenty years the arc has flattened, and worse, now that COVID has given us all an education in graphing, bent in the wrong direction.  We are living in an era when some of the most powerful are interested in preventing voting, at least for those who have differing views.  

I can’t think of anything that is more Un-American.

But Martin Luther King was right.  The arc of the moral universe does bend towards justice.  Those who are trying to restrict the vote will find that citizens will overcome the barriers, and change the rules so that every eligible citizen can take part in our government.  It’s the American thing to do. 

No one else was in the room where it happened
The room where it happened, the room where it happened
No one really knows how the game is played
The art of the trade, how the sausage gets made
We just assume that it happens, but no one else is in the room where it happens 

• The Room Where It Happens – Hamilton the Musical (of course)

At the Table

So Steve Mnuchin, Chuck Schumer, Mark Meadows and Nancy Pelosi walk into a bar.  If that sounds like a bad joke, you’re right, but that’s the “team” negotiating the most recent COVID recovery bill.  Of course, the joke’s on them:  we can’t recover from the COVID pandemic until we actually get control of it, something that doesn’t look likely to happen until a new administration takes the reins in January.  But anyway, those four are trying.

If it sounds like there’s a missing cog in the not so well oiled machine of Congressional compromise, you’re right.  Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell isn’t “in the room where it’s happening”.  And don’t assume that the Secretary of the Treasury and the White House Chief of Staff are speaking for him.  They are negotiating for the President.  McConnell has been neutered, cut off from a place at the table by his own divided Republican Senate membership.  Twenty of the GOP caucus have backed away from the Leader and the President, and demand that, “Too much money has been spent, and we need to stop”.

A Weakened President

What they are really saying is:  Trump’s in re-election trouble, and when he’s gone we will need to go back to our traditional conservative constituency and donors, and tell them something good.  So we are going to say that we stood against excessive spending and prevented the unemployed from getting more money for not working.  They need to get out and support the economy, so we tried to force them out.  

Of course unemployment is still somewhere north of eleven percent.  Over sixteen million Americans are collecting unemployment benefits.  And it’s not like there are a lot of jobs out there. The jobs folks used to have in restaurants, tourist industry, and lots of other industries aren’t available.  But for those twenty Senators, standing against “excessive” spending is more important than helping Americans through the COVID crisis.  And they no longer see helping President Trump as helping themselves.  

Can’t Lead

So Leader McConnell can’t lead the Senate Republicans in negotiations, when more than a third of his caucus is against everything on the table.  In fact, if the President, Schumer and Pelosi agree, McConnell may have to bring a bill to the floor for debate where the Democrats get the bill passed with minimal Republican help.  It will take all forty-seven Democrats and at least thirteen Republicans to get to the magic sixty-vote margin. 

And, if McConnell was completely candid, I think he would be more in line with the twenty holdouts then the President or the rest of the negotiators.  But he too is faced with a political crisis:  her name is Amy McGrath, the Democratic candidate for the Senate against McConnell back in Kentucky.  He currently holds a comfortable polling lead, 53% to 36% for McGrath, but for the first time in years, his campaign is being matched dollar for dollar.  And McConnell has absolutely hitched his wagon to Donald Trump.  His personal “favorability” rating is less than thirty percent.  Should the Trump Campaign continue to “go south” McConnell’s own fate will get shakier as well.

So McConnell cannot break with the President.  In fact, he will have to bring the Senate in line with the President’s view.  Traditionally Republican leaders won’t bring bills to the floor of the Senate without having a Republican majority to pass them.  It’s not the same as the discredited “Hastert Rule” in the House of Representatives, but it is a way to maintain control of the legislative process.  But with a rump caucus of twenty sitting in opposition, it will require the full cooperation of Minority Leader Schumer and the Democrats to get the President’s bidding done.

On the Table

So what’s on the table for negotiation?  For the unemployed, it’s additional benefits.  Most states pay fifty percent of previous earned wages as unemployment, since the first COVID bill, the Federal government has added $600/week to that amount.  But that ended last Friday.  Also, the government suspended mortgage foreclosures and rent evictions since April.  That too has ended, and millions of Americans are faced with a future “on the streets” as the thirty-day eviction processes begin.  

And there’s the “rebate” of tax money, similar to the $1200 checks sent out to Americans in May.  This time dependents over sixteen are included.  And the PPP, forgivable loans to businesses, would be extended.  There’s also a liability protection clause added to protect businesses from customers or employees that get COVID while working, shopping, or eating there.

Then there are the “extraneous” items that seem like they don’t really belong.  There’s a couple billion dollars for a new FBI building. And there’s additional funding for the F-35 multi-role fighter project.  

The House of Representatives have already put their cards on the table as well, with the Heroes Act.  While there is some agreement on many of the above items, the Democrats have also included mail-in balloting throughout the country, a non-starter for many in the Senate.

Making Sausage

It’s election time, and the United States is in the middle of a pandemic.  Almost five million Americans are diagnosed with COVID, and close to 160,000 have died.  Unemployment is high, schools are questioning whether they can open, and “normal” life is completely disrupted.  Trying to help the voters would seem to be a no-brainer for all members of the House, the Senate, and the President himself.

In a “normal” political world, the “sausage” would get made.  Both sides would get some of what they want, and lose some of the things the wished they had.  There would be a law, helping most people, and making both Republicans and Democrats look like they cared.  Most are running for re-election, you’d think that would be motivation enough.

Three Republican Senators are not running for re-election, Mike Enzi of Wyoming, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, and Pat Roberts of Kansas.  Eleven more Republicans are not up for re-election is 2020.  For the retiring Senators, they are looking forward to earning money by influencing others.  Alexander discussed this when he explained his impeachment vote.  He wanted to be able to “hang out” with his friends.  That lobbying requires that they be in “good stead” with the clients, most of whom are traditional conservatives.  And for the eleven looking at running again in 2022 or 2024, they are protecting their standing in the post-Trump era.

On Principle

So politically it might be more “astute” for them to stand on “principle” and try to block COVID aid.  Their future careers are more important than the current plight of the nation.  So there may not be a COVID aid bill passed in the next few weeks.  And if it doesn’t happen by September, it may well get lost in the political turmoil of the election campaigns.

Too bad for the unemployed, who won’t be able to stay in their apartments or their homes. And really too bad for America, bereft of real leadership in its moment of crisis.

Cartoons

When I was a kid, one of childhood’s traditions was cartoons on Saturday morning. At the time I didn’t realize it was actually a “parent trick”:  I would watch early morning cartoons, and Mom and Dad would get an extra hour or two of recovery time from Friday night.  They were smart, and everyone was happy.

It was the 60’s.  Cartoons were hand drawn, and included traditional characters like Bugs Bunny and Road Runner.  There also were the “shows”, like the Flintstones, that told the story of a white suburban family in stone-age times.  Kids could all relate to Fred Flintstones’ car; we used our feet for brakes on vehicles too.  

It was only as I got older, really right at the end of my Saturday Morning cartoon viewing; that the first automated cartoon came out, Speed Racer.  I guess I remember it best for the opening sequence of every show, as it seemed like dozens were killed in car wrecks as the singers joyfully called out, “Go Speed Racer Go”!!

If the Flintstones represented a mythical past, The Jetsons represented exactly one hundred years in the future in 2062.  They too were a white urban family, living in a huge apartment floating far above the ground in Orbit City.  Robots did “the dirty work”, though they could be quirky, like Rosie the Jetsons’ housekeeper.  To kids of the 1960’s, the Jetsons set “the future”.  We expect flying cars, soaring buildings, robot assistance and vacations on the moon.  And don’t forget Astro the dog could talk, though I’m not sure I want my three pups to be able to discuss dinner every night!

Halfway There

We are kind of on the way to a Jetsons future.  No we don’t have the flying cars yet, but Amazon already is delivering packages by drone.  And we don’t have Rosie the Maid robots, but I was surprised to see an IRobot lawn mower moving along the other day.  Houses can be controlled from our phones (not mine, we still have to turn lights on and off manually) and we have “wrist radios” just like another cartoon, Dick Tracy.  So forty years from the Jetsons we are headed that way.

The Jetsons never got too much into detail as to how their world was powered, but their flying cars ran on power capsules, not liquid fuel, so we can guess that they have passed the petroleum era.  And why shouldn’t we?

Fossil Fuel

Look, whatever political stand you take, fossil fuels are not the fuels of the future.  Sure we’ve found that fracking has extended the life of petroleum.  And we have turned our technology into wresting the last expensive bits of gas and oil from the earth.  But it’s a zero sum game; there is a finite end to fossil fuels.  Meanwhile, we risk ground water from fracking, the oceans from deep well pumping, and pristine wilderness from oil exploitation.  

Transportation will probably be the last industry to give up petroleum.  Planes and trucks are going to need it, and it’s hard to imagine a recreational vehicle pulling a camper that could run on batteries.  But there’s a whole lot we can do to move away from fossil fuels, and it’s inevitable that we will have to do it.  And it has that most important benefit of protecting our future.  The Jetsons might have been telling us more than we realized.  Their soaring apartments are far above the ground, maybe the environmental changes brought by fossil fuels literally forced them to live in the clouds.  

Solutions

We know that there is a clock ticking, a clock that will run out by 2050.  The changes to our environment that we are making from fossil fuel pollution will be unalterable if we don’t stop.  And we can, and we can do it while creating an entire new opportunity for mass employment when we do it.

Let’s just think about some “easy” things we can do, today, to change the future.  We have huge swaths of land filled with suburban housing.  If each of those houses were equipped with solar energy shingles, linked to battery storage units in the house, we could move our households to sixty to eighty percent renewable energy.  Yes, there’s a significant “up front” cost, but over decades it pays for itself.  In the meantime, we don’t use coal or gas created electricity from the grid.

And that electricity grid needs to move to renewable sources as well.  Solar is one, wind farms are another.  We should be making huge investments in those industries, instead of taking $60 million bribes here in Ohio to prop up old nuclear plants or build new fossil fuel generators.  In the US, electric power generation represents 32% of greenhouse gas pollution (EPA).

Generate power at home, make the grid non-polluting, and then plug in your electric commuter car.  28% of pollution comes from transportation activities; we can reduce a lot of that by moving to electric cars.  It might be better to create more mass transportation, but if Americans are addicted to their individual vehicles, as both the Flintstones and the Jetsons showed, then let’s have traffic jams with non-polluting cars.

Flying Cars

It’s 2020 and the clock is ticking on our environment.  Storms are stronger and more frequent, areas like Central America are facing droughts that are driving folks to migrate north, tides are getting higher, and the whole world is warming.  We can still “dodge the bullet”, and we can do so and employ a whole lot of folks.  It’s really not even a question of technology:  it’s a question of will.

We know what that cleaner environment will look like.  A strange “benefit” of the pandemic was that for a few weeks we stayed at home, and pollution literally went away.  We saw what could be done.

So while we do all of our fighting about stopping a second term of Donald Trump, add this to the list of why a Joe Biden Presidency would be better for our world. He is committed to a renewable energy America by 2040.

And that still gives us twenty-two years to get our flying cars!!

Purists

There are some of us who are “purists”.  We were the ones who had faith in Americans to see through the Trump campaign back in 2016.  We thought we saw Mr. Trump as he was, a charlatan, a “one trick pony” actor who was playing “The Apprentice” on a national scale. 

We read the national polls going into November of 2016.  And we fell for the “scientificity” of polling in October.  Sure, Trump had clawed back much of the advantage Clinton held throughout the summer and fall, but she still held a lead.  That critical “margin of error” in tiny type at the bottom of each graph, wasn’t really important, was it?  And the fact that Trump had climbed within that margin, aided by FBI Director Jim Comeys’ leaked letter to Congress, should have sounded alarms.  It didn’t.

Nightmares

And there is that other factor, the one that still haunts us today.  That somehow polling didn’t reach the “closet” Trump voter, the one that won’t admit to voting for the man, but in the secrecy of the voting booth still commits the deed.  Afterward, many of us made a big deal of the “closet vote”. But reality was there weren’t that many.  Vote counts were all within the polling margin of error.  Looking back, I think it was more a matter of hubris. We thought,  “How dare someone we knew, maybe even our friends, vote for ‘that man’?  Of course they wouldn’t admit it, even to pollsters.  They hid their ‘evil’ intentions.” 

And the “purists” share a searing memory.  That moment, somewhere in the middle of the night, when we realized that Barack Obama was going to be succeeded by Donald Trump.  That somehow, someway, the America that had progressed to the point of electing the first Black President, instead of choosing the first woman, was now electing — him.  All of the issues we hoped could be resolved by Hillary Clinton were now at risk.  It wasn’t a nightmare, because we weren’t asleep.   We cried for America.

Even Worse

We had no idea how bad it would really be.  Many tried to find a way to hang on to progressivism.  It was called “the Resistance”, and the purists signed on from inauguration day on.  Millions marched in the streets, chanting “not my President”.  But, of course, he was.

There were small victories.  John McCain, of all people, saved the Affordable Care Act.  The Supreme Court stopped the “Muslim Ban”.  The FBI investigated Russia’s involvement, and when Comey was fired, we had great hopes for the Mueller Investigation.  And, Donald Trump, President, was the third in history to be impeached.

But Trump had great victories as well.  The Border Wall, whether it really is being built or not, was a winning issue for the President.  And environmental rules have been slashed.  America stopped its leadership on climate change and renewable energy.  And perhaps saddest of all, children are still being separated at the border, in spite of Federal Court intervention.

The one unifying theme of the Trump Administration has been a cavalier ignorance of the Constitutional norms of America’s Democracy.  They’ve broken all the “rules” to improve life for the 1%.  And they have committed the most egregious sin of all:  incompetence.  The “team” that came in, the Trump Organization writ large, failed to protect America from the ravages of pandemic.  They didn’t just fumble the ball they threw the entire game.  In industrialized nations, our response rates as one of the worst.  It costs thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives.

A Grand Alliance

There is an old phrase: “beggars can’t be choosers”.  We are an America in crisis.  Resistors cannot be Puritan about who can join our cause.  We must accept the aid of other Americans, wherever they are coming from, and whenever they “saw the light”.  Maybe it’s the “Never-Trump” Republicans, like those in the Lincoln Project.  Sure, they remain traditional Republican conservatives, and in normal times they would be battling progressive ideas. 

But we are not living in normal times.  They bring their skills to the table, and we should embrace their energy.  We need them to reach out to their kindred spirits, now “closeted” Republicans who cannot stand to vote for Trump again.  The Lincoln Project Republicans can legitimize their vote.  While they cannot embrace “the Resistance”, or heaven forbid, Black Lives Matter, they can see McCain’s campaign manager, and a Republican candidate for White House Counsel, George Conway, as leaders they can follow.  

And, my Resistance friends remember this.  The President has already hinted that he won’t accept the election outcome.  He doesn’t have to, but it would absolutely help if there were an overwhelming mandate to remove him from office.  We need every vote, not just to win, but also to win decisively and end the Trump reign.  

“The Enemy of My Enemy is my Friend”.  If you are voting against Donald Trump, you are welcome to the cause.  Whether you were a “Resistor” from the beginning, or a realist who finally recognizes the incompetence of the pandemic response, welcome.  We can argue about our philosophical differences later.  Right now we are in an existential crisis, perhaps at the crossroads of our Democracy. 

Late or early, welcome to the Resistance.

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

Summer in the City 

Here’s the Link to the Lovin’ Spoonful Song

The summer of 2020 has been hot.  We’ve had twenty-two days over ninety degrees in the past two months, and we’ve had plenty of rain to go with it.  That’s the daily double; it’s hot as Hell, and humid too.  And the grass is growing so fast it’s got to be cut twice a week.  There’s no way to avoid this long, hot summer.  Can’t go to the movies, my parents’ cure for the heat.  The theaters are closed. Even driving the Jeep with the top off can be too much.  If you have to stop, it’s like being on a pan in the oven.

I think the heat is affecting peoples’ outlook on the world.  Things are already tense:  the COVID-19 crisis continues, with growing numbers of infections and hospitalizations.  But when your hot and sticky, it seems easy to buy into all of the fancy statistical “figuring”.  Given enough numbers, folks can find miniscule percentages of people who might “really” be at risk of COVID-19.  And if you believe that the virus isn’t a threat to you, then all of the “suggested” regulations, masks, social distancing and the like, chafe like a scratchy, grass covered t-shirt in the afternoon sun.

Colors

Of course, cooler heads get it.  The virus hasn’t gone away.  Ohio has instituted a “color code” system by county, warning the state when things are getting bad.  Code Yellow – Level 1 – means that there is exposure, but things aren’t bad.  Level II – Code Orange – the exposure is increasing.  Level III – Red – there’s a very high level of exposure.  And then there’s Level IV – Code Purple – severe exposure and time for folks to shelter in place.  No county in Ohio is at the Purple level yet, but there are a lot of them in Code Red. 

Of course the more people in a county, the more likely there’s viral transmission.  So it should be no surprise that the major cities:  Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Dayton, Toledo, are all in Code Red.  So are some of the smaller ones:  Portsmouth, Marion, and Lima.  And since Columbus has always been a “spread out” town, it really shouldn’t be a surprise either that some of the counties surrounding the core Franklin County are Code Red too:  Fairfield County and here in Licking County.

But Orange, Red and Purple aren’t the only colors that influence those counties.  It’s should be no surprise that most of the Code Red counties are also “Blue”:  Democratic counties.  And that the Code Yellow and Orange Counties are almost all “Red”:  Republican.  So built into the COVID-19 infection is political division.  If you live in Muskingum County, where the big city is Zanesville, it’s easy to see the epidemic as someone else’s problem.  There’s not much impact there, and “all the fuss” seems to be so overblown.

Dis-Information

Of course it doesn’t help that some politicians and social media have waged a campaign of dis-information, designed to raise doubts about the “official” scientific sources.  This week alone, far-right media published a series of “experts in white coats” touting discredited drugs that could “treat” COVID-19.  It went “viral” as folks are desperate for quick and easy answers to a threatening disease.  But “viral videos” won’t make the virus go away either – so everyone just gets even more hot and sweaty and less trusting of the voices of reason coming out of the state capital in Columbus.

Desperate also is the word for folks thinking about public schools.  They are desperate for the schools to open, desperate for their kids to have a “normal” life, desperate for childcare so they can go back to work.  But Code Red County schools are planning on “online” learning.  So kids will be at home, and parents are stuck with figuring out how to supervise their kids and their kids’ education, at least for the foreseeable future.

Hotheads

Here in Licking County, we are the source of the “itch”.  The western part of the county, adjacent to the urban Columbus area, is heavily populated and Code Red.  The eastern part of the County, more rural, is less impacted.  But since it’s a County system, with the numbers in the west, Licking County as a whole is “Code Red”.  So the county schools are faced with a dilemma.  The ones on the eastern side are planning on going to “regular” five-day a week in-person school.  The ones on the west side are pressured to open “regular” school, but are likely to end up “online”.  And no one is going to be happy.

And all of this will come to a head in the next two weeks.  Regardless of all of the planning, spacing desks and partitioning buses, schools are going to have to make a final decision.  Go or not go:  knowing that the community is going to question every call.  If you don’t trust Washington, or Columbus, or even Newark (the county seat), why would you trust any leadership at all?  If kids can play Little League Baseball and practice for high school football, why can’t they just go to school?  

So August is likely to be even hotter.  If the temperature outside doesn’t break ninety, the hot heads in town will provide all the heat we need.

1918

The United States was a very different place in 1918, the year my parents were born.  The nation was in the middle of a World War, with US forces joining the incredible death in the human meat grinder of trench warfare in Europe.  Four million Americans were mobilized and sent to the battlefields in just over a year.  One of the major training bases was at Camp Sherman, built on the sacred land of the Hopewell, the ancient moundbuilders, just north of Chillicothe, Ohio (NPS). 

110,000 Americans would die in World War I. Like deaths in the American Civil War only fifty-five years before, disease was as deadly as bullets. 45,000 World War I recruits died of the “Spanish” flu, the influenza epidemic of 1918.  30,000 of those never reached France, but died waiting in camps or on the way in ships. 

1,717 of those died at Camp Sherman, so many that the Majestic Theater in downtown Chillicothe became a temporary morgue.  The theater was shuttered anyway, quarantined by the virus that attacked civilians as well as soldiers.  Bodies, “stacked like cordwood,” were embalmed there. The body fluids ran into the alley next door:  it became known as “Bloody Alley”.  Then the bodies were transported by wagon back to Camp Sherman, to be shipped home by train (NPS).

Flu, War and Booze

Out of a population of 103 million, 675,000 Americans died in the 1918 Flu Epidemic (for those fixated on death rates, that’s .6% of the population).  The epidemic struck when Americans were already mobilized and sacrificing for the war effort.  Nineteen states already banned recreational alcohol use, in order to save the liquid for the war effort or use the grains for food production.  And many patriotic Americans “gave up” alcohol for the war.  It made a statement: many of the best-known beer manufacturers were of “enemy” German descent (Anheuser-Busch, Coors, Miller, Yuengling).

During the war saloons, bars, and nightclubs were closed.  In the epidemic, those same establishments served as what we would call today “hot spots”, places where disease was easily passed from one person to another.  Alcohol “greased” the rails of transmission.  Masks came off and social distancing became physical contact.  Think of the “you’ve lost that loving feeling” scene in Top Gun, or my Alabama-born boss making everyone stand and sing Dixie at the end of the night.  It’s part of our American tradition, and a perfect incubator for viral spread.

A Nexus in History

All of this fit in with a growing social movement in America to give up alcohol.  The Anti-Saloon League, the leading group pressing for national prohibition, was headquartered in Westerville, Ohio, a suburb of Columbus.  It became an historic nexus:  the anti-alcohol forces, the sacrifices for the War, and the epidemic all lead to the adoption of the 18^th Amendment, prohibiting recreational alcohol in the United States.

Today we aren’t at war with other nations.  Instead, we are at war with each other, agitated by half-truths and outright lies.  We aren’t tearing up ancient burial grounds to mobilize and train soldiers; instead we are tearing down statues erected to glorify the stain of historic racism.  In our current era of polarization, we are struggling to deal with a global pandemic.  Folks are physically protesting the restricting of our normal lives to control the virus.  We desperately want to crowd together at the ballpark, or the rally, or at the bar.  That, even though “That loving feeling” that we are looking for will further the spread of COVID-19.

And we are faced with a growing social movement recognizing the historic inequities of American racism. Americans are protesting for change, despite the dangers of viral infection and death.

In 1918 they were just beginning to understand how to treat the disease ravaging the nation.  But they did have a good knowledge of how to prevent the spread of the virus:  masks, social distancing, preventing large gatherings, closing the “hot spots”, the theaters, restaurants and saloons.  It was all part of the war effort.  But there were “anti-maskers” then too, especially after the War ended.  The duty to protect the troops was more effective in controlling disease than their duty to protect each other.

Nexus Today  

Today we are wrestling with ways to control COVID-19’s growth, waiting for a time when vaccination might return us to some form of normalcy.  We are arguing about what to do with schools, public events, restaurants and bars.  We are at a different kind of nexus:  a meeting of politics, unbridled information overload both real and false, social upheaval and epidemic.  Out of the 1918 nexus came a national desire to change behavior by Prohibition.  While that experiment ultimately failed, it was a noble effort to make life better.

Who knows what will come of our current nexus.  Just one favor:  don’t close all of the saloons.  Some of us need a drink.

Bush v Gore

It was “only” twenty years ago.  Vice President Al Gore was the Democrat running to succeed Bill Clinton, against the Republican Governor of Texas, George W. Bush. Personally, as a Democrat disappointed in Clinton, Gore was only a small step up.  He was a little less “moderate” than Clinton, but he was wooden as a campaigner.  Clinton was able to immediate relate to folks.  Gore tried to be that way, but came off as standoffish and mechanical.  

George W. Bush on the other hand was the personable guy we still think of today.  But a tough campaign staff offset his personal friendliness.  John McCain found that out in the South Carolina primary, when Bush supporters circulated rumors of an illegitimate black child.  It was “hard ball” politics, and a key factor in Bush’s win in South Carolina to lock up the Republican nomination (NYT).

The shadow across the Gore campaign was the Clinton Impeachment.  Whatever you thought of the outcome, whether Clinton should have been impeached or removed or not; the facts we learned about his behavior in the White House were ugly.  Of course, we learned a lot about Speaker Newt Gingrich, and Speaker-Elect Bob Livingston, and several other Congressmen as well.  In the end, no one looked good.

Hanging Chads

So it shouldn’t have been a surprise that the November election was close.  So close, that it came down to the electoral vote of Florida.  And Florida came down to only a few hundred ballots out of the almost six million cast.  

There is a scientific and mathematical term called  “margin of error”.  In any counting or polling, there is going to be some error in the results.  In counting votes, or counting pennies, there will be some mistakes.  Maybe it’s only one in ten thousand.  But the Florida vote was so close, that it was within that margin.  There were almost six million votes.  A one in ten thousand margin of error was around six hundred. The deciding margin was five hundred and thirty-seven.

It also means that however many times you recounted, you would get different result each time.

And then there were the flaws in the ballots themselves.  Many counties in Florida used “punch ballots”, where you punch out “chads” of paper so that a hole is left where you wanted to vote.  But some “chads” don’t get punched completely out, and some folks didn’t push hard enough.  Was a partially punched “chad” a vote for a candidate?  What about a dimple?

And finally, there was the Palm Beach County ballot, the “butterfly ballot” where it was easy to confuse the “punch” for Gore for the “punch” for third party candidate Ralph Nader.  How many Gore votes ended up as Nader votes was impossible to know. And how in the world could that error be undone?

The lawyers from both campaign descended, and Florida counted votes through Thanksgiving and on into December.  Finally on December 9^th the US Supreme Court, in a party line five to four vote, chose to stop the count.  That made the winner George Bush.

Patriotic Duty

Many Democrats refused to accept the Supreme Court solution in Bush v Gore.  It was only when Mr. Gore appeared in a nationwide address, and told the nation that he would support the new President, George W. Bush, that most began to accept the outcome. By the way, it’s worth a watch, if you’ve got eight minutes – a patriotic moment. By Christmas, there was lots of grumbling, but Vice President Gore led the Senate in counting the electoral votes and declaring Bush the victor.  At the inauguration, Clinton and Gore made it clear that they were doing their best to transit the government to Bush (but some staff stole the “W’s” off of keyboards in the White House).

So here we are in 2020.  The current President, Donald Trump, is maneuvering to have an “excuse” if the election doesn’t go his way.  He’s already questioned the legitimacy of mail-in ballots, in spite of the fact we’ve been doing it since the Civil War.  And he’s turned his back on international interference in our electoral process.  So there is the question:  will Donald Trump recognize the legitimacy of an election outcome that makes Joe Biden President?

Joe Biden, on the other hand, is a traditional American politician.  There really is no question that if the “shoe’s on the other foot” and Trump somehow wins again, Biden will follow the tradition of Gore and the others.  But Trump is not a “pro”, and he has made it clear that he has no problem being a “bad loser”.

Acceptance 

And what about the “forces” of the Federal government?  Trump hasn’t hesitated to use the military to pursue his political goals.  Ask the thousands of troops moved to the Southern Border to stop the mythical “caravan” of illegal immigrants, right around the 2018 election.  Or ask the thousands of Federal enforcement agents being mobilized today to go to “Democrat (sic) Cities”.  

Defense Secretary Esper and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Milley have expressed regret at getting dragged into the clearing of Lafayette Square and the “policing” of Washington, DC.  They seem prepared to fulfill the traditional role of the military in US elections:  remain neutral.  But until “orders” from the Commander in Chief come down, it’s difficult to tell what they would do.

Integrity

It’s not far fetched to envision a scenario where Biden or Trump wins by a narrow margin, weeks after Election Day as counting mail-in ballots progresses past Thanksgiving.  After an ugly campaign, those weeks would be even more divisive.  Taking the lessons of 2000, lawyers from both sides would descend on critical Boards of Elections, trying to put “their thumb” on the scale of the count for their candidate.  

By the time it’s all concluded will either candidate accept the result?  Will the American people?  

The election of 2020 is a critical turning point in the story of American democracy.  Whatever side of the political fray you find yourself, it will be an election held under unique circumstances, one conducted in the middle of a world pandemic.  And we have already spent seven months learning to question every statement by the “experts” about COVID; it won’t be a big step to question the “experts” in counting votes.

There’s really only one way out.  One candidate needs to win so decisively that there can be no question as to the will of the nation.  But in a nation so divided, there’s no certainty of that.  So to quote MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, “buckle-up”!  This won’t be over on Election Day.

One More Dad Lesson

So one of the lessons my father taught me over the years was not to be overwhelmed by decisions.  He had a system, a process that would help him decide what he should do.  It wasn’t a complicated procedure, just a legal pad and a pencil.  He would make two lists, one the “pro” list and one the “con” list.  At the end of making each list, you would look over the whole pad, and often it would lead you to a conclusion.

When he first showed this system to me, I objected that it didn’t have “heart”.  I felt that there was an emotional component to decision-making that ultimately had to be taken into consideration.  But Dad knew something I didn’t, that emotion colored the list, and more importantly, colored the strength of each of the factors on the list.  It was part of the process, and in the end, whatever conclusion you came to, it was usually right emotionally as well as intellectually.

So here’s my list of who to vote for President.  If you’ve read Trump World very often, I’m sure you won’t be surprised by the conclusions.  But perhaps it will help you reach some conclusions yourself, particularly if you are somehow on the fence in this incredibly polarized political world.  

Since I can’t put a legal pad in essay form, instead I’m going to do an issues list.  My comparison will be between Joe Biden, the Democrat, and Donald Trump, the Republican.  I will not be including third party candidates.  They don’t have a chance to win the Presidency, and I don’t believe this is an election to “honorably lose”.  And I don’t agree with most third party candidates’ positions anyway.

Old White Men

So let’s start with “the elephant” in the room.  Joe Biden is an old, white man.  He’ll be seventy-eight if he’s inaugurated in January, the oldest man to begin the Presidency.  Donald Trump is also an old, white man, but slightly younger at 74.  

And Joe Biden has a lifelong habit of saying “the wrong thing”.  Some of that can be attributed to his stuttering disability.  But some are “traditional” Biden screw-ups.  His latest was that “Trump was the first racist elected President”.  While there is little argument that Trump is a racist, there also is little argument that so were several other Presidents, including some chosen in the modern era.  Woodrow Wilson comes to mind.  I don’t attribute that to Biden’s old age – he’s been flubbing lines like that for his entire political career.  Remember the open-mike moment – “Barack, it’s a big f—king deal”?

Donald Trump has said some pretty crazy things too.  He talked about using light and disinfectant to cure folks of COVID-19, and he’s seems to have trouble walking and holding bottles of water.  And of course, he wished an accused sex trafficker “well” as she sits in a prison cell.  You could attribute that to old age, or the onset of dementia.  But the reality is, that neither Trump nor Biden are “perfect” candidates.  They are both old, white men, perhaps not as sharp as they were in the 1990’s.  So let’s call this a draw.  Either way, in 2021 an old white man who might be shakier than we’d like is going to be inaugurated as President.

Polarize

Donald Trump is a polarizer, the “Divider in Chief”.  He began his political career by gliding down the “Golden Escalator” and talking about Mexicans as rapists and criminals (and some – some are good people).  I’m a Liberal Democrat and Joe Biden is more moderate than I would like.  But he has made a career of reaching across the aisle, of working with both sides to reach compromises and further government.  

We’ve had three and a half years of division, so much so, that some of my more extreme conservative friends are talking about civil war if Biden wins.  That didn’t start because of Donald Trump, or even Mitch McConnell.  And it certainly didn’t start with Joe Biden or Barack Obama.  Actually, it began in the late 1980’s with campaigns run by Lee Atwater.  And before anyone screams bloody murder, I know there are Democrats who were divisive too.  Certainly Hillary’s “basket of deplorables” didn’t do anyone much good four years ago.

But here we are, in the present.  Our “binary choice” (is that a computer language?) is “Trump the Divider”, or “Biden the Uniter”.  Seems to me we’ve had plenty of division. It’s time to heal, and if there’s anyone who would make a terrific “Healer in Chief” it’s Joe Biden.

Socialists

And what about the “S” word – socialism.  The far progressive wing of the Democratic Party isn’t far from socialist, though I’m not sure that it’s a bad thing either.  But it really doesn’t matter, because Biden ain’t no socialist.  He is a middle-of-the-road, moderate Democrat.  He’s a capitalist who believes government can make things better, and can help the working class and the poor.  Trump believes that government needs to let everyone fight it out among themselves, except for the rich, who clearly need more tax breaks.

And speaking of helping, what’s happening with health insurance?  Donald Trump has now had three and a half years, two of them with a fully Republican Congress.  His main mission, to remove the Affordable Care Act, failed.  Meanwhile, there isn’t a Republican plan for health care.  They haven’t proposed anything (though didn’t he say there would be one in two weeks, about three weeks ago?)  The Trump Administration is still in Court to try to stop the Affordable Care Act, in the middle of a pandemic.

Biden obviously likes the Affordable Care Act, and wants to expand upon it.  He would like to add a public option to the plan, and do more to control costs, particular prescription drug costs.  We know what he’s already done as Vice President to get good health insurance to more people, so he has a track record.

Science

I am sixty-three years old.  I grew up in the shadow of nuclear destruction.  We hid under desks during the Cuban missile crisis, and the joke, “Moscow in flames, bombs on the way, film at eleven,” really wasn’t all that funny.  But we survived that era.  Now we are in an era of climate extremes that science says is caused by humans.  The summers aren’t the hottest, but they are very hot.  The storms aren’t the worst, but they are all bad.  The tides are getting higher, and the ice is melting.  

The Trump Administration has made it national policy to roll back environmental protections.  In one of the few areas where Trump had success, we have sold out the environment for short-term economic gains.  It’s at the heart of Trump’s success on Wall Street.  Joe Biden is committed to the long-term improvement of the climate, and reducing the world’s impact.  Biden is following science, Trump is ignoring it.

Competence

Twenty years from now those choices will have a big impact.  But ignoring science is costing us, right now.  We don’t need to worry about nuclear destruction; we need to worry about, viral infection.  Today the United States will pass over 150,000 deaths from the COVID-19 virus.  Near 4.5 million are infected.  

President Trump ignored science for short-term economic gains.  We are paying the price, literally in blood.  Joe Biden has put forward plan after plan to deal with COVID, plans that would lead America to reduced infection and death, and long-term economic improvements. He is listening to science.

Trump is incompetent.  Biden is competent.  That’s the bottom line on the checklist.  And while there are all sorts of things that I’d like to see in a President that Joe Biden doesn’t have, the minimal requirement has to be that: competence. 

 So that’s why I’m voting for Joe.