My mother bore a striking resemblance to Queen Elizabeth, not to mention being close to an exact contemporary. Thus it’s difficult to get out of the grocery store these days without my mum looking back at me from the covers of the many commemoratives of Her Highness, seemingly asking worriedly if I think that gigantic bag of Doritos would be good for me. And the public seems to be only slightly less interested, in its way, with the incoming king, Charles.
Read MoreYesterday as I was finishing breakfast, I got my second telephone call of the day from Senator Raphael Warnock’s crew asking for money. At least they stopped with two calls per day—they usually don’t. Actually, though, said calls were for my wife. When I tell them she’s isn’t there, which I do even if she IS home (per instructions, of course), they either politely tell me their business and tell me they’ll call back, or they start into their spiel anyway.
Not that I’m off the hook (like the phone). It’s just that I don’t get phone calls from the Democratic candidates but my turn will come in another couple of hours when the post arrives. I think yesterday my final total of solicitation letters from the Dems was six, which is about the median. There was one from a man who isn’t up for re-election for five years, and another from someone who squeals that the Republican is going to be able to outspend her by an order of magnitude. I had just finished reading on cnn.com that she’s raised over 31 million dollars. Her opponent has raised $600K.
Among the constant correspondents I didn’t hear from asking for help for their impoverished campaigns were Adam Schiff, who inhabits probably one of the top ten safest seats in Congress, or the two Tammys, Baldwin and Duckworth, neither of whom is up for re-election.
My daily goal, though, is to fill out my bingo card by hearing from the Big Five: Democratic National Committee, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Democratic Governors Association, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. And yes, it’s not unusual for me to attain this lofty status, nor is it unusual for me to receive two or three pleas from each of these groups.
So, do I give them any money? Sure. On the first of the month when we do our bills, I throw out the dupes, inventory what’s left, and have my wife pick a number between one and whatever (usually twenty-something) and the winner—occasionally two—gets my lavish donation of around thirty and forty bucks. I doubt that all told, they’re making any net gain from me, but it’s their business, not mine. In November, I shall watch the returns roll in with the reassuring knowledge that I did what I could to help them save American democracy. And that I can start pitching all this malarkey, at least for a while.
Read MoreAs with most bell curves, the broad middle interested me less, though, having come through the lower grades being indoctrinated with the hoary truism that we as Americans should treasure Honest Abe and The Father of Our Country above all other mortals, I was perplexed to find Washington in there with a shedload of Averages. Much, much later (like a couple of years ago), I learned from a semi-academic writer that this was attributable to his second term, when the departure of the great minds from his cabinet left everybody a peek behind the curtain and when he went all Dick Nixon against those who disagreed with his policies.
Read MoreThis line of inquiry goes back a long way. I’ve been following elections for sixty years now, and the tradition was old then. I came perhaps to political junkiedom a trifle early, as I was assigned to be Dick Nixon’s campaign manager by our second grade teacher, opposed by my prospective best friend—I had just changed schools—who was in charge of selling Jack Kennedy to our little band of tykes. We each had bulletin board space-- that I remember quite well-- and I seem to recollect, a little more dimly, having to give a campaign speech. For some reason, I was rather fuddled by a tradition I had heard of that candidates were supposed to be somehow ethical and vote for their opponent, and for the life of me, I can’t recall how I resolved that dilemma, though I do recall asking advice from several of my betters, and receiving nothing useful, invariably reducing to something about using my conscience. I doubt that I felt as though I had a conscience, perhaps had even heard of the concept, so I was, as would prove to be the rule rather than the exception during my life, at sea in a universe of ethical dilemmas.
Read MoreEven in these days of the Web, one still has to dig a little to find out what’s going to happen on a given night, but I decided I would forsake the pleasures of They Might Be Giants conjoined with the fascinations of matching up the St. Louis Browns with the New York Highlanders, and watch. Two ex-presidents were to speak, as was the charismatic Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez of New York, and there were hints dropped in passing that the rollcall vote to select a nominee might be in the cards. Yes, I would do my civic duty and watch.
Read MoreTuesday night, like most Tuesday nights, I settled in to watch election returns. To my horror, there were no election returns. Not, mind you, that I really expected the whole nine yards, with pundits pontificating, or boffins with their sleeves rolled up yelling about what the early returns from Door County told us about the Catholic vote, but I did at least expect that, even in this all-coronavirus all-the-time news cycle, there would at least be the reassuring little box up in the corner showing the percentages, Nope. Not even anything in the little cavalcade of minutiae which crawls along the bottom of the screen. Well, this morning after much too much prowling around news sites, I discovered that all of this was, at least nominally, because there weren’t going to be any returns for a week or so. Clearly, it’s already become tres gauche to care about who is the president of the United States, though perhaps we have another month or so before giving a damn will become an actual crime.
Read MoreSince most of the moderate alternatives to Bernie Sanders’ radicalism are perceived to have collapsed (Joe Biden) or have no appeal to minorities (Pete Buttigieg) or both (Amy Klobuchar), the punditry have contented themselves with the media-driven late entry campaign of Mike Bloomberg as the Democratic establishment’s last hope of stopping the socialist juggernaut on its way to handing the republic another four years of the miseries of Donald Trump.
Read MoreI’m not about to research this, but I’m guessing that this week’s International Court of Justice trial of Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi is the first time in history that a Nobel Peace Prize laureate has been tried for war crimes.
Read MoreLike the moon this week, I find that my interest in these debates is waning. Thus I decided to liven things up this time a tad by playing Candidate Bingo. I made myself up a little card with all the clichés I expected to hear and that was my bingo card. That I had nobody to play with didn’t stop me, nor did the fact that I couldn’t (quite) think of enough clichés to make two cards. I simply settled on twenty-four clichés and wrote them down. I also handicapped myself a bit by attributing each cliché to a particular candidate. Thus, when Tulsi Gabbard was the first to bring up her combat veteran status instead of my pick of Pete Buttigieg, I blocked myself. And off they went.
Read MoreAll the Democratic candidates accept the science behind anthropogenic global warming (AGW). They all accept it is serious, and something needs to be done. They accept that at least some of this something will need to come from the government. They accept that they need to say something about it to keep the base happy. Some of them think we have 11 years, some think we have fewer. The candidates who claim we are doomed and dramatic action is required get dismissed as apocalyptic naysayers. The ones who say we can make changes that create new jobs and keep the economy sound are dismissed as unrealistic, calling for expensive new programs that will raise our taxes.
Read MoreDid you catch the Democrats on Cable News Network the other night discussing the climate crisis? Too bad—you missed some great dancing. Not a debate, but a return to a series of town halls where they interact with the studio audience and a moderator but not each other, it seemed to be set up in the early summer pyramid format, with the front-runners in the middle, sloping downward to the least popular candidates in the polls around teatime and closing time at the disco, save for Amy Klobuchar, who somehow bogarted her way into the middle past Kamala Harris, who I heard had some droopy polls, but nothing that would put her below Klobuchar’s 2%.
Read MoreBut this is a new century, and the everyday threats to Main Street business are a much more complex stew, an amalgamation of government, big business, and the internet; anyone can blend those together to suit their own particular ideological preferences The only one of the traditional bugaboos missing would seem to be Big Labor; it amuses me to remember that Mr. Gallup used to ask the public each year which was the greatest threat to America among Big Business, Big Government, and Big Labor. If anybody worries about Labor at all these days, it’s usually more like Small Labor.
Read MoreI got everything done yesternight in time to get the TeeVee on in time to watch a little punditry. The big topic of the moment was whether Kamala Harris would reprise her assault on Joseph Biden; after a few modest spins on conventional wisdom, somebody said that she had better not, she had better watch her backside, because now that she had become a frontrunner of sorts, somebody, probably Tulsi Gabbard, would be coming for her. Give that woman Prophet of the Year.
Read MoreAnd finally it was time for another debate to help America choose the Democratic presidential nominee for next year’s election. I’m never sure who sets each debate up—The network? The party? Some nonpartisan commission of wise men?—but this time the debate moved networks, to CNN. This time they modified the drawing procedure to ‘seed’ the top four candidates so that two would be on each night, and—surprise, surprise—Joseph Biden ended up onstage with tormenter Kamala Harris and the two leading progressives, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were on together the first night.
Read MoreSo off we went. Again the evening began with pocketbook issues, which this time were not met with the same sort of discursive quasi-opening statements as the previous night. In other words, they mostly answered the questions they were given, yet another minor miracle in American politics. They all pretty much agreed on this, as they did on health care, though this night said topic, instead of morphing into a discussion of abortion, stayed, roughly, on topic. A show of hands of those who wished to abolish private health insurance got two takers, Sanders and Harris, but everybody raised their hands for covering illegal (or, as Democrats insist on saying, ‘undocumented’) immigrants.
Read MoreThen came one of the most singular moments of American debate history, when the moderator called for short answers to the question of what is America’s biggest threat, and, amazingly, they all followed instructions, the downside being that, having slept through shorthand class, I can’t tell you what candidates Castro and Ryan said. However, Inslee brought the house down by saying ‘Donald Trump’, Delaney went with China (but ended up babbling on about how it was really Iran), Klobuchar went along with China, as did Booker, but Klobuchar threw in Iran, Booker climate change. De Blasio thought it was Russia, Gabbard nuclear proliferation, and Warren and O’Rourke went with straight climate change, no chaser.
Read MoreDon’t worry about my health or losing sleep. Despite the affair beginning at my supper hour and continuing on past my bedtime, thanks to the miracle of the digital video recorder, I didn’t lose a minute of sleep; in fact, I may have gained a few minutes when Bernie Sanders started in explaining what he meant by democratic socialism. So, herewith, my report cards for all five of them, presented in order of appearance, which I’m guessing was a pyramid with the most popular in the polls getting the middle spot and working downhill to my suppertime and bedtime for the less popular.
Read MoreThe chart of presidential greatness was nicely delineated into “Great”, “Near Great”, “Above Average”, “Average”, “Below Average”, and the two “Failures”, Grant and Harding. As for the greats, in my memory those were FDR, Lincoln, and Jefferson. Near greats were ones such as Old Hickory, Teddy Roosevelt, and Ike Eisenhower. I was quite surprised that George Washington not only didn’t make the greats, he didn’t make the near greats, and I believe he had actually slipped down into the average group, I am sure to the chagrin of my elementary teachers. Finally, about the time I applied for Medicare, I read a book which explained the phenomenon to me, so I’m hip to the jive now, but at the time America’s great myth had not been punctured to me.
Read MoreIn 1972 one could buy a board game called Who Can Beat Nixon? I never succumbed to the very real temptation, and I imagine that it might have been a nice investment for sale on eBay these days, but I suppose that each player selected a primary candidate and off you went campaigning. That the game was thought to have commercial appeal is an indicator of how much Democrats wanted to get rid of Dick Nixon. There has been something of that level of obsession in the party for succeeding Republican presidents, perhaps excepting Ford and Bush 41, but I think never with quite the urgency that I sense toward The Donald. And, indeed, the polls, for now, are showing that Democratic voters are valuing electability over ideology.
Read MoreBut punditry took this very seriously and reacted with a spate of commentary bewailing that the Democratic Party’s supposed leftward lurch had made it all too difficult for a ‘pragmatic’ Democrat to win the nomination (in case you’ve missed it, the media’s favorite dichotomy this year is ‘Socialists’ vs. ‘Pragmatists’ in the Democratic Party), a subtheme being that the head-in-the-clouds Socialists think, presumably mistakenly, that The Donald is so unpopular, so beatable, that a true progressive can be elected and get to work on a real Left agenda.
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