Politics — Blog — Of Liberal Intent

THE HARRIS EFFECT

This 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.

PoliticsBigly CovfefeAugust 29, 2020Politics, Election 2020, Vice presidents

WHO NEEDS FOX NEWS?

Tuesday 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.

Media, PoliticsBigly CovfefeApril 8, 2020Politics, television, CNN, MSNBC, Trump

I LOVE A PARADE, OR, HOW MANY DEMOCRATS, PART 2

But 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.