Sunday, November 08, 2020

The 2020 Election: Triumph of the Center

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

I’m sure just about everybody reading this is feeling as relieved as I am that after January 20, 2021 Donald Trump will no longer be President of the United States.

I’ll be able to cast him back into the fading-celebrity oblivion I had him in before that infamous day in mid-2015 when he rode down the gold-plated escalator at Trump Tower and started his campaign with racist attacks on Mexican immigrants. I won’t have to worry about what kinds of trouble he’s going to get the country into with one of his racist, sexist or just plain crazy tweets. I won’t have to look at that pasty face and bloated body on my TV anymore. And I won’t have to hear that whiny voice, alternately hectoring, bullying and self-pitying, either unless I really want to -- which I won’t.

I literally ran into the jubilation on the streets of San Diego the morning of Saturday, November 7. Cars were driving down University Avenue in both directions as I waited for the #10 bus to take me from my home in North Park to my bank in Mission Hills, where I was going to get laundry quarters. A run that usually takes a few minutes lasted nearly an hour because the streets were so crowded with celebrators, many of them carrying flags: U.S. flags, rainbow Queer Pride flags, at least one Transgender flag. I thought I’d better warn my husband Charles, whom I knew would have to take the same route just about an hour later to get to his job at the Mission Hills Vons. I called him to tell him to leave for work early, which he did -- but he was still late.

The impending end of the Trump Presidency lifts a great weight off this country -- or at least the slightly over half of the electorate who rejected him both times. Charles reported (and backed it up with pictures he’d taken on his cell phone) that his store had sold enormous amounts of alcoholic beverages of all kinds and price ranges to people who wanted to drink to the redemption of America. (The highest-priced booze actually sold better than the rest.) There’s a spirit of celebration in the air that the U.S. had its closest brush since 1789 with the potential loss of its republican government and its becoming a dictatorship.

And at least one of the reasons that happened was the sheer blandness of Trump’s opponent, former vice-president Joe Biden. I must say I was acutely skeptical of Biden’s ability to win the election precisely because he was so bland. His campaign speeches were so dull I thought his slogan could be, “Make America Boring Again.” I voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2020 Democratic primary (as I had in 2016 as well) and resented the way the party bosses at the Democratic National Committee used Biden’s sweeping victory in the South Carolina primary -- fucking South Carolina, a state there was no way the Democrats could carry in November -- as an excuse to drive out the other “moderate” candidates, Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg, so voters wanting a less-Left alternative to Sanders or Elizabeth Warren would have only one choice, Biden.

My poor husband had to get used to hearing me yell at the TV every time Biden got another party endorsement, “Joe Fucking Biden?” I even wrote a song parody to the tune of “Bye, Bye, Birdie” called “Bye, Bye, Biden,” which implored, “Dems, dump Biden/For someone who can win.” I had already been convinced that Biden’s political career had been collateral damage of the Trump/Ukraine scandal that led to his impeachment, since Biden’s son Hunter had joined the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma despite zero experience or knowledge in the energy business, and Joe Biden had lobbied the Ukrainian government to fire the prosecutor that was investigating Burisma.

It’s true that there were extenuating circumstances in Biden’s case that didn’t exist when Trump tried to use U.S. aid to blackmail the current Ukrainian president into giving him dirt on the Bidens. A lot of other people, including the European Union and anti-corruption activists in Ukraine, had wanted to get rid of that prosecutor because they thought he was too easy on corruption. But I thought the bare fact that Hunter Biden had joined the board of a foreign company in a business he knew nothing about, and the implication that they’d put him on their board to curry favor with his dad, who was still vice-president of the U.S. when all this happened, would devastate Joe Biden politically

Fortunately, I was wrong. Trump’s last-minute attempt to elevate “Hunter Biden’s laptop” to a media obsession the way he and other Republican propagandists had with “Hillary Clinton’s e-mails” in the 2016 campaign fell flat. Instead of falling for it and reporting Hunter Biden’s laptop as the issue of the campaign the way they had with Hollary’s e-mails, most of the media either ignored it completely or fingered it as Russian disinformation. In the face of a viral pandemic that had already killed 230,000 by election day and, after a brief slowdown, was once again spreading at catastrophic rates, voters in the U.S. chose Biden’s very ordinariness -- his stability, his predictability, his humanity -- over four more years of Mr. Trump’s Wild Ride.

Split Verdict: GOP Gains in Congress, States

Despite Trump’s defeat (albeit by the same razor-thin margin that had elected him in the first place in 2016), November 3, 2020 was actually a pretty good night for the Republican Party. The Republicans kept their majority in the United States Senate -- which, given majority leader Mitch McConnell’s success at keeping any bills from the House of Representatives from even being debated in the Senate, ensures that Biden will be able to do precious little of anything. And the Democrats kept their House majority but saw half of their previous 40-seat margin evaporate.

What’s more, the Republicans kept a strong position in state legislatures -- which is especially important in a year ending in zero, since that’s when the legislatures that will control redistricting are elected. In 2018, 65 percent of Wisconsin’s voters wanted Democrats to represent them in the legislature -- but the Democrats only won 45 percent of the seats due to intense partisan gerrymandering. It’s highly likely that the Democrats will lose their House majority in 2022, partly because the last two Democratic Presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, lost their House majorities in their first midterms and partly because this redistricting will be the first conducted under a Trump-rigged census which went out of its way to undercount core Democratic constituencies -- poor people, young people,people of color.

Already the current Right-wing majority on the U.S. Supreme Court has accepted a case that questions whether undocumented immigrants should be counted in the census. The Constitution is crystal clear that the census, as defined in Article I, section 2, subsection 3, must count, and apportion House members based on, “the whole Number of free Persons” in each state. But if the current Supreme Court rules that undocumented immigrants somehow don’t count as “free Persons,” it will devastate the representation of immigrant-rich states like California and make the federal government even more unrepresentative and undemocratic than it is now. It will also vastly improve the Republicans’ chances of winning a long-term Congressional majority.

The Republicans were able to hang on to the Senate and win seats in the House in 2020 because, to put it bluntly, America remains a center-Right country. Democrats with an inflated sense of just how much progressive reform the American people would stand for got a rude awakening by just how close some of the House contests were. Abigail Spanberger, who won a seat from the Republicans in 2018 and barely hung onto it in 2020, warned House Democrats in a November 5 conference call that got leaked (https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/06/politics/abigail-spanberger-house-democrats-2020-election/index.html), "If we are classifying Tuesday as a success from a congressional standpoint, we will get [expletive] torn apart in 2022," Spanberger said bluntly. "That's the reality."

Spanberger identified two huge danger zones for Democratic House candidates -- and the party as a whole -- in 2022 and beyond. One was the demand of some in the Black Lives Matter movement to “defund the police.” Almost nobody who uses that slogan literally means that they want to cancel all funding to police departments. Mostly people who call for “defunding the police” want parts of the police budget redirected to crime-prevention programs. Sometimes it means asking whether the sorts of police departments we now have -- with their top-down, militaristic, authoritarian command-and-control structures and their internal cultures that seem to reproduce the perception that the lives of Afriican-Americans and other people of color somehow “matter” less than those of whites -- really serve to keep all Americans safe and secure..

But that’s not what a lot of American voters hear when they encounter the phrase “defund the police.” As Spanberger explained, “The number one concern in things that people brought to me in my [district] that I barely re-won, was defunding the police. And I've heard from colleagues who have said 'Oh, it's the language of the streets. We should respect that.' We're in Congress. We are professionals. We are supposed to talk about things in the way where we mean what we're talking about. If we don't mean we should defund the police, we shouldn't say that."

The other buzz-word Spanberger wants her fellow Democrats to abandon is socialism. It’s true that a lot of younger voters -- including those who were born after the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union fell -- aren’t as afraid of socialism as other voters. Indeed, many young people have more fear of capitalism, which as it’s been practice in the late 20th and early 21st centuries has shrunk their employment opportunities, saddled them with huge student debts, either eliminated their access to health care or left them dependent on their parents for it, and in general made them the first generation in American history likely to have a lower standard of living than the one before it.

But socialism is still a hugely negative term through most of America -- and that’s one reason Donald Trump tried to win re-election by tarring the entire Democratic Party with the S-word. “[W]e need to not ever use the words 'socialist' or 'socialism' ever again,” Spanberger said. "If you put all of the messages [that cost the Democrats House seats in 2020] into a single broad category, it would be the extreme leftward lurch of the Democrat Party. That was messaged in different ways in different districts. In New York state, bail reform was extremely unpopular and meshed well with defund the police, so a public safety angle was the most effective. In some districts, it was 'Medicare for All' and the loss of private health insurance. In a number of suburban districts, we talked about pocketbook issues like higher taxes under Biden. And in other districts, we focused on the extremism of the 'Green New Deal.' And in south Florida especially, it was socialism more broadly. All of those messages fit within the rubric of extremism."

New York Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez responded to Spanberger in a way that encapsulates the ongoing dilemma of the Democratic Party: how to appear progrssive enough to motivate its base while not going so far to the Left as to alienate swing voters. "You can't just tell the Black, Brown, & youth organizers riding in to save us every election to be quiet or not have their reps champion them when they need us," she tweeted. "Or wonder why they don't show up for midterms when they're scolded for existing. Esp[ecially] when they're delivering victories. … I'm happy to cede ground on things that aren't working in some areas! But finger-pointing is not gonna help. There's real workable & productive paths here if the party is open to us."

The 2020 election was a warning from the American people to both major political parties that this remains a center-Right country. The so-called “swing voters” rejected Donald Trump -- both his ideology and his personality -- as too destabilizing, too radical, too dangerous. But they also rejected the Left. Joe Biden won the Democratic nomination largely because he wasn’t calling for a “political revolution.” He was seen as safe, unthreatening, within the norms of American politics instead of too far over on either side.And in November the people removed Trump from the presidency but they put constraints on Biden just to make sure he doesn’t go too extremist and too crazy in support of his party’s base, either.

The Continuing Power of “Trumpism”

Nor is America necessarily done with the ideological movement that brought Donald Trump to power in the first place. What has been called “Trumpism” is simply a more radical and more open version of what America’s amazingly resilient radical Right has been after since it emerged as a political force in the late 1930’s. It began as a reaction to the Franklin Roosevelt administration, which -- under huge pressure from mass movements of the Left of a size America has never experienced since -- vastly expanded the power of government to regulate the economy and the workplace. The biggest thing they object to (and still do!) is Social Security in particular and the whole idea of taxing the rich to help the not-rich in general.

The radical-Right movement that began in the late 1930’s has slowly and steadily -- though with some interruptions -- built up its power and influence. It has also survived an extraordinary number of catastrophes that should have killed it. It survived the tacit -- and in some cases open -- alignment of some of its early leaders with the fascist cause in Germany, Italy and Spain, much to its embarrassment when the U.S. ended up fighting World War II against Germany, Italy and fascism in general. It recovered after World War II when Stalinist Russia emerged as America’s new existential geopolitical enemy and the radical Right could tell us, “We told you so.”

The radical Right survived the disgrace of its first national political figure, U.S. Senator Joe McCarthy (R-Wisconsin), in 1954. It survived the landslide defeat of its first Presidential candidate, U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater (R-Arizona), in 1964. It took such great advantage of the political and social turmoil of the 1960’s that within just four years of Goldwater’s loss, Right-wing candidates Richard Nixon and George Wallace had won 57 percent of the Presidential vote between them versus Democrat Hubert Humphrey’s 43 percent. They did it by exploiting the racial and cultural prejudices of America’s working class to smash the Democrats’ New Deal coalition and build a new ruling one on the basis of veiled but tacit white supremacy and opposition to the counterculture and rebellious youth in general.

In 1980 the radical Right finally elected Ronald Reagan as President on what amounted to the old Goldwater program, but with a more polished, professional and effective spokesperson pursuing it. In 1987 Reagan’s appointees to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) eliminated the so-called “Fairness Doctrine” that had limited the ability of radio and TV stations to be openly partisan -- and the result was the virtual takeover of the AM radio band by Right-wing talk shows that gave the radical-Right’s adherents its marching orders on what political candidates and causes to support or oppose.

In 1996 the political consciousness of talk radio was brought to cable TV via the Fox News channel. The Fox hosts either came from the world of talk radio or spoke the same way -- a constant hectoring of its audience; snippy, insulting dismissals and nasty nicknames for anyone who disagreed; the endless repetition of the same propaganda phrases in the “Big Lie” technique developed by Nazi propagandist Dr. Joseph Goebbels; and the construction of a media “bubble” in which its audiences could live by persuading them that theirs were the only news sources their listeners or viewers should trust.

As I wrote in these pages in 2016, Donald Trump was the first Presidential candidate to talk like a talk-radio or Fox News host. What’s more, while it may seem odd to use the word “honest” about a President who told an estimated 15,000 lies while in office, the fact is that Trump was honest about the way he intended to govern and the fact that he was concerned only about the people, geographic areas and constituencies that had elected him. Richard Nixon and Strom Thurmond had concocted the “Southern Strategy” of 1968, in which the Republicans picked up the mantle of white racism the Democrats had dropped, in private. Trump not only made racist appeals,he did it openly, offering at best token criticisms of white supremacy while savagely attacking the Left (and in the process making amorphous coalitions like Antifa look far more powerful than they actually are).

Trump brought the voice of talk radio and Fox News to the White House, and his supporters ate it up. In fact, they still do. In a November 4 Los Angeles Times column called “Even If He Loses, Trump Has Won” (https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-11-04/trump-election-win-lose), Nicholas Goldberg wrote that the fact that nearly half the American electorate voted for Donald Trump twice is “an assertion by those voters that, yes, this is who we really are — and that what the United States has become over the last four years is really what we want it to be. Their votes send a message to the world that this bizarre and untrustworthy man didn’t weasel his way into the most powerful job in the world by fooling the great American people. Rather, he was — and remains — the conscious choice of too many.”

In other words, over 67 million Americans lived through the horrors of the Trump presidency -- the family separations, the travel bans, the open racism,the allegations of sexual assault, the sucking up to dictators like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un, the open corruption (including the personal grafting of Trump insisting that his Secret Service details stay at hotels he owned, thereby taking money from the American people and literally putting it in his pocket), the impeachment for attempting to bribe Ukraine into supplying (or inventing) dirt on his principal opponent, the firing of dedicated long-time civil servants and their replacement by hacks whose only qualification was “loyalty” not to the Constitution, but to the person of Trump, the non-transparency about his own finances, and, worst of all, the utter failure to respond to a worldwide public health crisis and protect Americans from COVID-19 -- and said, “Yes! “We’re fine with all that! We want four more years of it!”

What will Donald Trump do after he leaves office -- assuming he can’t weasel his way out of defeat by a series of incoherent court challenges? I can’t imagine he’ll go gently into that good night and settle into a dignified retirement like George H. W. Bush. And having entered politics not to do anything for other people but merely to salve and soothe his incredible ego and enrich himself financially, he certainly won’t continue to look for other ways to serve the American people the way Jimmy Carter (like such other one-term Presidents like John Quincy Adams and Herbert Hoover) has.

No, I suspect Trump will set up a shadow Presidency of his own. He will still communicate to a large -- though, hopefully, steadily dwindling -- legion of followers on Twitter. He will probably try to organize huge rallies, though without the power of the Presidency to impose them on cities with public-health policies against them he’s unlikely to hold too many of them. I’m convinced he will try to run for President again in 2024 -- he will regard his defeat this year as an insult that must be avenged -- and that will split the Republican Party wide open between his acolytes, who will still be yelling, “Trump! Trump!,” and equally Right-wing but saner party activists, leaders and donors who will think, “No, we don’t want to go there again.”

Meanwhile, it will fall to Joe Biden to clean up after all of the messes Trump will leave behind. He will have to formulate some sort of rational response to COVID-19 -- while still acknowledging that the time we could actually have addressed the pandemic and brought it under some kind of control has long passed. He will have to try to fulfill his promise to extend the health-care protections of the Affordable Care Act against a Republican Senate and a Supreme Court likely committed to its abolition. He will try to reach out to the kinds of Republican Senators and Congressmembers with whom he used to form those across-the-aisle friendships -- and he will find that the Republicans who were willing to meet and work with him are all retired or dead.

Joe Biden has promised to bring sweetness and light to an America that has lived in darkness and acid for so long many Americans have come to regard that as its natural state. He will have to fight for science in an America where virtually half the people have rejected it, not only on COVID but the even more important, long-term, issue of human-caused climate change. He will have to govern in a way that appeases enough of the issue concerns of the Democratic Party’s progressive base while remaining true not only to his own centrist instincts but the center-Right position of the American body politic. And he will have to do this all in his first four-year term because if he doesn’t, he isn’t likely to have a second one -- either because he’ll retire (he sent out contradictory signals during the campaign as to whether he’d run for re-election or not) or America’s conservative instincts will reassert themselves and defeat him.

Monday, November 02, 2020

On the Eve

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

The November 3 presidential election is just two days away as I write this, and I’m scared shitless that Donald Trump will win.

I’m not alone. A recent Gallup Poll showed that 56 percent of all Americans think Trump will win -- 10 to 15 points higher than the numbers of people telling pollsters that they want him to win. So many Democrats and Left-leaning progressives are still so snakebit from Trump’s spectacular come-from-behind victory in 2016 that psychologists are already publishing articles about the mental state of people who don’t want Trump to win but remain convinced he will. Somehow the bastard will pull it out, they (I should say “we” here, because this group definitely includes me) think as the election lurches towards its final days. Perhaps we have here a new mental illness, a novel form of PTSD -- Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

I’ve heard all the reasons from liberal news outlets like MS-NBC as to why I shouldn’t be worried. They’re saying that Joe Biden’s leads over Trump in the current polls are about four points higher on average than Hillary Clinton’s were on election eve in 2016. They’re also saying that Joe Biden is far better liked than Hillary Clinton -- the Trump administration and the Republican propaganda machine has tried to vilify him the way they spent 25 years attacking Clinton as the Dragon Lady of American politics, but with his aw-shucks manner and his lovable-folksy-grandpa image, Biden comes off as Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington while Hillary came off as Cruella de Vil.

They’re also mentioning that this time Donald Trump has a record to defend. He’s no longer a political neophyte presenting himself as a breath of fresh air to blow away the ossified stuffiness of the way things are usually done in Washington, D.C. Though he still portrays himself as “not a politician,” the fact remains that he is a politician -- and an unusually tone-deaf politician at that. Trump has made no secret of his utter disinterest in being President of all Americans, including the ones who didn’t vote for him. Rather, he seems to regard people who didn’t vote for him as miscreants who need to be disciplined and punished for their lese-majeste.

Political analysts, including ones who’ve actually run campaigns, have been flummoxed throughout the Trump presidency by his utter refusal to do anything to broaden his base of support. Instead of reaching out to people who didn’t vote for him in 2016, he’s focused on serving red meat to his base and contemptuously ignoring everyone else. He’s said the reason there isn’t going to be another COVID-19 relief bill is that, as much as he would have liked to play Santa Claus and given most Americans $1,200 apiece before the election, it was more important to him to punish “Democrat-led” states and cities by denying them any help to cope with the stratospheric costs they’ve suffered responding to the pandemic.

But there are at least four factors that keep Donald Trump very much in the running and could lay the groundwork for a spectacular come-from-behind victory for him like the one he won in 2016: voter suppression on the part of Republicans throughout the country; the success of President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in packing not just the Supreme Court but all the federal courts with new judges who are radical-Right ideologues; what I call the “reverse Bradley factor” of millions of Americans who are planning to vote for Trump but don’t want to tell that to poll takers; and campaigns of violence and intimidation against both Democratic candidates and ordinary voters.

Voter Suppression

It’s long been axiomatic in American politics that the higher the percentage of eligible voters who actually vote, the better the Democrats do. Conversely, the lower the percentage of eligible people who vote, the better Republicans do. The modern-day Republican Party is on an ideological mission to impose a libertarian economic policy that will destroy Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, eliminate the right of workers to form unions, and end health and safety protections for workers, consumers and the environment. At the same time they want to shrink government’s ability to regulate economic activity and give huge tax breaks to wealthy individuals and corporations, they also want to impose Big Government control over people’s personal lives -- especially their sex lives -- allowing government to regulate who people can have sex with, how they can have sex and how they may deal with the consequences, both good and bad, of their sexual decisions.

This Republican Party agenda would almost certainly fail if the Republicans themselves were honest about it and if they sought the approval of the majority of the electorate. So they don’t. They frame the libertarian economic agenda in terms of “individual freedom” and the radical Christian Right anti-choice and anti-Queer agenda as “traditional family values.” And in order to make sure candidates committed to those agenda win, they want to keep the electorate as small as possible because the voters who would be hurt by it -- the poor, the young, people of color and Queer people -- are the least likely to vote generally and can be targeted to maie it even harder for them to vote at all.

Voter suppression has become not only something Republicans do; it’s the essence of their long-term political strategy. President Trump has pushed it farther than anyone else -- including putting Louis DeJoy, a Trump financial donor with no experience in mail, in charge of the United States Postal Service to sabotage the entire U.S. mail delivery system just to make it harder for people to vote by mail. He’s also repeatedly proclaimed that whoever is ahead in the count on election night should be declared the winner, and votes received after that day (even if they’re postmarked and mailed before November 3) shouldn’t be counted at all.

Whether Joe Biden gets to be President will, I believe, be determined largely by whether or not he leads in the count in the Electoral College on the night of November 3. If Trump leads on the election-night count, he will file suit in every state that still has outstanding mail-in ballots and demand that the courts rule they not be counted. Thus, not only will Trump remain President, the American people will literally never know who would have won if all the ballots had been counted.

Republicans throughout the country are using a wide variety of voter suppression tactics, including -- ironically -- many of the ones used by Southern Democrats back when they were the party of slavery, segregation, racism and the Ku Klux Klan. They’ve cut back polling hours and closed polling places in communities of color while leaving them open and easily accessible in white neighborhoods -- especially affluent ones. They’ve publicly questioned the integrity of mail-in voting -- with no evidence, but as Hitler’s propagandist Dr. Joseph Goebbels said, people will believe a lie if you repeat it often enough. They’ve restricted the number of drop-off boxes where you can cast a mail-in ballot if you don’t trust the mail to get it to the election counters on time -- in Texas and Ohio to only one per county.

And in addition to outright threats of physical violence against voters who vote “wrong”, the Republicans have filed a barrage of lawsuits aimed at restricting the ability of people to have their votes counted. They’ve gone to court to impose confusing regulations and allow state authorities to throw out a ballot if it isn’t contained in two envelopes instead of just one. They’ve also filed lawsuits to block the counting of any ballots received after November 3, no matter when they were actually cast. And most frighteningly, in Michigan they won a state court ruling giving Republican paramilitaries the right to carry guns into polling places, the better to intimidate the “wrong” kinds of voters.

Court-Packing

“Court-packing” was a derogatory term invented in the 1930’s when Franklin D. Roosevelt, elected to the presidency in 1932 at the height of the Great Depression, and a Congress with a huge Democratic majority were having a problem with the United States Supreme Court. The Court was dominated by long-serving justices appointed by conservative Republican Presidents, and they were throwing out Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation as unconstitutional almost as soon as Roosevelt could get it through Congress and sign it into law. In 1936 Roosevelt won a landslide re-election victory, increased his Democratic majorities in Congress, and decided to use his new-found power to expand the Supreme Court to 15 justices.

Roosevelt’s plan was a dismal political failure. But one of the Republican justices on the court, Owen Roberts, started voting to uphold the kinds of bills to create social-welfare programs, guarantee workers’ right to organize unions, regulate the economy and prosecute financial speculators that he’d previously voted to throw out. It became known as the “switch in time that saved nine,” and because FDR served longer in the White House than anyone else ever has (or ever will), he ultimately got to remake the Supreme Court by sheer attrition.

Over time, the U.S. Supreme Court transformed from a bastion of reaction and repression into an institution of far-reaching social change. And it wasn’t just Democratic appointees that did that, either. Dwight Eisenhower appointed Earl Warren and William Brennan; Warren, the former governor of California, steered the Court to its unainmous Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing racial segregation and radically expanded voting rights and the due-process rights of criminal defendants. Richard Nixon picked Harry Blackmun, who wrote the majority decision in Roe v. Wade that guaranteed women the right to control their own reproduction. (The dissent in Roe, by the way, was by a Democratic appointee -- Byron White, picked by John F. Kennedy.) Gerald Ford, faced with the task of replacing FDR appointee William O. Douglas, pledged to pick someone who would continue Douglas’s progressive legacy -- and found him in John Paul Stevens, George H. W. Bush put David Souter on the Court, and even one of Ronald Reagain’s appointees, Anthony Kennedy, though usually a solid Right-winger, deviated from party orthodoxy on two key issues, juvenile justice and Queer rights.

Many Republicans thought those appointments of liberal and even progressive justices by Republican Presidents had been mistakes, and in 1982 Right-wing law students at Harvard, Yale and the University of Chicago sought to “correct” that. They formed an organization called the Federalist Society whose purpose was to identify young law students committed to Right-wing ideology, mentor them and help them rise through the legal profession, and ultimately get them lifetime appointments to the Federal bench. Today the Federalist Society virtually dictates the composition of not only the United States Supreme Court but the entire federal judiciary -- and will continue to do so as long as the Presidency and the U.S. Senate remain in Republican hands.

When Mitch McConnell became leader of the Republican delegation in the U.S. Senate in 2006 and majority leader after the Republicans took control of the Senate in 2014, he set out on a long-term project to remake the federal judiciary in a hard-Right direction. During Barack Obama’s last two years as President, he systematically denied confirmation votes to most of Obama’s judicial appointees -- including, most infamously, Merrick Garland to the U.S., Supreme Court -- in order to leave as many judicial vacancies open as possible if and when the Republicans took over the Presidency in 2016.

Since then, he has created a smooth pipeline for Right-wing judges to get on the bench for life in association with President Trump and Leonard Leo, the head of the Federalist Society. The simple fact of life these days is that if you don’t have a Federalist Society recommendation, you don’t get on the federal bench. Though the Federalist Society originally declared itself in favor of “judicial restraint” -- using the courts’ power to invalidate laws as unconstitutional only rarely -- that soon changed. The Federalist Society’s judges at all levels have made decisions to strike down the entire Affordable Care Act, President Obama’s signature legislative achievement and the only part of Obama’s agenda Trump has not yet reversed, as unconstitutional.

The death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her replacement by her ideological opposite, Amy Coney Barrett, almost certainly means the death of the Affordable Care Act as well as Roe v. Wade, a decision Coney Barrett has publicly announced as “barbaric.” It also vastly increases the likelihood that Donald Trump will win judicial challenges to the election and be able to stay in office for a second term whether the voters want him to or not. Trump himself said as much when he announced he was determined to replace Ginsburg before the election because “the election will be decided by the Supreme Court” and he wanted a solid six-vote Right-wing majority he can count on to rule however they have to rule to keep him in power.

Even if Joe Biden wins the presidency -- which, in order to have a reasonable chance of taking office, he has to do by such a wide margin the Republicans can’t possibly mount a credible court challenge to it -- and even if the Democrats take control of the United States Senate, which they will have to do if Biden wants to get anything done legislatively, he is still likely to have a tug of war with the Supreme Court similar to what FDR went through in his first term. And with six hard-core Right-wing justices on the bench, all thoroughly committed to the principles of the Federalist Society, he’s unlikely to be saved by a “switch in time” the way Roosevelt was -- or Obama was when chief justice John Roberts, who used to hold the balance of power on the Court but has now been almost totally neutralized, switched sides and voted to uphold the Affordable Care Act in 2012.

The upshot is that while Republicans are increasingly denouncing Democrats for threatening to try what FDR tried -- expanding the Supreme Court to get more liberal and progressive justices and balance out the Right wing -- it is Republicans who successfully packed the courts with hard-Right ideologues. Once again the federal judiciary is reverting to its historical role as a reactionary institution in American politics -- and the current Supreme Court will either keep Donald Trump in the White House or, failing that, prevent the Biden administration from doing much of anything. For Republicans, no matter how people actually vote, it’s “heads we win, tails you lose.”

The “Reverse Bradley Factor”

The phrase “the Bradley Factor” entered American politics in 1982. Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, a political moderate and an African-American, was favored to win that year’s election for governor of California against his Republican opponent, attorney general George Deukmejian. Polls on the eve of the election indicated Bradley had a lead of about 2.5 percentage points. But when the actual votes were counted, he had lost the election by 2.5 points.

After that, American political researchers noticed a pattern: other Black candidates in high-profile state and local races, as well as U.S. House and Senate contests, also seemed to do five percentage points worse in the actual elections as they’d done in the polls. Eventually people came to the conclusion that five percent of voters were too racist to vote for an African-American candidate but also too ashamed of being thought “politically incorrect” to tell that to a pollster.

When Barack Obama was elected President in 2008, his win was widely thought of as the end of the “Bradley Factor.” It wasn’t. Obama was ahead by 10 points in the final polls but won the election by only five points. So the “Bradley Factor” worked against him exactly as predicted. He was just so far ahead he won anyway.

When Donald Trump routinely started doing about five points better in the 2016 Republican Presidential primaries than he was polling, I came to the conclusion that there was a “reverse Bradley factor” working in his favor. I argued that there was about five percent of the American electorate which was planning to vote for Trump because they shared his racism, but once again they were ashamed to tell that to a pollster for fear of being thought “politically incorrect.” As the campaign progressed, and especially after Trump won by eking out small victory margins in traditionally Democratic “battleground states” like Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, I concluded that the reverse Bradley factor had been key to his victory. Not only had he done better throughout the country, and especially in these battlegrounds, than the polls predicted, but the Democrats had been lulled into a false sense of security because they’d read the poll numbers as written and hadn’t applied the reverse Bradley factor to them.

So I’m unconvinced by the current polls showing Biden leading by four to nine points in key battleground states. If you apply the reverse Bradley factor, some of those margins become dead even and some fall within the polls’ margin of error (which is usually three points in a national survey and five points in a single state). Trump himself and his campaign staff are well aware of the reverse Bradley factor working for him; it’s what Trump is referring to when he claims he has “invisible voters” or “shy Trump voters” in the wings, ready to deliver decisive margins to him in enough states to win him the Electoral College even if he loses the overall popular vote (again).

There is an open question as to whether the reverse Bradley factor is as important in 2020 than it was in 2016. It’s possible that the percentage of “invisible” or “shy” Trump voters has shrunk simply because Trump has done such a good job normalizing racism in American political discourse that they’re no longer ashamed to tell pollsters they’re voting for Trump. The polls showing that Trump voters are more enthusiastic about their choice than Biden voters -- two-thirds of Trump voters say they’re genuinely excited about him; two-thirds of Biden voters say they’re merely voting for him to get rid of Trump -- suggest that maybe this year the reverse Bradley factor is less significant than it was in 2016.

But if I were a political operative in the Biden campaign or the Democratic Party as a whole (and especially if I were working for a Black candidate running against a white one, like Jaime Harrison’s campaign for the Senate against Lindsay Graham in South Carolina), I would be routinely reading the polls as if my candidate were doing five points worse than they say, and I would be strategizing accordingly.

Political Violence

If all else fails -- if the “reverse Bradley factor,” the Republicans’ intense efforts at voter suppression and the packed judicial system don’t come through for them to re-elect Trump, they have one more ace up their sleeve: political violence. Already the Biden campaign has had to cancel a scheduled event in Texas because armed vigilantes surrounded the Biden campaign bus and threatened to attack the event if it took place.

The most shocking threat of political violence this year has come from Michigan. It snowballed from a series of protests against the state’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, and the Michigan legislature for imposing statewide masking requirements and other measures to stop the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and the disease it causes, COVID-19. It attracted the support of at least one Michigan county sheriff, a member of the so-called “Posse Comitatus” movement which regards all government authorities above the level of county sheriffs as illegitimate and an affront to freedom. Eventually it spread so far that 13 people have been arrested for an alleged plot to kidnap Governor Whitmer, hold her hostage, put her through a mock “trial” and execute her.

And what has President Trump said about this at his rallies? While he’s challenged Joe Biden to condemn violence at Black Lives Matter protests (which Biden has consistently done), Trump’s only comment on the plot against Governor Whitmer was to say she should be grateful that “my Justice Department” arrested the alleged conspirators. Instead of condemning their actions and saying that violence has no legitimate role in our country for settling political disputes, he’s condemned Governor Whitmer repeatedly and demanded that she “open your state” and “liberate Michigan.”

Trump doesn’t seem to care that this cavalier attitude puts him on the same ideological side as a bunch of white-power extremists. He also called on the far-Right “Proud Boys” movement to “stand back and stand by” -- to do God knows what, though on the face of it it seems like he’s calling on them to use violence to prevent Trump from being removed from office. When he’s asked for a public condemnation of white supremacists, he usually mutters something vaguely like a statement that he doesn’t like them -- but then he immediately changes the focus to the Left-wing Antifa movement (which exists but is far less organized than the white supremacist groups and is mostly just concerned with keeping Right-wing speakers off college campuses) and says, contrary to statements by U.S. intelligence officials, that it’s the domestic Left and not the domestic Right that’s America’s main terrorist threat today.

Donald Trump’s thuggish temperament and his belief in violence has been on display ever since he emerged down the escalator at Trump Tower in 2015 to announce his presidential candidacy and denounce Mexican immigrants as murderers and rapists. He’s openly called on his rally audiences to beat up hecklers and offered to pay their lawyers if they’re prosecuted for it. He’s said he could murder someone in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue and it wouldn’t change his poll numbers one bit. He’s called on police officers to stop pushing down the heads of suspects they’ve arrested and said they should just slam their heads into the roofs of the cars. The only thing that keeps Trump from being a street thug is his utter lack of physical courage; he’s the sort of chickenhawk who wants to pay other people to do his dirty work for him.

And it’s not just free-lance vigilantes with guns and homemade weapons (including the sorts of IED’s -- improvised explosive devices -- that have wreaked havoc on our soldiers in Afghanistan or Iraq) we have to worry about. It’s also the U.S. military. If there’s a protracted struggle over the outcome of the Presidential election and both Biden and Trump claim the right to occupy the White House, eventually the U.S. military may be called upon to resolve the issue. Biden himself has told reporters that if he wins the election and Trump won’t leave the White House, he trusts the U.S. military to do its duty and evict him.

But should he? The current U.S. military isn’t a representative sample of the whole population; it’s a self-selected group of people who signed up, some because they saw no other way to finance a college education and move themselves up economically; some because they wanted for whatever reason to learn to fight in combat for their favorite cause. What poll evidence exists suggests that the U.S. military is farther Right politically than the country as a whole -- and Right-wing organizations, including white supremacist militias, have openly encouraged their members to join the military in order to learn combat skills they can then bring home and use for political violence against what they call the “Zionist-Occupied Government” (ZOG).

In short, there may be many people in the U.S. military who regard their principal allegiance not to the nation as a whole, but to a white-supremacist vision of it in which people of color, non-Christians and Queers are driven out of it or simply eliminated. There may be many more who haven’t imbibed the whole white supremacist Kool-Aid but see President Trump as the last defender of American freedom against radical anarchist socialist Antifa hordes who want to destroy American capitalism and culture. If it comes down to an armed conflict between Biden and Trump factions within the U.S. military -- if individual servicemembers are called on either to live up to their oath to defend the U.S. Constitution or swear the Fuhrer oath to Donakl Trump -- American civilians can’t necessarily count on most of the troops to back the Constitution over Trump.

We got a chilling vision of what the future might look like when General Mark Milley, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, joined the delegation of Trump himself and his top officials to clear Lafayette Square Park in Washington, D.C. of legitimate, nonviolent protesters so Trump could walk to a church and do a photo-op holding a Bible and denouncing Black Lives Matter. Milley not only joined Trump’s party, he did so in full camouflage uniform as if he were entering a battle zone. (Later Milley acknowledged that his joining Trump's anti-democracy procession in uniform had been a mistake.) When you have people like Trump’s current defense secretary saying city governments need to respond to street demonstrations by “dominating the battle space” and Trump sending in unmarked paramilitary forces, apparently responsible only to him, to cities like Portland and Seattle to kidnap protesters and hold them in undisclosed locations, it starts to look like Trump will be able to hold the Presidency at will as long as he wants to through force of arms.

The Consequences

The sheer extent of the anti-democratic tactics Donald Trump and his supporters are willing to use to keep him in office whatever the outcome of the impending election is exceeded only by the potentially catastrophic consequences of another four (or eight, or 12) years of a Trump Presidency. Already it’s a pretty foregone conclusion that if Trump wins another term, the American republic as we have known it for nearly 250 years is history. A re-elected Trump will be free to ignore or eliminate any challenge to his power. He will have an attorney general in place (maybe his current one, maybe someone even crazier) who will fulfill Trump’s long-standing promise to launch politically motivated prosecutions of Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and all the many others he regards as his political enemies.

The direct threat Trump poses to the American experiment in republican self-government (notice that I’m using the word “republican” instead of “democratic” because the framers of the Constitution designed the U.S. to be a republic, not a democracy) is bad enough, but Trump poses an even more direct and immediate threat to the lives of millions of Americans. Already Trump’s White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, has said, “We’re not going to stop the pandemic.” Instead they plan to let it run riot across the country and let the virus kill as many people as it takes to achieve so-called “herd immunity” -- even if that death toll runs in the millions. The simple fact is that there are hundreds of thousands -- perhaps millions -- of Americans living today who will survive if Joe Biden becomes President, and will die if Trump remains in office.

And a Trump re-election is not only a direct threat to the millions of Americans who may die from COVID-19 if Trump continues to fight pandemic mitigation efforts and pursue the “herd immunity” strategy. It threatens the entire human race through his rejection of the scientific fact that humans are permanently and drastically altering the Earth’s climate and we’re fast approaching the so-called “tipping point” at which we’ll no longer be able to stop it. Other Presidents, including Barack Obama, at least paid lip service to the fact of human-caused climate change even though their efforts were too weak to address the climate crisis as it needs to be addressed.

But Donald Trump is actively and scornfully against any effort to mitigate human-caused climate change. In fact, he’s directly intervened with the U.S. government’s own scientific agencies to deny them the ability even to monitor climate change and maintain the evidence that it is happening. The actions of the human race in continuing to burn fossil fuels, generate greenhouse gases and pollute the environment far beyond its ability to repair itself are already threatening the ability of the human species to survive as the dominant life form on this planet -- and Trump’s proud and relentless assault on any attempt at environmental protection is only driving more and faster nails into humanity’s climate-change coffin.

Thursday, October 22, 2020

Heat and Light: Trump, Biden Clash in Second Debate

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

I’m writing this just after viewing the second televised Presidential debate between incumbent President Donald Trump and former Vice-President Joe Biden. As usual, I’m writing these reflections just after the debate took place; I’ve made it my practice to set down my reactions to the debates uncolored by TV reporters and pundits telling me what they think I saw, or should have seen, on my TV.

First of all, if there was a real winner in tonight’s debate it was Kristin Welker, NBC News White House correspondent, who -- at least possibly because she, like the rest of us, watched the first Trump-Biden debate and knew what she was up against -- did a far better job of keeping order than Chris Wallace had done in debate one on September 29. Aided by a rules change from the Commission on Presidential Debates that provided that at least for the opening responses to Welker’s questions, one candidate’s microphone would be turned off while the other was speaking, Welker was able to keep the intrusive interrupting both candidates had done the last time (but Trump far more than Biden) to a minimum and actually make it through her list of questions without going more than 10 minutes over the scheduled 90-minute time slot.

Second, Donald Trump -- though still hardly a paragon of civility -- was far better behaved tonight than he was at the last debate or he’s been at media appearances since. He didn’t openly challenge the moderator or question her objectivity the way he did with Savannah Guthrie at last week’s NBC-TV “town hall” that took the place of the second scheduled debate October 15 (along with a competing event by Biden on ABC-TV) after Trump walked out on it because it would be “virtual” and he and Biden wouldn’t be in the same room at the same time, Nor did he storm out in the middle in disgust the way he did when CBS-TV’s 60 Minutes reporter Lesley Stahl tried to tape an interview with him for this Sunday’s episode.

Before tonight’s debate Trump had said he was going to be “angry” but also “happy,” leading a lot of media pundits to ridicule him and question how he could be both in the same event. The answer was he cooled it -- but did not entirely eliminate -- his personal attacks on Biden and his family, He repeated the bizarre claim that Biden had received $3.5 million from the wife of the mayor of Moscow, and he exploited Biden’s son Hunter’s service on corporate boards in Ukraine and China for considerably more than it was worth.

Biden argued that his son had done nothing wrong in accepting a paid position on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma while Biden was vice-president despite knowing absolutely nothing about the energy industry. The truth is bad enough for Biden -- it’s obvious that Hunter Biden got that cushy job because the company wanted to curry favor with the then-vice-president -- but Trump has consistently embroidered it. He’s made allegations of secret payoffs and embraced the New York Post reporting on allegedly corrupt e-mails supposedly found on Hunter Biden’s laptop which not only Joe Biden but a number of former U.S. intelligence officials have declared are fakes, products of a Russian disinformation campaign to discredit the Bidens and ensure Trump’s re-election.

Trump treated the revelations of Hunter Biden’s alleged e-mails as if their provenance were as unquestionable as the rise of the sun in the east and its setting in the west. He was showing himself a victim of what Los Angeles Times reporter David Lauter had called his “information bubble” in a story published the morning of the debate (https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-10-22/trump-biden-stakes-for-final-presidential-debate).

“Throughout his presidency, and despite losing the popular vote in 2016, Trump has seemed to believe he can win re-election solely with voters who already support him,” Lauter wrote. “That approach has especially shaped his actions during this campaign year, even as a majority of voters consistently tell pollsters they disapprove of the way he is doing his job.” It’s become obvious in his public statements, including his tweets and his retweets (some of which, including one linking to a white-power Web site, Biden called him on tonight) that while previous Republican candidates used Rupert Murdoch-owned news outlets like Fox News and the New York Post as propaganda outlets to reach the GOP base, Trump actually believes their reporting, including the conspiracy theories these outlets spew.

Trump didn’t sound happy tonight. He sounded as angry as he has throughout his meteoric five-year political career, and though he was a bit more civil than he’d been on the previous debate September 29, but that was probably more due to the rules changes, Welker’s aggressive moderating and his own advisors telling him that his poll numbers had gone down five percent after the last debate (though they’ve since gone back to what they were) than any true change of heart on Trump’s part.

Stepping Back from the Carnage

One thing Trump did that was effective was he stepped back from the images of “American carnage” that have been so much a part of his political rhetoric since he started his 2016 campaign. He didn’t once mention the Left-wing Antifa movement or say they were organizing millions of people to take over the streets of America and kill or rape people at random to sow chaos and install an anarchist socialist America. (Actually anarchism and socialism are very different political philosophies, but Trump is far from the only American who lumps them together.)

Instead he actually tried to portray himself as the true friend of Americans of color -- African-Americans in particular. He once again made the preposterous claim that he’s done more for African-Americans than any president since Abraham Lincoln (memo to Trump: does the name “Lyndon Johnson” mean anything to you? The master Congressional manipulator who got the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and a 1966 bill banning discrimination in housing which Trump’s company was prosecuted by the federal government for violating in the 1970’s?), he made one legitimate point against Biden.

It was Biden who shepherded the 1994 crime bill through Congress, including denouncing a generation of young Black men as “super-predators” and imposed long mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent federal drug crimes. And it was Trump and a bipartisan Congressional coalition that passed the First Step Act in 2019 that started to undo the havoc Biden’s crime bill had wreaked on America’s Black communities.

It’s an argument Trump could be making far more effectively if he weren’t also denouncing the Black Lives Matter movement and calling for “law and order” in the streets of American cities (issues he ducked tonight), and if Trump didn’t have the record of open racism Biden called him on, including his demand for the death penalty for the so-called “Central Park Five,” young African-Americans who were prosecuted foir gang-raping a white woman -- for whom Trump demanded the death penalty and who turned out to be innocent.

Trump’s most effective moments during the debate were the ones in which he attacked Biden for not having accomplished any of the things he’s promising now during the 47 years he’s previously served in political office. And Biden’s most effective moments came when he talked directly to the American people and told them he cares about them. It’s been the best argument the Democrats have been able to come up with against Trump’s re-election: “Vote for Joe Biden. He’s a normal human being who actually gives a damn about other people.”

The Dems’ Dilemma: Voters vs. Money

Interestingly, Biden didn’t go for the jugular even when the opportunity presented itself. He did not -- as some of the MS-NBC commentators pre-debate had urged him to -- bring up the record of Trump’s own children in public office, including daughter Ivanka Trump’s blatant violation of the Hatch Act in holding down a paid White House staff position and publicly campaigning for her dad. (The Hatch Act is a 1920’s law that says if you take a job with the federal government, you have to give up quite a few of your First Amendment rights, including public participation in political campaigns.)

Biden defended himself in his best aw-shucks Jimmy Stewart manner when Trump accused him of favoring socialized medicine and being a pawn of New York Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Trump also accused Biden of flip-flopping on the issue of fracking -- a horribly dangerous and environmentally destructive way of getting fossil fuels out of the ground that has increased America’s domestic production of oil and natural gas while both directly and indirectly threatening the environment -- and Biden said he’d opposed fracking on federal lands but not elsewhere.

These responses go directly to the problem Democratic Presidential candidates have had since 1968: the ongoing clash between the party’s progressives (including its younger voters) and its moderates (including most of the party bureaucrats and large donors). I voted for Joe Biden (like an estimated 40 million Americans -- one-third of the likely total of voters -- my husband Charles and I have already cast our ballots) in spite of his opposition to junking private health insurance in favor of a government-run single-payer health plan, and in spite of his support of continued fracking.

The problem just about every Democrat who’s run for the presidency since 1968 -- and a lot of Democrats in down-ballot races as well -- is they have to steer a distance between the progressive demands of much of the Democratic constituency and the moderate priorities of the people who actually fund the party. As former New Jersey Senator Robert Torricelli, who was driven out of office in 2003 over a campaign finance scandal, once said, the demands of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party have a “voter constituency” but don’t have a “financial constituency.”

Republicans don’t have this problem because what their voter constituency and what their financial constituency want are pretty much the same things: lower taxes, cutbacks in government regulation of business, cutbacks in environmental regulations (tonight Trump said over and over again that environmental protection programs are “job killers” and Biden stressed the new jobs developing renewable energy would create) and cutbacks in social programs. The one big Republican voter constituency that doesn’t also have a financial constituency is the evangelical Christian community and its demand for big-government regulations on people’s private lives -- especially their sex lives -- which is why Republican Presidents and Congresses have done more to fulfill the party’s libertarian economic agenda than that of the Christian Right.

Democrats have a fundamental problem because achieving the progressive agenda will require a lot of radical social changes the business community -- even the relatively liberal sectors of it -- will vehemently oppose. The fact is you cannot guarantee all Americans health care as a right -- as Biden promised to do tonight -- while still maintaining a private health-care system run by for-profit insurance companies. And you cannot clean up the environment and reverse the effects of carbon dioxide emissions -- the key factor in global warming and human-caused climate change in general -- if you continue to frack instead of leaving the remaining fossil fuels in the ground.

America’s nature as a capitalist economy throws up immense roadblocks to the kinds of sweeping social, economic and environmental changes the progressive Democrats whose votes Biden needs want. My hope for Biden if he’s elected President is that, like Franklin Roosevelt, he will be pushed to the Left by circumstances and a vibrant activist community like the ones that pushed FDR from the moderate campaign he ran in 1932 (in which he actually accused incumbent Herbert Hoover of running overly big budget deficits in fighting the Great Depression) to his actual policies, including Social Security, the federal minimum wage and the legal recognition of labor unions, as well as using government money actually to hire unemployed people instead of giving “incentives” to the private sector to do it.

Tonight’s debate was full of contradictions that probably won’t get noticed in the media commentaries, including Trump’s assertion at one point that Biden was the candidate of Wall Street (which is largely true; there are reports that Wall Streeters are shifting their campaign donations to Biden, largely out of fear of continued economic chaos if Trump is re-elected) and at other points that Biden’s “socialist” economic agenda will devastate the economy. I’d have liked to see Biden ask Trump, “You say that I’m the candidate of Wall Street and that I’m a socialist whose policies will destroy the economy. If I’m going to destroy the economy, why would Wall Street be giving me money?”

The Looming Threat of the Pandemic

And of course there was the looming threat of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic over the debate, as it is over the entire campaign and the future of American people. Trump got the first question on this topic and ran through his litany of assertions that he stopped the epidemic in its tracks by banning travel from China to the U.S. while Biden was denouncing him as “xenophobic.” (Biden’s response was that he has indeed called Trump “xenoiphobic,” but on issues other than the pandemic.) Trump, as always, seemed to regard SARS-CoV-2 as yet another attack on him personally, saying that he was sailing to an easy re-election on a growing economy until this pesky virus from China came along and ruined things for him.

On the pandemic, Biden does what he does best: he evoked, in terms at once chilling and deeply moving, the families who have an empty place at their dinner tables, the wives or husbands who reach out through force of habit to their spouses in bed only to realize that they’re not there anymore due to COVID-19 (the name of the disease the SARS-CoV-2 virus causes), the human cause of the pandemic. Trump, with his Orwellian doubleplusgood doublethinker’s ability to say contradictory things and believe both of them (and argue both of them with equal sincerity), said he has a great deal of respect for Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, even though Trump has publicly denounced Fauci as “a disaster” and apparently hasn’t spoken to him privately in weeks.

I have no particular love for Fauci -- in his early days in his current job he was so spectacularly incompetent in his response to AIDS that tens of thousands of my Gay male brothers died unnecessarily -- and it’s a tribute to his skills as a bureaucratic politician that he still has that job after 36 years even though he started it with such a spectacular failure. During the debate Trump once again reminded America that in the early days of the pandemic Fauci had told the American people not to wear masks -- something Fauci has probably regretted every day of his life since then. Fauci said it because he was worried that there wouldn’t be enough masks for medical personnel if everyone in the U.S. started wearing them.

Indeed, one of the weirdest aspects of the U.S. response to SARS-CoV-2 has been the whole politicization of masks. It’s not like we weren’t warned -- in the flu pandemic of 1918-1919 the public health director of San Francisco made masks his front-line defense, and he got ridiculed for it. A doctor reporting on that pandemic in 1925 for the American Medical Association said masks were good for “individual prophylaxis” but not “community prophylaxis” -- that wearing a mask could protect you personally either from getting or giving the infection, but it wasn’t going to stop the pandemic because there’d be the same problem there is now: lack of compliance.

In his classic account of the 1918-1919 flu, America’s Forgotten Pandemic, historian Alfred Crosby wrote that the mask requirement in San Francisco turned into an object of ridicule. In this pandemic something even worse has happened: mask-wearing has become a political statement of which side you are on in America’s great political divide. We heard that once again in tonight’s debate, with Trump coming on without a mask and Biden entering with one (though he quickly removed it before he went on camera). A mask has become as much a visual symbol that you don’t like Trump and the Republicans as a MAGA hat has become a symbol that you do.

Trump tried to justify his handling of SARS-CoV-2 tonight the way he always has: he said it was a totally unexpected viral threat, that it was China’s fault for not cooperating with international health authorities early on (this is actually a defensible argument, but not from the President who pulled the U.S, out of the World Health Organization at the height of the pandemic), and that we need to reopen the economy and send kids back to school immediately regardless of the potential health hazards.

Of course, he’s also downplayed the potential health hazards, saying that children are virtually immune from either getting COVID-19 or spreading SARS-CoV-2 (neither, alas, is true) and the whole risk of the pandemic has been overhyped by sinister elites who want to use it as an excuse to destroy the American economy. In his Los Angeles Times article cited above, David Lauter quoted Trump’s statement at a recent rally denouncing the media for over-reporting on the pandemic and wrote, “That sentiment reflects the widespread agreement within Trump’s bubble that the pandemic has passed its peak and was never as bad as the media said.”

Unfortunately for Trump and all his wishful thinking that the virus would “just go away” and economic lockdowns were not only useless but counterproductive, viruses have their own agenda. A virus is a submicroscopic particle of nucleic acid, proteins and a lipid coat that allow them to attach themselves to cells, infect them and use those cells to replicate. The more opportunities we give SARS-CoV-2 particles to do that, the longer the pandemic will last and the more people will die from it. There are really only two ways to stop a viral epidemic: either you develop a vaccine so the human immune system will be able to defend against the infection, or you eliminate the transmission vectors that allow the virus to spread from one host to another.

The 1918-1919 flu pandemic ended not because we developed a vaccine (back then scientists still thought flu was caused by a bacterium, not a virus), but because World War I ended and thus humans stopped creating near-ideal transmission vectors (crowded troop ships, overcrowded field hospitals and the filthy trenches in which the soldiers lived during combat). This led the killer strains of flu to die out because they couldn’t spread to new hosts as fast as they were killing the old ones. Right now our best shot at stopping people from dying of COVID-19 is to wear masks, enforce social distancing and keep limiting large public gatherings -- the very measures so many of Trump’s supporters routinely denounce as instruments of some vast authoritarian conspiracy to undermine America’s economy and turn us all into slaves.

I want to end these reflections by quoting from a real leader, one Trump’s most reality-challenged Republican supporters insist on comparing him to even though they couldn’t be more different. HIs name was Winston Churchill, and he led the British government through most of World War II. “There is no worse mistake in public leadership than to hold out false hopes, soon to be swept away,” Churchill said in early 1942, when the war situation looked dire for both Britain and the U.S. “The British people can face peril or misfortune with fortitude and buoyancy, but they bitterly resent being deceived or finding that those responsible for their affairs are themselves dwelling in a fool’s paradise.”

Winston Churchill was a leader. Donald Trump is a huckster who tells people whatever he thinks he needs to say to get them to do what he wants -- buy condos in Trump Tower, gamble at Trump casinos, attend Trump University, or vote for him. Had he followed Churchill’s advice, been honest with the American people about the dangers posed by SARS-CoV-2, and embraced the radical public-health measures that could have stopped it well before the U.S., death toll reached 220,000, Trump would probably have been hailed as a great leader and be coasting to an easy re-election. Instead he’s trailing badly in the polls -- a standing this debate is not likely to change -- and, with so many people having already voted, he’s running out of time to stage the dramatic from-behind comeback he would need to win re-election fairly.

Monday, October 19, 2020

Trump's Sicknesses

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

President Donald J. Trump is a very sick man.

He’s sick physically with COVID-19, the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus that has created a pandemic which has not only killed 215,000 Americans at this writing but has infected over eight million just in this country. He announced he had it a little over two weeks ago and, with the total and bizarre lack of any trace of humility that has marked his character almost since he thrust his way out of his mother’s womb 74 years ago, he’s claimed that he’s been “cured” of the disease thanks to state-of-the-art medical care and the “good genes” he’s claimed for his family.

He’s sick psychologically. Ever since he emerged from his penthouse at Trump Tower over five years ago to begin his foray into politics, he’s been diagnosed by psychologists studying his actions, statements and overall character as a narcissist, a psychopath with delusions of grandeur. Most of the psychologists who offered these diagnoses acknowledged that since they had never even met Trump, much less treated him professionally, their analyses should be taken with a grain of salt. Then Trump’s niece Mary, who has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and has literally known him all her life, came out with her book about him that seconded all the pathologies he’d been diagnosed with from people with her expertise but without her personal connection to him.

And he’s sick spiritually. Trump’s evil genius has been to drag down everything he touches to his sordid level. The United States of America has done an awful lot of bad things in its history -- most notably the genocide against Native Americans (as Adolf Hitler told Edward R. Murrow, “I’m only doing to the Jews what you did to the Indians”) and the importation of Africans as slaves. But it’s also done some good things; it’s been a beacon to the rest of the world that a large, heterogeneous nation can govern itself as a representative republic and can give its citizens the final say over its affairs as well as opportunities for economic advancement far beyond what the class-bound societies of Europe and Asia offered.

Trump’s sickness has infected not only the American body politic but the world’s as well. At home he has completed the process Richard Nixon began of using the White House to divide the nation, declaring its whiter, more rural, more “traditional” in religion and lifestyle, the “real Americans” and everyone else beyond the pale. He’s insisted that there are “good people on both sides” in clashes between white supremacists seeking to remake the U.S. as a whites-only country and recycling the Nazis’ anti-Jewish slogans and the counter-protesters in the streets who challenged them. In his debate with major-party opponent Joe Biden September 29 and his solo town-hall TV appearance October 15 Trump made pro forma statements that he opposed white supremacy but then launched his bitterest and most severe (and most sincere) attacks on the Left-wing “Antifa” activists who challenge them.

Worldwide, Trump has not only pulled the U.S. out of international agreements like the Paris climate-change accords and the Iran nuclear deal, he’s taken America out of the World Health Organization at the height of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. He’s sucked up to enemies of freedom like Russian President Vladimir Putin, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and, most notoriously, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un (of whom he said, “We fell in love”). At the same time he’s systematically undermined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), founded in 1949 to protect Western Europe against the threat of a Russian invasion, and most recently he’s announced sharp cutbacks in the numbers of U.S. troops stationed in Germany to deter or resist such an attack.

Trump’s sickness has corroded even America’s and Americans’ willingness to believe in the cornerstone of republican (small-”r”) governance: the faith and trust that elected officials will leave power when the voters tell them to. In 2016 he said at one of his debates with Hillary Clinton that he would consider the election outcome fair “if I win,” and in 2020 he’s used the considerable powers of the presidency to make sure he can’t lose, including trashing the entire U.S. Postal Service just to make it harder for voters concerned about the pandemic to cast their ballots by mail. He’s pre-emptively denounced the whole process of mail-in voting as inherently rigged and fraudulent (unless it’s run by Republicans, as in his adoptive home state of Florida, from which he himself will vote by mail) and has made it clear that if he leads the count as it stands on the night of November 3, 2020 he will regard that result as final no matter how many votes for Biden come in after that.

Indeed, I suspect Trump’s determination to rig this year’s election and ensure he will stay President whether American voters want him to or not is at the heart of his unseemly rush to get federal appeals judge Amy Coney Barrett onto the U.S. Supreme Court before November 3. Part of his determination to get Barrett on the court is that, based on her law review articles and other public statements, Barrett is a nearly certain vote to throw out the Affordable Care Act -- the landmark health insurance law passed by President Obama and a Democratic Congress in 2009 -- and to reverse Roe v. Wade so that states will have virtually unlimited power to make abortion illegal. But Trump is also doing it for himself: he has said publicly that “the election will be decided by the Supreme Court,” and he wants three of his own people, as well as at least two other justices he thinks he can count on, to hear the lawsuit he will file to stop the vote counting after November 3 and make the decision he wants.

When Trump announced that he was positive for SARS-CoV-2 and was almost immediately rushed off to Walter Reed Medical Center (the state-of-the-art facility named after the courageous public-health official who in the 1890’s figured out what caused yellow fever and thus allowed the Panama Canal to be constructed safely) for treatment with experimental drugs unavailable to virtually any other COVID-19 patient in the world, I had hopes that he would see the error of his ways. I hoped that, like British Prime Minister Boris Johnson -- who also had downplayed and ridiculed the dangers of COVID-19 until he caught it himself -- Trump would learn how serious this illness is from having it himself, and that understanding would inform his judgment about it and improve his policy decisions on the pandemic.

My hopes were shared by Scott Jennings, a former policy advisor to Republican President George W. Bush, who wrote in the October 2 Los Angeles Times (https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-10-02/op-ed-trumps-covid-19-diagnosis-gives-him-a-huge-opportunity-if-he-can-muster-some-humility):

“Trump’s illness also provides him with an opportunity to change the trajectory of the conversation on coronavirus, something he has badly needed. He can now cast himself with the people he governs, and offer at least a thimble-full of humility.

“Essentially, for a president who has presided over a very divided country, there’s a simple message for this moment: We are all in this together.

“It’s a sobering moment for the world to see the U.S. president contract a potentially deadly virus in real time. From their president, the American people will want resolve, optimism and a sense of calm. And they will want — and need — to hear from him some acknowledgment that he is now experiencing the same disruption that American citizens have since early this year.”

We were wrong. As Jennings also wrote: “Trump’s usual style is to project that he’s uncommon — uncommonly wealthy, uncommonly suited to fix the nation’s problems, uncommonly credentialed (i.e. not a politician), uncommonly accomplished (‘I’ve done more in 47 months than you have in 47 years …’).”

Donald Trump has always presented himself as essentially Superman -- both in the sense Friedrich Nietzsche meant when he coined the term, as an advance in human evolution comparable to the leap from ape to human, and in the sense of the comic-book character created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. It wasn’t surprising when reports came out that Trump had actually wanted to wear a T-shirt with the comic-book Superman logo and thrust open his suit jacket and shirt to reveal it when he returned to the White House from Walter Reed after just three days. He was talked out of that stunt, but it’s a pretty good insight into how he wanted the world in general, and the American electorate in particular, to perceive him as so totally uncommon a specimen of humanity that he could quickly and easily beat a virus that had already claimed the lives of 215,000 of his countrymen.

As I’ve written before about Trump, his most salient characteristic is an uncanny ability to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. He did it in 1991, when he was able to convince the bankers he owed millions to on his Atlantic City casinos that they shouldn’t force him to declare bankruptcy and sell those properties because they’d be worth more with his name on them than without it. The bankers let Trump keep his name on the casinos as long as he agreed not to have anything to do with actually running them -- and Trump suddenly found he had a new business model. He could sit back on the top floor of Trump Tower and collect worldwide royalties on the use of his name without the bother of building or operating anything.

As the New York Times recently revealed, Trump once again came within a hair’s-breadth of a catastrophic business collapse in the 1990’s. This time his savior was TV “reality” show producer Mark Burnett, who after getting turndowns from other, more genuinely successful financial bigshots, offered Trump the lead in a series called The Apprentice. The show paid Trump enough to cover his huge business losses -- which led the Times reporters to make the acid comment that Trump had made more money playing a tycoon on TV than he had actually trying to be one. It also helped elect Trump president: despite his at best uneven and at worst disastrous record as a real-life businessperson, millions of Americans believed Trump was the most intelligent, brilliant, sagacious and successful capitalist who’d ever lived -- because that was the role they’d seen him play on The Apprentice.

It worked for Trump again in 2016, when he ran for President and closed in on the general election with all the polls saying he’d lose by margins of up to 10 points -- exactly the same leads for Hillary Clinton the same pollsters are giving Joe Biden today. Though he didn’t win the overall popular vote -- and therefore he wouldn’t be President if America were truly a democracy instead of the republic the Founding Fathers created (quite deliberately, as James Madison explained in Federalist #10, in which he said that unlike a democracy, a republic would “refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations”) -- he exploited the anti-democratic features Madison and the other authors of the Constitution had inserted into it and became the fifth President in U.S. history to carry the Electoral College without winning an actual plurality of Americans’ votes.

Indeed, it’s indicative of Trump’s obsession with himself as the “Comeback Kid” who will triumph over any adversity and come out on top that, before his niece Mary Trump broke with him, he wanted her to ghost-write a book for him called The Art of the Comeback. And it will be far more satisfying psychologically for Trump if he wins re-election in 2020 after a whole campaign season of polls saying he was behind than it would have been if he’d led in the polls throughout the campaign. A victory against all the odds in 2020 would only confirm the sense he’s had his entire life that he is an unstoppable figure of destiny -- while a defeat, in case the polls are right and Biden leads in the vote count on election night and does so by such a margin even someone as unscrupulous as Donald Trump can’t mount a credible legal campaign against it -- will still leave Trump a formidable political figure.

He’ll still have millions of Twitter followers who will hang on his every word. He’ll still have a huge influence over Republican base voters who will buy his contention that he and they were “robbed” of a victory rightfully theirs. And he will still be eligible to run for another term in 2024 -- which will tie the Republican Party into virtual knots as they wage an internal battle royal over whether the long-term course for their party is to re-embrace Trump or repudiate him once and for all and deal with their gigantic case of post-Trump PTSD. Previous Presidents who lost re-election campaigns either went gently into that political good night or found other ways to serve their country -- as John Quincy Adams, Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter did.

Not Donald Trump. Already, as the Los Angeles Times noted in a front-page article October 17, Trump is closing out his re-election campaign by making defeat seem like a personal insult. Times reporters Eli Stokols and Noah Bierman began their article, “Sinking in the polls, strapped for cash and facing a potential tidal wave of early Democratic voting as coronavirus cases have soared, President Trump has found new culprits to blame for his political mess -- his own supporters, Cabinet members and even fellow Republican leaders.”

The article quotes Trump’s bizarre comment at one of his recent rallies -- huge events attracting thousands of people at a time when the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has closed theatres, concerts and virtually all other forms of mass in-person entertainment -- to suburban women voters: “Suburban women, will you please like me? I saved your damned neighborhoods!” It’s a weird statement that speaks to Trump’s eternal sense of status anxiety as well as his racism, since what he’s telling suburban women he “saved your damned neighborhoods” from is Obama-era regulations that would have required suburban developments to include “affordable housing.” To Trump, and to the racists that are such a key part of his base, “affordable housing” is code for letting those [insert racial slurs here] move next door to you.

On the October 16 episode of the PBS news show Washington Week, some of the commentators were noting that in 2016 Trump’s campaign reflected and expressed the grievances of his supporters -- particularly the sense white working-class people had that their jobs were being taken away by immigrants or outsourced to Mexico or China by corrupt trade deals (one reason Hillary Clinton was so awful a choice for the Democrats to run against Trump was her husband’s instrumental role in pushing those deals and getting them approved by Congress) or threatened by preferential treatment for women and/or people of color.

Today, the Washington Week commentators argued, Trump seems to use those big campaign rallies no one else dares have at all to express his own sense of grievance, his narcissist’s obsession with hearing (or making) the rest of the world tell him he’s as wonderful as he believes (or likes to pretend) he is. The commentators were saying that Trump’s campaign has become too self-referentlal to appeal to masses of disenchanted Americans the way he did in 2016 -- and yet to a large extent Trump has built a huge sense of identification between himself and his base. “They’re attacking me because I’m standing up for you,” Trump tells his base voters, “so when they attack me they’re really attacking you. Therefore, you must strike back at them by voting for me.”

Donald Trump is both simple and highly complex at the same time. He’s simple in the sense that he’s straightforward about who and what he is -- including the fact that he really only cares about himself and is willing to sacrifice the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans to SARS-CoV-2 just to keep the economy looking good. At the same time he’s highly complex in the sheer number of pathologies he has and the huge amount of destruction he’s willing to wreak on his country just to salve his chronically wounded sense of self-worth. Often when I read or hear journalists reporting on the sheer number and extent of Trump’s lies -- and how often one set of Trump lies flatly contradicts another set -- I think of Walt Whitman’s lines from Song of Myself: “I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am large; I contain multitudes.”

And perhaps the most frightening aspect of Trump’s pathology is the sense of invincibility he has created around himself. Earlier in this year polls were reporting that two-thirds of Americans thought Donald Trump would be re-elected President in 2020, even though overwhelming majorities in those same polls didn’t want him to be. An op-ed in the October 15 Los Angeles Times said that, despite months of polls saying Trump is behind, 56 percent of the respondents in a recent Gallup survey said they thought Trump would win the 2020 election -- and only 40 percent thought Joe Biden would.

That’s why the Democratic Party is responding to the polls favoring Biden by demanding that people redouble their efforts to make sure they get their ballots in and counted early. If the Democrats learned one lesson from 2016, it’s not to trust too much in polls -- especially when your opponent is Donald Trump. I’ve long thought Trump had a “reverse Bradley factor” going for him -- a body of about five percent of the electorate who are racist enough to vote for him but too ashamed or embarrassed by it to admit it to a poll taker -- and I suspect a major factor in his 2016 win is that Democrats didn’t realize that and believed they had the race won on the basis of the polls.

It’s hard to make any predictions as to just how the 2020 election will turn out. Just about anything from a sweeping Biden victory to a sweeping Trump victory seems possible. Voter suppression by the Trump administration and Republican politicians -- especially in GOP-controlled state governments (and in the U.S. it is the states that actually run the election) -- has become not just a strategy but the strategy of the Republican Party. Even before Trump took office, but especially during his Presidency, the Republicans have rejected any attempts to broaden their appeal beyond their base. Instead, they have sought to win elections by subtracting voters from the other side’s base.

America is living through an existential nightmare. Our country is being led by a madman who doesn’t care about anything or anyone but himself. A re-elected Donald Trump will hasten not only the demise of American democracy but -- because of his relentless attacks on any law, regulation or international agreement to protect the environment against the threat of human climate change -- the death of human civilization itself. And yet at least 40 percent of the American people want to stay on this lemming ride off the cliff to disaster … and it’s impossible for a man who’s made as many comebacks against seemingly impossible odds as Donald Trump to be written off just because he momentarily seems to be behind in his re-election effort.

Saturday, October 10, 2020

San Diego County Democrats Endorse Todd Gloria for Mayor -- and So Do I

I just received this e-mail from San Diego County Democratic Party chair Will Rodriguez-Kennedy endorsing Assemblymember Todd Gloria for Mayor of San Diego. I enthusiastically second that endorsement. Both Todd and his opponent, Barbara Bry, are nominal Democrats. But Todd is a true Democrat while Barbara is a DINO (Democrat in Name Only).

I lost any sympathy I might have had for Barbara when she came to a candidates' forum at the San Diego Democrats for Equality and boasted that she had killed off all the retail shopping space in Horton Plaza. Not only had she done this to fulfill her mad dream of turning Horton Plaza into a giant campus for high-tech firms, she was actually proud of it! She bragged that she had managed to stop the city from keeping at least some retail space in the center.

It's hard to list all the reasons Barbara's mad scheme is a terrible idea. One, it eliminated a major retail space from downtown and thereby forced downtown and East Village residents to shop at Mission Valley, Fashion Valley and other temples to southern California's notoriously auto-centric culture. It goes totally against San Diego's "City of Villages" plan to make each neighborhood as totally self-sufficient as possible and thereby minimze auto travel and its malign effect on the environment.

Also, as Barbara herself acknowledged, attracting high-tech companies to cities has invariably led to major increases in housing costs -- which in San Diego are way too high already! Barbara said she had a plan to counteract this, but she didn't say what it would be. What's worse, much of Barbara's TV campaign is based on the idea of giving neighborhoods more say in what gets built there -- a nice idea in theory, but in practice neighborhood organizations usually use that power to kill any attempt to develop affordable housing. So Barbara's proposals will raise the already astronomical cost of housing in San Diego and frustrate attempts by the city and nonprofit corporations to add to the affordable housing stock.

Finally, Barbara's attempt to turn San Diego into "Silicon Valley South" won't even work. Even before the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, high-tech companies were already decentralizing their operations and allowing more employees to work at home. The pandemic has already accelerated that change and led many companies to reduce instead of increase their use of office space. Suppose Barbara's reconstructed Horton Plaza opens -- and no one wants to rent space in it? Then she's just destroyed a valuable community resource for no reason at all!

I've known Todd Gloria for years. He's not a flashy politician who pushes great schemes and tries to convince voters he's their friend. He's a steady hard worker who quietly and unflamboyantly gets the job done. I will be proud to vote for Todd, for all the reasons Will lists below as well as what I've seen from him in his various offices. -- Mark Gabrish Conlan


*****

The San Diego mayor’s race is between two Democrats. Our party has endorsed one of them, Assemblymember Todd Gloria, and for good reason.

Not only are the candidates' positions on important issues different, but their behavior in seeking the office illustrates why Todd Gloria received the overwhelming support of the San Diego County Democratic Party and is strongly backed by our local, state, and federal Democratic elected officials. On the issues, Todd stands out.

• Housing: Todd doesn’t give lip service to this issue. He supports more housing near jobs and transit, and he’s willing to make the zoning and regulatory changes necessary to build more homes so prices come down. In communicating her housing position, Todd’s opponent has used language like “They are coming for our homes” and “There goes the neighborhood” and has continually misrepresented Todd’s position.

• Homelessness: Todd supports a compassionate, “housing first” approach to providing permanent, supportive housing instead of temporary shelters. We can’t expect people to tackle mental illness and drug addiction without a roof over their heads. He believes in providing the housing and wrap-around services that people need to get off the streets long-term. His opponent has changed her position and no longer supports the “housing first” model of ending homelessness, instead saying “reducing red tape” will solve this crisis.

• Pandemic Recovery: Todd understands that working and middle-class people have been left out of the economic boom of the past few years. He will work to ensure that ends with our pandemic recovery. Todd is endorsed by nearly every labor organization in San Diego because his policies are good for working San Diegans. His opponent says these endorsements are bad for San Diego.

• Racial Justice: Todd has a full racial justice plan that goes beyond police reform and lays out ways we can solve the racial injustices that plague our institutions. His opponent has no racial justice plan.

• Transportation: Todd envisions a clean transportation future for the City of San Diego and will fight to enact strategies that offer true mobility options, reduce congestion, conform to the City’s Climate Action Plan, and prioritize safety while encouraging economic growth. His opponent has no transportation plan but criticizes Todd’s, saying it will require tunneling under neighborhoods.

• Climate Action: Todd authored San Diego's Climate Action Plan, committing the city to move to 100% renewable energy by 2035. Under his opponent’s watch, the city has failed to meet many of the goals in the plan over the last four years.

San Diego County Democrats strongly believe that Todd Gloria is the best candidate to be our next mayor.

In Solidarity,

Will Rodriguez Kennedy
Chair, San Diego County Democratic Party

Wednesday, October 07, 2020

The Vice-Presidential Debate: The Grownups Take Over

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

The Presidential debate series continued October 7 with a far more polite conversation between Vice-President Mike Pence of Indiana and Senator Kamala Harris of California than the one we got on September 29 between the two heads of their tickets, President Donald Trump and former vice-president Joe Biden. It helped that Pence is a far less confrontational and openly judgmental public performer than Trump, and that Harris is considerably younger and quicker on her feet, mentally, than Biden.

Though this debate -- moderated by Susan Page of USA Today, who sometimes had to talk over the candidates to get them to cut short their answers and stay within the time limits of the debate format but had an easier job than Chris Wallace, who moderated (or tried to) the Trump-Biden debate eight days earlier -- was considerably more collegial, it also exposed the deep fault lines that divide American politics today.

Mike Pence was an articulate spokesperson (far more so than his boss!) for a Republican vision of America in which taxes are cut to the bone for the wealthiest American individuals and corporations. Supposedly the benefits from this are supposed to “trickle down” to everyone else through increased investment that puts more people to work and thus benefits the non-rich. Throughout the debate Pence repeated the Republican mantra that tax cuts, deregulating business, “unleashing” the American energy sector through continued production of fossil fuels by hydraulic fracturing (so-called “fracking”) and adopting a lassiez-faire attitude towards regulation and capitalism in general is the way to ensure economic prosperity.

And yet when Pence was asked, via a question about Trump’s nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett of Indiana to the U.S. Supreme Court and the possibility (actually a virtual certainty, given her writings in judicial opinions and law review articles) that she will provide the fifth vote at long last to reverse the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that gave American women a constitutional right to some (though not all) abortions, he made it clear not only his own so-called “pro-life” views but his willingness to use the powers of government to make them the law of the land. Because Mike Pence personally believes abortion is wrong, he wants states to have the power to make it illegal (though he dodged Page’s question of whether he would support an attempt in Indiana to make abortion illegal if Roe is overturned).

One of the most fascinating aspect of American politics over the last 40 years has been the extraordinary longevity of the Republican coalition between economic libertarians and social conservatives. When religious leaders like Jerry Falwell, Sr. and Pat Robertson brought the radical Christian Right into the Republican Party in 1980 a lot of people, including me, thought that coalition was inherently unstable and would soon collapse. After all, it argued that government should keep its hands off the private business sector and the economy as a whole -- but we should have the biggest of big governments when it came to people’s most intimate decisions about their private lives, particularly their sex lives and how they shoud deal with the consequences therefrom, good and bad.

It wasn’t always like this. Before Falwell, Robertson and others brought the Christian Right into the Republican Party in the late 1970’s and started saying their issue positions were the only “moral” ones, militant Christians involved in politics, from William Jennings Bryan to Jimmy Carter, had generally been economic progressives who believed government should use its power to redress economic inequality and the exploitative aspects of capitalism. Also, secular conservatives like Barry Goldwater had usually applied the philosophy of “that government is best that governs least” to the bedroom as well as the boardroom -- which is why Goldwater shocked quite a few younger Rightists when in the 1980’s he came out as pro-choice on abortion and for adding Queer people to the protected classes under the 1964 Civil Rights Act (which, ironically, he’d voted against in the first place).

Today, however, there is virtually no dissent within the Republican Party on either lassiez-faire economics or a highly interventionist government policing people’s private behavior. Republicans have accepted the seemingly contradictory position that we should have “small government” when it comes to the economy and “big government” when it comes to sex. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party remains deeply divided between so-called “progressives” and “moderates” -- between supporters of broad social change and limits on capital, particularly to address environmental threats and economic inequality (though there was almost no talk at all from either candidates or moderators at both debates so far about economic inequality) and those who want to tinker at the edges of capitalism to alleviate some of its problems without fundamentally changing or challenging the system.

The Democrats are acutely vulnerable in each election cycle over those differences and the need to unite the two wings of the party. Since 1968, when between them Richard Nixon and George Wallace won 57 percent of the Presidential vote to Hubert Humphrey’s 43 percent (thus spelling the end of the Democratic New Deal coalition and the rise of the Right-wing consensus that has mostly --- though not totally -- dominated American politics since), Republicans have won eight Presidential elections to the Democrats’ five. The three Democrats who have won Presidential elections since 1968 -- Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama -- were all relatively young and were able to “square the circle” by appearing more progressive than they really were, thereby holding younger, more Left voters while not scaring off the moderates.

Obviously, Joe Biden is not that sort of candidate. In 2017 the then-70-year-old Donald Trump broke Ronald Reagan’s record as the oldest person ever inaugurated as President. Now Trump is 74 and Biden is 78, so if he wins Biden will break Trump’s record as the oldest President ever. Ironically, Biden ended up as Obama’s vice-president for the same reason Dick Cheney ended up as George W. Bush’s -- both Bush and Obama were seen as relative lightweights because of their relative youth and they needed older running mates to offer experience and gravitas to their tickets -- but Biden faced the same problem in picking his running mate in 2020 that Trump did in 2016.

Trump’s problem was that he needed to shore up his support from the evangelical Christian side of the Republican base -- so he recruited a hard-core dyed-in-the-wool evangelical to convince the Christian Right they could safely vote for Trump despite his three wives, his numerous adulteries, his ownership of casinos (gambling is supposed to be a big bozo-no-no among Right-wing Christians) and his overall image as an amoral huckster. Biden’s problem was he needed a running mate that would check off some affirmative-action boxes and get the progressives more excited about him while still not alienating the moderates.

In the last debate between Biden and his last remaining rival for the Democratic nomination, Bernie Sanders, Biden carefully parsed his words and said he would appoint a woman (her race carefully unspecified) as his running mate and a Black woman to his first vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court. From that I guessed who he had in mind was Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar for vice-president and Michelle Obama for the high court. Then African-American George Floyd was killed in Klobuchar’s home state by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, a nationwide protest movement erupted -- and it turned out in her previous jobs as district attorney of Hennepin County (which includes Minneapolis) and attorney general of Minnesota, Klobuchar had had the chance to prosecute Chauvin on one or more of the 17 previous complaints of police brutality against him -- and she hadn’t.

So, realizing that she had become a political liability to the Democratic Party in general and the African-Americans of its voting base in particular, Klobuchar took herself out of the running and suggested that Biden pick a woman of color. Accordingly Biden picked Kamala Harris, partly because of her bi-racial background (her father was African-American and her mom was from India) and partly because she had a similar political trajectory to Klobuchar’s -- from county district attorney to state attorney general to U.S. Senator. Biden was clearly hoping that putting a career prosecutor on his ticket would help neutralize the inevitable Republican accusations that a President Biden would be “soft on crime.”

In tonight’s debate, that dynamic played out in some interesting and surprising ways. Harris pointed out that she was the only person on the stage who had actually prosecuted criminals -- including white-collar criminals like bankers as well as murderers. Pence attacked her from the Left, saying that during Harris’s tenure as California attorney general Black people were prosecuted 19 times as often as white people committing similar crimes. It was a reflection of a criticism Trump could be making of Biden as well -- it was Biden who was the principal Senate sponsor of the 1994 crime bill that made so-called “no-knock warrants” in drug cases, like the one that got Breonna Taylor killed, legal -- and Trump who signed into law the “First Step Act” to start minimizing the inequalities in sentencing white and Black people for similar crimes. But it’s hard for either Trump or Pence to make that case when they’re also telling white suburban voters to be very, very afraid of being murdered in their beds by Antifa thugs if Biden and Harris are elected.

Indeed, Pence’s comment was indicative of one of the major problems with this debate -- and with debates in general. Both candidates were spitting out a lot of statistics at each other and the audience with virtually no opportunity to fact-check them. Ironically it was Pence who quoted more than once the famous line from the late New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan that “everybody is entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own set of facts.” It’s a phrase that’s become a staple of Trump’s opponents, but Pence used it tonight to suggest that the Democrats in general and Harris in particular were attacking Trump’s wonderful, glowing record without any hard evidence to back them up.

A few more random notes about tonight’s debate: Harris was considerably less edgy through most of it than she’s been confronting Trump administration officials and nominees as a Senator in committee hearings. It’s also clear that, though Hillary Clinton may have lost the 2016 election, she’s won the Battle of the Pantsuits. Through most of my lifetime women candidates for political office wouldn’t have dared show up for a debate or any other formal campaign occasion in anything but a dress. Harris came out in a black pantsuit so severely cut it looked almost like a twin of Pence’s.

Perhaps the most interesting exchanges of the debate were the ones about climate change, whether humans are responsible for any of it and what can be done to stop it. Here the irony was that it was Pence, forced to defend the record of a President who has referred to human-caused climate change as a “hoax,” who was pledging that the administration in which he serves would “follow the science” on climate change. Trump’s record on climate change is similar to his record on the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic: he “follows the science,” all right, but he cherry-picks the scientists he’s going to follow and rejects the mainstream in favor of oddballs who agree with him.

Here Pence was cleverly attempting to split that delicate balance any Democratic Presidential candidate has to walk between holding young progressive voters while not alienating older moderate ones. The more Harris repeated that neither she nor Biden wanted an outright ban on fracking -- an insanely destructive environmental practice in its own right that releases fossil fuels that, for the sake of the earth and its continued ability to sustain human life, damned well better be left in the ground -- the more she demoralized younger (and some not-so-younger, like me) Democratic voters who believe that stopping climate change before it’s too late is the political issue of our time.

Pence also praised President Trump’s decision to pull the U.S. out of the Paris accords on climate change -- the ones widely criticized by environmentalists for not being stringent enough to achieve the sweeping reductions in earth and ocean temperatures we need to preserve our planet’s ability to sustain human life -- and said that efforts to protect the environment are “job-killers.” His most absurd moment said when he claimed Biden had a ridiculous plan to retrofit four million buildings with solar panels, which he said would destroy American jobs. It didn’t seem to occur to him -- and since this was at the end of an exchange Harris didn’t have the chance to point it out, either -- that if you want to retrofit four million buildings with solar panels you’re going to have to pay people to do that work, and therefore you will be creating jobs.

Overall, at tonight’s debate Pence came off as a sort of kinder, gentler Trump -- but still a spokesperson for a very noxious agenda. His most hectoring moment came when he asked Harris again and again if she and Biden would seek to add more justices to the Supreme Court if Barrett is confirmed and Trump’s first term ends with a 6-3 Right-wing Court majority. I have a hard time believing Biden, even with a Democratic Senate, could “pack” the Court even if they wanted to. If Franklin Roosevelt couldn’t do it in 1937, coming off a landslide re-election and with much larger Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress than Biden could even dream of, it’s hard to believe Biden can.

But if Biden wins, the Senate goes Democratic and the new majority eliminates the filibuster, we could be setting the stage for an epic confrontation between the political branches and a court merrily striking down everything the rest of the government tries to do as unconstitutional. Then enough Senate and House Democrats could end up seeing diluting the Right-wing hold on the Supreme Court as a matter of sheer political survival.

A lot of it also will depend on how radical the new hard-Right court is. If they not only overthrow the Affordable Care Act but so severely restrict the application of the Constitution’s interstate commerce clause as to restrict virtually any attempts by the federal government to regulate the economy, then just about every American with politics even slightly left of center could demand Court expansion as an antidote to control of the government by “unelected judges” the way their ancestors were doing when the Court declared war on the New Deal in the mid-1930’s.

In some ways, the debate between Mike Pence and Kamala Harris was everything the September 29 Trump-Biden debate should have been but wasn’t. Part of the difference was Pence himself: though both he and Harris occasionally interrupted each other in their eternal quest for the Last Word, he was a far more gentlemanly figure who didn’t go all out to disrupt the debate so he could tell a rally audience later that “I had fun.” Part of it was Harris, who was less combative and “prosecutorial” than we’ve seen her at other times and who managed to evade one of Pence’s traps for her: he tried to pin her to support of the “Green New Deal.”

There isn’t just one “Green New Deal,” just as there isn’t just one definition of “Defund the police” -- though the names tend to put moderate voters off, there are ways of defining both the “Green New Deal” and “Defund the police” in ways that make them sound less scary while still representing positive change. Pence accused both Biden and Harris of being committed to a program that would cost several trillion dollars -- though you could make a case that several trillion dollars is a small price to pay for our continued ability to survive on this planet -- but my fear on the climate issue is that the current worldwide ruling class has such a stranglehold on both policy and public opinion it has the power to prevent the radical changes we need to be able to survive as a species on the only planet we’ve got.