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.
Thursday, October 22, 2020
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.
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
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)