Category Archives: Democrats

2020 General Election, Democracy, Democrats

Did Kevin Drum have it right all along?

This week a friend sent me a link to Steven Teles’s New York Times op-ed (“Our Political System Is Unfair. Liberals Need to Just Deal With It.”). I found it hard to disagree with Teles, in contrast to the tact I had taken in response to Kevin Drum on November 1 (‘Is democracy alive and well in the U.S. and unthreatened by a “bugnut insane” GOP?’)

Professor Teles:

… As Ezra Klein has argued, our constitution “forces Democrats to win voters ranging from the far left to the center right, but Republicans can win with only right-of-center votes.” As a consequence, liberals can’t have nice things.

The argument is logical, but it is also a strategic dead end. The United States is and in almost any plausible scenario will continue to be a federal republic. We are constituted as a nation of states, not as a single unitary community, a fact that is hard-wired into our constitutional structure. Liberals may not like this, just as a man standing outside in a rainstorm does not like the fact he is getting soaked. But instead of cursing the rain, it makes a lot more sense for him to find an umbrella.

Liberals need to adjust their political strategy and ideological ambitions to the country and political system we actually have, and make the most of it, rather than cursing that which they cannot change. 

I accept this argument, while I dissented from Drum’s view opposing Ezra Klein. As I summarized at the time:

An off the rails Republican Party threatens democratic governance. Political scientists and other observers have made a strong case for this judgment. Kevin Drum’s appeals to previous eras of American politics, to past partisan skirmishes with wins and losses for each side, and to old school leadership fail to undermine this conclusion.

What gives? The short answer is: what a difference a day makes — in this case, November 3.

When Drum made his case (on October 23 and again on October 24), we didn’t know the results of the election. In particular, we didn’t know that Democrats would fail to retake the Senate and to increase their majority in the House. Barring a double victory in Georgia on January 5 (which I do not rule out!), Democrats will be in no position to advance a pro-majoritarian agenda (including judicial reform and admission of new states).

I agree with Teles because, at this stage (with a Biden victory and down ballot disappointment), we’re stuck (at least prior to January 5). Thus, we “can’t have nice things.”

Drum’s argument — regardless of whether or not Democrats were heading toward a landslide — flatly rejected the pro-majoritarian agenda as misguided, unlike Teles, who begins his op-ed with a reality check:

The American voters chose to give the Democrats the White House, but denied them a mandate. Even if Democrats somehow squeak out wins in both Georgia Senate races, the Senate will then pivot on Joe Manchin of West Virginia.

Not only does this take much of the liberal wish list off the table, it also makes deep structural reform of federal institutions impossible.

This is the world we live in. We have to take stock, trim our agenda, and then move forward. Such is life at least until we regain a working majority. Teles agrees with this assessment (at least regarding D.C. statehood): “If Democrats at some point get a chance to get full representation for Washington, D.C., they should take it.”

Editor’s note: I began my November 1 post by noting that Kevin Drum and I do not think alike, nor do we agree on “nearly everything.” We do, though, agree (or very nearly agree) sometimes. On November 7, he posted how he voted on each of the dozen California state ballot initiatives. As it happens, I voted — with one exception — exactly as he did. I too was disappointed in how often I found myself in the minority (though this is nothing new).

The exception: I voted No on Prop 25, which would have ended cash bail. After some consideration, I bought the argument of some civil rights advocates, including the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California: “NO on Prop 25 that would eliminate money bail, but replace it with risk assessment tools that are racially and socioeconomically biased. “

Who knows whether this was the right call.

(Image: voters lined up to cast ballots in California’s March 2020 primary.)

Blue State Blues, Democrats

Our elites are failing us — California edition

Los Angeles Times columnist Robin Abcarian had three questions for Governor Gavin Newsom this week:

Why did Newsom attend his friend’s birthday party on Nov. 6 when he was telling his constituents to do one thing (dine in alone), while he and his wife did another (dined out with friends)?

How sincere was his subsequent apology following the very public spanking he received after the San Francisco Chronicle broke the news that he’d broken the rules?

And why does our governor hang out with a lobbyist who is trying to influence him on behalf of clients?

As question number two suggests, the governor — once he was caught — did apologize. (This puts him into a different category than, say, Donald Trump. But that’s a pretty low bar.)

The governor explained, after getting caught, that though he knows he was wrong, at least the dinner was outside. Perhaps it was, but the party began inside.

And as if this weren’t bad enough, it turns out a couple of officials from the California Medical Association were among the partiers. That would be CMA CEO Dustin Corcoran and the association’s top lobbyist Janus Norman.

On July 2, I posted that Governor Newsom’s quick action in mid-March to impose a statewide shelter-in-place order (following early action by Bay Area counties) “cast California’s political leadership in a good light and protected Californians before the virus had gotten out of control,” but that the guv’s subsequent actions cast doubt on his pledge to base his decisions on science and public health data.

Now we learn that Newsom has one standard for the public and another for himself and his friends. And apparently we can say the same thing about the leadership of the California Medical Association.

And then there’s this: “Legislators from California and other states are gathering for an annual conference in Maui this week despite a spike in COVID-19 cases in the Golden State that resulted in travel warnings by health officials.“

It has been confounding to live in Los Angeles County, which leads California with coronavirus cases and deaths, and trying to follow sensible steps (wearing masks, social distancing, avoiding gatherings — and being painfully separated from family and friends), while rates of infection, hospitalizations, and deaths increased because obviously so many people are flouting these sensible steps.

The political elite in California, by the way, is overwhelmingly Democratic. These folks are committed — just ask them — to science, equality, social justice, and (of course) public health.

Robin Abacrian advises us that the governor paid for his own dinner. “That’s a relief,” she notes, “because if he hadn’t, he’d be in violation of the California law that says lobbyists can only cover $10 of a public official’s meal.“

By the way, entrees at the French Laundry are $350 each. That’s a cool $700 for the Newsoms. Of course we don’t know what wine they had. And I couldn’t say if dessert was extra. Was there a cake?

(Image of one of two daily menus at the French Laundry.)

2020 General Election, Democrats

Reflections on the 2020 election and reaching more voters

  1. Words of wisdom from Michelle Goldberg:

Left-wing populists often believe that there’s a silent majority who agree with them, if only they can be organized to go to the polls. If that were true, though, an election with record high turnout should have been much better for progressives. Instead, 2020 was a reminder of something most older liberals long ago had to come to terms with: The voters who live in the places that determine political control in this country tend to be more conservative than we are.

I’m an older liberal. I live in Los Angeles County, where Joe Biden romped with more than 71% of the vote to Donald Trump’s not quite 27%; Congressman Adam Schiff was reelected with more than 72% of the vote; an advocate for criminal justice reform defeated the incumbent (an African American woman and a Democrat) for District Attorney; and my city councilman (a progressive Democrat in a nonpartisan office, with a slew of mainstream endorsements, including Mayor Eric Garcetti and Speaker Nancy Pelosi) became the first City Council incumbent defeated in 17 years, by a candidate running to his left.

I’m fine with those results (though I voted for my councilman, whom I had no reason to be mad at, but won’t miss). But I know that Los Angeles is hardly representative of the rest of the country — and I want Democrats to win there too.

2. I was convinced that 2020 was the year that Susan Collins would go down. (A more reasonable prospect than daydreams about the defeat of South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham or Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell.) Mainers disappointed me again.

Today’s New York Times provides perspective on that senate race, which suggests that so much money poured into the state that much of the spending misfired:

Maine’s mill towns were reliably Democratic until they flipped red for Mr. Trump in 2016. Once wealthy communities, they have steadily lost population, and remain dotted with relics of their old prosperity, like Rumford’s elegant, neoclassical Hotel Harris. The paper industry began a long decline in the 1980s, and Rumford’s mill work force contracted from a high point of 3,000, in the 1960s, to around 650 today.

“They’re fed up with politics, politicians in general, Democrats and Republicans,” said Kerri Arsenault, whose memoir, “Mill Town,” traced the industry’s decline.

“There’s a lot of angry Trump people who work in that mill,” said Deano Gilbert, 57, a union official at the mill. “I deal with guys that have had union jobs for decades that are superstrong Trump supporters. In the 1970s, everyone would be trying to vote their jobs, but now that’s all over.”

Asked how Democrats could better reach voters in towns like Rumford, he said, “Know your audience.”

3. Did I mention Lindsey Graham? Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger — under fierce attack by many Republicans who don’t like the state’s election results — alleges that Senator Graham called with questions about Raffensperger’s handling of signature-matching laws and the oblique suggestion that Raffensperger throw out legally cast ballots. Graham made the call on the same day a Trump supporter filed a lawsuit in Georgia to do just that and Trump tweeted, “Georgia Secretary of State, a so-called Republican (RINO), won’t let the people checking the ballots see the signatures for fraud.”

Graham denies Raffensperger’s account, but when asked earlier by Sean Hannity — at a time when the South Carolinian was raising bogus charges of electoral fraud — whether the Republican-controlled state legislature in Pennsylvania should consider rejecting the majority vote for Biden and selecting Trump electors by fiat, responded: “I think everything should be on the table.”

He said “everything” on Fox News Channel and endorsed the possibility of throwing out the ballots from Pennsylvania, but we’re supposed to believe he balked at making a discrete call to a Republican Secretary of State in Georgia to suggest more limited sabotage? This is hardly a credible denial from a hardly credible Senator, someone who has been all-in with Trump’s efforts to delegitimize the election results and the incoming presidency of Joe Biden.

4. When he arrives at the White House on January 20, Biden’s first order of business will be defeating the coronavirus, which Trump has refused to take on. It will be a tall order — especially in light of how the Republican Party has created yet another wedge issue to divide us by opposing wearing a mask and social distancing to stop the spread of infection.

Democrat Joe Biden may have won the presidency pledging a national mask mandate and a science-based approach to controlling the pandemic. But in the states where the virus is spiking highest — particularly in the Upper Midwest — Republicans made substantial gains down-ballot. Often they did so by railing against the very tool that scientists say could best help arrest the virus’s spread.

Democrats on the left, convinced that messaging that’s effective in California or New York or other solidly blue states and metro regions, will be well-received in areas with a redder tinge, should pause to reconsider. Reflect on the opposition to taking simple steps — recommended by scientists, doctors, and public health authorities — to save American lives. This is the same audience that accepts election fraud nonsense.

Most of these folks — among the 73 million voters who embraced Donald Trump’s reelection — may be out of reach. But Democrats have to figure out a way to pry apart this bloc, to bring a portion of these Americans over to our side — enough to form a working majority.

Right now, they’re not talking our language, not accepting our facts, not seeing what we’re seeing. Expecting that an effective message in blue America will resonate in red America is wishful thinking. It’s going to be a harder lift than that.

(Image: Susan Collins via wikipedia.)

2020 General Election, Democrats, Republicans

Fox News reveals that most Americans have liberal views on the issues. That’s not Fox’s problem.

Folks on the left had fun on Tuesday night posting images on Twitter of the results of polling by Fox News Channel. Most Americans, the survey found, are decidedly liberal on a host of issues.

Changing to a government-run health care plan: 39% strongly favor; 33% somewhat favor; 14% somewhat oppose; 15% strongly oppose.

Supreme Court action on Roe v. Wade: 71% leave as is; 29% overturn it.

U.S. gun laws should be: 55% more strict; 12% less strict; 33% kept as is.

What should happen to illegal immigrants in the U.S.? 72% pathway to citizenship; 28% deportation.

Increasing government spending on green & renewable energy: 37% strongly favor; 33% somewhat favor; 16% somewhat oppose; 15% strongly oppose.

Donald Trump’s approach to Russia: 4% too tough; 58% not tough enough; 38% about right.

And so on. What Fox (and viewers) discovered is a phenomenon that’s goes back decades. Here’s how Matthew Grossmann and David A. Hopkins described it in Asymmetric Politics:

The American electorate consistently holds collectively left-of-center views on most policy issues even as it leans to the right on more general measures of ideology—as Lloyd A. Free and Hadley Cantril observed nearly five decades ago, the public is simultaneously operationally liberal and symbolically conservative.

Operationally liberal: when asked their opinions about political issues, majorities consistently take the liberal side (as did the folks FNC polled). In other words, when confronted with specific issues, they approve of public policies that actively address or remedy the situation (and they do so even if, in the abstract, they embrace small government or rugged individualism — symbolically conservative positions).

Symbolically conservative: when asked to characterize their ideology or philosophical outlook, more Americans say they are ‘Conservative’ than ‘Liberal’ — that’s how they view themselves. They embrace traditional American values, which the GOP has branded as its own (and runs with year after year, rather than emphasizing its unpopular policies).

Huge numbers of Republican voters and Trump supporters are operationally liberal and symbolically conservative. They vote for the party that opposes their views and interests. There’s nothing new here. It’s the starting point of Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas?

Unfortunately for Democrats, adopting positions on a range of issues that most Americans are in agreement with hardly guarantees support at the polls. As Grossmann and Hopkins explain: the pendulum swings back and forth (with Democrats winning one cycle, Republicans another) with an electorate that sometimes makes a decision based on specific Democratic issues (in 2018 healthcare was critical), sometimes based on abstract Republican messaging (often, as negative polarization has increased, in broad strokes that demean their opponents: socialists, radicals, elitists).

The level of negative partisanship is so high now, it is harder than ever to break through to the other side to make ones case. That’s a huge problem for the Democratic Party, which Alex Pareene addresses with a question, ‘What if it barely matters what Democrats “talk about” or “campaign on”?‘ His answer isn’t encouraging:

It seems possible … that voters no longer believe that the Democratic Party represents a coalition that includes the working class, and that even if the party puts forward Democratic candidates who support pro-worker policy, it simply will not suffice to reach or convince voters.

It’s inevitable that the FNC mix of propaganda and actual news will clash from time to time. While amusing, that’s not really a problem for the network. What Tuesday night’s polling results show, however, is something that Democrats must grapple with, if the party is ever to regain the White House while enjoying majorities in both houses of Congress. With such a closely divided nation, a constitutional structure that advantages vast stretches of land rather than people, and an opposition party bent on obstruction and paralysis, Democrats have to figure out how to gain the support of folks from red states, who would actually benefit from Democratic policies.

2020 General Election, Democrats, Republicans

Senator Feinstein, living in the past, misses the big picture in GOP’s rush to confirm Amy Coney Barrett

Hard to believe in October 2020, just over two weeks until election day, that a prominent Democratic senator — the ranking member, who has been in office for 28 years — is so clueless about the raw power play Republicans just made in the Senate Judiciary Committee. Senator Dianne Feinstein had this to say to Chairman Lindsey Graham:

“This has been one of the best set of hearings that I have participated in. And I want to thank you for your fairness and the opportunity of going back and forth. It leaves one with a lot of hopes, a lot of questions, and even some ideas, perhaps some good bi-partisan legislation that we can put together to make this great country even better. So, thank you so much for your leadership.”

Earlier this week, I highlighted Josh Marshall’s injunction that it was foolish to embrace the pejorative language of ones opponents — especially when it creates a false narrative that “turns the entire reality of the situation on its head.”

Joe Biden hasn’t followed the injunction. I’m sure his advisors are unconcerned about their candidate’s words on what they regard (at least at this stage of the campaign) as a small-ball issue. The Biden campaign has been a smashing success with a candidate who has hardly strayed from strategic messaging on big picture issues.

In the context of the rush to confirm a conservative ideologue to replace Ruth Bader Ginzburg on the Supreme Court, however, Dianne Feinstein’s fulsome praise of Lindsey Graham — followed by a hug, without masks — is inexcusably damning.

In 2018, when Feinstein ran for reelection, two Democrats had finished first and second in the voting in California’s jungle primary, and so faced off in the general election. The California State Democratic Party endorsed Kevin de León, the former president pro tempore of the California State Senate, over the sitting U.S. Senator. De León also received my vote. Why?

In part (speaking for myself) because Dianne Feinstein was, and is, living in the past. She is an anachronism, out of sync with contemporary politics, and willfully blind to the unwavering commitment of her Republican colleagues to scorched earth opposition to all things Democratic. The refusal of the Republican majority to even hold a hearing for Merrick Garland seems to have slipped her mind, while she willingly overlooks Republicans’ deceitful hypocrisy in doing a 180 with the Barrett nomination. (“I want to thank you for your fairness.”)

California’s senior senator recalls an era when Ted Kennedy and Orin Hatch co-sponsored legislation and when John McCain and Joe Lieberman could form strong friendships — and often bipartisan agreements — across the aisle. She remembers an era when comity and senatorial courtesy were ascendant; a time, just a year before her election to the Senate, when committee chair Joe Biden could decide to preclude calling supporting witnesses for Anita Hill because he had made a pledge to a Republican colleague in the senate gym to hurry the proceedings along.

Those were the days. Whatever we think of them, though, those days are long gone. But Dianne Feinstein still clings to them.

This morning’s Los Angeles Times reports [emphasis added]: “Polls have shown that a majority of Americans believe the winner of the election should fill the seat left vacant by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Meanwhile, Republicans prominently featured Feinstein’s comments and the hug with Graham in digital ads and news releases.“

(Image: Bloomberg on YouTube.)

2020 General Election, Democrats, Republicans

The phrase “Court-packing” should not be in the vocabulary of any Democratic candidate

“I’m not a fan of court-packing, but I don’t want to get off on that whole issue,” Biden told CNN affiliate WKRC in Cincinatti. “I want to keep focused. The President would love nothing better than to fight about whether or not I would, in fact, pack the court or not pack the court.”

In this response, Joe Biden used the phrases “court-packing” and (twice) “pack the court.” In doing so, he accepted, wholly, unreservedly the Republican-frame of the question of whether Democrats — if they win the presidency and the Senate — should consider changing the number of Supreme Court justices.

While this is unlikely to have a measurable impact on the trajectory of his campaign, I regard this as an unforced error.

. . . I thought I would become apoplectic when I saw that some Democrats were referring to expanding the Supreme Court as “court packing” or tacitly accepting the use of the phrase when asked about it by reporters. Any Democrat who uses this phrase should be, metaphorically at least, hit over the head with a stick.

The simple fact is that “court packing” is a pejorative phrase. It is nonsensical to use it as a description of something you’re considering supporting or actively supporting. If you decide to support a certain politician you don’t refer to deciding to ‘carry their water.’ Someone who supports expanding the estate tax doesn’t call it the ‘death tax’. This is obvious. Doing so is an act of comical political negligence. But of course the error is far more than semantic. No one should be using this phrase because it is false and turns the entire reality of the situation on its head. — Josh Marshall, the day before Biden made his comment

Although I don’t advocate hitting Biden over the head with a stick, I wish his team would have armed him with another response. The Biden campaign — like the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee on day one of the hearing — has maintained superb message discipline. They lost it in this instance.

Republicans don’t use the phrase “voter suppression” to describe their electoral strategy. Or “court-packing” to describe their packing the federal courts at all levels with Republican lawyers — often regardless of their qualifications, judicial experience, or temperament — whom they expect to be ideological and partisan jurists to rule consistently against Democratic constituencies, issues embraced by Democrats, and Democratic governors and legislators.

But, in addition to conveying the simple rule, Don’t use a pejorative expression flung at you by your political opponents, there’s a more basic issue at work (just beneath the surface). Josh Marshall followed the obvious point with an elaboration that reveals a more fundamental blunder [emphasis added]:

If you decide to support a certain politician you don’t refer to deciding to ‘carry their water.’ Someone who supports expanding the estate tax doesn’t call it the ‘death tax’. This is obvious. Doing so is an act of comical political negligence. But of course the error is far more than semantic. No one should be using this phrase because it is false and turns the entire reality of the situation on its head.

Republicans have pursued an extreme agenda through corrupt means to politicize the courts. That’s the issue staring us in the face (though not, in the midst of an election campaign that will culminate in three weeks’ time, an issue that Biden must address now).

The formula was and is simple: use every ounce of raw political power to stack the federal judiciary with conservative ideologues. Refuse to consider nominations; then rush them through. No nominations within a year of an election; but quickie confirmations within a month of an election. Republicans have taken the constitutional framework and abused it to the maximum extent possible to achieve this transcendent goal. While these are almost universally abuses, none are clearly illegal or unconstitutional. At the most generous they amount to using every tool that is not expressly illegal to maximize control of the federal judiciary.

The untimely death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the final weeks of an election Republicans seem likely to lose has cast the whole drama in clarifying light. Republicans are now on the cusp of securing a 6-3 conservative High Court majority which will act as an effective veto on Democratic legislation using arguments no less facially absurd than the list used to attack Obamacare.

This is all the work of decades. But it is particularly the work of the last decade, 2010 to 2020. And it is all guaranteed, locked in, final on the assumption that Democrats will not even consider much milder and expressly constitutional remedies to repair the damage wrought by Republican judicial corruption. Indeed, conservatives are now reacting with something like apoplexy at the idea all this work, wrecking half the government in the process, could be voided with a simple majority vote to expand the federal judiciary and the Supreme Court. The Republican program is raw power for me, norms and prudence for you. Few things show how much Washington DC remains wired for Republican power than the idea that anyone can with a straight face call the possibility of Democrats taking some remedial action “court packing.”

Joe Biden, take notice.

(Image: Amy Comey Barrett makes her opening statement on day one via PBS/YouTube.)

2020 General Election, Democracy, Democrats

Clinton believes Biden will win — after legal battles and relentless pushback against the GOP

Jennifer Palmieri interviews Hillary Clinton.

Look, it’s gonna be a close election. As I said in my speech, you can win three million more votes and still, you know, not get elected because of the Electoral College. It all comes down to the Electoral College.

If it’s a close election, like say Biden, you know, say Biden wins. What do you think Trump will do?

Look, I think that they have a couple of scenarios that they’re looking toward. One is messing up absentee balloting.

Right. Of course. Yeah.

They believe that helps them. So that they then get maybe a narrow advantage in the Electoral College on election day. Because remember we’ve seen a couple of cases, like in Wisconsin, where they did everything they could to mess up voting. But because courts had ordered absentee ballots to be counted if they were postmarked on election day, Democrats actually won some important races there.

In the recent Michigan primary, I was told, in Detroit the Republicans had forty lawyers challenging absentee mail-in voting. And a local reporter, talking to one of the lawyers he knew, was told it was a dry run for November.

So we’ve gotta have a massive legal operation. I know the Biden campaign is working on that. We have to have poll workers and I urge people who are able to be a poll worker. We have to have our own teams of people to counter the force of intimidation that the Republicans and Trump are going to put outside polling places.

This is a big organizational challenge. But at least we know more about what they’re going to do.

And, you know, Joe Biden should not concede under any circumstances because I think this is gonna drag out. And eventually I do believe he will win if we don’t give an inch. And if we are as focused and relentless as the other side is.  

2020 General Election, Democrats, Donald Trump

Day one of DNC: Sound the alarm and urge Americans to “Vote for joe Biden like our lives depend on it.”

Kristin Urquiza, Bernie Sanders, and Michelle Obama were among the speakers at the first night of the Democratic National Convention.

Kristin Urquiza, who lost her father to COVID-19, addressed Donald Trump’s most deadly failure (tragically ongoing) last night.

Her remarks in full [emphasis added]:

I’m Kristin Urquiza. I’m one of the many who have lost a loved one to COVID. My dad, Mark Anthony Urquiza, should be here today, but he isn’t. He had faith in Donald Trump. He voted for him, listened to him, believed him and his mouthpieces when they said that coronavirus was under control and going to disappear, that it was OK to end social distancing rules before it was safe, and that if you had no underlying health conditions you’d probably be fine.

So in late May, after the stay-at-home order was lifted in Arizona, my dad went to a karaoke bar with his friends. A few weeks later he was put on a ventilator, and after five agonizing days he died alone, in the I.C.U., with a nurse holding his hand. My dad was a healthy 65-year-old. His only pre-existing condition was trusting Donald Trump — and for that he paid with his life.

I am not alone. Once I told my story, a lot of people reached out to me to share theirs. They asked me to help keep the communities safe, especially communities of color, which have been disproportionately affected. They asked me, a normal person, to help, because Donald Trump won’t. The coronavirus has made it clear that there are two Americas: The America that Donald Trump lives in and the America that my father died in. Enough is enough. Donald Trump may not have caused the coronavirus, but his dishonesty and his irresponsible actions made it so much worse.

We need a leader who has a national, coordinated, data-driven response to stop this pandemic from claiming more lives and to safely reopen the country. We need a leader who will step in on day one and do his job: to care.

One of the last things that my father said to me was that he felt betrayed by the likes of Donald Trump. And so when I cast my vote for Joe Biden, I will do it for my dad.

Video NBC News; transcript: NPR.

Bernie Sanders also took Trump to task for his failures to crush the coronavirus (“Nero fiddled while Rome burned; Trump golfs.”) and the economic crisis these failures have brought our country. The Senator focused as well on the unprecedented threat of authoritarianism Trump has brought to our country:

“At its most basic, this election is about preserving our democracy. During this president’s term, the unthinkable has become normal. He has tried to prevent people from voting, undermined the U.S. Postal Service, deployed the military and federal agents against peaceful protesters, threatened to delay the election and suggested that he will not leave office if he loses. This is not normal, and we must never treat it like it is. Under this administration, authoritarianism has taken root in our country. I and my family, and many of yours, know the insidious way authoritarianism destroys democracy, decency and humanity. As long as I am here, I will work with progressives, with moderates, and, yes, with conservatives to preserve this nation from a threat that so many of our heroes fought and died to defeat.”

Video NBC News; transcript CNN.

Michelle Obama offered a strategy for change [emphasis added to excerpted remarks]:

So what do we do now? What’s our strategy? Over the past four years, a lot of people have asked me, “When others are going so low, does going high still really work?” My answer: going high is the only thing that works, because when we go low, when we use those same tactics of degrading and dehumanizing others, we just become part of the ugly noise that’s drowning out everything else. We degrade ourselves. We degrade the very causes for which we fight.

But let’s be clear: going high does not mean putting on a smile and saying nice things when confronted by viciousness and cruelty. Going high means taking the harder path. It means scraping and clawing our way to that mountain top. Going high means standing fierce against hatred while remembering that we are one nation under God, and if we want to survive, we’ve got to find a way to live together and work together across our differences.

And going high means unlocking the shackles of lies and mistrust with the only thing that can truly set us free: the cold hard truth.

So let me be as honest and clear as I possibly can. Donald Trump is the wrong president for our country. He has had more than enough time to prove that he can do the job, but he is clearly in over his head. He cannot meet this moment. He simply cannot be who we need him to be for us. It is what it is.

Now, I understand that my message won’t be heard by some people. We live in a nation that is deeply divided, and I am a Black woman speaking at the Democratic Convention. But enough of you know me by now. You know that I tell you exactly what I’m feeling. You know I hate politics. But you also know that I care about this nation. You know how much I care about all of our children.

So if you take one thing from my words tonight, it is this: if you think things cannot possibly get worse, trust me, they can; and they will if we don’t make a change in this election. If we have any hope of ending this chaos, we have got to vote for Joe Biden like our lives depend on it.

…

Joe Biden wants all of our kids to go to a good school, see a doctor when they’re sick, live on a healthy planet. And he’s got plans to make all of that happen. Joe Biden wants all of our kids, no matter what they look like, to be able to walk out the door without worrying about being harassed or arrested or killed. He wants all of our kids to be able to go to a movie or a math class without being afraid of getting shot. He wants all our kids to grow up with leaders who won’t just serve themselves and their wealthy peers but will provide a safety net for people facing hard times.

And if we want a chance to pursue any of these goals, any of these most basic requirements for a functioning society,These tactics are not new.

But this is not the time to withhold our votes in protest or play games with candidates who have no chance of winning. We have got to vote like we did in 2008 and 2012. We’ve got to show up with the same level of passion and hope for Joe Biden. We’ve got to vote early, in person if we can. We’ve got to request our mail-in ballots right now, tonight, and send them back immediately and follow-up to make sure they’re received. And then, make sure our friends and families do the same.

We have got to grab our comfortable shoes, put on our masks, pack a brown bag dinner and maybe breakfast too, because we’ve got to be willing to stand in line all night if we have to.

Look, we have already sacrificed so much this year. So many of you are already going that extra mile. Even when you’re exhausted, you’re mustering up unimaginable courage to put on those scrubs and give our loved ones a fighting chance. Even when you’re anxious, you’re delivering those packages, stocking those shelves, and doing all that essential work so that all of us can keep moving forward.

Even when it all feels so overwhelming, working parents are somehow piecing it all together without child care. Teachers are getting creative so that our kids can still learn and grow. Our young people are desperately fighting to pursue their dreams.

And when the horrors of systemic racism shook our country and our consciences, millions of Americans of every age, every background rose up to march for each other, crying out for justice and progress.

This is who we still are: compassionate, resilient, decent people whose fortunes are bound up with one another. And it is well past time for our leaders to once again reflect our truth.

So, it is up to us to add our voices and our votes to the course of history, echoing heroes like John Lewis who said, “When you see something that is not right, you must say something. You must do something.” That is the truest form of empathy: not just feeling, but doing; not just for ourselves or our kids, but for everyone, for all our kids.

And if we want to keep the possibility of progress alive in our time, if we want to be able to look our children in the eye after this election, we have got to reassert our place in American history. And we have got to do everything we can to elect my friend, Joe Biden, as the next president of the United States.

Thank you all. God bless.

(Image of host Eva Longoria from the Democratic Party.)

2020 General Election, Democracy, Democrats, Donald Trump, Republicans

Trump’s war on the Post Office is key to the Republican party’s voter suppression strategy

https://twitter.com/therecount/status/1293896544668782592

They want three and a half trill — billion dollars for the mail-in votes. Okay, universal mail-in ballots. Three and a half trill — They want 25 billion dollars — billion — for the Post Office.

Now they need that money in order to have the Post Office work, so it can take all these millions and millions of ballots.

Now, in the meantime, they aren’t getting there. By the way, those are just two items. But if they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting. — Donald Trump on the phone with Fox Business Network.

It couldn’t be clearer.

“They” are the Democrats and “they need  that money in order to have the Post Office work” — and Donald Trump doesn’t want the Post Office to work because it would permit “universal mail-in voting.”

Donald Trump — adopting a decades old Republican strategy — is focused on depressing voter turnout in the upcoming election. He realizes that — based on the best evidence we have right now — in a high turnout election he will be turned out of the White House.

Gutting the U.S. Postal Service — never mind the effects on the American public and our economy, both of which rely on prompt, reliable mail delivery — is an attempt to avoid being held accountable on November 3. This strategy has played out over the past three months:

In May, Louis DeJoy – a multi-million dollar contributor to the Republican Party – was appointed Postmaster General. Since that time he has imposed changes that have eliminated overtime for hundreds of thousands of postal workers; prohibited late trips to deliver mail; and ruled that, if a distribution center is running late, “they will keep the mail for the next day.”

He reassigned 23 top executives at the Postal Service, imposed a hiring freeze, and implemented “early retirement authority” for nonunion employees.

On Tuesday, Noel King at NPR interviewed Kimberly Karol, president of the Iowa Postal Workers Union. Among the things we learn from Ms. Karol is that the Postal Service has been removing mail sorting machines at facilities across the country. Another key fact: many of the changes circumvent rules that require public comment when closing offices or degrading delivery standards – but which have the same result.

Here is a brief exchange:

KAROL: Yes, we are beginning to see those changes and how it is impacting the mail. Mail is beginning to pile up in our offices, and we’re seeing equipment being removed. So we are beginning to see the impact of those changes.
KING: Curious – I hadn’t heard about this one – equipment being removed. What equipment?
KAROL: The sorting equipment that we use to process mail for delivery. In Iowa, we are losing machines. And they already in Waterloo were losing one of those machines. So that also hinders our ability to process mail in the way that we had in the past.
KING: Sure. Sounds like it would. You’ve been a postal worker for 30 years? How do you feel about Louis DeJoy?
KAROL: I am not a fan. I grew up in a culture of service, where every piece was to be delivered every day. And his policies, although they’ve only been in place for a few weeks, are now affecting the way that we do business and not allowing us to deliver every piece every day, as we’ve done in the past.
KING: Do you get the impression that your feelings about him are shared broadly among postal workers? Do people agree with you?
KAROL: Yes, all across the country. We are trying to activate people all across the country and notify the public because we will – my opinion is that the PMG is trying to circumvent the rules that have been set in place to safeguard the public by making changes that don’t require public comment but have the same impact as closing offices and/or changing delivery standards. And so this is a way to avoid that kind of public comment. And we’re trying to make sure that the public understands that they need to make comment.

It is remarkable that this attempt to sabotage democracy by crippling the Post Office is happening in plain sight.

In recent years the Republican Party has increasingly relied on sowing social division, on racial, ethnic, and religious cleavages, to win elections. And, as that ugly Us-vs.-Them narrative has proved unreliable — the GOP has won the popular vote in only one presidential election since 2000 — the fallback position, now in the foreground, is to attack democratic institutions that ensure majority rule.

And that’s not the half of it. It’s not just democratic practices and institutions that are threatened. Much more is at stake. The Republican Party is prepared to accept a stomach-turning level of collateral damage to stay in power. Early on, as Trump jumped to do Vladimir Putin’s bidding, Republicans accepted the damage to our national security and the destruction of alliances that have kept the peace. As the coronavirus has swept the country, Republicans have chosen to accept an enormous and still rising death toll, rather than break with Trump. Let’s grant, inflicting severe damage on the Post Office is small potatoes for these guys. They appear ready to do pretty much anything they can get away with to stay in power.

The decision Americans make on November 3 could hardly be more consequential.

2020 General Election, Democrats, Donald Trump, Republicans

Joe Biden offers a sharp contrast to Donald Trump with his embrace of Kamala Harris,Hagar the Horrible, and Søren Kierkegaard

In selecting California Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate, Joe Biden has embraced the diversity of the Democratic coalition. An eminently well-qualified woman of color of a different generation than the former vice president rounds out a well balanced ticket to take on Donald Trump and Mike Pence, who lead the monochromatic Republican Party.

In a photograph of Biden and Harris chatting by video, a Danish philosopher and the author of Nihilism (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series) spotted a Hagar the Horrible cartoon behind the former VP’s laptop.

That cartoon suggests that a higher being (whether the God of Biden’s Catholicism or an ancient Norse deity) directing the storms and tribulations bedeviling Hagar doesn’t answer to any man. Whether or not an individual suffers misfortune is often the furthest thing from a personal choice.

No one needs that comic reminder less than Joe Biden, who lost his first wife and their one-year-old daughter in 1972 and his oldest son, Beau, in 2015, and has credited his faith with helping sustain him. In an interview with Stephen Colbert, four months after Beau’s death, Biden spoke about putting one foot in front of the other when experiencing great suffering — and of other people who keep going when confronted with tragedy in their lives.

. . . Think of all the people you know who are going through horrible things and they get up every morning, And they put one foot in front of the other. And they don’t have, like I said, anything like the support I have.

I marvel, I marvel at … at the ability of people to absorb hurt and just get back up. And most of them do it with an incredible sense of empathy to other people. . . .

Joe Biden talks about putting one foot in front of the other with Stephen Colbert.

Biden tells Colbert that his wife Jill tapes quotes to his bathroom mirror, which he sees in the morning when he shaves. Biden has mentioned one quote, from Kierkegaard — “Faith sees best in the dark” — on several occasions. It illustrates that when tragedy strikes, when our suffering is most intense, reason (human understanding) has nothing to offer — that’s when believers must rely on faith.

One need not share Biden’s faith (as Colbert does) to appreciate the man’s compassion and empathy for other human beings. The Colbert interview offers a sense of the man whom Democrats have chosen as their candidate for president. His empathy distinguishes him in a fundamental way from the current occupant of the White House. Indeed, the contrast could hardly be greater.

It is extraordinary and calamitous to have Donald Trump as president in the time of a global pandemic. The man hears of the deaths of Americans — more than 165,000 and counting — and thinks only of the misfortune to himself.

Trump often launches into a monologue placing himself at the center of the nation’s turmoil. The president has cast himself in the starring role of the blameless victim — of a deadly pandemic, of a stalled economy, of deep-seated racial unrest, all of which happened to him rather than the country. (“Trump the victim: President complains in private about the pandemic hurting him,” by Ashley Parker, Philip Rucker, and Josh Dawsey)

And while Trump is psychologically deviant — an outlier unrepresentative of his party, the GOP still embraces him and accepts the harm he brings. Moreover, one of the fundamental differences between Democrats and Republicans is the empathy that Democrats feel for others — including folks not in our tribe — who suffer.

We might draw the contrast this way: The circle of moral concern — the width and breadth and diversity of the group of human beings whom Democrats regard empathetically — is clearly greater by far than the batch of folks whom Republicans view as worthy of moral consideration.

Think of those kids separated at the border to illustrate this point. Or of our Kurdish allies, whom Trump sold out to Erdogan. Or of tens of millions of Americans — our neighbors — without adequate health care coverage.

Americans will have a stark choice — Trump-Pence or Biden-Harris — on the ballot this fall.