Tag Archives: Joe Biden

Democracy

COVID-19, the economic consequences, and the role of the federal government

Nurses and doctors across the country are exhausted by the ordeal they are confronting day after day.

“We are physically, emotionally and mentally exhausted,” Dr. Kate Grossman, a pulmonary and critical care physician in Columbia, Missouri, wrote in a message shared on Twitter.

“I have seen so many emergent intubations. I’ve seen people more sick than I’ve ever seen in my life,” Lacie Gooch, an intensive care unit nurse at Nebraska Medicine in Omaha, said in a video that Nebraska Medicine shared on Twitter this week.

And they are exasperated that people in their communities refuse to take the simple steps to prevent the airborne virus from continuing to spread.

“We’re tired. We’re understaffed. We’re taking care of very, very sick patients and our patient load just keeps going up. We’re exhausted and frustrated that people aren’t listening to us,” said Gooch, who said she has patients who don’t believe in COVID-19 even as they are hospitalized for it. “It kind of blows my mind and it’s frustrating.”

Medical care providers are risking their lives to help others and doing so at a time, nearly eight months into the pandemic, when PPE shortages persist.

NPR reported on this exchange today with NRP’s Will Stone and two nurses, Rachel Heintz of Bismark, North Dakota and Mary Turner of St. Paul, Minnesota:

HEINTZ: There are times when you feel like, I should be in four different places at once. People’s lives are hanging on, and I can’t even check if their oxygen level is OK or check if their airway is OK. Like, just the basic make sure that they’re still alive.

STONE: Not everywhere is quite as bad as North Dakota, but many places are starting to look that way. More than a thousand hospitals are critically short on staff, and the fears among health care workers are familiar – not enough people and not enough personal protective equipment.

HEINTZ: We are still worrying N95s for the entirety of our shift, whether that’s 12 hours – or the other day, I worked a 16-hour shift.

STONE: Before the pandemic, that would be unheard of. These N95 masks shield against tiny airborne droplets. And they’re only supposed to be used once. But now Heintz considers herself somewhat lucky. She even gets one per shift. Mary Turner, who works in a COVID ICU, is president of the Minnesota Nurses Association.

MARY TURNER: I have nurses in Minnesota that still wear their masks eight to 10 shifts.

Amanda Mull decries the illogic in the rules governors, mayors, and other authorities have put into place to contain the virus. That — plus the lack of a national plan and misinformation from the federal government — has confused the public, including Mull’s friend Josh, who had been dining indoors in restaurants.

Josh was irritated . . . If indoor dining couldn’t be made safe, he wondered, why were people being encouraged to do it? Why were temperature checks being required if they actually weren’t useful? Why make rules that don’t keep people safe?

Across America, this type of honest confusion abounds. While a misinformation-gorged segment of the population rejects the expert consensus on virus safety outright, so many other people, like Josh, are trying to do everything right, but run afoul of science without realizing it. Often, safety protocols, of all things, are what’s misleading them. In the country’s new devastating wave of infections, a perilous gap exists between the realities of transmission and the rules implemented to prevent it.

The problem isn’t, as Mull puts it, that leaders are moved to placate “centers of power” in their communities, it’s that the effects of closures reach far beyond the powerful: devastating businesses and putting employees out of work. State and city leaders are attempting a delicate balancing act — and failing.

It isn’t safe to dine indoors with folks who aren’t part of your household. And after many months it has become clear that safely opening schools, while keeping bars open isn’t likely to be a successful approach. Drinking, talking, laughing, and flirting in crowded indoor settings are inconsistent with reducing the infection rate, which makes for safer schools and families.

And in failing to keep us safe, our political leadership has also failed to sustain the economy. Many professionals, especially men (whose wives devote a disproportionate amount of time to tending to children) have thrived during the pandemic (often while shedding commuting time). Less advantaged workers, often people of color, have fared far less well.

Last week, Jerome Powell urged Congress (which hasn’t passed a comprehensive coronavirus bill since March) to step in.

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell on Tuesday made a fresh appeal to Congress to pass another coronavirus relief package to help troubled businesses and out-of-work Americans.

In a talk to a business group in San Francisco, Powell said Congress’ tax and spending powers can directly target income support for groups that really need it, in a way that the central bank cannot.

“There hasn’t been a bigger need for it in a long time,” Powell said.

Getting us through this should be job number one for the White House and Congress. This is why we have a federal government. The failure of the Trump administration to do this, or even to try, is a huge reason we’re in the midst of a transition now.

The President, watching TV, tweeting, golfing, and whining that his loss was due to (imagined) fraud, hasn’t shown a scintilla of interest in curbing the virus. Or in assisting working Americans who have struggled financially. What about Congress? Which means, what about Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell?

Joy Reid noted the severe impact of COVID-19 on families in Kentucky (with one-third of Kentuckians struggling to pay for food, heat, or rent, and experiencing 162,838 cases of the virus) and reviewed federal assistance programs expiring by year’s end, noting that the Senator McConnell has sent the Senate home on vacation. She suggests that the Majority Leader is indifferent to this suffering. Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy responded:

Let me just underscore that level of desperation. I literally just came from Hamden, Connecticut from a food distribution event for the holiday weekend. And the organizers were panicking a little bit, because they had enough food for 300 people and they had what looked like about 300 cars lined up prior to the beginning of the event. And they were scrambling to figure out what they were going to say to all of these families who were now faced with perhaps going hungry over the holiday weekend.

People are at the end of their rope. And, you’re right, Mitch McConnell is refusing to do anything.

What we need for Mitch McConnell to do is just enter the negotiating room. He has refused to negotiate with anybody. With Nancy Pelosi, with Chuck Schumer. Again, because he is afraid of splitting his caucus. Right now about half of the Republicans want to do nothing. They think that this should just be all up to the states or that Joe Biden should be saddled with the entirety of the problem.

And so Mitch McConnell is sort of putting the unity of his caucus ahead of the survival of the nation, because there are 20 Republicans that would vote with 47 Democrats in order to pass a pretty substantial coronavirus relief bill. But he doesn’t want to split up the Republicans, again, heading into Georgia, heading into the new Congress.

You know, that’s kind of par for the course for Mitch McConnell, unfortunately.

Let’s stipulate: it’s not unheard of, or even objectionable, for the party leader of his caucus to have an eye on the next election. So long as s/he has one eye out for the American public.

With McConnell the next election is an interest that invariably overrides the national interest or the welfare of Americans. For eight months (since passage of the CARES Act) McConnell had his eyes on the November 3 election. Now he has his eyes on the January 5 election in Georgia. And after that?

Recall McConnell’s affirmation during the first term of the most recent Democratic president: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

On January 6, whether or not Republicans prevail in Georgia, the single most important thing McConnell will want to achieve will be to limit the Democrats to one term in the White House.

There have been questions about whether Joe Biden, who has reached out to the other side, seeking to unify the country, can coax the Kentuckian’s cooperation in defeating the coronavirus and putting the economy back on track. At this stage, McConnell hasn’t even acknowledged Biden as the president-elect.

Mike DeBonis puts the issue this way: “McConnell’s ongoing silence, even as the Trump administration moves to allow Biden to start his transition, leaves a question mark over what could be the most important Washington relationship of the next two years – between an incoming president who promised to tackle the nation’s most pressing concerns and the win-at-all-costs Capitol Hill operator who may well serve as his legislative gatekeeper.”

I’ll grant this reported assessment of McConnell as likely: “…GOP aides say he is unlikely to orchestrate a complete blockade.” Not a complete blockade.

That’s a very low bar.

I suggest keeping our expectations for bipartisan cooperation very low. I’m pretty sure we can count on Mitch McConnell’s eyes to be focused on November 8, 2022, no matter how many Americans die or struggle financially throughout 2021 and 2022 — while he aims to duck accountability for whatever bad stuff happens.

(Image: Nebraska Medicine Twitter via GMA/ABC News.)

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, Democracy

Cause for celebration: Joe Biden defeats Donald Trump

The Biden-Harris victory is an unalloyed good thing.

A clear majority of Americans — well apportioned among key battleground states — rejected Donald Trump at their first opportunity following his Electoral College victory in defiance of a popular vote majority in 2016. Joe Biden — a decent, caring, well-qualified man, who will genuinely seek to represent the whole country — will replace him.

No, the Democrats didn’t win the Senate (though there will be another go-round in Georgia in January), they lost seats in the House, and upwards of 70 million Americans voted to reelect a man monumentally unfit for the presidency. Mitch McConnell will relish obstructing Joe Biden at every turn. Republicans in most states will control redistricting for the next decade. Enacting a progressive agenda is not yet on the horizon.

The next four years will be highly challenging. But I’m too much of an optimist to presuppose that the Biden presidency is doomed to failure, that the 2022 elections will mark a further setback, or that 2024 will return Republicans to the White House.

From the January 2017 Women’s March through the 2020 voting that concluded on Tuesday, Americans have organized in opposition to Trump and the GOP. The political struggle is hardly over. But it brought an extraordinarily significant victory this week.

That’s cause for celebration.

(Photo of the President-elect from Wikimedia Commons.)

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, Donald Trump

Trump lies, defiles, wraps himself in trappings of the state, and flees from his responsibility to govern

I’ve been following American politics since I was teenager in the mid-1960s (that’s 50+ years). I had never before witnessed anything like what we’ve seen during the Trump era, essentially since that golden escalator ride five years ago, but especially during his tenure in the White House.

Trump’s transgressions against democratic institutions and practices, common purpose across our political divides, and a commitment to Constitutional limits and the rule of law have grown increasingly aggressive. The past week has been beyond anything I would have thought likely — certainly not three and a half years ago, but not even early in 2020.

First, there is the torrent of lies from the Republican National Convention. I’ll remark on a prominent theme of the convention later in this post. Limiting our focus now to the whoppers the President told, consider Daniel Dale’s review of Trump’s 70-minute address Thursday night. Definitely worth a listen (20 or so lies and misleading half-truths in 3 1/2 minutes flat):

Indefatigable fact checker, Daniel Dale, reviews many of the lies Trump voiced during his acceptance speech.

That’s one speech, from a man whose lies since taking office total more than 20,000 (as of July 13, 2020).

More troubling than the lies, though, are the chronic violations of law and of customs that have served our nation by nurturing democracy and boosting unity.

Let’s begin with the Hatch Act, which both parties have mostly respected — at least until Trump, and the staging of a television extravaganza with political speeches by Melania and Donald Trump on nights three and four of the Republican National Convention on the south lawn at the White House.

Congressional Democrats, although outraged, were powerless to stop these breaches, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s video endorsement of Trump, convention videos of Trump issuing a pardon and observing a swearing in of immigrants as new citizens, and the other executive branch personnel participating in and preparing for the RNC. Congressional Republicans either murmured mild disapproval or acquiesced in silence. Chief of Staff Mark Meadows was an exception: “Nobody outside of the Beltway really cares. They expect that Donald Trump is going to promote Republican values and they would expect that Barack Obama, when he was in office, that he would do the same for Democrats.”

There were also anonymous exceptions: “Some of Mr. Trump’s aides privately scoff at the Hatch Act and say they take pride in violating its regulations.”

The Trump administration had long since expressed contempt for this law. Kellyanne Conway had this to say after openly violating the law in spring 2019: “Blah, blah, blah. … If you’re trying to silence me through the Hatch Act, it’s not going to work. Let me know when the jail sentence starts.” 

The Trump White House ignored the recommendation of the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (the federal agency with oversight responsibility for the law) that Conway be dismissed.

Since no president in the 231 year history of our republic has ever commandeered the White House for a political convention in the midst of his campaign for reelection; since no previous president has been so willing to disregard the law, past practice, and democratic values; and since Donald Trump has repeatedly voiced admiration for authoritarian rulers; the spectacle (in the image at the top of this post) brings to mind something more akin to 1930s-era Europe, when democracy was at bay, than to an American reelection campaign.

I promised to return to one theme of Trump’s reelection campaign — a portrayal of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party that presaged a dystopian future. The comments of Congressman Matt Gaetz about the Democrats ware representative:

They will disarm you, empty the prisons, lock you in your home, and invite MS-13 to live next door.

Kimberly Guilfoyle took a similar tack and added a slam at California:

As a first-generation American, I know how dangerous their Socialist agenda is. My mother, Mercedes, was a special education teacher from Aguadilla, Puerto Rico. My father, also an immigrant, came to this nation in pursuit of the American Dream. Now, I consider it my duty to fight to protect that dream. Rioters must not be allowed to destroy our cities. Human sex drug traffickers should not be allowed to cross our border. The same Socialist policies which destroyed places like Cuba and Venezuela must not take root in our cities and our schools.

If you want to see the Socialist Biden/Harris future for our country, just take a look at California. It is a place of immense wealth, immeasurable innovation, and immaculate environment, and the Democrats turned it into a land of discarded heroin needles in parks, riots in streets, and blackouts in homes.

Vice President Mike Pence summed things up in a sentence: 

It’s not so much whether America will be more conservative or more liberal, more Republican or more Democrat. The choice in this election is whether America remains America.

A handful of excerpts from Donald Trump’s speech (all focused on disqualifying a middle of the road Democrat who has been in public life since his first election 50 years ago without revealing his covert subversive agenda) illustrate the Trump campaign’s reelection strategy:

This is the most important election in the history of our country. At no time before have voters faced a clearer choice between two parties, two visions, two philosophies, or two agendas.

This election will decide whether we SAVE the American Dream, or whether we allow a socialist agenda to DEMOLISH our cherished destiny.

. . .

Your vote will decide whether we protect law abiding Americans, or whether we give free reign to violent anarchists, agitators, and criminals who threaten our citizens.

And this election will decide whether we will defend the American Way of Life, or whether we allow a radical movement to completely dismantle and destroy it.

At the Democrat National Convention, Joe Biden and his party repeatedly assailed America as a land of racial, economic, and social injustice. So tonight, I ask you a very simple question: How can the Democrat Party ask to lead our country when it spends so much time tearing down our country?

. . .

If the left gains power, they will demolish the suburbs, confiscate your guns, and appoint justices who will wipe away your Second Amendment and other Constitutional freedoms.

Biden is a Trojan horse for socialism. If Joe Biden doesn’t have the strength to stand up to wild-eyed Marxists like Bernie Sanders and his fellow radicals, then how is he ever going to stand up FOR you?

The most dangerous aspect of the Biden Platform is the attack on public safety. The Biden-Bernie Manifesto calls for Abolishing cash bail, immediately releasing 400,000 criminals onto your streets and into your neighborhoods.

When asked if he supports cutting police funding, Joe Biden replied, “Yes, absolutely.” When Congresswoman Ilhan Omar called the Minneapolis police department a cancer that is “rotten to the root,” Biden wouldn’t disavow her support and reject her endorsement — he proudly displayed it on his website.

Make no mistake, if you give power to Joe Biden, the radical left will Defund Police Departments all across America. They will pass federal legislation to reduce law enforcement nationwide. They will make every city look like Democrat-run Portland, Oregon. No one will be safe in Biden’s America.

. . .

If the Democrat Party wants to stand with anarchists, agitators, rioters, looters, and flag-burners, that is up to them, but I, as your President, will not be a part of it. The Republican Party will remain the voice of the patriotic heroes who keep America Safe.

. . .

If the Radical Left takes power, they will apply their disastrous policies to every city, town, and suburb in America.

Just imagine if the so-called peaceful demonstrators in the streets were in charge of every lever of power in the U.S. Government.

Liberal politicians claim to be concerned about the strength of American institutions. But who, exactly, is attacking them? Who is hiring the radical professors, judges, and prosecutors? Who is trying to abolish immigration enforcement, and establish speech codes designed to muzzle dissent? In every case, the attacks on American institutions are being waged by the radical left.

Always Remember: they are coming after ME, because I am fighting for YOU.

We must reclaim our independence from the left’s repressive mandates. Americans are exhausted trying to keep up with the latest list of approved words and phrases, and the ever-more restrictive political decrees. Many things have a different name now, and the rules are constantly changing. The goal of cancel culture is to make decent Americans live in fear of being fired, expelled, shamed, humiliated, and driven from society as we know it. The far-left wants to coerce you into saying what you know to be FALSE, and scare you out of saying what you know to be TRUE.

. . .

So tonight, I say again to all Americans: This is the most important election in the history of our country. There has never been such a difference between two parties, or two individuals, in ideology, philosophy, or vision than there is right now.

Our opponents believe that America is a depraved nation.

. . . 

For contrast, Donald Trump mentioned Joe Biden by name 41 times. The former vice president failed to utter Donald Trump’s name once at the Democratic Convention.

Finally, there’s the failure to govern, to lead, to accept the responsibilities of office as the president.

Let’s reflect on what passes for public policy in Trump’s U.S.A.

More than 183, 000 Americans have died from COVID-19, while Donald Trump has refused to even make a plan for crushing the virus. This past week, consistent with Trump’s oft-spoken wish to reduce testing, the CDC stealthily changed its testing guidelines (before the director walked this back, slightly, after an outpouring of criticism from the medical community).

As part of a furious months-long campaign vilifying by-mail voting, the President has been willing to cripple service at the Post Office, amid continuing evidence of the damage that has resulted.

Donald Trump’s aversion to hearing well-established conclusions by the intelligence community that Putin’s Russia assisted in Trump’s election in 2016 and has continued to do so as we approach November 2020 has led officials to decline to brief him on such issues. In that context, and with his reelection in the balance, the decision last week to stop all in-person intelligence briefings to Congress is consistent with a campaign strategy of smothering unwelcome information.

And, in spite of Trump’s insistence that he is uniquely positioned to solve America’s problems — “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.” — and his obsession with disorder in the streets, he evades responsibility. Instead, he blames others. Moreover — and this is most damning of all for a president sworn to “faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” he has not only relished the disorder, he has in view of local and state officials added to the chaos (most recently in Kenosha and in Portland).

The unbridled Kellyanne Conway clearly articulated the strategy for Fox News, “The more chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence reigns, the better it is for the very clear choice on who’s best on public safety and law and order.”

Sixty-three days to go until Americans cast judgement.

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.

2020 General Election, Democrats, Republicans

Should Joe Biden and the Democrats welcome help from GOP Never Trumpers to defeat the President?

“It is possible for Biden to beat Trump without attracting many conservative votes. But it is not possible for him to win in a giant landslide without winning moderate conservative votes.” — Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes in “The Revenge of the Never Trumpers.”

That’s a Yes.

Moreover, a landslide will help deliver the Senate to Democrats — and the more victories in 2020, the more secure the Democratic majority will be after inevitable defeats in less favorable election cycles in the future.

A number of folks on the left side of the political spectrum have criticized the Lincoln Project and John Kasich’s prime time role at the Democratic convention. The most substantive objection is that, somehow, Republican Never Trumpers might gain undue influence over Joe Biden’s agenda, moving him toward a hawkish foreign policy, and away from health care expansion and increases in the corporate tax rate.

I don’t buy it. If a Biden win brings a new Democratic majority to the Senate, it will be the influence of conservative Democratic senators — not Republicans and former-Republicans who joined Democrats in opposing Trump — that shape the breadth and reach of his policy successes in 2021.

Besides — Biden hasn’t won the election. There are 98 days to go until November 3. A lot can happen — and will. Rejecting disaffected conservatives from a broad Biden coalition is foolish.

(Photograph: Voters in line to cast ballots in California’s March 2020 primary.)

2020 Democratic Primary, Democracy

Elizabeth Warren bows out, Joe Biden soars to the lead – How did we get here?

Regarding Warren:

There are many reasons why she failed to win the Democratic presidential nomination. But don’t kid yourself: Being a woman is one of them. – Francis Wilkinson

People always say …

Well, It’s not the right woman. Well, who’s going to be the right woman? Look at us, we’re as diverse as you can get, we’re all different shapes, sizes, colors. So which one of us is the right woman? – Pennsylvania Congresswoman Susan Wild

She was doing so well for a time.

For a while, it seemed like she had a good shot, but then as voting approached, she didn’t. Spooked voters blamed “the country,” as if they themselves didn’t populate the country. I’m ready for a female president, but the country isn’t. And then they voted for a man they could tolerate instead of the woman they loved.– Monica Hesse 

Although Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016, her defeat diminished the prospects of a woman winning the Democratic nomination in 2020. The safer choice turned out to be an old white guy whose “policies, such as they are, are milquetoast appeals to moderation in the face of impending catastrophe — vows to compromise on legislation with Republicans, despite their demonstrated commitment to steamrolling democracy in the interest of partisan advantage; refusals to fight for free health care for all in the name of preserving private insurance, despite the rampant horror stories of insulin rationing and deferred emergency-room visits that prevail among the tens of millions of uninsured or underinsured Americans,” in the words of Zak Cheney-Rice, who continues:

But where his policies underwhelm — and, indeed, most voters would be hard-pressed to name a single one — his campaign has found incredible success drawing on voters’ emotional attachment to what they think he represents: a return to the sociopolitical norms that were so rudely disrupted by Trump’s election.

Black voters in South Carolina are credited with giving Joe Biden the boost he needed to overtake Bernie Sanders in the race for the nomination.

Mara Gay laments Elizabeth Warren’s withdrawal from the race: “Looking at this as an American woman, and thinking to yourself, Elizabeth Warren was the most qualified, in many ways, … most experienced candidate in the race. She had the best ideas … and she really did her homework. And I think there is a sense among a lot of women that you have to be twice as good – and even then it’s not enough. And I think that’s what happened tonight.”

“But,” Gay adds, “there is a larger context here.”

I just got back from a trip across the South … And the reality is that Senator Warren was running in the shadow of Hillary Clinton’s loss. And voters – Democratic voters, especially black Democrats in the South who really spoke up forcefully in favor of Joe Biden – they are so desperate and so intent on beating Donald Trump that they are looking for the least risk imaginable.

I had voter after voter tell me, ‘You know, we really like Elizabeth Warren, but we don’t know if our neighbors were going to vote for a woman.’ . . .

‘We look at what happened to Hillary and we think maybe it’s too risky.’ . . .

They know Joe Biden. So he may not be Barack Obama and as inspiring, but he’s somebody who they believe is the best bet to get Donald Trump out of the White House.

In a column earlier this week, Gay offered additional context, illustrating the depth of southern black voters’ concerns:

Not long ago, these Americans lived under violent, anti-democratic governments. Now, many there say they see in President Trump and his supporters the same hostility and zeal for authoritarianism that marked life under Jim Crow.

For those who lived through the trauma of racial terrorism and segregation, or grew up in its long shadow, this history haunts the campaign trail. And Mr. Trump has summoned old ghosts.

“People are prideful of being racist again,” said Bobby Caradine, 47, who is black and has lived in Memphis all his life. “It’s right back out in the open.”

Cheney-Rice represents a younger generation, which has no memories of Jim Crow, and a different worldview than Congressman Jim Clyburn, born in Sumter, South Carolina before the U.S. entry into World War II. Moreover, many of us view the governing norms that, in Cheney-Rice’s dismissive words, Trump “so rudely disrupted,” as fundamental to a healthy democracy.

If searing memories of a brutal, vicious past moved South Carolina voters, many Democrats — white, black, Northern, Southern, from East to West — have embraced the principle that this isn’t the year to take big risks.

Why Biden? Why late February 2020? Kevin Drum has a chart (actually two): Biden started to surge on February 22 (two days after the Las Vegas debate and four days before the Clyburn endorsement).

So what happened on or around February 21? The only thing that stands out is the Las Vegas debate, which took place on the evening of February 19. The consensus for this debate was that Elizabeth Warren left Mike Bloomberg bleeding on the floor, but that no one else especially distinguished themselves. I just reread the New York Times summary of the debate, and it barely even mentions Biden except to note that he joined Warren in attacking Bloomberg.

So there’s something peculiar here. The conventional wisdom says that Clyburn’s endorsement powered Biden to a big win in South Carolina, and the big win in South Carolina powered Biden to victory on Super Tuesday. But Clyburn endorsed after Biden had started surging. Something else must have started the Biden surge, but the Las Vegas debate sure doesn’t seem like it was a turning point either.

Though Drum expresses puzzlement, I think he has pinpointed the key event: the debate – and the news coverage that followed over the next few days. The big story, as he notes, was Warren’s takedown of Bloomberg. And that’s – as I suggested in the last sentence of a previous post – a key to Biden’s rise. This isn’t at all peculiar.

Bernie Sanders was ascendant. Many Democrats (even on the left) were convinced that a Sanders nomination posed significant risks for the party in November. The former VP — hogging the moderate lane — appeared shaky throughout the nomination process. Other less risky choices had fallen by the wayside.

The results of the Nevada caucuses on February 22 — the beginning of Biden’s rise in Drum’s chart — would prove that neither Buttigieg, nor Klobuchar could go the distance (a result that the press had anticipated). And Warren (et al.) had already faltered.

But Bloomberg — following a half billion dollar+ campaign, including scads of slickly produced TV ads — had secured many Democratic endorsements and had steadily risen in the polls. He was waiting in the wings, ready to step up on Super Tuesday to rescue the party and the country. His fortunes changed, however, when Warren eviscerated him on stage.

No one else was left standing at that point — except Joe Biden. What exquisite timing.

(Image: WaPo on YouTube.)

2020 Democratic Primary, Democrats

Thoughts on the Democratic primary in the aftermath of Super Tuesday

After Super Tuesday, Joe Biden has pushed Bernie Sanders from his position as frontrunner. With everyone else out of the way, Bloomberg especially, it’s a two-man race for the Democratic nomination.

In 2016, I initially gave Sanders a pass when he continued campaigning even after it was obvious he had no chance of beating Hillary Clinton. After all, one of his goals was to amass enough delegates that he could influence the party platform and push it to the left. To do that, he had to keep competing.

But he’s done that. – Kevin Drum

Agreed. I was indulgent of Sanders’ protracted 2016 primary campaign because of my confidence that Hillary Clinton would win in November. If Sanders falters this time, let’s hope the senator promptly concedes and gets behind the Democratic nominee.

Perhaps the starkest symbol of Sanders’s limitations last night was the resurgence of a problem that severely damaged him in 2016: widespread resistance from primary voters who self-identify as Democrats (as opposed to independents). . . .

The Super Tuesday exit polls showed Biden beating Sanders among self-identified Democrats by about 30 percentage points in both Virginia and North Carolina, about 25 points in Oklahoma, 20 points in Tennessee, and nearly 50 in Alabama. Sanders was more competitive among Democratic partisans in the New England states of Massachusetts and Maine. But the overall pattern was unmistakable.

His collapse among Democratic partisans came after recent full-throated attacks on “the Democratic establishment” in his rallies and media appearances. Sanders has often sounded more as if he believes he’s leading his movement in a hostile takeover of the party than a merger with it. – Ronald Brownstein

Yeah. Democrats can’t resist complaining about the Democratic Party – but the millions of Democratic voters are a diverse bunch. Our communities are as diverse as we are. We don’t always agree. That’s the nature of a broad coalition under a big tent. Most Democrats, in the election of our lives, are seeking someone to unify us, not scold us – or our leaders. Attacking the Democratic establishment is a discordant rallying cry, especially from someone who regards himself as standing outside the tent.

When the campaign began, I had a fervent wish not to have to vote for an old white guy. It wasn’t always clear to me, if I didn’t get my wish, whether a Biden or a Sanders nomination would be the most disappointing.

From my vantage point today, Biden looks like the best bet to help Democrats boot out Trump and take back the Senate. Joe Biden has significant vulnerabilities, including looking and acting like a not especially vibrant 77-year-old; a continuing career of gaffes, verbal tangents, and visibly losing his train of thought; and an inability, thus far, to explain simply and coherently why the Hunter, Burisma, and Ukraine tales hammered by Republicans aren’t on a par with Trump’s corruption. But he is one of us, the last one standing (since Sanders chooses to stand apart from us), and it’s us against them.

That said, yesterday I cast a ballot – with no expectations that she would hit 15% in California – for Elizabeth Warren. Here’s hoping this terrific senator returns to Washington next year to a chamber with a Democratic majority. And, give her credit, Warren had the starring role in taking down Mike Bloomberg and his obscene $600,000,000+ campaign (which, not incidentally, provided a critical assist in the resurrection of the Biden campaign).

L.A. County’s new “ballot marking device” worked like a charm (though the process of checking in voters was very, very slow).
Casting a ballot for Elizabeth Warren in March 2020 primary election.

(Image of Joe Biden from his twitter page.)

Democrats, Republicans, Short & Sweet ... Short & Sour

Might Joe Biden be having second thoughts about working cooperatively with his GOP friends?

Understatement of the day:

“The increasingly personal and angry nature of the impeachment proceedings threatens to undercut a key message of Joe Biden’s campaign — that comity and civility can return to Washington after President Trump’s departure and that he’s the man to make that happen.” — Matt Viser, Washington Post (“Joe Biden unloads on Lindsey Graham amid signs GOP senators will target Hunter”)

(Image: screengrab of Democratic debate in Atlanta.)