Monday Wake Up Call – November 14, 2016

We just can’t seem to stop talking about Trump winning the election. Pundits have sliced and diced the data from November 9, and so far, the major trend remains poor turnout.

From 538: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

The raw number of votes rose: About 1.4 million MORE Americans voted in this year’s election than in 2012, a total which itself was down from 2008. But the electorate was growing in the meantime: About 57% of eligible voters cast ballots this year, down from 58.6% in 2012 and 61.6% in 2008, which was the highest mark in 40 years.

The total number of votes was up, but the percentage of actual voters to eligible voters was down. This says that, in 2016, people cared less about the outcome of the election than they did in 2012. 60% of Millennials failed to vote, 6% less than in 2012. The 65+ cohort dropped most dramatically, down 12% from 2012. From Carl Beijer:

The major trend in 2016 was one of increasingly apathy. Within that broader trend, the demographic patterns are muddy. Deviations in relative support from group to group don’t map well onto the standard media narratives that dominated this election; for example, apathy grew more among women and voters of color than among men and white voters. Among the candidates, Clinton either broke even or lost support among every single demographic group, while Trump won support among voters of color and boomers.

And if we look at states that were key to Trump’s victory – Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Florida, Ohio, New Hampshire, all but Pennsylvania and Florida had lower overall turnout. And in the case of Ohio and Wisconsin, turnout was much lower.

While it’s too early to say that we saw a populist revolt, it is clear that the slimy campaigns and the unattractive candidates probably depressed turnout.  And it isn’t clear yet whether voter suppression laws had a significant impact on the outcome of the election, but America’s gotta wake up.

When 43% of eligible voters don’t bother to vote, we risk surrendering our democracy to a well-organized minority of Americans. Nobody should be complaining if they failed to vote.

To help the non-voters wake up, we will listen today to Leonard Cohen. Wrongo mentioned Cohen’s death yesterday. His dying wasn’t a surprise, since he said in last month’s profile in the New Yorker that he was “ready to die.” Yet, on October 13th he told an LA audience:

I think I was exaggerating. I’ve always been into self-dramatization… I intend to stick around until 120.

That didn’t come to pass. His final album, “You Want It Darker” came out on three weeks ago. In it, he waves goodbye to us with grace. Asked often about his process for songwriting he usually replied:

I’ve often said if I knew where the good songs came from, I’d go there more often.

But we remember him today with “Everybody Knows”. It probably has been overplayed this week, but it is appropriate for the revolutionary week we had:

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

Sample lyrics:

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows

Doesn’t that kind of sum up where we are heading for the next four years?

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Election Day 2016: Closing Argument

“I look forward to a great future for America – a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose.” –  John F. Kennedy

JFK said that at Amherst College less than a month before he died. He wasn’t running for reelection yet, but that quote shows how he towers over the two presidential candidates in front of us today.

We could ask: “What does wisdom have to do with being president?” And our answer should be “everything”!

Some Americans are angry. Some are mainly angry with Washington. Many are impatient, unable to keep a long complicated idea in their heads to a conclusion, saying things like: “bottom line this for me” after less than a couple of minutes of talk. People are overwhelmed with information, much of which is patently false, so they do not know what to believe. The simply angry people will not help us solve anything, and they may not even accept a solution designed to help with some of their problems.

This is the context for today’s election.

The best case for Hillary Clinton is that she represents a continuation of Obama’s policies, with a few slightly more progressive ideas forced into the mix by Bernie. If Clinton is president, she will continue to have the same fights with Republicans in Congress that Obama had, but since Trump wants to enact policies that are destructive, some of which will be enthusiastically supported by Republicans in Congress, wisdom indicates Hillary is our best option this year.

Over the next four years Clinton is unlikely to do anything domestically that makes the lives of most Americans worse, and any Supreme Court justices she picks are likely to be reliably liberal on social issues, assuming Republicans are willing to confirm any nominee offered by a Democrat.

Her foreign policy is hawkish. This is the one place where Trump seems to be to the left of Clinton. How we handle Russia, China and the Middle East will be a huge challenge to the next president, but the leader of the free world cannot be an impulsive know-it-all.

What about the arguments against Clinton?

Emails are Hillary’s quicksand. Win or lose, Congress will keep worrying on that bone for a long, long time.

What about the paid speeches, the relationships with Wall Street and foreign governments? None of that is unique to Clinton. Her neoliberal positions and affiliations are common in both Parties. Obama, both Bushes, Bill Clinton, and Reagan have all taken money from most of these same groups through the campaign finance system.

Money and influence are the business plan for all American politicians. There’s nothing particularly revelatory about that, and it doesn’t make her any more corrupt than most other Democrats and Republicans who have run for president.

Arguments for Donald Trump:

The best argument for Donald Trump doesn’t rely on any of his policy positions, some of which are unclear and many of which are completely detached from evidence-based reality. Instead, the argument for him is that he will shake things up, and possibly, change some things.

Arguments against Trump:

A Trump presidency would be risky, since his ideas and temperament could easily make things worse than the current situation. He’s been called many names, his own ghostwriter for the book “The Art of the Deal” called him a sociopath. Many words describe Donald Trump, but here are a few that do not: Thoughtful. Serious. Presidential. So, wisdom argues that we not elect Trump.

People are looking for change. For them, it’s disheartening to settle for someone like Clinton who seeks gradual improvement, but is not a change agent.

America needs change, but it has to be a positive kind of change. That means it’s better to stick with the lower risk candidate unless there is a political alternative who really might make things better.

There will be better messengers for left-driven and right-driven populism down the road. When that happens, we will have more chances to pick a workable political alternative to the neoliberalism of both establishment parties.

Be patient, while we wait for a better alternative.

And vote today, if you haven’t yet.

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Voting Rights and John Roberts

From USA Today:

National and local voting rights activists, worried about threats to casting ballots nationwide, are setting up command centers, staffing hotlines and deploying thousands of monitors to polling sites across the country to ensure voters can get to the polls.

There has been plenty of talk about “rigged’’ elections in the 2016 presidential campaign. Link that with the Supreme Court’s rejection of a key section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and civil rights and voting rights activists say they’re concerned about possible roadblocks at the polls next week.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, 14 states will have new voting restrictions in place, ranging from photo ID requirements to early voting cutbacks, to registration restrictions.

Some of the blame for this can be laid at the door of the Supreme Court and Chief Justice John Roberts. Stephanie Mencimer in MoJo writes that Roberts “had it in for the Voting Rights Act”:

In 2013, when Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. issued the most far-reaching Supreme Court decision on voting rights in the 21st century, he finally succeeded in gutting a civil rights law he has been fighting his entire career. For three decades, Roberts has argued that the US has become colorblind to the point where aggressive federal intervention on behalf of voters of color is no longer necessary—and this case, Shelby County v. Holder, was the pinnacle of that crusade.

Roberts honed his views on race and voting as a clerk for Justice William Rehnquist and later in the Reagan DOJ. Rehnquist redefined opposition to civil rights laws as a commitment to color blindness, using this leap of logic to undermine the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

The Atlantic reports that Roberts has a history of insisting that the US is a post-racial, colorblind society, a viewpoint he emphasized in his 2013 Shelby County v. Holder opinion. That decision removed a critical component of the Voting Rights Act: the requirement that jurisdictions with a long history of voting discrimination submit any changes in voting procedures to the DOJ for “preclearance,” to ensure those changes didn’t have a discriminatory impact.

Preclearance blocked more than 700 discriminatory voting changes between 1982 and 2006. But in the Shelby opinion, Roberts asserted that such protections were no longer warranted. He said that federal oversight of the jurisdictions in question, mostly states in the Deep South, was outdated and unjustified.

After the Shelby decision, several states passed new voting restrictions that were overwhelmingly directed at minorities. On the day the Shelby decision was handed down, Texas announced that the only two forms of state voter identification it would accept were a driver’s license or a gun license—a measure the DOJ had previously blocked.

  • Georgia moved some municipal elections in predominantly minority areas from November to May, depressing turnout by nearly 20% in one instance.
  • Alabama implemented a strict voter ID law—and then shut down driver’s license offices in every county where more than 75% of voters were African American.
  • The most blatant was North Carolina’s omnibus voting law. Passed shortly after the Shelby decision, the NC law imposed strict ID requirements, limited the registration window, and dramatically cut early voting during times traditionally used by African Americans.

Some lower courts are walking back the Shelby decision. In July, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals blocked enforcement of North Carolina’s voting law, saying its provisions “target African-Americans with almost surgical precision.”

Will the lower court ruling cause Roberts to rethink his Shelby opinion? No.

In August, the Supreme Court, without a Scalia replacement, would not hear an appeal of the 4th Circuit’s blocking of North Carolina’s voting law, but Roberts wrote that he personally would have allowed most of the law to take effect.

According to Harvard’s Alex Keyssar, the popular vote in North Carolina for the state legislature and members of Congress for the last several years has been pretty much evenly split, but the seats are overwhelmingly Republican. And that matters. That’s how the Republican legislature put together its voting laws.

Voter suppression and partisan gerrymandering are the greatest threats to our democracy. Suppression provides the opportunity to gerrymander. Taken together, suppression and gerrymandering provide the means to disenfranchise groups of the electorate from our democracy.

The anger in this nation is because people can feel things slipping away, even if they don’t all agree on why it is, or who to blame.

At some point, it won’t matter anymore. But by then, we might have a Republic in name only.

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RIP Tom Hayden

Tom Hayden died on Monday. Like Bob Dylan, Nixon, Robert Kennedy, MLK and many others, Hayden was a part of inventing the 1960s as we remember them. He was best known as an anti-Vietnam War activist, but he was active in the Civil Rights movement and in other social causes.

In 1961, he joined the Freedom Riders, challenging Southern authorities who refused to enforce the Supreme Court’s rulings banning segregation on public buses. He was beaten for his efforts in Mississippi and then jailed in Georgia. Hayden was the first president of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a university-based student activist movement, started in 1962.

In 1968, Hayden helped plan the antiwar protests in Chicago that targeted the Democratic National Convention. Police officers clashed with thousands of demonstrators, injuring hundreds in a televised spectacle that a national commission later called a police riot. Yet, Hayden and others were charged by federal officials with inciting riot and conspiracy.

The resulting Chicago Seven trial was a classic confrontation between Abbie Hoffman and the other defendants and Judge Julius Hoffman (no relation), marked by insults, outbursts and contempt citations. The demonstration that led to the Chicago Police riot and the trial, is remembered for Mayor Richard Daly saying these infamous words:

Gentlemen, let’s get this straight. The policeman isn’t there to create disorder, the policeman is there to preserve disorder.

In 1973, Hayden married Jane Fonda, went to Hanoi and escorted a few American prisoners of war home from Vietnam. Later, he won a seat in the California Legislature in Sacramento in 1982, and served as an assemblyman and as a state senator, for a total of 18 years.

Last April, he explained why he was switching his vote from Bernie Sanders to Hillary Clinton in the California Democratic primary:

There are two Hillary Clintons. First, the early feminist, champion of children’s rights, and chair of the Children’s Defense Fund; and second, the Hillary who has grown more hawkish and prone to seeking “win-win” solutions with corporate America…

Hayden went on to say:

I wish our primary could focus more on ending wars and ending regime change too, issues where Bernie is more dovish and Hillary still harbors an inner hawk. Both Bernie and Hillary call for “destroying” ISIS, whatever that might mean—but it certainly means we are moving into yet another “war presidency”…

Hayden closed with this point: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

So here we are, at the end of one generation on the left and the rise of another…We still need the organizing of a united front of equals to prevail against the Republicans….It’s up to all of us.

Hayden was a member of the Silent Generation, yet he willingly passed the activist torch to the current progressive political movement headed by Millennials, based less in marching and demonstrating, and more in social media, as the means of organizing support and expressing their activism. We saw this clearly with the Bernie campaign, where most of Bernie’s communication took place via social media.

We saw it in the aborted Occupy movement as well.

Trump has used social media to build a huge following. Now he is running a nightly newscast on Facebook. The first “broadcast” looked like a live TV newscast. There was a news scroll at the bottom of the screen, and there was also a button for donating to Trump’s campaign.

And this isn’t only an American process. In Hong Kong one year ago, as protesters fought against a proposed electoral rule change by Beijing, social media, and technology more broadly, were key to spreading the message that was heard not just by protesters, but around the world. Even those not attending were involved, showing solidarity with the protest was as simple as sharing an image of a yellow umbrella on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Back to Hayden: Our society hasn’t paid much attention to the political activists of the 1960s in a long time. Groups like the Moral Monday movement are using a hybrid of the old civil rights strategy with large demonstrations in cities, backed by social media to organize public opinion, and drive turnout at their events.

Many in Hayden’s generation of civil rights and anti-war activists took on issues that divided America. The new progressive movement is now taking on those same issues all over again in a still-divided America.

The world of the 1960s and 1970s is far enough in the past that these activists who were young adults then, are now dying. But, our 2016 political landscape shows that we have yet to come to terms with that period in our culture.

The same problems exist. Let’s hope that this new generation of activists will be more effective in solving them.

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Can a Main Stream Party Win Millennial Voters?

Millennials seem to be on the fringe of the political action in 2016. A new survey “The Millennial Economy” by Ernst & Young (E&Y) shows that they are also on the fringe economically, and that they distrust many American institutions.

That may explain why they are disaffected with the current Presidential race. A mid-June survey of 1,200 18-34 year olds was conducted online and via cell phone buy E&Y. It has a margin of error of ± 2.83%. E&Y found that coming of age during an historic economic downturn has severely impacted Millennials:

  • 30% of respondents live with their parents, and it’s 40% if they are still single.
  • Nearly one­-third believe their local community is still in a recession.

Millennial stress levels are high:

  • 78% of Millennials are worried about having good-­paying job opportunities.
  • 74% are worried they won’t be able to pay their healthcare bills if they get sick.
  • 79% are worried they will not have enough money to live on when they retire.

Millennials are the most educated generation in US history, but they are not convinced of the cost/benefit of higher education. Instead of education opening doors, many Millennials feel that student debt has boxed them in. The WSJ reported that among college-educated Millennials, 81% had at least one source of long-term debt, while The Atlantic reports that real wages have fallen for Millennials (and only Millennials) in the past five years, even as education costs have skyrocketed.

E&Y surveyed Millennials’ views of the establishment. They find that Millennials have very little confidence in many of our established institutions, but they are patriotic and supportive of a leading role for the US in the world. This chart is from the study:

millennial-view-of-institutions-png

Millennial men have greater confidence in US institutions than women, with 34% of men expressing confidence in the institutions polled compared to only 25% of women. Overall, Millennials:

  • Had the least confidence in the News Media (73%) closely followed by the Federal Government, Governors, and Corporate America (72%).
  • Had the most confidence in the Military (55%), followed by Colleges and Universities (51%) and Professional Sports (32%).

Millennial men remain more optimistic than Millennial women, although the clear majority of both genders think the country is headed in the wrong direction:

  • Men are nearly twice as likely to believe that the country is headed in the right direction (33%) as women (17%).
  • Hispanic men and black women are the most optimistic group within each gender, with 41% of the former and 27% of the latter believing the country is headed in the right direction.

So the $64 question is: How to win the vote of Millennials? E&Y says that economic uncertainty greatly influences Millennials’ political priorities. They found that Millennials are looking to politicians to alleviate their financial insecurity:

  • 64% of Millennials believe public education should be a top priority for federal tax dollars, a consensus that crosses party lines.
  • Social Security and Medicare were their second priority (46%), while National Security was third at 45%.
  • 47% of Millennials identify as independents.

Finally, as a crib sheet for debate prep, E&Y have this checklist for Millennial hot-button issues:

millennial-vote-checklist

Politicians always play to a checklist. Trump mentioned every battle ground state in the last debate, but fell in the polls. And playing generational politics can result in the candidate seeming completely inauthentic. That has been Hillary Clinton’s problem with Millennials. Al Gore tried it with Social Security in 2000 vs. GW Bush, and it did not work.

Polls show Clinton running far behind where she would hope to be with Millennials. She is winning just under half of Millennial votes, while Obama got over 60% in both of his campaigns.

As we have said, Hillary is not Bernie, and doesn’t stand for what Bernie stood for. So while millennials loved him for it, Hillary will not do as well with them.

Wrongo is concerned about how many young people are considering voting for Gary Johnson. Johnson’s libertarian views are far worse for their interests than anything Hillary stands for.

Johnson certainly would never support the government doing anything with student debt. Yet apparently, many young people will be voting for him, with no apparent concern about how it might help elect Donald Trump.

Perhaps Millennials and the rest of us need to have a busload of faith to get by between here and Election Day in order to survive. Here is Lou Reed live on Letterman in 1989 with “Busload of Faith”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNZm89wLaBw

True to Lou, he sang about a busload of faith, minus the bus, and minus the faith.

Those who view the Wrongologist in email can see the video here.

Sample Lyrics:

You can’t depend on your family
you can’t depend on your friends
You can’t depend on a beginning
you can’t depend on an end

You can’t depend on intelligence
ooohhh, you can’t depend on God
You can only depend on one thing
you need a busload of faith to get by

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Trump ≠ Change

Despite being the presidential candidate of the Republican Party, Donald Trump has positioned himself as the candidate of change in the 2016 election. During the first debate, he tried to hammer home his call for sweeping political change. From Reuters:

Some of Trump’s strongest moments at Monday’s debate were when he categorized Clinton, a former secretary of state and US senator as a “typical politician,” accusing her of achieving nothing in her years in Congress and government.

Polls show an electorate hungry for change, with a majority believing the country is on the wrong track. In fact, Reuters/Ipsos polling shows that 64% of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track. That number includes 87% of Republicans and 44% of Democrats.

When Reuters asked voters to pick the first word that comes to mind when thinking about the country, the most popular choice was “frustration,” (49%) followed by “fear”(15%) and “anger”(13.8%).

With an electorate once again yearning for change, as they do every four years; who will they turn to in 2016? Many pundits have said that Hillary Clinton is the voice of the status-quo, while Donald Trump is the candidate of change, that she represents incrementalism, while he represents big ideas.

Bill Clinton ran and won on change. Barack Obama ran and won on “change you can believe in.”

But, as Jeff Jarvis says: (brackets by the Wrongologist)

I ended up voting for Barack Obama, but while he was in a [primary] race against Hillary Clinton his campaign slogan drove me to distraction. “Change we can believe in.” What change exactly?

Jarvis makes this point:

“Change” is an empty word, a vague promise. Obama promised “change” and it was a vessel into which his supporters poured their dreams…The proper word is not “change” but “progress.”

But the term “progress” has been devalued and given different meanings by both the left and the right, making it less useful to describe what is required in next stage in our political and social evolution.

Jarvis thinks the key word should be “improvement”: Based on her web site, Clinton will work to improve health care, college costs, infrastructure, criminal justice, mental health, national security, the environment, taxation, campaign finance, and the status of women and minorities.

In this context, Trump ≠ change. He promises little improvement. In fact, his basic message is one of regression: Let’s return to an earlier time in America when many of his supporters feel they had more control over their lives. They say that they have lost their cultural and (possibly) their economic position due to changes they could not control, changes they resent, changes that broadened American opportunity, making it available to others, some of whom are outsiders. Trump is promising to stop these kinds of change.

Change can be of the revolutionary or evolutionary kind, but other than the American Revolution, are there examples of successful revolutionary change in the past 300 years? China, maybe? The French Revolution? Iran? All of these revolutions were accompanied by bloodshed. In our current environment, with instant global communication, evolutionary change is likely to be more successful.

And when you think about what evolutionary change involves: Understanding a problem, preparing and planning for the required change, building a supportive coalition, implementing and sustaining it in law and action, what about Donald Trump suggests to you that he could be an effective change agent?

Alternatively, Clinton presents a vision of a country headed basically in the right direction, but one that needs to address income and other forms of inequality. She is boxed into a position of running against “real” change, because of her career as a member of the establishment, and in part because she wants to run on Obama’s record. She would also like to bring his coalition along with her, but by temperament, she isn’t Bernie.

Still, she has cataloged the many tweaks and changes she hopes to make to policy. They are available online for those who have an attention span longer than it takes to read 140 characters.

This is in contrast to The Pant Load, who values tweets, conflict and personality over substance.

Three AM Tweet Storms are not change, they improve nothing. He promises nothing, and we are letting him get away with it.

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – September 18, 2016

Luckily, it only comes up every four years:

cow-cialis-election

Colin Powell’s emails were hacked, and America loved it:

cow-colin-powell

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

OTOH, Powell lied at the UN about WMDs. That helped start an unnecessary war in which many died. People have short memories. His standing should not be revived by a few blunt emails.

Hillary is back on the road. Is it too little vision, too late?

cow-fainting-spell

Dems should be ashamed, ashamed that their candidate runs so poorly with the young. That she is an ineffective campaigner. This is reminiscent of the summer of 1988, when Dukakis spent a week in August in Nantucket thinking he was ahead in the polls (Clinton spent two weeks in the Hamptons). She and her team are badly misdiagnosing what drives voters. Every response seems weak and ineffective.

Wells Fargo caught in phony account scheme:

cow-wells-fargo

Wells fired 5300 “low level” employees, roughly 1% of the workforce, for signing up customers for checking accounts and credit cards without their knowledge. About 2 million sham accounts were opened, complete with forged signatures, phony email addresses, and fake PIN numbers, created by employees who were hounded by supervisors to meet daily account quotas. But the executive at the top of this hot steaming pile, Carrie Tolstedt, left in July with a $125 million retirement package.

Trump retracts his birther scam with an untrue swipe at Hillary Clinton:

cow-trump-admits

From Mark Shields  on the NewsHour about Trump’s birther nonsense:

He wasn’t only the loudest and the highest-profile and the most persistent and the most well-publicized birther, he, Donald Trump…lied. He lied consistently and persistently.

And, today, without explanation or excuse, he just changed his position and tried to absolutely falsely shift the blame onto Hillary Clinton…he debased democracy. He debased the national debate. He appealed to that which is most ignoble or least noble in all of us.

From David Brooks on the NewsHour:

Usually, there’s some tangential relationship to the truth…But now we’re in a reverse, Orwellian inversion of the truth with this. And so we have a team of staffers and then the candidate himself who have taken the normal spin and smashed all the rules. And so we are really in Orwell land. We are in “1984.” And it’s interesting that an authoritarian personality type comes in at the same time with a complete disrespect for even tangential relationship to the truth that words are unmoored…And so what’s white is black, and what is up is down, what is down is up. And that really is something new in politics.

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – September 4, 2016

Welcome to Labor Day weekend. This means that summer is over, and mercifully, there are only nine weeks until Election Day:

COW Labor Day IV.png

Donald Trump did a drive-through in Mexico. His souvenir sombrero says “Culero”.  For those who do not speak colloquial Spanish, Culero means asshole:

COW Culero

Some thought he looked presidential while with President Nieto, but then he looked more like an ultra-nationalist in Phoenix. A Trump advisor said that without enforced deportation, we would soon have a taco truck on every corner. America responded:

COW Taco Trucks

Even better, there were some estimates that a taco truck on every corner might deliver enough jobs to eliminate today’s US unemployment. Great idea Donald!

The Pant Suit did not have a good week. The FBI released some of the information they had collected while investigating the email issue. The outrage by those who believe Clinton is the worst candidate ever was palpable. Should we be buying it?

COW Bad Bag

OTOH, for many it’s just too much appearance of guilt:

COW Guilty Looking

49rs QB Colin Kaepernick has touched a nerve. It is surprising to see who is for and against his position:

COW Divided we Sit

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Obama’s Convention Speech

The President gave a great speech last night. And it was a clutch performance. For our non-ESPN readers, “clutch” means a top performance when the stakes are high. It was a summation of his time as president, and the presentation of a vision which is left for his successor to achieve. From Nancy LeTourneau:

The expectations were high for President Obama’s speech last night at the Democratic Convention. He had several tasks to accomplish. First of all, he needed to remind us of what we’ve accomplished over the last eight years.

And Obama said:

A lot’s happened over the years. And while this nation has been tested by war and recession and all manner of challenge – I stand before you again tonight, after almost two terms as your President, to tell you I am even more optimistic about the future of America. How could I not be – after all we’ve achieved together?

More from LeTourneau:

Second, he needed to acknowledge that we still have a lot more work to do.

And Obama said:

So tonight, I’m here to tell you that yes, we still have more work to do. More work to do for every American still in need of a good job or a raise, paid leave or a decent retirement; for every child who needs a sturdier ladder out of poverty or a world-class education; for everyone who hasn’t yet felt the progress of these past seven and a half years. We need to keep making our streets safer and our criminal justice system fairer; our homeland more secure, and our world more peaceful and sustainable for the next generation. We’re not done perfecting our union, or living up to our founding creed – that all of us are created equal and free in the eyes of God.

Martin Longman offered some context for Obama’s speech in the history of presidents making speeches at presidential conventions:

We have to go back a long way to find a president who was had the popularity and moral credibility at the end of their second term in office to even have the opportunity to give a speech like Obama delivered…

He offered some perspective:

The last two-term president, George W. Bush, delivered his speech to the 2008 Republican National Convention via satellite…There’s no question, however, that John McCain was not itching to have Bush as his character witness.

Longman reflected on Bill Clinton:

In 2000, the country was still angry about Bill Clinton’s behavior in office…Al Gore not only tried to create distance between himself and the president, but he selected Joe Lieberman as his running mate in large part because Lieberman had been one of Clinton’s harshest critics during l’affaire Lewinsky.

More on other presidents: (brackets and emphasis by the Wrongologist)

In 1988, Ronald Reagan was very popular with Republicans [but he]…staggered to the end of his presidency through the Iran-Contra Scandal…He did give a speech at the convention, and his approval ratings spiked during his last year in office.

Jimmy Carter wasn’t a two-term president, but in 1992 it was a different Georgia Democrat who was selected to give the Keynote Address at the Democratic National Convention: Zell Miller.

Presidents Nixon and Lyndon Johnson had no credibility left when the 1976 and 1968 conventions rolled around.

Eisenhower…did address the 1960 Republican National Convention in Chicago, but he didn’t bother to mention Richard Nixon’s name.

Reagan came the closest to having been able to give a speech like the one Obama gave last night in which a popular and morally credible president can make an impassioned and enthusiastic speech in favor of their successor and have it be well-received by the media and the people.

A final point from Longman:

It seems like a low bar…, but it’s remarkable that we have to go searching in the mists of time to find a precedent…On character and performance, he has no recent peer.

Obama is the whole package: Words and deeds. No President since FDR has both inspired and led as he has. Even though St. Ronnie could give a good speech, he wasn’t nearly as good, as often, as Obama has been.

The calls by Joe Biden and Mike Bloomberg to independents and middle-of-the-road Republicans to come to Hillary may gain a little traction, depending on her speech tonight. It’s possible, since the display of moral force and basic human decency these past few days is in stark contrast to the fear, hate, and anger in Cleveland.

Wrongo wants Democrats to win in 2016. While Hillary isn’t a perfect candidate, we can’t make perfect the enemy of good, as some of the Bernie people seem to want.

It’s Dump Trump – but after eight years of GOP obstruction, it’s Ditch Mitch, too.

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Make America Safe?

Wrongo has tried hard not to write again about the murderous and divisive actions taken against police over the past few weeks, but it seems impossible. From the NYT:

The twin attacks — three officers dead Sunday in Baton Rouge, five killed on July 7 in Dallas, along with at least 12 injured over all — have set off a period of fear, anguish and confusion among the nation’s 900,000 state and local law enforcement officers. Even the most hardened veterans call this one of the most charged moments of policing they have experienced.

Never one to let bad news pass without blaming, the Pant Suit criticized President Obama’s response:

FireShot Screen Capture #104 - Trump

Monday kicked off the GOP Convention. The theme for the first day is “Make America Safe Again”. In case you thought that despite the recent spate of cop killings, you live in one of the safest places on earth, the Trump team is out to scare you up good.

The central theme of Trump’s campaign is that he plans to protect you: From scary Islamic terrorists, from scary immigrants who steal jobs, rape and pillage, and from scary black men with guns.

This resonates with many Republicans who are in the grip of overpowering nostalgia for the1950’s. Republicans see this as a time of stable marriages, respect for authority and economic dynamism. They are not alone: Democrats see it as a time when most men could leave high school and walk into a well-paid job, with pension and health-care benefits, which would allow them to support a family and retire comfortably.

There was much to like about this era of 25₵ gallons of gas, sport coats and cars with tail fins, but it is far from the whole story. It forgets the specter of nuclear annihilation that was ever-present. It forgets that women had little chance of a career beyond the typists’ pool, or that society forced African-Americans to the back of the bus.

Feminism, the civil-rights movement and economic progress in other countries swung a wrecking-ball at the society of the 1950s. But, to regret its collapse, as many Tea Partiers and Republicans do, is also to wish those improvements had never happened, which is absurd. Life was NOT good for the working person in the 1930s and 1940s. Even in the halcyon days of the 1950s -1970s, life was not good for women, people of color, gay people, and others.

Republicans see our politics and our culture decaying, so we see the sharpening Trump “law and order” rhetoric, and the success of the Tea Party in setting our national political agenda.

An alternative view to Trump’s is that Obama’s eulogy for five Dallas police officers a week ago was an eloquent plea to Americans to acquire “a new heart” – a new empathy toward others across the racial divide. And rarely has a president talked so bluntly about the limits of his ability to bring about the changes he seeks. Mr. Obama:

It is as if the deepest fault lines of our democracy have suddenly been exposed, perhaps even widened…Faced with this violence, we wonder if the divides of race in America can ever be bridged…We must reject such despair…I’ve seen how inadequate words can be in bringing about lasting change. I’ve seen how inadequate my own words have been…I confess that sometimes I, too, experience doubt.

In an era of partisan polarization, the problem isn’t merely a deficit of leaders capable of binding us together; it’s a shortage of citizens willing to listen. According to the Pew Research Center, only 14% of Republicans approve of Obama’s conduct, compared with 80% of Democrats. That’s a record high in polarization – except that the previous record held by George W. Bush, who was supported by only 23% of Democrats. Trump is exploiting that.

When we zoom out from the “Make America Safe Again” meme, we remain in a competition between divergent views. We will not even start on the road to consensus until two conditions are met:

  • Our solutions strive for the preservation of a value called “the greater good”.
  • Our solutions rely on the preservation of a value called “in good faith”.

We have never changed ethics by legislation, although we can impact behavior.  What we have to change is whether or not we as a society will accept the greater good and good faith as inextricable parts of our society.

But as long as there are those among us who can defend the rights of people to use a weapon of war to kill policemen and children, or people who threaten the careers of the elected representatives who stand up to them, we will be seeing this happen again and again, and we’ll be stuck asking the same questions over and over.

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