Category: The Presidency

Saturday Soother – November 13, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park, UT – November 2021 photo by Byron Jones

This week’s Veteran’s Day apparently isn’t finished with Wrongo just yet. It’s important to remember that when the US war in Afghanistan ended in August after nearly 20 years, there were both hard and soft costs that had been paid, and much that remains to be paid.

The Pentagon reports the hard costs of our Afghanistan adventure to be $825 billion. However, the “Costs of War” project at Brown University estimates those costs at $2.313 trillion. But it gets worse: They estimate the costs of all US post-9/11 war spending at $8 trillion, including future obligations for veterans’ care and the cost of borrowing on the associated federal debt for roughly 30 years. They also estimate the human costs of the “global war on terror” at 900,000 deaths.

Those are all truly staggering numbers.

And Congress is now considering next fiscal year’s military budget. Defense One is covering this so you don’t have to. They’re saying that the proposed 2022 defense budget will be another bipartisan effort by the old-timers in the House and Senate to add more money than was asked for into the pot. And it’s part of a long history of hiding flimsy arguments behind dramatic rhetoric: (parenthesis by Wrongo)

“This year, both the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) and House Armed Services Committee (HASC) have displayed a similar unwillingness to distinguish between needs and wants in their versions of the National Defense Authorization Act, which recommend adding $25 billion and $24 billion, respectively, to President Biden’s recommended $715 billion Pentagon budget.”

More:

“It is difficult to imagine how either the SASC or HASC could convincingly demonstrate the necessity of such military spending increases when none of the most urgent crises facing the United States today have military solutions. Furthermore, the credibility of both the Pentagon and Congress on this subject is, to put it mildly, underwhelming: one has an extensive history of budgetary boondoggles, and the other is openly cozy with the U.S. arms industry.”

Defense One says that the most frustrating aspect isn’t the exorbitant amounts, but the lack of any substantive strategic justification for the increased spending by either Chamber. In specific, Defense One argues that  there’s been no effort to demonstrate that the Senate’s billions are funding needs instead of simply political wants.

Remember this is from Defense One, a stalwart defender of America’s military.

We shouldn’t assume legislators think carefully about the public’s interest when crafting the defense budget. Over the years, the defense budget process is driven partly by what the administration and the Pentagon ask for, and by what the defense industry wants for its bottom line. (Full disclosure, Wrongo holds a significant number of shares in a large defense contracting firm.)

US military spending in 2020 was $778 billion. The next closest nation was China, at $252 billion. In third place was India at $72.9 billion. Another perspective is to compare what we spent to fight in Vietnam to the costs of our Apollo moon landing. Apollo 11 got to the moon in July of 1969. That feat cost the US about $25.8 billion.

During the same era, it’s estimated that the Vietnam War cost the US $141 billion over 14 years. That means that we spent about as much in two years in Vietnam as we spent on the entire space race!

When we think about accountability for the costs of the Pentagon, we should remember that the Pentagon has never passed an outside expense audit. Waste is endemic; and the Pentagon simply fabricates numbers, but receives nearly zero pushback from Congress.

There’s so much corruption in the halls of Congress that we will never know how little we could spend on defense. Maybe we should just make some deep cuts to the defense budget and force real strategic decision-making down their throats.

Enough! It’s Saturday, and we need to take a break from trying to figure out whether Steve Bannon or Kyle Rittenhouse will ever go to jail. It’s time for our Saturday Soother.

With a soaking rain in Connecticut today, we’re limited to indoor sports. Most of our fall clean-up is still ahead, but today, let’s grab a seat by the window and listen to pianist Max Richter’s “Mercy” with Richter on piano and Mari Samuelsen on violin. Richter originally wrote the piece 10 years ago for violinist Hillary Hahn. For Richter, “Mercy” places the need for mercy and compassion firmly within our view:

 

 

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Expanding The Dem’s Voter Base

The Daily Escape:

Artist’s Point, Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park, AZ-UT – October photo by Alan Seltzer

Ruy Teixeira explains the political (and messaging) dilemma facing Democrats in 2021:

“A recent Gallup release confirmed that Democrats now have about as many liberals in the party as moderates or conservatives. That liberalism has been mostly driven by increasing liberalism among white Democrats which has spiked upward 20 points since the early 2000s. White Democrats are now a solidly liberal constituency. Not so black and Hispanic Democrats who are overwhelmingly moderate or conservative.”

The contrast is particularly striking among Whites who are college graduates and working class (non-college) nonwhites. The Gallup data show that two-thirds of White college grads are liberal while 70% of Black working class and two-thirds of Hispanic working class Democrats are moderate or conservative.

This takes on additional relevance because in 2020, 63% of voters did not have college degrees, and 74% of voters came from households making less than $100,000 a year. This should make it painfully obvious that, if issues and rhetoric that appeal mostly to college-educated White liberals are promoted, Democrats could see serious attrition among Democrat working class nonwhites who dislike those issues and rhetoric.

It’s hard to build a majority if you’re focused on a minority of the electorate. The internal conflict between Democrats, displayed by the Gallup poll mentioned above by Teixeira, pits the Party’s progressives against its moderates, its college-educated against its working class.

Like the modern Democrats, the Whigs cobbled together their party in the late 1830s out of an assortment of constituencies, many of whom had little in common. The Whig Party was formed to counter President Andrew Jackson and the Jacksonian Democrats. They were one of the two major political parties in the US from the late 1830s through the early 1850s and managed to elect two presidents: William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor.

By the mid-1850s, the Whigs were divided by the issue of slavery, particularly as the country had to decide whether new states would be admitted as slave or non-slave states. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 overturned the Missouri Compromise and allowed each territory to decide for itself whether it would be a slave or free state. Anti-slavery Whigs then spun off to found the Republican Party in 1854.

Is the modern Democratic Party on the precipice of becoming the new Whigs? The Whigs were a coalition of bankers, lawyers, and the Eastern mercantile class. In the South, Whigs worked to put a moral face on slavery. This allowed the Whigs to cultivate political distance from what was becoming a party of southern Democrats happy to extend slavery in new states, and a northern base of what we call “blue collar” (white) workers.

The Whigs couldn’t continue bridging the ideological distance between the Northern industrial states section of the party and the Southern agribusiness/slavery Whigs. Faced with this dilemma, the party broke apart.

If the Democrats are to remain one Party, a new poll by Jacobin, YouGov, and the Center for Working-Class Politics offers a perspective on how to win among working-class voters. They found that:

  • Candidates who prioritized bread-and-butter issues (jobs, health care, the economy), and presented them in plainspoken, universalist rhetoric, performed significantly better than those who had other priorities or used other language. That preference was even more pronounced in rural and small-town areas, where Democrats have struggled in recent years.
  • Candidates who named elites as a major cause of America’s problems, invoked anger at the status quo, and celebrated the working class were well received among working-class voters.
  • Potential Democratic working-class voters did not shy away from candidates who strongly opposed racism. But candidates who framed that opposition in identity-focused language fared significantly worse than candidates who embraced either populist or mainstream language.

The survey proposed multiple sound bites spoken by potential candidates to survey respondents to rank. The most popular sound bite was the “progressive populist” one:

“This country belongs to all of us, not just the super-rich. But for years, politicians in Washington have turned their backs on people who work for a living. We need tough leaders who won’t give in to the millionaires and the lobbyists, but will fight for good jobs, good wages, and guaranteed health care for every single American.”

This has implications for the 2022 mid-terms. Keep Trump off the table unless, by some miracle, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attempted coup refers charges to the DOJ and the DOJ acts on it. Another key finding was that those surveyed felt Democrats run too far left on certain priorities:

This is also key for building Democrats’ messaging in 2022. You can read the full report here.

Democrats need to think about what it will take to do two things simultaneously: How to stay together as a Party, and how to retain majorities in the House and Senate.

It won’t be simple, but everything depends on it.

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Dems Must Persuade the Persuadable

The Daily Escape:

Sunrise, Jensen Beach, FL – November 2021 photo by Patrice Ostradick

More about the Dem’s messaging problem. The latest jobs report showed that we added more than 530,000 new jobs in October. And the DOL also revised its estimates for September and August, confirming an additional 235,000 positions were created.

That’s 766,000 jobs we didn’t know about until last Friday.

The news sent the Dow Jones upward (again). It ended at another all-time high, 36,327. Since Biden was elected last year, the market is up 40%. That’s $14 trillion in new wealth that has landed in quite a few pockets. But the media still covered a Biden administration in disarray. From Eric Boehlert:

“…on Friday, news consumers visiting WashingtonPost.com had to scroll down past 75 different stories and links before they found the first mention of the blockbuster jobs report…..at the top of the Post site Friday afternoon was a column about how the White House is having trouble spreading good news about the economy.”

Again, the media going all “gotcha” on Biden. And it’s having an impact on his poll numbers, which took another dive in a USA Today poll over the weekend that shows Republicans holding a lead on the 2022 Congressional ballot. It found that Biden lost support among the Independent voters who delivered his margin of victory over Trump one year ago:

  • 46% said Biden has done a worse job as president than they expected, including 16% of those who voted for him. Independents, by 7-1 (44%-6%), say he’s done worse, not better, than they expected.
  • 64% said they didn’t want Biden to run for a second term in 2024. That includes 28% of Democrats.

Democrats need to understand their peril. The NYT’s front-page story, “Americans Are Flush With Cash and Jobs. They Also Think the Economy Is Awful” shows their dilemma. The economy is by all accounts on fire, but consumers and voters think it’s floundering. You might question just who is flush with cash, but the negative views of the economy seem to be tied to the effects that rising prices and shortages have on families. Regardless of the exact causes, after decades where the lack of jobs drove economic sentiment, inflation now appears to be a force driving opinion about the economy.

Prices for many consumer goods are rising, and as we said yesterday, it’s impossible to win elections by telling voters that their concerns are imaginary. From Bloomberg (paywalled):

“It’s not all negativity: A record-high 74% of respondents told Gallup in October that this is a good time to find a quality job, and 65% told AP-NORC pollsters that their personal financial situation was good. The Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index rose in October and, while lower than before the pandemic, is higher than at any time between 2001 and 2017.”

The reality is that consumer prices have risen faster over the past six months than at any time since the early 1980s. And there’s increasing evidence of a partisan bias in consumer sentiment, with most people judging the economy more favorably when the person they voted for is president.

Remember that the USA Today poll says 64% think Biden shouldn’t run in 2024. Maybe some of today’s economic pessimism has to do with people downgrading their view of Biden’s competence after the surge in the Delta variant that killed so many, while our messy withdrawal from Afghanistan was seen by many as humiliating.

The Democrats’ conundrum is how to respond both to the economic concerns and the cultural attacks. They can’t win by simply pointing to their actual policies on specific issues. They must respond to the attacks on “wrong way for the country” by honing a message that works for the persuadable Independents. We live in a 40-40-20 country in which 40% percent are hard-wired for either Party, and 20% are swing voters, who are primarily located in the suburbs. They largely control the outcome of elections.

Democrats need to study the art of persuasion. The Right is driven by nostalgia: they want to go back to a “simpler time”. The Left is motivated by change, to ensure rights for all, whether that’s healthcare or fair wages. if Democrats want to win against the highly organized right-wing media ecosystem, they must find a series of messages to persuade Independents.

We need a tune for Tuesday. Here’s Willy Nile with something brand new, “The Justice Bell” a tribute to John Lewis, from his August 2021 album, “The Day The Earth Stood Still”:

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Monday Wake Up Call – Messaging Edition, November 8, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Catskill Mountains and Hudson River from Rhinebeck, NY – October photo by hikingfordonuts

Wrongo on Sunday pointed out that polling shows that only 30% of Americans think the US is on the right track, despite tons of good economic news. The poll was by NBC just before the November elections. It showed that 70% thought the US is moving in the wrong direction. It also showed Biden’s job performance approval rating at 42%, a sharp drop from 49% in August and 53 % in April.

In addition to the great jobs report, the record stock market, and a booming economy, in less than a year, Biden has withdrawn forces from Afghanistan and passed a substantial Infrastructure Bill. These are two Trump priorities that he couldn’t accomplish during his four-year administration.

The Infrastructure Bill is an unambiguous case in which Biden succeeded where Trump failed. You may think that the Afghanistan exit was messy, but both Biden and Trump were on that same page, and now, we’re out with minimal casualties.

So, what’s the disconnect between Biden’s performance and perception of his performance? It’s that Democrats have a huge messaging problem. Don Draper suggested that when you don’t like what’s being said, you should change the conversation.

From Diane Feldman: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Most people want to feel safe in their communities, have health care when they need it, and have the opportunity for economic advancement for themselves and their children. Wanting those things is not very divisive along political lines nor by race, class, or gender….Voters are more likely to trust someone who articulates the goals and connects the policies to them than someone who argues the details of a particular policy or spending level. While there are differences between Democratic progressives and moderates on policy, most voters really don’t engage with those.”

It’s questionable if the Democrats could have pushed an upbeat, optimistic message in the election while they were also insisting that America urgently needed funding for social policies. That contradiction may be worth them exploring in more depth.

Virginia’s governor-elect Youngkin demonstrated that Republicans who use identity politics without embracing Trump’s extremist rhetoric can be highly competitive, including in solidly Blue states like New Jersey. And it’s worrying that Dems seem to believe that Youngkin was an extremist posing as a suburban dad (he is), who MSNBC’s Joy Reid said incited “white backlash” by exploiting “fake” and “imaginary” fears about the teaching of “critical race theory” (CRT) in public schools.

But that doesn’t explain the inroads Youngkin made in Blue suburbs. Voters usually consider education to be an important issue. They tend to trust Democrats to handle it better than Republicans. But, according to one Virginia poll the week before the election, Youngkin led McAuliffe by 3% among likely voters, but by 15% among K–12 parents.

So, like it or not, parental views about CRT and local control of public education were a real thing to Virginia voters.

Democrats must develop a plan for how they can avoid further political losses when Republicans across the country emulate Youngkin’s strategy. Here’s The Atlantic’s Yascha Mounk: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“For anybody who cares about making sure that Donald Trump does not become the 47th president of the United States, it is crucial that Democrats avoid repeating the mistakes that just put a Republican in Virginia’s governor’s mansion. It is impossible to win elections by telling voters that their concerns are imaginary. If Democrats keep doing so, they will keep losing.”

Democrats are led by a group of geriatrics who no longer are able to communicate. They have no real social media skills or traditional cable media machine (MSNBC isn’t the answer) to create messaging that resonates. Sadly, the traditional media is biased against them. If you doubt that, read the sub-headlines on Saturday’s front page of the NYT:

For the NYT, a Democrat win isn’t really a win. Democrats need to be crafting winning narratives. The only way that will happen is through ongoing, targeted, year-round campaigns. Not simply more speeches by geriatrics from behind podiums.

There are Democrats and Democrat-leaning voters out there. But in Red areas, they are demoralized and are sometimes hiding in plain sight. They think they are alone. Democrats have to show these demoralized Americans they are not alone, assuming the Party expects them to turn out and challenge the looming conservative majority.

Time for Democrats to wake up! Unless the messaging changes, the endgame is that Democratic voters will continue to sort into the most populated states, and Republicans will gain a permanent supermajority in the Senate. If current trends continue, in 2040 half of the US population will live in eight states.

To help them wake up, listen to Gil Scott-Heron’s “Pieces of a Man” from his 1974 album “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”:

Sample Lyric:

I saw my daddy greet the mailman
And I heard the mailman say
“Now don’t you take this letter to heart now, Jimmy
‘Cause they’ve laid off nine others today”
But he didn’t know what he was saying
He could hardly understand
That he was only talking to Pieces of a man

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Democrats Fail

The Daily Escape:

Black Oak trees in Shastice Park, CA with Mount Shasta in background – October 2021 photo via Northern California Hiking Trails

Every political writer thinks that Tuesday’s elections reinforced their preconceived view of what the Democratic Party needs. The Dems spilled gallons of metaphorical blood by blindly walking into a political propeller on Election Day.

Wrongo wants to add his two cents to the story, so he turns to a Republican for perspective. Charlie Sykes says:

“The Republican Party — populated with cranks, crooks, clowns, bigots and deranged conspiracy theorists — has spent five years alienating women, minorities and young voters….So, now, Democrats need to ask themselves this rather urgent question: Why can’t we beat these guys?”

A few words about the Virginia gubernatorial election, won by Republican Glenn Youngkin. All the talk about white suburban women being the new Democratic Party base isn’t true in Virginia. A year ago, Joe Biden won Virginia by 10 points. Four years ago, Democrat Ralph Northan won the governorship by nine. Last night, Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic former governor, lost it by two points.

Youngkin won because he convinced enough Joe Biden voters to switch sides. The Virginia suburbs have a large college-educated population. These voters moved strongly to the Democrats both times Trump ran. This time, Youngkin won enough of them without sacrificing votes from Trump’s base.

Terry McAuliffe is a terrible candidate. He walks into the room dragging the whiff of campaigns by both Clintons, but without any of Bill Clinton’s charm or political skill. McAuliffe tried to nationalize a local campaign, trying to run against Trump instead of Youngkin. Youngkin, by contrast, made a point of sticking strictly to in-state issues. Youngkin also came across as the nicer guy.

Youngkin had been the co-CEO of the Carlyle Group, a huge private equity firm with deep DC political ties. If this had been a real campaign, McAuliffe would have attacked Youngkin as a capitalist who wouldn’t do a thing for the middle class. But since McAuliffe is an investor in a Carlyle fund, he didn’t.

Welcome to today’s Democrats!

The Democratic Party’s basic issue is that it’s out of touch with average people. As an example, we’re in a time of growing pro-labor sentiment, but the leadership of the Democratic Party says little to the working class. The switch has been flipped. Now many Democrats are rich, and blue collar workers are Republicans. Getting them back will take years, if ever.

Also, each time the Democrats have a victory based in political change, they move back to the center, alienating those to whom they gave hope. So why should that part of their base continue to show up and vote?

American politics is polarized by cultural issues. Outside of marginal economic questions, Democrats have taken the big economic issues off the table. They’re at a disadvantage, because Republican cultural issues have broader appeal, while the Democrat cultural issues appeal to mostly the college-educated, who are a minority of voters. That means whenever Dems get in power, they can’t really change the policies that the monied and corporate classes want.

Wrongo thinks that it was good that the Dems lost in Virginia. Virginia, now led by Republicans, will also try to pass the same social warrior cultural programs as other Red states. The meanness and tone-deafness of those programs will horrify suburban Virginians. And they will swing back in 2024.

Still, senior national Democratic leadership needs an overhaul. They’re old and incompetent. How difficult is it to establish whether bringing in the big guns for a local election is going to be positive or negative for a campaign? The power of money in elections means that the first priority for any race is a candidate with the ability to raise money. This is why we see McAuliffe a second time, and not someone better.

That’s corruption, as Elizabeth Warren defined it in 2020.  Add the callous way Democrats react:

  • They speak of the opposition as stupid, or brain-dead. As deplorables, or as clinging to their guns and religion.
  • Their radicalization of wedge issues like “Defund the Police”, or Supreme Court Packing reveal them to be intellectually lazy.

McAuliffe said about angry parents attending school board meetings:  “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” That lost him the election because Dems never came up with a counter message.

The Republican’s success with defining control of education as a wedge issue could turn out to be a winning message in 2022.

When a Party won’t pick charismatic candidates and can’t focus on the issues that people are crying out for them to answer, voters react to both the poor messaging and leadership by going back to slogans, grievances, sports-like dynamics, and elevating trivial issues.

In other words, the Virginia campaign.

Democrats must shake up their leadership if they are to re-take the now-lost inroads they made in suburban (and female) Republican voters in 2020. They’ll need to talk in simple terms.

They’re not telling the story of how white working parents need food stamps to supplement their income. They’re not telling the story of how a family in rural America sends their kids to a school that can’t teach them how to use a computer.

There’s work to be done.

Schumer and Pelosi should report to HR for their new assignments.

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Climate Change Summit, Part II

The Daily Escape:

Mt. Princeton, Buena Vista, CO – October 2021 photo by Haji Mahmood

Biden sees the Glasgow Climate Summit as a legacy event that will bring about substantive change. But nobody believes that. Change doesn’t occur easily, and in the case of climate change, the forces arrayed against it are overwhelming.

Corporations will not give up profits easily. Individuals will not willingly pay more for goods once companies jack up their prices to maintain margins. Countries will try desperately to avoid being the first to bend the CO2 curve, knowing that their economic growth will slow precipitously.

Sometimes a change in culture has to occur before political change can begin. Think about the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, or the anti-war movement in the early 1970s. Those great political changes were built on a foundation of cultural change. One came from Black churches, and the other from college students.

We’re in the middle of a 2-year Covid debacle on top of a 13-year economic debacle. Before the Great Recession, if people weren’t making it, they (and everyone else) thought the problem wasn’t America’s politics or our economic system, but it was mostly about their laziness or lack of skills. Back then, we believed that anyone could make it. Few thought the system was rigged, and there wasn’t a widespread push for serious change.

Now, young people are tumbling to the fact the problem isn’t them – it’s the system. Think of it as a game of musical chairs, where the people sitting down never stand up when the music plays. From Ian Welsh: (Brackets by Wrongo)

“They [the young] think, ‘it’s you, not me’ where ‘you’ = society and politics. They may have…student loans, but they know boomers paid….[only] a nominal amount for university. They know they can’t afford a home or apartment, not because they don’t earn enough, but because wages have effectively gone down, and real home prices have gone up….They know medical care is too expensive and that drugs didn’t used to cost nearly this much.”

Young people are beginning to understand that without political change, their lives aren’t going to get better. In fact, they will probably get worse. This is true for the climate as well as for the basic inequalities in our society.

We need a political revolution to change these things, but America’s political system doesn’t like big changes. It does enable smaller cultural and political changes all the time. Our politicians give us intermittent reinforcement: They are amenable and sometimes eager to serve up limited forms of change, but not what most people want, or what the planet needs.

And the longer we rely on today’s politicians to save us, the farther we will be from the changes we need. Our political system is very resistant to change, as the prolonged debate over Biden’s social spending bill shows.

And there’s no political will at any level to change the system.

Still, it has to change, or it will self-destruct. When you are at Wrongo’s advanced age, the temptation is to say, “the future is hopeless.” But America’s youth will soon replace the elders in both political parties. They will not be staying quiet.

What must happen is a cultural change that a significant portion of the population will buy into. It doesn’t have to be everyone, but it has to be compelling to at least a 10%-20% minority which can then influence the other 80%-90%.

We live in a culture that values greed, power, and control over other people’s lives. So, the new culture must be built on a different set of values. Insisting on a different set of values is something we can all do both individually and collectively.

The Trumpists have attempted this with middle-aged White Americans. Steve Bannon knew that change must first happen culturally, that the culture has to want it, or at least allow it. But so far, the Trumpist appeal seems limited to 30% of the population.

The other 70% are on the sidelines, waiting for a reason to believe in something else.

If you doubt that young people can have an outsized impact, watch “The Children Will Rise Up!” an climate change anthem written by Nandi Bushell, who gained social media fame as a drummer, and Roman Morello, son of Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello. Here these two 10 year-olds perform with cameos by Jack Black and Greta Thunberg:

Sample Lyric:

They let the earth bleed to feed their greed.
Stop polluting politicians poisoning for profit.
While they are killing all the trees, now we all can’t breathe
As the temperature’s a rising, nothing is surviving.

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Monday Wake Up Call – October 25, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Anza-Borrego Desert SP, Borrego Springs CA – October 2021 photo by Anthony Pilny.

According to Politico, Joe Biden hosted Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WVA) in Delaware on Sunday, where Biden was spending the weekend. They’re trying to find common ground on the Biden social spending plan. Senate Majority Leader Schumer also attended.

As of now, nothing has been released about the substance of the meeting, or whether they’ve made any progress towards bringing a revised bill forward in the Senate.

The meeting comes at a critical time for Biden, who is seeking to clinch a deal with both Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) on his social spending plan this week. And it has to happen soon. Democrats have to pass something, or they risk being as dysfunctional as the press says they are.

The Progressive Caucus had a plan: the social spending bill passes the Senate via Reconciliation, and then the infrastructure bill passes in the House. Both pass in lock step. Now, if both stay linked, both could easily fail. Is the House Progressive Caucus prepared to sink the infrastructure bill? We’ll soon find out.

The Democratic House and Senate caucuses have been largely behind the president’s agenda, but that’s been obscured by Manchin’s and Sinema’s foot dragging. The cruel fact is that without substantive movement by both Senators, they could be on the verge of killing Biden’s signature programs.

Why Manchin is doing this is easy to see. He is the only Democrat holding statewide office in West Virginia, as well as the only Democrat in West Virginia’s congressional delegation. He won reelection in 2018 by just 19,400 votes. According to FiveThirtyEight, Manchin has voted with Biden 100% of the time up to May 2021, but now his constituents are pressuring him to leave the Democrats, and he’s feeling the heat.

Sinema also has a strong Democratic voting record. However, there isn’t a reliable view of what would bring Krysten Sinema to vote for the social spending bill, although she did vote to bring the Freedom to Vote Act forward for debate. Arizona is in the midst of demographic change that may insure a durable Democratic majority, but Sinema doesn’t appear to be near the center of where the Arizona Democrats are heading.

The Democrats’ problem with these two Senators also highlights that zero Republicans are willing to defect from Mitch McConnell’s anti-Biden position. It has been at least a decade since there was a credible possibility of Republicans crossing the aisle in these circumstances.

Fifty seats +1 in the Senate was never going to be a position of political strength for Democrats, and they’re lucky to have avoided being in the minority in both Houses after the 2020 elections. Biden needs both Senators to stop obstructing, and to stand with the Party, although Sinema may be a one-term Senator, she will hold the seat until January 2025.

In the past, Manchin and Sinema would have gotten some extra money or projects for their states, the bill would have passed, and we would have moved on to talking about something else. But it’s been clear from the start that isn’t Manchin’s and Sinema’s game.

Manchin is wealthy. He’ll be 77 at the end of his current term. Fear of an investigation into his coal holdings might motivate him to think differently about his vote. Sinema is new to politics, and seems not to be looking towards her re-election, but to a future on the corporate gravy train.

Given Manchin’s and Sinema’s intransigence, there may be no political endgame available for Biden. Without a compromise, they could cost Biden a second term.

It is now completely clear that the entire US political system is corrupt and sclerotic, broken from top to bottom, and it has been for decades. Political reform needs to happen, but the crux of the current problem is that the Democratic Party’s leadership must change also. If that were to happen, a Trumpist wave could end democracy as we know it long before a new Democratic Party leadership could secure a working majority.

It’s time to wake up Democrats! Take a small win now, and then work to reform the Party. Losing seats in the 2022 Mid-terms can’t be an option.

To help you wake up, listen to Maria Muldaur sing a brand new tune, “Vaccinated and I’m Ready for Love”, released this month:

Muldaur is an American folk-blues singer probably best known for her 1974 hit song “Midnight at the Oasis“. This is bluesy and fun!

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Amend the Electoral Count Act

The Daily Escape:

Great North Woods, NH – October 2021 photo by Michael Blanchette

Regarding Facebook’s outage: How did anti-vaxxers do their research without Facebook?

On to what’s wrong today: The Jan. 6 coup attempt didn’t succeed, but it came close. And those involved in the plot have learned from their mistakes. This means the country faces a growing risk of electoral subversion by Republicans and by Trump and his supporters.

We’re still learning the details behind Trump’s attempt to overthrow the 2020 election, including his pressure on state officials, the Eastman memo, and the Oval Office meetings with Mike Pence, attempting to convince him to throw out certified vote totals from certain states during the Jan. 6 Electoral College vote tally. This attack to subvert the will of the American voters didn’t involve the Capitol rioters. It was held in the White House and led by Trump.

But the attempted coup isn’t over. There’s an organized effort by Republicans in many states to fill key, lower profile election jobs with people who will only certify elections that Republicans win. They’re proponents of Trump’s Big Lie and they’re trying to upend our democratic election process.

On Saturday, the NYT had an editorial about a reform that may be both the most urgently needed, and the easiest (relatively) to pass into law, reforming the Electoral Count Act (ECA):

“The Electoral Count Act, which passed more than 130 years ago, was Congress’s response to another dramatic presidential dispute — the election of 1876, in which the Republican Rutherford Hayes won the White House despite losing the popular vote to his Democratic opponent, Samuel Tilden.”

The NYT says that the Electoral Count Act contains numerous ambiguities and poorly drafted provisions:

“For instance, it permits a state legislature to appoint electors on its own, regardless of how the state’s own citizens voted, if the state “failed to make a choice” on Election Day. What does that mean? The law doesn’t say. It also allows any objection to a state’s electoral votes to be filed as long as one senator and one member of the House put their names to it, triggering hours of debate — which is how senators like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley were able to gum up the works on Jan. 6.”

A few legal scholars have argued that parts of the ECA are unconstitutional, which was the basis of Eastman’s claim that Mike Pence could simply disregard the law and reject electors of certain key battleground states. But the NYT says:

“Nothing in the Constitution or federal law gives the vice president this authority. The job of the vice president is to open the envelopes and read out the results, nothing more. Any reform to the Electoral Count Act should start there, by making it explicit that the vice president’s role on Jan. 6 is purely ministerial and doesn’t include the power to rule on disputes over electors.”

Democrats could bring forward an amendment to the ECA. And it’s unlikely that Republicans would filibuster the vote on the amendment, so Democrats could pass it with a simple majority vote. Their amendment should clarify that the vice-president’s role is purely ceremonial. Further, the threshold for objections to state electoral vote counts could be made higher than just one Senator and one House member from the state in question.

Instead of focusing on the ECA, Senate Democrats hope to pass a version of the Freedom to Vote Act. The act would set nationwide voting standards to help counteract anti-democratic laws passed by legislatures in at least 17 states driven by partisan, conspiracy-minded election officials who could sabotage legitimate election results. The Freedom to Vote Act has four principal pillars:

  1. It sets national standards to protect and expand the right to vote.
  2. It would protect the integrity of elections and make it harder for partisan officials to subvert valid election results.
  3. It would prohibit partisan gerrymandering and empower courts to invalidate overly partisan maps, a needed change since many states have already begun their 10-year redistricting process.
  4. It would reduce the power of big money in elections by shining a bright light on so-called dark money campaign spending.

But there’s little chance of this bill’s passage through the Senate. From Sen. Angus King (I-ME):

“I don’t think the Republicans here are interested in short-circuiting what their brothers and sisters are doing in statehouses across the country,”

Maybe Republicans would also reject ECA reform if the Senate tried to change it. We’re in a world where what the majority wants is no longer what will happen politically.

And the window for fixing this is closing before our eyes.

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General Milley’s Testimony

The Daily Escape:

Clouds, Coachella Valley, CA – 2021 photo by Laura Green

(Like prairie dogs popping their heads out of their burrows after a storm, Wrongo and Ms. Right have decided to venture onto a plane and fly to visit kids and grandkids. This is our first flight since the fall of 2019, but muscle memory will probably guide us through the airport maze. Posting will be light and variable until mid-next week.)

A quick thought before Wrongo heads to the airport about Tuesday’s testimony by Gen. Milley before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Milley spoke to the arc of our failed war in Afghanistan. He said that in 20 years there, more than 800,000 US military personnel served; 2,461 were killed in action, 20,698 were wounded, and many others came home with PTSD and other scars.

Milley pointed out that despite the talk about our rushed exit in August, we needed context. In 2011, we began the drawdown of troops. We went from a peak of 97,000 US troops (and 41,000 NATO troops) to 12,600 US troops when Trump signed his deal with the Taliban in February 2020.

With Trump’s deal, the US agreed to withdraw the balance of our forces if the Taliban met seven conditions that would lead to a deal between the Afghan government and the Taliban. Milley also observed that the Taliban had honored only one of its seven required conditions: It didn’t attack US personnel. But, despite that, in the 8 months after the agreement:

“…we reduced US military forces from 12,600 to 6,800, NATO forces from 8,000 to 5,400 and US contractors from 9,700 to 7,900
.”

Milley also said that the Doha agreement:

“…did affect the morale of the Afghan security forces.”

Leading to their unwillingness to stand up against the Taliban when the time came.

On November 17, 2020, Trump ordered Milley to reduce troop levels to 2,500 no later than January 15, 2021. Thus, Biden had about 3,500 in-country when he took over. Despite the attempt by Republicans to blame Biden for “losing Afghanistan” by not adding more troops, Milley said that holding Bagram air base would have required 5,000–6,000 additional troops.

He said that staying on after the August 31 deadline would have required 15,000–20,000 more troops, who would have faced significant risks:

“While it was militarily feasible…we assessed the cost to be extraordinarily high….Therefore, we unanimously recommended that the military mission be transitioned on 31 August to a diplomatic mission in order to get out the remaining American citizens.”

Republicans on the committee didn’t focus on finding out about the failures (or successes) of our time in Afghanistan. But true to form, they hunted for sound bites to use on the 2022 campaign trail. Sen. Tom Cotton had a gotcha question for Milley, asking why Milley hadn’t resigned after his recommendations to Biden were rejected.

Milley explained to Cotton, a former Captain in the US Army, that isn’t the way military service works:

“Senator, as a senior military officer, resigning is a really serious thing…It’s a political act if I’m resigning in protest. My job is to provide…the best military advice to the president…..The president doesn’t have to agree with that advice. He doesn’t have to make those decisions just because we’re generals.”

Milley explained that: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“This country doesn’t want generals figuring out what orders we’re going to accept and do or not…that’s not our job. It’s critical. My dad didn’t get a choice to resign at Iwo Jima. They can’t resign, so I’m not going to resign.”

General Milley suggests that generals follow the rule of law, the Constitution, and military order. But some Republicans find his actions to be worth resignation.

The question is: Who is really undermining our democracy? It’s the GOP, not Milley. The GOP continues to promote the Big Lie to corrupt fair elections and they supported a coup to overthrow our government.

There will be more hearings. Here is how they will go: Democrats will ask the generals probing questions. Republicans will use their allotted time to state how outraged they are about our withdrawal from Afghanistan, and Milley’s actions. Their statements will contain tested soundbites ready-made for right-wing media. Those media will play the soundbites for days or weeks or months.

Not a single Trump supporter’s mind will be changed, and we will have not advanced our understanding of civilian-military relations.

And we’ll have learned nothing that would help us prevent us from falling into another Afghanistan sinkhole.

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It’s a Big Week for Democrats

The Daily Escape:

Early fall foliage, Long Pond, Rutland, MA – September 2021 photo by Jurgen Roth Photography

Charlie Sykes, talking about what will be a jam-packed week in Washington DC:

“This is going to be a helluva week. Democrats in Congress may not be able to save the Biden presidency, but they can destroy it
”

There are clear differences among Democrats on social spending priorities and the correct size of the pending human infrastructure spending bill. Several Democratic House members have vowed not to support both of Biden’s bills, unless they get what they want included. Along with threats by Sens. Sinema and Manchin not to stand with Democrats in the Senate, both House Speaker Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Schumer can’t be happy trying to lead their fractious caucuses.

And among these efforts to thread the needle, are the twin crises of a Thursday cut-off of federal spending and a subsequent (possible) default on the nation’s debt.

Funding for the federal government is set to run out on Thursday at midnight. Senate Democrats will move a stopgap spending measure forward to position for a vote on the House-passed short-term funding bill. That would keep federal agencies open until Dec. 3, while suspending the debt limit until Dec. 2022.

Suspending the debt limit for another year is a great idea, but Senate Republicans are certain to tank that proposal. The likely scenario is that Senate Dems will remove the debt-limit provision and pass the bill with bipartisan support. Then, the House passes the bill, Biden signs it, and a government shutdown is averted for another two months.

But that leaves the debt-limit problem unresolved. We will reach that in early-mid October.

Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans won’t support an increase in the debt limit. They say that Democrats should lift the cap on government borrowing on their own, as a part of their reconciliation package. But that creates a political advantage for the Republicans. And besides, it could take weeks, enough time to bring the country close to defaulting on its obligations. And it isn’t certain that Schumer has the votes to pass it without Republican help.

Only one thing’s certain: No one knows what’s really going to happen.

On infrastructure, Pelosi announced that debate on the Senate-passed bipartisan infrastructure bill would start on Monday. A House vote on it is slated for Thursday. House Democrats are also trying to make progress on the big reconciliation package.

Pelosi’s challenge is to keep progressives from walking away from the big bill and tanking the infrastructure bill. Democratic leadership also must appease Senate centrists about the size of the big infrastructure bill, which they say is too large.

House Democrats will meet late on Monday, (shortly after Wrongo posts this). Pelosi wants the members who’ve drawn lines in the sand about the human infrastructure bill (and who haven’t shown up for caucus meetings lately) to be there. From Politico:

“I urge the fullest participation of Members and hope that as many of us can be there in person as possible…”

These are strange days for Democrats. As a Sunday WaPo article said, “Political Suicide is not a Strategy”. In addition to the obsessive focus on securing the necessary votes in the House and Senate, the focus on the human infrastructure’s price tag is the essence of bad political messaging. Few Democrats stand up to say that the $3.5 trillion will be spent over 10 years, amounting to only 1.2% of GDP over that period.

Worse, focusing on the dollar amount takes attention away from the value in the bill for children, families, education, health care, housing, and climate. From Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT):

“When Democrats allow a debate to be only about a number, it’s like talking about a Christmas party and only discussing the hangover.”

The WaPo quotes Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) as saying that the discussion is getting things exactly backward:

 “We should work from what policies we want to enact, rather than an arbitrary number.”

No one can forecast how this will all work out. It would be dandy if Republicans supported the debt ceiling increase.

It would also be dandy if they accepted the results of the 2020 election, got vaccinated and stopped passing voter suppression laws. A rational and patriotic Party would do those things. But those are a bridge too far for today’s Republican Party.

So, Democrats are on their own. We’ll soon see if they can stand together as a team to avoid disaster and deliver on Biden’s promises.

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