As I look at the Republican primary with fear and loathing and the Democrats with unenthusiastic resignation, it’s tempting to retire from the field and throw darts from the sidelines, to become mesmerized by the media coverage and disengaged from the process.
Read MoreReally?
Because Donald Trump is a buffoon does not mean we should continue treating him as a joke. I’m no longer interested in trying to plumb the shallows of his mind. We don’t need to know the causes of his psychopathic narcissism, nor should we care what turned him into a bully. He is a man who will say anything because he believes in nothing – and takes no responsibility for his words. Like every aspiring demagogue, he feeds on scapegoats and thrives on the damage he begets.
Neither he nor his message is new in American history. Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798 to protect us from immigration and free speech, and three decades later, passed the Indian Removal Act, which led to the Trail of Tears. We have endured Know Nothings and Dixiecrats, the Palmer Raids after World War I and George Corley Wallace. South Carolina gave us “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, a rich Populist who built a mass movement of “Red Shirts” with his message of violence and racial terror; and Wisconsin gave us a cowardly, prevaricating, destructive blowhard named Senator Joe McCarthy.
But no one has come so close to being the presidential nominee of a major party, whose leaders are now debating whether to oppose him or embrace him. They’re worried he’ll destroy the party. But what about the country?
“Make America Great Again.” How’s he doing so far?
To paraphrase the man who brought McCarthy down, “At long last, have we no sense of decency?”
If you’re wondering how a socialist who touts countries with the world’s highest tax rates and a demagogue who appeals to people’s ugliest instincts continue to be their parties’ presidential frontrunners, consider this: The United States ranks dead last among well-off countries in income and wealth inequality and close to the bottom in job creation and economic mobility, according to a just-published report by the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality. Among its findings, the U.S: “has a distinctively anemic safety net and distinctively unequal distribution of wealth;” “performs poorly in domains that have historically been regarded as its strengths,” such as job creation; “fails to deliver on its long-standing commitment to . . . high mobility;” and “is starkly at variance with our reputation as the land of opportunity.”
This is not the America we venerate at Super Bowl games and Rotary Club breakfasts; nor the one we learn about in schoolbooks. That exceptional America has left the building, replaced by one “where the birth lottery matters more. . .than in most well-off countries.”
And yet we’re still inside, clinging to the myths on which we were nurtured, wearing our American flag lapel pins, cheering patriotic speeches, thanking veterans for their service, asking God to continue blessing us – and dismissing the possibility that Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump could ever get nominated, let alone elected, president of the United States. While millions of Americans, across all spectrums, are experiencing the gulf between the America of their dreams and the reality of their lives.
• Sir: I read with interest your report that Jeb Bush is paying $2,888 per vote. I work among men who have long provided those services for free, and we’re wondering if Mr. Bush pays that sum for each recorded vote, or just once per person.
Sincerely,
J.D. “Digger” Blagden, Jr.
Cook County Cemetery
• Defenders of James Buchanan and Bush 43 objected to my singling out the two gentlemen for censure (one pointing to Bill Clinton’s “thievery, lasciviousness, abuse of power and deceit”). First, I didn’t mean they were the only bad presidents. One thinks of Chester A. Arthur, Warren G. Harding and the two Andrews, Jackson and Johnson – and what to make of Millard Fillmore? – all of whom America survived. But I do believe that at least one criterion for evaluating a president is the state of the country at the end of his tenure – and on that score it would be hard to do worse than 1860, as Buchanan dithered on slavery while the country hurtled toward war, and 2008, after the work of the Bush-Cheney domestic and international wrecking crew. (Well, maybe there’s also a place for Mr. Hoover.)
• Dear Gillespie, wrong Epistle: 1 Corinthians 15:52: “In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.”
• II Corinthians 3:17: It’s not two Corinthians, moron. It’s eleven Corinthians. @realDonaldTrump
Correction: A reader noted that my number of Democratic caucus goers was off by 171,109, which is embarrassing. Iowa Democrats, however, do seem to have an odd way both of counting voters and recording votes.
Such is the state of Iowa, where 183,410 Republicans and 1,398(!) Democrats just reset the entire 2016 presidential race.
Read MoreLet’s review this morning’s news. In Harney County, Oregon, Ammon Bundy, his brother and six other people involved in the 24-day occupation of Malheur Wildlife Refuge were arrested; one man was hospitalized; and LaVoy Finicum, the Arizona rancher who had announced he wouldn’t be taken alive, was killed. The heavily armed Citizens for Constitutional Freedom came to the facility, which Bundy called “the tool to do all the tyranny” (it's managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) to demand the return of federal lands to “local control.” It’s probably worth noting that none of those arrested come from Harney County. In fact, none even live in Oregon. Governor Kate Brown, the Oregon Cattlemen’s Association and most local residents told the protesters to go home.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump has pulled out of Thursday’s Republican debate because Megyn Kelly doesn’t like him. But he's found someone who does: former state Senator Jake Knotts will endorse Trump later today in Lexington, SC. Knotts is the guy who said of then-candidate, now-governor Nikki Haley, the daughter of Indian immigrants, “We got a raghead in Washington, we don’t need a raghead in the State House.”
It’s time to speak up against people brandishing guns in the name of freedom, wrapping themselves in the Constitution to commit crimes, and spewing racist hatred to protest political correctness – and it’s time to stop treating the politicians who fan these flames as a joke.
The silent majority, I keep hearing, stands with Trump. I’m betting the silent majority stands with me.
It’s worth thinking about these days, especially today, which honors a man who dedicated his life to protesting laws – of segregation and Jim Crow, of intimidation and all-white juries – that brutally contradicted the principles on which this country was supposedly founded.
Read MoreWith the presidential primary season practically upon us, Donald Trump is rolling in the endorsements of international heavy hitters. Last weekend, Sean Penn reported that Joaquín Guzmán Loera (aka “El Chapo”) had called Trump, “Mi Amigo!”, a double-edged phrase in organized crime, politics and real estate deals meaning roughly, “My Friend!”
Read More“No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President.” Now the blustering birther is going after Ted Cruz, although more quietly than his bombastic attacks – which he has never retracted – on Barack Obama’s presidential legitimacy. Cruz, as everyone knows by now, was born in Canada. His father was Cuban, his mother from Delaware. This is a problem, says Trump, not so much because Cruz is ineligible, but because the Democrats will sue and the case will drag through the courts for years. Why take the chance? Vote for me. I was born in Queens.
“Not a problem, experts say.” Cruz is a natural-born citizen because of his mother’s citizenship. So while there are many reasons he shouldn’t be president, this isn’t one of them.
Yet I know people who still doubt Obama’s legitimacy. In the eighth year of his presidency, they’re still talking about the typefaces on his alleged birth certificate. “An obvious forgery,” one said to me recently. Obama was born in Kenya. He was born in Indonesia. He was born – ready for this one? – in Hawaii, Kenya, “which sits right outside the Gates of Hell.”
This is damning stuff, of course, but it doesn’t change the fact that Obama’s mother was born in Wichita, Kansas, which makes him as American as . . . Ted Cruz.
So why are people still demanding the president produce his "real" birth certificate?
Maybe they think Canada is more American than Kenya.
“The problem with you,” said my high-priced handler early in my never-to-be-repeated campaign for United States Congress, “is that when someone asks you a question, you think you need to answer it.”
He had me there. Other than a question like “How are you?” (to which the answer is, not, “I’m having an anxiety attack,” but “Fine, thank you.”), I was raised to answer questions truthfully. In fact, I thought that was the purpose of campaigning: people, or their stand-ins in the press, ask questions and the candidate tries to answer them so the voters can decide whom to support.
Well, no. A question is an opportunity to deliver, yet again, your three (always three) talking points. But seasoned reporters already know that. Their job is to get you off message to give voters insight into something more substantive than a bumper sticker. You may have noticed that John Kasich’s wonderfully impassioned and well-rehearsed condemnation of the know-nothings in his party came in response to the evening’s first question: “What is your biggest weakness and what are you doing to address it?” To which he responded, “Good question, but..."
It was all downhill from there, and I didn’t make it to the end. The questions were tiresome, the answers unedifying and the only poignant moment was Jeb’s sad smile as he watched his takedown of Marco blow up. It’s all about entertainment now, like hoping for a pile-up at NASCAR. And sadly, both the media and the candidates know it.
Just because he comes across as sort of stupid doesn’t mean Donald Trump is always wrong. Take his latest dust-up with Jeb over George W. Bush’s responsibility for 9/11: Trump: “He was president, okay? Blame him or don’t blame him, but he was president. The World Trade Center came down during his reign”(sic).
Trump is right. George Bush was nine months into his first term and had just returned from a 30-day vacation on his Texas ranch when the planes hit. That doesn’t mean the tragedy was his fault, but not once has he, or anyone else in his administration, accepted any responsibility for what happened.
As for Jeb’s response, after two wars in which over 10,000 American soldiers and civilian contractors died and over 100,000 were wounded, that cost over $6 trillion in mostly off-the-books expenses and produced America's first-ever defense of torture, I’d say his brother left this country in a shambles. Whether he kept us safe seems a matter of opinion.
Can you imagine the reaction of this Congress if 9/11 had happened on Barack Obama’s watch? Let's see: foreign-born Muslim president and 19 foreign-born Muslim hijackers steal four airplanes in American airspace . . . Trey Gowdy would get so excited connecting those dots he’d put his gavel through the table.
Meanwhile, as James Fallows notes in The Atlantic, Congress prepares for tomorrow’s 21st hearing on Benghazi. It held a total of 22 on the attacks of 9/11.
On March 26, 1883, Mrs. Vanderbilt gave a party. And what a party it was: it cost, in today’s dollars, $6 million, and its 1,200 opulently costumed guests included included the Mrs. Astor, who had rigorously excluded the Vanderbilts and their crass, arriviste ilk from her list of New York’s old-moneyed elite. But she capitulated because, while they may have been socially inferior to the 400, the new breed of millionaires were a lot richer; and when they wanted something – social acceptance, a state legislature, an English title – they bought it. Their manners – and their ethics – were constantly questioned, but their energy was never in dispute. I thought of the 400 while reading The New York Times’ examination of the 158 families who have so far contributed almost half the money to the 2016 presidential campaign, almost all of it to non-establishment candidates. In depicting the current Republican split between a blue-collar, red-necked Tea Party and the Wall Street wing, the media overlook how much of the conflict is between new money and old – and how much new money there is.
There are major changes going on in America, comparable to the Gilded Age, and while I do not like the politics it has brought, I respect the energy. I think of Jay Gatsby and Tom Buchanan in Fitzgerald’s enduring portrait of America. And I remember that, for all the ugliness of their family fortune’s origins, subsequent generations of Rockefellers have used their money to do much good in the world; and Andrew Carnegie endowed 1,689 libraries across the country.
It all seems so reasonable. Who could possibly object to a law that simply requires a person to produce proof of identity before voting? We’ve all heard the stories of dead people voting in Cook County and live people paid to vote three or four times in different places. The vast majority of Americans support photo-identification laws, which are now in place in 17 states. True, the numbers are underwhelming: one study found 26 incidents of voter fraud in 197 million ballots cast; another found 31 in a billion-vote sample. True, far from being part of our national electoral tradition, voter-ID laws have arisen in the last decade, promoted primarily by Republican legislatures in states where demographics (i.e., minorities and the poor) favor the other party. And, yes, some legislators have said strange things – such as Pennsylvania House Majority Leader Mike Turzai’s boast in early 2012: “Voter ID . . . is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.” (It didn’t.)
And now we have Alabama, a state with a long history of voter suppression, where a law requiring voters to produce government-issued photo IDs went into effect last year – on the same day the Supreme Court rolled back the Voting Rights Act. The most common form of photo-ID is a driver’s license. Unfortunately, the state will be closing most of its license bureaus, including those in eight of the ten counties that voted most heavily for Obama and in “every single county in which blacks make up 75 percent of registered voters.”
Apparently, it’s a budget issue.
Perhaps somewhere deep in the Amazon rainforest or the jungles of New Guinea there exists a yet-undiscovered community of people living in blissful harmony and governing themselves by consensus. I hope so, because government today seems to slant inexorably toward oligarchy.
Read MoreWe leave the five mariners safely on board Sparky to write of other things. But the “Rescue at Sea” series is not over. We are still 140 miles from shore, 10 of us now on a boat fitted for five, and while we have been rescued, more remains to be told – less dramatic, but no less important – a story of courage and kindness, a story to which we will return to find out why Sparky turned back, the final day at sea, the fate of Restive. I will intersperse the sea tale with other posts over the next few weeks, and I hope you will stay tuned. Thank you for your expressions of interest. The Numbers Game
Last night’s debate was not the roller derby I’d anticipated, although the pundits are seizing on the few personal dust-ups to make it seem like a free-for-all. That’s, of course, why we tuned in – for politics as entertainment spectacle. But that’s what American politics has always been, and sometimes out of the process emerges a Madison, a Lincoln, an FDR, a Barack Obama. I thought the ten candidates, not one of whom I want to be our next president, held up well in what is a humiliating venue, and this sort of cattle show may actually prod the candidates off their scripted sound bites and give us insights into their beliefs.
Much is made of the unwieldy numbers, but why shouldn’t all 17 candidates be included? (I keep hearing about Carly Fiorina’s performance, and I was sorry to miss it). There are, however, other numbers that need closer attention:
Fewer donors. More money. Fewer voters. These numbers do not add up to a healthy democracy.
The very weird case of J. Dennis Hastert, the former Speaker indicted for perjury and illegal bank withdrawals for payments he apparently made to someone who was purportedly blackmailing him for alleged sexual abuse when he was a high school wrestling coach. My thesaurus is exhausted. And so we have the all-too-depressingly-familiar accusations of sexual misconduct by a man who (a) was in a position of power and trust over vulnerable young men and (b) had spent his career in the helping professions.
We also have another story of a less personal – and more common – kind of abuse. When Hastert left Congress he became a lobbyist, and however you dress up the role of a lobbyist, it is essentially to sell access – something that former House speakers have lots of. After a sluggish start, Hastert’s business began picking up around the time he needed money to make large payments to the still-unidentified blackmailer. (I wonder what would have happened if these demands had arisen while Hastert was still in Congress, with access not just to people but to classified information.)
There is much more to be learned about the personal case of Dennis Hastert, whose sudden fall from grace caught his many admirers by surprise. But how many more stories do we need to read about the cozy connections between those who purport to serve the public good and those who only want to line their own pockets before we get serious about political and financial reform?
It used to be said that anybody (well, any boy) could grow up to be president, and clearly the dozens of Republican candidates frantically trying to get noticed took that civics lesson to heart. But how can you be president if you can’t even make the cut for the televised debates – which Fox and CNN will limit to the 10 highest-rated candidates in current polls The grousing has begun. Which polls? How current? With what margin of error? “If you’re a United States senator, if you’re a governor, if you’re a woman who ran a Fortune 500 company,” said former Senator Rick Santorum, who in 2012 went from 0% to Romney’s runner-up – and is back again to 0%, “then you should have a right to be on stage.” Santorum is right (a sentence I never thought I’d write). The thing stinks.
Will it be a circus to have 18 or 20 candidates, including Donald Trump, interrupting each other? Isn’t that why we watch, waiting for a gaffe or putdown? But what’s happening now is even more demeaning, as candidates try to claw their way into the top 10 with all the dignity of reality show contestants.
Since when do broadcast companies and ever-changing polls, which together have done so much to dumb down our elections, get to choose the candidates – and, incidentally, provide superPACs one more opportunity to buy advertising? Let’s bring back the excitement and honest corruption of the old conventions, with their horse-trading in non-smoke-filled rooms. In the meantime, let them all run.
For those who are counting, the number of Republican presidential candidates now equals all your fingers and half your toes, while the Democrats are up to three. With all the handwringing over big money in politics, it’s fun to watch everybody publicly distancing themselves from the plutocrats (although not from their money) and pandering to the middle class, which is how 90 percent of Americans have traditionally identified themselves. Hillary has gone a step further and thrown in her lot with “everyday Americans” (notwithstanding the Clintons' reported 16-month earnings of $30 million). The Republicans have jumped to fill the void. “They are the party of privilege,” announced the George Pataki. “We are the party of the middle class.” The myth of the middle class has long been the glue that held America together. It was as much aspirational as real – a belief in opportunity – but as the gap between the rich and everyone else continues to expand, that belief is eroding: almost as many people now identify themselves as lower class as middle class. They are not deluded: a recent report ranks the United States fourth from last among developed nations in income inequality – ahead of only Turkey, Mexico and Chile. And that, a Princeton study concludes, is creating a political system in which “policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans [and] America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.”
Maybe that’s why Bernie Sanders is gaining traction in Iowa.
“The health of our water is the principal measure of how we live on the land.” Luna Leopold While Texans brace for Emperor Obama’s military invasion, Californians continue to pray for rain. With 93.4% of the state in its fourth year of “severe drought," a beautiful sunny day is an oxymoron and the clouds have no rain.
Carly Fiorina knows why. The latest contestant in the Republican presidential sweepstakes, Fiorina’s main claim is that she ran Hewlett-Packard into the ground, the difficulty of which should not be underestimated. Her analysis of the drought is equally unsettling. “Droughts are nothing new,” she wrote recently. The problem this time is not nature. It’s people, specifically “overzealous liberal environmentalists” whose policies “allow much of California’s rainfall to wash out to sea” instead of being diverted to Central Valley cantaloupe farmers. “It comes down to this: Which do we think is more important, families or fish?”
This is nonsense. Anyone who thinks that a drop of water making it to the ocean is wasted should visit the once-mighty Colorado, which has been so thoroughly dammed and diverted (4.4-million acre feet a year to California alone) that it hasn’t flowed regularly to the sea since 1960. Its estuary has become a poisoned trickle. We’re the problem all right: we’re killing the river.
A river is not a pipe. It’s an ecosystem that, if we care for it, will return huge benefits – including fish. Our health depends on its health. The answer, Ms. Fiorina, is “families and fish.”