Quote of the Day (Roger Ailes, to a Client He Masterminded to Victory)

“Jesus, nobody likes you. Your own mother wouldn't vote for you. Do you even have a mother?”— American television executive and media consultant Roger Ailes (1940-2017), before creating successful ads for his client, eventual 1980 New York Senate race winner Alfonse D’Amato, quoted by Gabriel Sherman, The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News—and Divided a Country (2014)

It may be hard for some voters to see, but some candidates, like former Senator D’Amato (nicknamed “Senator Shakedown” by The New Republic), cannot be stomached at any level, no matter what sleazy commercials and social-media posts that will reach an Election Day crescendo may tell you about an opponent.

Roger Ailes might agree with the proposition that a politician can be sold like soap, but I don’t think that does justice to what he and other political consultants have wrought. Now, crud can be sold as if it’s soap—at least, if you make the perfectly logical equation that certain politicians are crud.

So take your responsibility seriously as you cast your ballots on Tuesday. If you’re not careful, you might get 18 years of a politician that even his consultant can’t stand, as New York State did once it elected D’Amato, the sleazy product of Joseph Margiotta's Nassau County political machine.

(The image that accompanies this post about Roger Ailes, president of Fox News and chairman of the Fox Television Stations Group, was taken at the Fox News Headquarters in Times Square, New York, June 14, 2013, by Sgt. Christopher Tobey—before, of course, Ailes lost his job over sexual harassment allegations.)

TV Quote of the Day (‘Frasier,’ on What Qualifies Him to Run for Condo Board Prez)

[Frasier has decided to run for president of his condo board.]

Niles Crane [played by David Hyde Pierce]: “Surely you're not actually thinking of running? You've never held an elective office in your life!”

Frasier Crane [played by Kelsey Grammer]: “Are you forgetting I served two terms back in high school as Grand Panjandrum of the Vocabulary Club?”—Frasier, Season 4, Episode 11, “Three Days of the Condo,” original air date Jan. 21, 1997, teleplay by Michael B. Kaplan, directed by David Lee

Oh, who could forget that?

Flashback, February 1825: Adams Victory in Disputed Presidential Race Launches ‘Corrupt Bargain’ Charge

With none of the three major candidates winning a majority of votes in the Electoral College, the 1824 Presidential election was thrown into the House of Representatives, which awarded the office to John Quincy Adams in February 1825.

I wrote 15 years ago about Adams’ first year in the White House, while surveying his prior distinguished diplomatic career and consequential post-Presidency. But the month in which he fulfilled his ambition for the nation’s highest office was so astonishing—and such an anticipation of how current thinly sourced smear campaigns can poison the electorate—that it deserves exploration in depth.

With the popular James Monroe declining to run for a third term, the stage was set for an electoral free-for-all in 1824, featuring four candidates:

*Secretary of State Adams, the son of another President, John Adams, drew strength from the Northeast, especially New England.

*Andrew Jackson, hero of the Battle of New Orleans, looked to a base mostly confined to the West and South, with residual support in the Northeast.

*Treasury Secretary William Crawford, though the favorite of the Democratic-Republican Party establishment, had suffered a debilitating stroke before the election. Though unable to campaign, he retained support in the Deep South.

*Speaker of the House Henry Clay, who earned the least votes in the Electoral College, ended up exerting the greatest influence on the vote.

The election of 1824 was the first that used the procedures outlined in the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution, which called for the House of Representatives to pick among the top three candidates in the Electoral College.

Those three turned out to be Adams, Jackson, and Crawford. Although Jackson led the Electoral College count (and, most historians contend, what would have been the popular vote), he did not have a majority. Crawford’s medical condition effectively made it a two-man race between Adams and Jackson.

Four years before, it took the Missouri Compromise to avert a civil war over slavery. Many of the sectional differences barely muzzled in that agreement were coming to the fore again.

A sense of déjà vu must have particularly gripped Adams: as in the election of 1800 (lost by his father), it would take a New York Federalist to secure the outcome.

But, while Federalist leader Alexander Hamilton had persuaded his side to vote for Thomas Jefferson rather than Aaron Burr in that earlier election on the 36^th House ballot, it took only one ballot—cast by 60-year-old aristocrat Stephen Van Rensselaer III—to settle matters in 1825.

Legend holds that, while agonizing on the House floor over whom to support, Rensselaer noticed a ballot placed in front of him reading, ADAMS. Believing this to be divinely inspired, the congressman voted accordingly.

If only matters had remained that simple…

In an early attempt at creating a unifying “team of rivals” strategy that Abraham Lincoln later used, Adams asked Crawford to remain as treasury secretary and Jackson to take over the War Department. Both declined.

The selection of the third rival, Clay, sparked enormous controversy. The President-elect knew him as a fellow diplomat in the Treaty of Ghent negotiations that ended the War of 1812, and though he didn’t particularly trust the Kentuckian or care for his drinking and gambling, he knew he was able and shared common domestic policy goals.

Adams asked Clay to become Secretary of State after his House of Representatives victory, not before (contrary to what some Websites and podcasts claim to this day).

But, because Clay had swung the vote of his state’s delegation to Adams, and the State Department had served as a steppingstone to the Presidency for all occupants of the office in the prior 25 years, an anonymous letter soon appeared in Philadelphia’s Columbian Observer charging that the two men had engaged in a “corrupt bargain.”

Eventually, the “anonymous” Congressman emerged from the shadows to admit being the source of the allegation: George Kremer of Pennsylvania.

William Russ, Jr.’s article about the incident in the October 1940 issue of the academic journal Pennsylvania History noted not only that Kremer had “sunk into oblivion, even locally,” but that before and after his moment in the spotlight he was “obscure.” That difficulty in remembering him has only increased with time.

In 1825, Kremer, then completing his first term as a congressman, was hardly a disinterested observer, and certainly not a distinguished one. Successive stints as a storekeeper, lawyer, and two-year state legislator had done nothing to disabuse perceptions that he was a backbench time-server, a reputation not helped by his propensity for wearing a leopard-skin coat on the floor of the House. 

The topic that preoccupied Kremer in Congress–eliminating waste and abuse in government—frequently seemed like a pretext to contest initiatives that involved funding internal improvements—the policies that Clay and Adams supported and that Jackson opposed. Kremer, in fact, often anticipated many of the same arguments that MAGA supporters use today against government expenditures.

Challenged by Clay to testify and offer evidence before a congressional committee that would investigate the corruption allegations, however, Kremer backed down, saying at first, bizarrely, that he hadn’t intended to "to charge Mr. Clay with corruption," then refusing to testify on constitutional grounds, before finally crowing, after his three terms in Congress, how proud he was for his part in spreading the news about the scandal.

To be sure, backers of all four major candidates maneuvered furiously for advantage behind the scenes. But no documentary evidence has ever been produced substantiating the claims about Clay and Adams.

Moreover, despite friction between the two men in the past, even a shouting match, there could be little doubt that the House Speaker preferred Adams to Jackson—or, to put it another way, that Clay regarded Jackson as unsuited for the Presidency by virtue of his military background, hair-trigger temper, and distrust of banks.

None of that mattered to Jackson. He could have remembered that Adams, unlike Presidential aspirants like Crawford and Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, had come to his defense in the Monroe Administration over his overly aggressive responses to Native American raids from Florida into Georgia.

But it was easier for him to think he’d lost because of the “corrupt bargain” than because of his incompatibility with Clay. So he not only nursed a grudge against the two men, but encouraged his supporters to regard the new administration as illegitimate—not unlike how Donald Trump convinced his followers that, all evidence to the contrary, the election of 2020 had been stolen from him at the polls.

Like his father, Adams erred in believing that he could govern above the fray, without benefit of political adherents. Jackson would not make the same mistake. (The “spoils system” is one Jacksonian legacy that Trump seems especially eager to copy in his return to the White House.)

When Adams left office four years later, defeated by the man he’d beaten previously, Jackson, he was one of the unhappiest men ever to occupy the White House.

Like his father, John Quincy Adams was so peeved by what transpired in his single term in office that he didn’t stick around for the inauguration of his successor.

Historians still regard Adams as the greatest Secretary of State in our history, and, like Jimmy Carter, he earned great respect for his post-Presidential career (see my prior blog post about his fight against the Jacksonian “gag rule” meant to squelch any opposition to slavery in Congress).

But his term in the White House was virtually unrelieved misery for him and his family, because of the stark mismatch between his lofty policy goals and miniscule political instincts. 

Quote of the Day (Eric Levitz, With an Election Prediction That Actually Came to Pass)

“[T]he Trump era indicated that its coalition has more room to grow than liberals tend to think. The GOP improved with Hispanics nationwide as well as with Black and Asian American voters. Historically, immigrant communities have grown more conservative in their later generations, and Hispanic and Asian immigrant groups may follow a similar trajectory. At the same time, as the Black church declines, and young African-Americans enter more integrated social networks than their forebears, the Democrats' capacity to unite 90-plus percent of the demographic behind their banner is likely to diminish.

“If the Republicans make minuscule expansions to their base, they will likely control all three branches of the federal government by 2025 while boasting a hammerlock on the Senate for a decade or more.”—American political and economics reporter Eric Levitz, “The Big Rig,” New York Magazine, June 7-20, 2021

With Wednesday’s news that Republicans have maintained their hold on the House of Representatives, the Democratic nightmare envisioned by Levitz has come to pass.

All those 2002 predictions about demographic trends spelling “An Emerging Democratic Majority,” one of those generational “realignments” so beloved by political scientists, have turned out to be electoral fools’ gold—and even that optimistic book’s authors, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira, saw fit to revise their estimate last year with Where Have All the Democrats Gone?

Well, no matter. First things first: how the Democrats plan to block the worst Trump appointments and actions, right now.

Quote of the Day (Charles Dickens, on a ‘Riotously Excited’ Parliamentary Election)

“Party feeling runs so high, and the contest is likely to be so sharp a one that I look forward to the probability of a scuffle before it is over…. Such a ruthless set of bloody-minded villains, I never set eyes on, in my life. In their convivial moments yesterday after the business of the day was over, they were perfect savages. If a foreigner were brought here on his first visit to an English town, to form his estimate of the national character, I am quite satisfied he would return forthwith to France, and never set foot in England again….The polling begins on Friday and then we shall have an incessant repetition of the sounds and sights of yesterday 'till the Election is over—bells ringing, candidates speaking, drums sounding, a band of eight trombones (would you believe it?) blowing —men fighting, swearing, drinking, and squabbling—all riotously excited, and all disgracing themselves.”—English journalist-turned-novelist Charles Dickens (1812-1870), Dec. 16, 1835 letter to fiancée Catherine Hogarth about a Northampton by-election he was reporting on for the Morning Chronicle, in The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens, edited by Jenny Hartley (2012)

I’m indebted to British historian Simon Schama’s historical overview of Parliamentary elections, in last weekend’s Financial Times, for bringing to my attention Dickens’ typically colorful account of what elections were like in the early 19^th century.

Much has changed since then, but the unbridled nature of the proceedings remains the same.

Was it only five years ago that Boris Johnson achieved what looked like significant party realignment by winning an 80-seat majority, making inroads even in former Labour strongholds?

Now, with Thursday’s landslide election, Labour has ended 14 years of Conservative (mis)rule, with current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak so hapless in warding off the electorate’s rebuke that he may well be called Poison Sunak by sour members of his party’s rank and file from now on.

Even so, elections have consequences, and the wreckage the Conservatives have left behind—most of all, through Brexit and former PM Boris Johnson's rampant constitutional violations—will not easily be reversed.

Voters have less patience and shorter attention spans than formerly, and Keir Starmer will have to continue moderating the toxic stands of former Labour chieftain Jeremy Corbyn even as he shows tangible progress on the issues on which the electorate found the Conservatives wanting.

Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan’s sharp warning from three years ago to American politicians applies equally well abroad: “Politicians are never so dangerous as after a triumph.”

One element of modern political life that also seems to have carried across the Atlantic is the specter of far-right extremism. At this point, the so-called “Reform UK” party has won five seats in the House of Commons and a 14.3% share of Thursday’s vote, making inroads at the expense of the Conservatives.

Reform leader Nigel Farage has vowed to “change politics forever" through the party’s stances on taking immigrants in small boats back to France, a public inquiry into vaccine harm, protecting defense forces from human-rights inquiries, and adding 10,000 detention places.

Despite Reform’s current small representation in Parliament, he ought to be taken seriously, as history is replete with fringe political parties wreaking damage, whether in combination with others or by seizing power themselves. 

Quote of the Day (Peggy Noonan, With a Prediction for the 2016 GOP Race)

“I can say what this [2016 Presidential] election will most assuredly be, at least on the Republican side: anything but boring. On the Democratic side Hillary Clinton may wind up debating herself on an empty stage with good lighting. But Republicans will have Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee, Marco Rubio and probably John Kasich duking it out. Add Carly Fiorina, and some others….What a heck of a fight this will be.” —Pulitzer Prize-winning conservative columnist—and former Presidential speechwriter—Peggy Noonan, “The Too-Smooth Cruz,” The Wall Street Journal, Mar. 28-29, 2015

For some reason I don’t recall now, I clipped out the page where Ms. Noonan’s article was originally printed, put it aside, and then found it by chance only a week or so ago. As soon as I re-read this quote, I burst out laughing.

There’s an obvious name missing here—indeed in the entire article. I suppose you could say that Ms. Noonan did anticipate a candidate coming out of nowhere and making at least a momentary splash when she used that phrase “and some others,” as if recalling Herman Cain (remember him) from 2012. But that really would be stretching things, wouldn’t it?

Many of my friends on the liberal side of the spectrum will chortle at Ms. Noonan’s lack of foresight about the 2016 election. But I don’t offer this to ridicule her.

(Indeed, she warned early on that Donald Trump’s chances that year should not be airily dismissed, and she’s endured more than her share of brickbrats from him and the MAGA faithful since then for her periodic attacks on him—perhaps most memorably, in a direct hit on his emphasis on his “strength,” assailing his “whiny, weepy and self-pitying” character.) 

No, I put this out there to illustrate that the Washington establishment that Ms. Noonan joined in the Reagan administration is much like how Oscar-winning screenwriter William Goldman described Hollywood: “Nobody knows anything...... Not one person… knows for a certainty what's going to work. Every time out it's a guess and, if you're lucky, an educated one.”

It’s safe to say that, unlike what Ms. Noonan expected, Bernie Sanders gave Hillary Clinton an unexpectedly tough time in the Democratic primaries.

But this is what’s really wild: Trump beat 16 rivals for the GOP nomination that year, including those Ms. Noonan praised, in a case of being overly charitable, for being “serious talents with big accomplishments.”

Well, grant her this: nearly all of those 16 possessed governmental and/or national security experience that the eventual nominee conspicuously lacked. 

And all but one—retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson—had been answerable to the public, either voters or (in the case of Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina) shareholders in her company.

Instead, GOP primary voters embraced a private-company executive with no financial transparency and no board of directors that could remotely question his plans.

This year, 91 criminal counts on four indictments, not to mention two adverse decisions in civil courts, did nothing to dent Republican faith in Trump’s candidacy. 

Yet, even with a field significantly narrower than the divided one he conquered eight years ago, he still romped through the primaries.

Nothing like this has ever been remotely seen in the history of Presidential campaigning. No other candidate would be so shameless in defying scandal. No other electorate has ever ignored at such a high level the weight of so much evidence of bad faith, corruption, and basic lack of character.

To adapt a phrase from one of his scorned rivals, “low-energy Jeb” Bush, the former reality-show host did become “the chaos President.”

Famous not for being a great business executive but for playing one on TV, Trump was anything but the proverbial “dark horse” candidate. 

But he became (to borrow a phrase from the field of finance) “the black-swan” candidate—one elected through a series of unexpected, even close to unknowable, events.

That black-swan candidate found his rock-solid base—and is now slated to be a Presidential nominee for the third time—in a contingent that conservative Peter Wehner, in a New York Times opinion piece, termed “Fifth Avenue Republicans”—diehards who would support Trump even if, as he boasted back in 2016, he shot someone on that tony New York street.

We can’t begin to tell what this year’s events will be, especially now. That’s why polls are as good as useless at this point.

That’s also why maintaining vigilance about threats to democracy can be so frustrating. But, as Shakespeare would say, “the readiness is all.”

In one sense, Ms. Noonan was right: the 2016 GOP race, with Trump insulting rivals, lashing out at anyone remotely critical of him, and circulating falsehoods almost as often as he opened his mouth, was “anything but boring.” But now she’d probably agree with the adage about being careful what you wish for.

For myself, after the past eight exhausting years, I can’t wait to get back to “boring.” 

This Day in Presidential History (Truman Stuns Dewey in Whistle-Stop Win)

Nov. 2, 1948—Harry Truman went to bed this night with most observers predicting he would lose the election badly to Republican challenger Thomas Dewey. 

But, in a result that astonished politicians, pundits, and pollsters who’d written him off long before, the President pulled off probably the greatest electoral upset in the 20^th century, leading Dewey to concede at 11 o’clock the following morning.

The New York governor could have been forgiven if he had started measuring the drapes in preparation for moving into the White House. 

Dewey had been a successful mob-busting Manhattan prosecutor before winning two gubernatorial races in the nation’s most populous state; had prior experience as a Presidential candidate, running a creditable campaign against the formidable Franklin Roosevelt; and headed a Republican Party far more firmly united than Truman’s Democrats, who were suffering schisms on its left wing by Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party and on the right by Strom Thurmond’s states-rights (or “Dixiecrat”) Party.

Even at the Philadelphia convention that nominated him, some cynics had carried signs parodying the Missourian’s campaign tune: “I’m just mild about Harry.”

Why, then, did Truman emerge victorious? 

Historians would later point out that he’d cobbled together, for the last truly cohesive time, the New Deal coalition of urban ethnics, union members and southern whites that had sustained Roosevelt; that he’d achieved wider margins in the Midwest and West than anyone expected; and that, in contrast to the open, frank nature that made Truman a natural on the stump, Dewey was so infuriatingly reserved that tart-tongued Alice Roosevelt Longworth had dubbed him “the man on the wedding cake.”

All of that, to one degree or another, is true. 

But I have another theory why he won.

Faced with adversity, Truman displayed an intelligence, equanimity, and unwillingness to buckle under pressure that had served him well at key moments in adulthood, such as when he led his battery under fire in the Meuse-Argonne campaign in WWI and won his reelection campaign as U.S. senator from Missouri in 1940 against the state’s popular governor. 

He had made one tough decision in the Oval Office after the death of FDR: dropping the atomic bomb, launching the Berlin Airlift, recognizing the new state of Israel, and desegregating the armed forces.

No wonder his future Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, came to think of him as “the captain with the mighty heart.”

Perhaps nothing epitomized his battling, never-say-die spirit better than his famous “whistle-stop campaign” in 1948. 

From July to October, the President launched three major tours totaling 31 days through much of the country, delivering a series of brief, peppery broadsides from the back of his train against the “do-nothing Congress” controlled by the GOP that had stymied much of his domestic “Fair Deal” legislation.

During his initial difficult months taking over from FDR, Republicans had joked “To err is Truman.” Three years later, and to the end of his Presidency, they would gripe that he was hyperpartisan. 

Yet, as a student of history, he believed that the duties of his office required him to refrain from pandering to people’s worst instincts. Voters, seeing the man up front, identified with his plain speaking and unpretentious nature. 

In the crucial run-up to the election, ordinary citizens came to respect and admire this veteran politician who refused to be counted out.

To their deep subsequent regret, the one group that did not suspect Truman was shifting the electorate his way were the major pollsters, George Gallup and Elmo Roper.

Polling had advanced since 1936, they insisted, when Liberty Digest, working from an inadequate sample size, had wrongly predicted a victory for Alf Landon over FDR. (The Kansas governor lost in a landslide.) 

But, despite Truman’s gain of seven percentage points against Dewey from August to October, Gallup was so certain the President would lose that he stopped taking surveys two weeks before the election.

 As for Roper, in visiting journalism students at Columbia University, he had even “explained the infallibility of the sampling process” used for the 1948 campaign, recalled student Patricia Christiansen in a retrospective for the Fall 2008 issue of Columbia Magazine. 

All of that lulled an overconfident Dewey to conduct a platitude-laden, content-free campaign in the crucial closing weeks.

All of them were wrong—spectacularly so, to the delight of Truman, who, in the famous image accompanying this post, let them know it, in unmistakable fashion.

Quote of the Day (Roger Kimball, With Smug, Inaccurate Election Predictions)

“I write toward the end of September, when many pollsters are still treating their prognostications as a form of fan fiction. For example, one poll has star trooper Mark Kelly ahead of Blake Masters by 6.2 points in the Arizona race for US Senate. That, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is ridiculous. Punditry isn’t prophecy, but mark my words: Blake Masters, absent some intervening catastrophe, is going to win that race and win convincingly.

“I am going to stick my neck out and say the same about John Fetterman and Mehmet Oz in the Senate race in Pennsylvania. ‘The polls’ have Fetterman ahead by 4.5 points. But… Dr. Oz, smooth, articulate, personable, is going to crush Fetterman.”— American art critic, editor and conservative social commentator Roger Kimball, “Poll Position,” The Spectator, November 2022

Want me to continue, Faithful Reader? Very well. In this same article, Electoral Nostradamus Kimball went on to say that Republicans probably “will increase their numbers by between thirty-five and fifty seats in the House and three to five seats in the Senate.”

The final results? As of this writing (a lot closer to the event than Kimball’s “end of September”!), with 98% of expected votes reporting, Kelly had 51.4% of the vote to Masters’ 46.5%. In Pennsylvania, also with 98% reporting, Fetterman had 51% to Oz’s 46.5%.

Nationwide, the Republicans will not gain control of the Senate, and though they are achingly close right now to taking the House, they will have nowhere near the thirty-five to fifty seats Kimball expected.

All  of this without "an intervening catastrophe" in the last month...unless you discount taking a good look at the catastrophic candidates put up in these cases by the GOP.

Smugness is hardly the province of one political party. You might recall that six years ago, Democrats were gobsmacked when Donald Trump upset Hillary Clinton. They continued to be two years ago when their victory margins in the Presidential and Congressional races were nowhere near as sizable as they expected.

Given this history, Kimball would have been perfectly justified in cautioning not necessarily to believe pollsters. But his faith in his own fortunetelling skills was so flabbergasting that I burst out laughing when I read his piece over the weekend.

What he must be experiencing right now is a phrase that my college friend Rob brought to my attention: “face-plant,” meaning a case of someone falling face down or into something—a situation often found in sports, where “the thrill of victory—the agony of defeat” became a catchphrase years ago.

In the future, Kimball—and anyone else who bets on these contests—would be best advised to follow two courses of action:

*Don’t listen to partisan echo chambers on TV or Websites. Read newspapers outside from where you live. Take a look around at rallies and signs outside your immediate neighborhood.

*Don’t believe what you’re already inclined to believe. Just vote. Enough people acting like you can still make a difference.

Quote of the Day (Gore Vidal, on Public Opinion)

“At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation, and prejudice.” —American novelist, essayist, and playwright Gore Vidal (1925-2012), “Sex and the Law,” originally published in Partisan Review (Summer 1965), republished in Homage to Daniel Shays: Collected Essays,1952-1972 (1972)

Vidal wrote the above not only when tracking public opinion was still in the early stages of being considered a “science,” but also when most people still accepted the word of official sources. It was also, critically, before the current sledge of digital disinformation.

The “chaos” Vidal referred to more than a half century ago certainly proved to be even more the case in 2016 and 2020. Why did we expect the 2022 midterms to be any different?

At this point, the disparity between voter surveys and the final election results is so wide that the entire polling industry should close up shop. Too many prospective voters won’t answer survey questions because they regard them as either an infringement of their privacy or a diabolical plot by the “progressive media.”

How can pollsters and the party handlers who feed off them claim any validity in their results, given these attitudes?

Quote of the Day (Mike Lupica, on the Increasingly Tangled Tale of Herschel Walker)

“One more thing about [onetime Heisman Trophy winner and current Senate candidate] Herschel [Walker]? I’m really starting to worry about just the sheer logistics of what next Father’s Day are going to be like for this guy. The more you read, the more you think he hooked up with everybody except Stormy Daniels.”—Columnist Mike Lupica, “Shooting From the Lip,” New York Daily News, Oct. 9, 2022

Stormy Daniels? Please! Don’t go giving the guy any more ideas!

(The photo accompanying this post, showing Herschel Walker at the 2018 College Football Playoff National Championship Playoff Fan Central, was taken Jan. 6, 2018, by Thomson200.)

Quote of the Day (Mark Shields, on Avoiding Losing Candidates)

“People come up with very creative excuses why they can’t be with you when you’re losing. Like ‘my nephew is graduating from driving school,’ and ‘I’d love to be with you but we had a family appointment at the taxidermist.’”— TV political commentator and former Democratic campaign strategist and Mark Shields (1937-2022), quoted in Clyde Haberman, “Mark Shields, Political Analyst Known for His Sharp Wit, Is Dead at 85,” The New York Times, June 19, 2022

(The accompanying photo of Mark Shields was taken May 19, 2010, by DC_Rebecca from Washington, DC.)

TV Quote of the Day (‘Yes, Prime Minister,’ on Education as a Key Election Issue)

Prime Minister Jim Hacker [played by Paul Eddington]: “I think education is extremely important. It could lose me the next election.”

Sir Humphrey Appleby [played by Nigel Hawthorne]:” Ah! In my naivete, I thought you were concerned about the future of our children.”

Hacker: “Yes, that too. After all, they get the vote at 18.”— Yes, Prime Minister, Season 2, Episode 7, “The National Education Service,” original air date Jan. 21, 1988, teleplay by Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, directed by Sydney Lotterby

Quote of the Day (George Bernard Shaw, on Elections as ‘A Moral Horror’)

“An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.” —Anglo-Irish playwright and Nobel Literature laureate George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Back to Methuselah (1921)

So it was, again, this year, a century after Shaw wrote these words. And it wasn’t even a midterm election, let alone a Presidential one.

Shaw was correct about the shamelessness and self-abasement displayed by those running for office. But he could not conceive that, by the time he died nearly 30 years later, a worse kind of “moral horror” would be triggered in vast stretches of Europe, by Fascists and Communists—intimidation of candidates and interference with the right to vote—or that now, similar blights on democracy would crop up on both sides of the Atlantic.

Quote of the Day (William Seward, on ‘Intelligent Votes’ Needed to ‘Save the Great Democratic Government of Ours’)

 “There is no virtue in Pearl Street, in Wall Street, in Court Street, in Chestnut Street, in any street of the great commercial cities, that can save the great democratic government of ours, when you cease to uphold it with your intelligent votes … You must, therefore, lead us.”—William H. Seward (1808-1872), U.S. Senator from New York, Republic Presidential candidate—and future Secretary of State, “Democracy the Chief Element of Government,” address in Madison, Wisc., Sept. 12, 1860, in The Works of William H. Seward, Volume 4, edited by George E. Baker (1888)

No matter how the next few weeks will play out, the convulsions since Election Day—at this point, sure to extend into January—should refute the notion that voting doesn’t count.

Will America Survive the Great Trumpression?

I started to think about this post back in late winter, when Americans began to wrestle with the implications of COVID-19. I held back on finishing it, looking for other items to write about that were geared toward specific dates and/or less likely to send my blood pressure climbing.

Unfortunately, the main outlines of this piece remain as valid now as they were then. The only differences are that the list of daily outrages perpetrated by Donald Trump has grown far lengthier and that the American people will be coping with the resulting destruction for at least some time no matter who they elect President this week.

Thousands of articles have been published over these last several months, attempting to assess the unprecedented nature of the current American crisis. To call this a “recession” understates its complexity and, consequently, its peril to every American citizen.

A New Term for Our National Emergency

We need a new word coinage that will encompass this in all its dimensions, and assign responsibility for its creation and perpetuation. That phrase is The Great Trumpression:

*In its economic severity, the term lies between a recession and depression. Earlier this year, the U.S. unemployment rate had climbed to 14.7%, a level not seen since the Great Depression. Even its current rate of 7.9% is well above pre-pandemic levels. Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter remain the preeminent symbols of Presidential haplessness in the face of high joblessness, but Trump enjoys a dubious “distinction” possessed by neither of these two unfortunates: he has thrust 12.6 million unemployed Americans into a disease-ravaged environment, where it is more difficult to interview with or gain the attention of potential employers, and where his administration has been itching for the Supreme Court to rule against the Affordable Health Care Act (ACA) that so many depend on.

*The term also involves suppression of dissenters and even bearers of bad news. Put aside voter suppression (an effort that Trump has been pursuing energetically, as noted by Eric Levitz of New York Magazine). Forget about tolerating Democrats, the press or late-night comics: Trump can’t even abide opposition or even mild internal criticism from fellow Republicans. Last fall, even with high approval ratings for Trump among registered Republicans, state GOP officials canceled primaries in which Mark Sanford, Joe Walsh and William Weld were set to run. They did not dare the remotest possibility that voters could register adverse opinions, or that the President who could send them federal funds might retaliate for not doing their wishes. They surely feared an early-morning Twitter assault. This President hinted in a debate four years ago that he could attack Sen. Rand Paul for his looks, tweeted that Ted Cruz’s dad may have had something to do with JFK’s assassination, fired Attorney-General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from the Robert Mueller investigation, then ridiculed him enough to turn a majority of GOP voters against him in a race to re-join the Senate. This is also a President who, as soon as the impeachment inquiry was over, fired accuser Col. Alexander Vindman and his brother Yevgeny from their jobs with the National Security Council. (Even Bill Clinton waited till the closing days of his Presidency to sack Linda Tripp for her role in instigating the Lewinsky investigation.) To his everlasting shame, Trump has not only gleefully hinted that he will sack Anthony Fauci after Election Day but has whipped up animosity so extreme that this immunologist, honored by past administrations of both parties, now requires a security detail. But, at last, that suppression may have finally come home to roost. In keeping the lid on eight weeks of coronavirus reports from early to mid-summer, Trump’s aides ensured that COVID-19 would spike just as voters would be going to the polls, with the administration’s denials and sorry performance fresh in their minds.

*It implies repression of marginalized groups at home and abetting autocrats abroad. Trump’s use of federal military force to crack down on protests against police brutality—not just constitutionally dubious but hypocritical, given the conservative movement’s longtime extolling of states’ authority—diverts attention from his failure to mitigate the pandemic. This sham show of strength is being used against a group disproportionately affected by the health crisis and the economic downturn. Trump’s “playbook”—encouraging far-right nationalists and scoffing at COVID-19—has been followed by fellow aspiring international authoritarians, notably Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who, in styling himself the “Trump of the South,” initially scoffed at masks, then, when the pandemic worsened, imitated the U.S. President in advocating tirelessly for hydroxychloroquine.

*It facilitates the proper assigning of responsibility for the twin pandemic-economic collapse. Ten years ago, Republicans fell over themselves calling the ACA “Obamacare.” However one might feel about the nickname, it focused voters’ attention on who should be credited or blamed for sweeping legislation that would alter how Americans received medical care. A similar need for accountability would be met by assigning Trump’s name to the current crisis. Earlier this year, National Catholic Reporter contributor Michael Sean Winters suggested the term “Trump tents” in case the military erected MASH tents in parking lots to handle hospitals pushed to capacity by COVID-19. That event may yet come to pass, but “Trumpression” will certainly in the meantime convey what has been going on since March—and what will likely continue to happen in the new year, even with a change of Presidents.

Trump Branding in Reverse

Another delicious aspect of this neologism is that it inverts Trump’s hideous branding practices. For nearly four decades, users of Trump properties had to stomach seeing his name in big letters and bright lights, no matter the extent of his involvement, all to satisfy his colossal egotism (a practice only recently receding as the name loses its allure). Now, with “Trumpression,” that megalomania will be properly checked.

Throughout his real estate career, Trump sought every opportunity to seize credit but avoid blame. He was everywhere when The Art of the Deal trumpeted him (falsely) as a great businessman, but was saved from a total collapse of his businesses because of cash infusions from his father.

The pattern continued into his Presidency. When disasters occurred on the watch of other Presidents (e.g., John F. Kennedy with the Bay of Pigs, Jimmy Carter with the failed hostage mission), they appeared before the public and accepted responsibility.

In contrast, Trump said, “I don’t take responsibility at all” for virus testing delays in March when they could have made a material difference, just as, a few weeks later, he said he “can’t imagine why” there could have been a spike in hotline calls about disinfectants after he suggested injecting them to treat COVID-19.  

He complains at rallies about media that cry “COVID, COVID, COVID,” even as his campaign requests that attendees sign statements absolving the President of any liability in case they contract the disease at venues in which most attendees disdain mask wearing or social distancing.

The term “Trumpression” assures that this slide away from responsibility ends. For weeks early in the crisis, he conducted daily press briefings—colossal wastes of time surpassed in fatuity only by the interminable anti-capitalist harangues of Fidel Castro at the height of his power. These rambling, content-free, propaganda exercises falsely reassured his followers that the boastful empty suit now occupying the Oval Office was acting like a true President.

In fact, it was governors who were seizing the initiative. They took the risks of lost revenues, lawsuits from businessmen, Fox News harangues, and—in the case of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer—crazed libertarians’ kidnapping plots; he took the bows for the one tangible result of those stiff measures: preventing COVID-related deaths and caseloads from rising even higher. By refusing to lead a federal response to the coronavirus, he let them take the rap for the failures that were his own doing.

The term “Trumpression” puts an end to this charade. It will indicate concisely to future students of American history the identity of the principal National Insecurity President. For contemporary voters, the tag signals that clown time is over.

COVID’s ‘Wartime President’ Surrenders, Without a Shot Fired

Back in his spring five o’clock follies, the onetime Candidate Bone Spur said that he had in fact felt at times like a “wartime president.” How rich!

Too bad he doesn’t seem to have studied the Civil War, or else he might have learned how Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman used a version of their old chief Winfield Scott’s “Anaconda Plan” at the start of the war—till they came along, applied inadequately by prior Union commanders—to coordinate efforts simultaneously across several regions to bring down the Confederacy.

Instead, the struggle to contain COVID was hampered by Trump’s haphazard, half-hearted strategy of letting states fend for themselves, even to the point where they were competing for scarce medical supplies. Later, he even threatened withdrawal of aid from states like Pennsylvania, New York and Michigan whose governors criticized the federal approach.

Trump projects onto opponents the faults of himself or his opportunistic toadies—in this case, the evisceration of attempts to prepare a strategy to fight future pandemics. He laid the groundwork for the fumbled federal response by cutting the number of staffers who could identify health problems in China and by reducing funding for the Centers for Disease Control.

Subsequently, by refusing to take COVID-19 seriously and flashing contradictory signals about the need for wearing masks, he not only undercut pandemic preparation procedures by the Democratic predecessor he has loathed for possessing the intelligence and class that he lacked, but even earlier foundational efforts by the Republican George W. Bush. (“If we wait for a pandemic to appear, it will be too late to prepare,” Dubya said—as far back as 2005.)

Trump couldn’t be bothered to learn any more than the rudimentary facts about COVID-19, so he put others in charge of dealing with it. But who was it? Not the scientists or doctors who studied the disease’s transmission and who should have been involved. No, it was Mike Pence and Jared Kushner. Even then, he couldn’t decide which one would have ultimate authority.

The upshot? Two adjectives this WWE aficionado loves to apply to others but never himself: “Pathetic” and “weak.” The nation once admired by the rest of the world for its scientific advances muffed the opportunity to lead the international campaign against the greatest medical threat of our time. “Promises kept”? Not by the President who continually said the disease would go away by summer, then that America was “rounding the corner” in dealing with it.

This is what the GOP let themselves in for when they acquitted Trump on all impeachment charges: a resentful, self-pitying Fox watcher and Twitter practitioner who went AWOL against COVID-19. If historian Barbara Tuchman were alive today, she would surely want to add this as a chapter to The March of Folly.

The Lasting Residue of the COVID Nightmare

In the beginning, Trump insisted that the coronavirus would eventually “wash away.” Not only did that never happen, but the casualties have only mounted. Each repetition or variation of that phrase makes him sound more like Herbert Hoover claiming in the Great Depression that “Prosperity is just around the corner.”

Hoover, at least, only thought that restarting production was simply a matter of injecting confidence into the American economy. Trump, we now know from tape recordings released by Bob Woodward, knew as far back as February that "this is deadly stuff."

His claims to the contrary since then have been an attempt to dance around the judgment of voters, just as he managed, from the 1980s to 2000s, to evade bankers’ attempt to claw back the millions he owed them. (Witness his repeated assertions over the last few weeks that a vaccine would be available by Election Day—a date that even spokesmen now shamefacedly agree was “kind of an arbitrary deadline.”)

Trump has been sure that COVID will be gone, “like a dream.” I think the more exact noun is “nightmare,” with scenes not easily forgotten when we awake to the brighter tomorrow he claims desperately will come any day now. (Even his own brush with the disease has left him unchastened about spreading misinformation.)

The danger is that, before then, it will leave a lasting residue on American civic, commercial and even private life. Even before a single state government had ordered a lockdown, many Americans were already withdrawing from going to offices, attending trade shows, using public transportation, eating in enclosed restaurants, or shopping at malls for fear of contradicting a disease that even then was growing exponentially.

Look around now and the danger has spread. It’s more than just the downtowns of blue cities and suburbs that feature gaping holes. Now, states that initially thought their lower population density and Republican voting base would somehow magically save them are experiencing infection spikes and strained health-care capacity. And it is all because Trump feared how the damage to the economy would affect his reelection hopes.

Ironic, isn’t it, that America’s greatest germaphobe forfeited the chance to rally his countrymen against COVID-19—and now risks not only defeat at the polls but a mortal threat to the multinational business portfolio he never divested himself of?

Uniquely in the annals of Presidential leadership, Trump has demonstrated how impaired moral character and intellectual laziness can combine to produce monumental managerial disaster.

I have no doubt that history will judge this Great Trumpression harshly. That will be so whether a victorious Trump immediately fires dissenters like Fauci or a losing Trump orders the destruction of papers and electronic files that would document his mismanagement and crimes.

What I fear is that somehow, the President will win re-election, and go on to lead America to an even worse catastrophe over the next four years—because each time in his life that Trump has been enabled, he goes on to incur a greater risk and experience a graver crisis of his own creation.

It's not like even some Republicans didn’t foresee what he might do—or undo. Jeb Bush called him appropriately “the chaos candidate” during the 2016 primaries. Then, in July 2019—not only before COVID-19, but even the impeachment battle—conservative columnist George F. Will warned, in an interview on MSNBC, of the lasting damage wrought by Trump to the functioning of government, the civility of political discourse, and the solidity of truth:

“You can't unring the bells. You can't unsay what he is saying. And it's amazing to me…how fast something could go from unthinkable to thinkable to action. And it doesn't seem to me it's going to be easy to just snap back as though this didn't happen. It happened, and he got away with it, and he became president, and there will be emulators.”

The most ardent of Trump’s followers have wanted to “own the liberals,” but, by handing him a second term, they will share ownership in the wreck of the world’s greatest economy and the deterioration of the proud leader of democracy on earth.

Joke of the Day (Will Rogers, on Elections, ‘The Only Advertised and Known Calamity’)

“We have various pestilences every once in a while, but the only advertised and known calamity is our elections. It's just like an operation, the anesthetic is the worst part of it. It's these weeks of putting you under that is the trying part of an election.”—Comedian-actor-columnist Will Rogers (1879-1935), in Will Rogers' World: America's Foremost Political Humorist Comments on the 20’s and 30’s—and 80’s and 90’s, edited by Bryan and Frances Sterling (1993)

Somebody help me, please—wake me when this is all over!!!!

Photo of the Day: Sign Noticed in Nyack NY

I took this photo over a month ago in Nyack, NY—many of whose residents, like a great number nationwide, hope to translate this into reality exactly a week from today.

Joke of the Day (Burns and Allen, With Her Presidential ‘Announcement’)

Gracie Allen: “George, I’ll let you in on a secret. I’m running for president.” [audience applause]

George Burns: “Gracie, how long has this been going on?”

Gracie: “Well, 150 years—George Washington started it.”—Gracie Allen and George Burns quoted in Laura Ansley, “Run Like a Girl: When Politics Becomes Show Business: Gracie Allen Runs for President,” https://nursingclio.org/, Oct. 11, 2016

Recently, a former teacher told me of a reference he made in class about 20 years ago to Jack Benny. His students’ faces went blank when they heard these two, he told me. I’m afraid that they would register only marginally more recognition today if they heard the names of Benny’s longtime friends, George Burns and Gracie Allen.

Maybe, just maybe, some might recall a film that Burns made with John Denver, Oh, God! A few of the more trivia game-minded might remember seeing Burns’ appearance in his Oscar-winning Best Supporting Actor role in The Sunshine Boys.

But I think you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone under 65, maybe even 70, who’s very knowledgeable about Allen, Burns’ wife of 38 years and his brilliant comic partner for 36. That’s in no small part due to the fact that she last appeared with him on their eight-season-long TV situation comedy in 1958. But the comic duo had quite a run in their day, spanning vaudeville, radio, film and TV.

Their act—he, the straight man to her lovable ditz—may have reached a zenith of sorts in 1940. That year, Franklin Roosevelt sought to become the first President to win a third term. But Gracie, she announced, had her own “first” in mind: the first female President.

Just two decades after women got the right to vote, many American males found it laughable on its face that a woman would even think of running for President. But, with Nazism spreading across Europe and Americans squabbling over the necessity of intervening in that conflict, the country sure needed a laugh, and on their radio show that year Gracie (contrary to her image, as shrewd as they come) and her husband were happy to oblige, with a campaign where she was billed as the “Surprise Party’s Dark Horse.”

In her high-pitched voice, she took issue with George’s sputtering claim that Presidents were born, not made, responding: “Well what do you think I was, hatched?”

Amazingly, the couple’s publicity stunt took on a life of its own, with thousands turning out for her “tour” and receiving write-in votes even after “retiring” from her campaign, according to this 2008 NPR story.

Gracie’s “campaign,” of course, was completely a put-on. But many listeners now would find it all too close to reality to encounter a candidate with little prior knowledge of world geography, let alone politics (she looked forward to votes from Canada and Mexico); who promises Cabinet posts to friends (in her case, based on which of her outfits they preferred); and most of all, whose campaign slogan was “Down with common sense.”

(BTW: if you want to catch the couple in action, other than through YouTube clips, you are best off to watch Antenna TV through your local cable TV lineup. Just hope it’s not at some ungodly overnight hour.)