THE 2/19/20 DEMOCRATIC DEBATE: “HEY (MIKE), DID YOU GET THE LICENSE NUMBER?” “LICENSE NUMBER?” “YEAH, THE LICENSE NUMBER OF THE TRUCK THAT HIT YOU.”

2/20/20

Until last night, I had given up on listening to the Democratic debates.   After listening to the first few, yours truly grew tired of the incessant screeching and bellowing about how misogynistic, racist, plutocratic, and just downright awful our country has become.   However, with Mike Bloomberg making his Dem debate debut, and with a few friends’ urging me to watch, I decided to take in this latest approximation of participatory democracy and have come up with several thoughts:

• ·         A resume and a pile of spondulicks do not a good candidate make.   For proof of this, consider John Connally in 1980, who entered the GOP contest with the big money and a huge political pedigree behind him before being pounded into irrelevance in one of the first (if not the first; memory is failing me here) debates of the season by Ronald Reagan.    Also consider the highly qualified, but nearly completely tone-deaf, Mitt Romney, defeated convincingly, if not resoundingly, in 2012 by Barack Obama.  More to the point, Mike Bloomberg looked as bad as everyone said he did last night.   In addition to being demolished by his fellow Dems, most notably, but not exclusively, by Elizabeth Warren, he seemed to be channeling a bizarre combination of Elmer Fudd and Mortimer Snerd.  This is indeed regrettable, because Mr. Bloomberg is a man of intelligence, accomplishment, and compassion.   He would probably make a good president.   And so would have John Connally and Mitt Romney.   But politics is more than a rare combination of management and leadership skills; it is also a matter of showmanship and likeability (See a later bullet point.)   And Mr. Bloomberg, at least judging from this debate, has neither.   Perhaps debates don’t mean that much; yours truly suspects they don’t.  So maybe Mr. Bloomberg can recover.   But he was just awful last night.

·         There seems to be a battle within the Democratic Party between the crazies (Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren) and the relative moderates (Mike Bloomberg, Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar, and Pete Buttigieg.)   And I hasten to add here that “moderate,” like most terms in finance, economics, and politics, is a relative term, but I digress.   The fundamental question confronting the Dems is whether they want a revolution or whether they just want to get rid of President Trump and return to a more “normal” state of affairs, whatever that is.   Those who want a revolution would support one of the crazies.  Those who prioritize normalcy and getting rid of Mr. Trump would logically support the relative moderates.  If one considers the pre-debate combined polling numbers of these two groups, it would appear that the two camps are about evenly divided.   However, those polls have been taken among Democratic voters.   If one expands the polled universe to include all those who have not firmly decided to vote for Mr. Trump, i.e., to independents and to Republicans who are, er, hesitant to vote for the President, one suspects that those desirous of normalcy and getting rid of the President would triumph over the revolutionaries by a landslide.  The conclusion is that, since elections are not decided by Democrats alone but by the wider electorate, the Dems should nominate someone from the relative moderate camp if they hope to win this election.    One wonders, however, if they can take sufficient control of their emotions to make such a reasoned choice; see PRESIDENT TRUMP CANNOT WIN, BUT THE DEMOCRATS CAN LOSE, IN 2020.

·         Some of the experts, mostly, but not exclusively, from the GOP side, contend that, due to the divisiveness of last night’s debate, the big winner was President Trump.    They are wrong.  Senator Sanders did his Party a great service last night, a service that was formerly performed by Senator Warren when she was the front runner, to wit, Senator Sanders makes the rest of the candidate, except for Senator Warren, look sensible.  In fact, there were even some cheers from the crowd when, for example, Mr. Bloomberg pointed out that the Party could not win by running a socialist like Mr. Sanders and when other candidates pointed out that the programs championed by Mr. Sanders and Ms. Warren were simply unaffordable and not beneficial for large groups in society, such as those who are happy with their existing health insurance arrangements.   One got the sense that the 2020 Dems were either maturing into a party that could govern, rather than rabble rouse, or were cleverly hiding their socialistic impulses in order to get elected.  While I’m hoping for the former, the larger point is that neither could have been accomplished without Senator Sanders’ unwitting, yet tireless, efforts.   When you combine the growing at least perceived sensibleness of the Dems with the huge audience last night’s debates attracted, the Democratic Party was the big winner last night…unless the post-debate polls show Senator Sanders gained strength from his performance last night, and there was little in his performance to suggest such an outcome.

·         Senator Warren had her best debate of the season last night but, thankfully, it will probably not be enough to catapult her back into the first tier of candidates.   In the unlikely event, however, that she did gain considerable ground last night, the Dems would do well to consider that, if one looks at the history of presidential elections for at least the last 60 years or so, it has been the more likeable, or, as in 2016, the less unlikeable, candidate who has won.   The only exception to this general rule was 1968, when Richard Nixon, who looked like, and had the demeanor of, the bad guy in a typical Three Stooges episode, defeated the Happy Warrior Hubert Humphrey, but it was damn close and it wasn’t supposed to be.   One could argue that 1964 was also an exception; who liked LBJ?   But considering that Johnson’s fixers had the electorate convinced that Barry Goldwater was set to vaporize the world in a nuclear holocaust, LBJ was still the more likeable of the two.   If this general rule holds in 2020 and the Dems nominate Senator Warren, they don’t have a chance for reasons extending beyond her wacky ideology.

·         Finally, most of my readers are old enough to recognize the OGCR (According to my students, they love, but usually don’t get, “Mr. Quinn’s OGCRs (“Old Geezer Cultural References”)”) in the title to this missive.   At least I hope so.

THE EBBING CHICAGO AUTO SHOW

2/17/20

My wife and I made our annual pilgrimage to the Chicago Auto Show on Valentine’s Day this year.    Gone are the days when I went to the show three or four times each year and made an occasional trip to the Detroit (North American) Auto show, but we still make it a point to attend the Chicago Show and always thoroughly enjoy it.

The overwhelming feeling we got from the show this year was that it is shrinking.   BMW, Mercedes, and Volvo all opted out of the Chicago show this year; Mitsubishi left last year.    Further, the automakers that chose to stay pulled out fewer stops than they did in the past.    There were fewer contests, displays, prizes, and the like.  The “ride and drive” programs, which allow show-goers to test drive new cars, have gone from five companies (Ford, Subaru, Volkswagen, Kia, and Mazda) to three (Ford, Subaru, and Honda.)   It was tougher to get free tickets to the show this year than in the past.   For example, Chevy Drives Chicago, which always offered a pair of free tickets in the past to those who bothered to go to its website, answer a few questions, and visit a dealer, didn’t do so this year.   Subaru, which traditionally has offered a pair of tickets to Subaru owners, ran out of such ducats within a day; by the time I got home from teaching in the afternoon and answered the Subaru e-mail that hit my inbox that morning, the tickets were spoken for and yours truly was put on a waiting list from which I never emerged.  Finally, while I haven’t seen official attendance figures, at least on an anecdotal basis, the show did not seem crowded.    We were there from the 10:00 AM opening until about 8:00 PM (Yes, we do love the auto show.) and the place never got crowded.   Further, friends and family members who went on both weekends and weekdays reported that the crowds were manageable, or even light.

The shrinking of the show this year came as no surprise; there has been much talk of late in the buff books and in the business press about the demise of the auto show as we know it.   There are various reasons offered for this retreat from the shows on the part of the manufacturers.   One, and the least plausible, such reason is that business isn’t good.   This is clearly not true.  U.S. light vehicle sales have been hovering around the 17 million-unit level, a level not reached even before the Great Recession induced bankruptcies, for several years now and the average transaction price continues to climb.   Yes, unit sales have plateaued, perhaps permanently, but the dollar sales continue to grow and those sales, on a per unit basis, are at least as profitable as ever.   The future of the auto business, according to some, might be bleak in the era of electrification (Let yours truly note that what he will think about and what he will believe are different things.), but right now, business is good.   One almost thinks, judging from these gloomy predictions during times of great prosperity, that those in and around the industry who bray about the poor state of the car business must, like your author, be of Irish heritage; one of the most salient characteristics of those of us lucky enough to carry at least some Celtic blood is being able to, as Yeats put it, call upon our abiding sense of tragedy to sustain us through temporary periods of joy, but I digress. To attribute the declining auto show commitment of the manufacturers to conditions in the business both ignores the current state of the industry and attempts to attribute a secular phenomenon to cyclical causes.

Two other explanations of the demise of the auto show are related.   The first of these is that people are more interested in new technology, such as in-vehicle communication and connectivity technology and autonomous driving, than they are in the actual vehicle or driving experience.   There are better places than the traditional auto show, according to this argument, to display technology that people really care about.  The second argument is the standard argument about anything that those of us of a certain vintage like and/or find useful, to wit, millennials don’t care about cars; therefore, we should follow their lead and abandon the car.   This second argument will go down in history as yet another evanescent perceived business trend that somehow never came to fruition and resulted in a lot of investment propositions that ultimately went south…way south.   Those of us who have been around for longer than it takes to drink a $9 Starbucks remember when the same things were said of our generation.   We were all going to, among other things, live in urban boxes in the sky and abandon our individualistic cars for collectivist public transportation because that was the hip and the “right” and “responsible” thing to do.  How did that turn out?  Despite all that we read about the urbanization of America, suburbs and exurbs are bigger than ever, both in raw numbers and percent of the population, and we are buying, as I mentioned before, 17 million cars a year.   And twenty, no, ten, no, five years from now, millennials will be driving SUVs (or maybe even sedans) to their homes in Naperville, Orland Park, Hinsdale, Glenview, and Wilmette.  Trust me on this…or don’t and instead follow the admonitions of the “experts” who profess the investment thesis that you must put your money into those asset classes and stocks that conform to their perceptions of millennial tastes, and then wonder what happened to your nest egg.   But I digress…again.

The related argument that we, and especially the millennial we, don’t care about cars per se but are more interested in other ways to distract ourselves when we are supposed to be driving may hold some weight; it doesn’t take even five minutes of driving to encounter some dullard texting away while veering from lane to lane at ten mph under the speed limit imperiling the lives of all around him while answering and sending texts the gist of which is “How ya doin’?”   However, yours truly has also held that the traditional auto show is a bad place to display the attributes of a vehicle that matter to people who care about driving but is a rather good place to display the ancillary items with which we, and especially, again, the millennial we, are fascinated.   While the “ride and drive” programs at the Chicago Auto Show have helped to address the longstanding most salient shortcoming of the show, i.e., it is hard to learn much about a car when you can’t drive it, the show remains a better place to show off accessories to vehicles, such as the aforementioned connectivity and autonomous driving technology, than actual cars.   Thus, if we really don’t care about cars, we might, ironically, be more attracted to the things that auto shows can actually show us.

None of the above explanations offered by the “experts” about the demise of auto shows is satisfactory, and at least one of them is outright wrong.    This decline of the auto show is a long-term, secular phenomenon born of a common sense, dollars and cents approach to business.   Yours truly, a lover of the auto show, a car nut, and an avid follower (and former participant) in the car business, has long wondered why the auto industry, broadly defined, goes to what must be the enormous expense of putting on these extravaganzas.   All the people, positioning, transportation, hardware, inventory, and travel expenses have to be enormous.   And what is the payoff?   People who are really interested in buying a car are going to go to a dealership, or a variety of websites, to do so; they may winnow down their buying list at an auto show, but that’s all they will, or can, do there.   Thus, it’s hard to believe that the sales won at an auto show justify the expense of said shows.   Yes, brand awareness and “building a brand” is important and is currently very sexy, but in times when numbers do more and more of the talking, and building shareholder value, either as a real issue and goal or as a rationalization for managements’ doing what they decide to do anyway, is the holy grail of the business world, auto shows are growing to be a costly anachronism.   Do the millennial argument and the technology argument have anything to do with both the cost and benefit sides of the auto show cost/benefit equation?   Maybe.   But the point is that auto shows, for whatever reason, don’t justify their costs and haven’t for a very long time.   It’s a damn shame to those of who love cars and auto shows, but the demise of the auto show will continue.

All that having been written, we did have a great time, as we always do, and look forward to next year’s show.   Here are a few less serious, and perhaps more interesting, thoughts on the show:

·         My late brother Dick (See my 1/23/19 piece, THE INIMITABLE DICK QUINN:  MY BROTHER AND MY BEST FRIEND), with whom I would go to the show religiously, always pointed out at our post-show repast that when we first entered to the show, we’d take a look at the sticker prices and respond with something approximating “Oh, boy…that’s a lot of money.  Dad’s ’66 Caddy was less than $6 grand.”    But by about midway through the show, we’d be looking at just about the same prices and saying something like “Hey, this seems pretty reasonable.”    This happened again this year.   When Sue and I first got into the show, we’d comment on how expensive everything was.   By the time we got to the Hyundai exhibit, we were saying something like “Hey, this one’s only $33 grand…loaded.”    Funny how that works.   Maybe all my above comments on the cost effectiveness of the auto show are wrong.

·         Speaking of Hyundai, I’ve believed for a long time that anybody looking for any kind of vehicle should be looking at the Korean makes.    Whether it’s Hyundai’s luxury marque Genesis, Hyundai itself, or its cousin Kia, these cars offer not only low prices but exceptional values.   This visit to the show confirmed that belief.    Yes, the Japanese brands are terrific, the Europeans remain overpriced, and the “domestics,” once one gets past their nonsensical pricing approach, are vastly underrated, but the Koreans are “must-see” machines.  Surely, they are on yours-truly’s list, unless…

·         Subaru had the best display at the show…and it wasn’t even close.    The national parks theme, the virtual mountain stream, the pet adoption area, and the attentive and expert product specialists (though Buick was close in the product expert realm) added up to a spectacular, and completely enjoyable, experience.   Here’s the problem, though, at least from yours truly’s perspective:   Subaru is not a product; it is a cult.  The Subaru display did nothing to dispel this growing conviction.   I currently own a Subaru and, so far, have resisted the steely trap the company has set for me; I am not yet venturing out into the woods with native American shamans searching for trees to hug, wildlife to preserve, and dogs to rescue.   But, despite a handful of niggling shortcomings I have found in my car, I love my Forester and fear that I may soon be urging Sue to join me on a camping expedition to Yellowstone or the like.  And, believe me, yours truly is the very antithesis of the outdoorsman.  My much more well-grounded fear is that, despite my overall love of cars and the car buying process, my fondness for the Korean auto manufacturers, and the several makes that remain on my bucket list (Volvo and Lincoln, for reasons I can’t explain but have nothing to do with my status as an aging quasi-academic or with Matthew McConaughey, of whom I didn’t know before his Lincoln commercials , come immediately to mind.), is that I will never again buy anything but a Subaru.   When the time comes to buy a new car, the entire process will consist of going to the Subaru dealer and picking out a trim level and color.  No, it can’t happen…can it?    Lord, please no!   What fun would the auto show be under such circumstances?