THE FIRST 2020 PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE: I WOULDN’T HAVE DONE IT THIS WAY, BUT…

 

9/30/20

Yours truly surely would not have conducted myself the way President Trump did last night in his first debate with former Vice-President Joe Biden.  

I wouldn’t have attempted to convey strength by attempting to dominate the conversation by constantly interrupting Mr. Biden in mid-sentence.   Not only would avoiding such interruptions been the more gentlemanly thing to do, it would have given Mr. Biden more time to commit the verbal gaffes and tormented twists of logic to which he is naturally occasionally prone.   Also, such interruptions and verbal bullying do not convey strength, but, rather, the insecurity of a petulant child.  By engaging in such conduct, Mr. Trump looked weak rather than strong. 

Yours truly also wouldn’t have attacked Mr. Biden’s intelligence and academic achievements.   Belittling Mr. Biden’s alma mater, be it the University of Delaware or, as Trump put it, perhaps in an attempt to highlight a previous Biden gaffe, Delaware State, sounds awfully elitist from a Wharton graduate whose ostensible main reason for political existence is to be the candidate of the common man.   And attacking Mr. Biden’s intelligence just sounds outright silly coming from a guy whose most salient feature is not his towering intellect.   Incidentally, yours truly has been blessed with, among many other things, the opportunity to know and learn from many extremely smart people.   One of the most intelligent and successful of those, who, in what is surely no coincidence, is a near religious reader of this blog, is a proud graduate of the University of Delaware.   But I digress.

I also would have been more subtle in attacking the shady business dealings of Mr. Biden’s son Hunter and I would have placed less emphasis on the actual shenanigans, or worse, in which young Mr. Biden has been involved and more on the insouciant attitude of his father who has repeatedly contended that “My son has done nothing wrong.”   Yes, Hunter’s actions at the very least constitute conflict of interest and quite possibly worse.   But Joe’s contention that Hunter did nothing wrong says a lot about what Mr. Biden’s forty-seven years of “public life” do to someone’s judgment regarding right and wrong and such things as entitlement.  That is where the focus should be when discussing the reprehensible behavior of Hunter Biden.

All that having been written, though, I am not Donald Trump, and the contrast goes further than Mr. Trump’s being president of the United States and, unless the New York Times is right, a successful real estate/entertainment/gaming tycoon while yours truly is a man of (very) modest accomplishment who makes a moderately comfortable living teaching an occasional class, making some wise investments, pulling off a good trade now and then, and collecting a few royalty checks on my books.   Simply put, people, whether they love or hate Mr. Trump, do not expect him to be anything resembling a gentleman; such a characterization is simply not in his character.    People insisting on a gentleman president do not support Donald Trump.    And those who support Donald Trump would be confounded, and probably more than a little disappointed, were he to comport himself in the style of, say, yours truly.   So, yes, Mr. Trump’s performance last night was over-the-top, and, unlike his political rallies, in which Mr. Trump resembles nothing so much as a borscht belt comedian, didn’t even make me smile, to use the words of a great Sinatra tune.   It was a sorry performance, but, given who Mr. Trump is, didn’t shock anybody.

I would also be quick to note that Mr. Biden did not cover himself in glory by any stretch of even the most febrile imagination.   He called Mr. Trump a “clown” and a “racist” and told him to “shut up, man.”  In a particular favorite of the left, he accused Mr. Trump of repeatedly using “dog whistles.”  While Mr. Biden cleared the ridiculously low bar Mr. Trump had foolishly set for him, he did commit his share of suspicion feeding gaps, as when he repeatedly bumbled the number of COVID deaths in this country and, after finally settling on approximately the right number, 200,000, asked how many of those victims survived.   If Mr. Trump and his supporters had not conditioned people to expect Mr. Biden to drool, wretch, mumble, and mutter, much more would have been made of such bumbling.

 

More importantly, Mr. Trump accomplished two things he set out to accomplish.   He realized that this debate was going to change few minds if for no other reason that there are few minds out there to change.    The purpose of this debate was not to charm the, depending on who’s counting, the 5%, 7%, or 8% of the electorate that is undecided in this contest.   The purpose of this debate, on both sides, was to fire up the base.  Mr. Trump succeeded in that endeavor.   By continually hitting the main points of his argument for re-election, and tossing in plenty of red meat, Mr. Trump surely got the base revved up.  That he made those of us who were already not counting our upcoming vote for Mr. Trump as among our lives’ finest choices even more unsettled about supporting this man is of little consequence; even we are still going to vote for the guy or, more properly, against his opponents.

 

Most importantly, and far more subtly, Mr. Trump did something very clever last night and probably did so unwittingly.   Joe Biden has been given something of a free pass this entire campaign, and not only by the mainstream media who really ought to formally give up the transparent as glass masquerade that they are somehow unbiased reporters of the news, certainly regarding this campaign.  What I am addressing here is Mr. Biden’s heretofore ability to rest on his questionable reputation as a moderate while remaining more or less committed to the agenda items of those on his party’s far left.   So far, he has masterfully walked that tightrope, persuading moderate suburban voters that they are safe in expressing their visceral hatred of Mr. Trump by casting a vote for him while assuring the woke wackos in his party that he will carry their revolution to Washington and, from there, to the entire benighted country that so badly needs the wisdom of a group of malcontents who lack even the most basic understanding of how this country achieved the abundance of wealth and wisdom that enables it to indulge their inane silliness.  

 

Even if Mr. Trump didn’t knock Mr. Biden off that tightrope last night, he certainly made Mr. Biden stumble.   Despite Mr. Trump’s misplaced observation that “He just lost the left,” Mr. Biden did the exact opposite.   By repeating that Antifa is an idea rather than an organization, being unable to name one police organization that supports him, being unable to even say “the word (sic) law enforcement,” as Mr. Trump put it, and refusing to rule out packing the Supreme Court, Mr. Biden made it increasingly clear that his reputation as a moderate is a vestige of a past that may itself be the victim of selective memory.    If anybody missed this last night, believe me, they will be repeatedly reminded of Mr. Biden’s leap (or maybe a baby-step, really) to the left between now and election day.  The main effect of Mr. Biden’s more firmly placing himself in solidarity with, if not outright membership in or obeisance to, the left of his party will be to fire up Mr. Trump’s base by alerting them to the dangers of a nominal Biden presidency.   It will also keep those of us who are not the least bit happy about having to vote for Mr. Trump in the President’s camp.

 

Finally, after the debate, yours truly went back and forth between CNN and Fox News for post-debate commentary.   I thought for a moment that I was visiting two different planets, or at least an episode of The Twilight Zone featuring two dimensions of the same planet.  The people on CNN were, as is their wont, hysterical, discoursing endlessly on the decency and nobility of Joe Biden and the utter evil that is Donald Trump and spinning tales of children crying and fleeing from the rooms in which the debate was being broadcast in response the ugliness of the depths to which their “democracy” had sunk.   Though they had a few more reasoned voices on their panels, the heavyweights on Fox were equally as hysterical, though, of course, on the complete opposite side of the continuum, declaring that Mr. Trump had steamrolled Mr. Biden and made his country proud.   Sean Hannity repeatedly declared that he liked the open brawling of the debate and that the next debate should dispense completely with the moderator and let the candidates have at it because, after all, Americans like a good brawl.   He sounded like Bob Luce promoting a Dick the Bruiser/Johnny Valentine Texas Death Match.   While yours truly always enjoyed such matches, which, curiously, never ended with anybody’s death and were not held in Texas, we are deciding on a president here.   Further, this was the commentary from CNN and Fox; one can only imagine the maniacal ravings that must have emanated from such outfits as OAN and MSNBC.

 

There really is nowhere to go any more for news; all that remains is opinion, sometimes masquerading as news, sometimes not.   And the opinion business is getting awfully crowded.    And the country is in trouble.

 

 

THE SUPREME COURT NOMINATION: ARE YOU READY FOR SOME RAW, SHARP-ELBOWED POLITICS?

 

9/21/20

Yours truly feels compelled to preface this post by stating that I detest identity politics and the notion of selecting candidates for public office or other high positions of public trust based on their race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and the like.  We are all Americans that should be judged, or, more properly, evaluated, on the basis of our merits and, in the words of a guy whose opinions on such things once mattered, the content of our character.   Further, my opinion on how President Trump and the GOP ought to proceed on a replacement for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was made clear in my last post, (HOLD OFF ON THE SUPREME COURT NOMINATION…AND OTHER QUICK THOUGHTS ON THE DEATH OF JUSTICE RUTH BADER GINSBURG, 9/19/20).    Not only would delaying the nomination be the right, or at least the non-hypocritical, thing to do, which I admit is a quaint notion in these days of politics supra omnia, but it might also help the GOP politically for a number of reasons, especially should the public suddenly decide it would prefer character in its leaders, an eventuality that is admittedly a long-shot.

 

However, the President and his Party have already decided that a nomination for the Court won’t wait.   Further, the notion that race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation and the like are the most, if not the only, traits worthy of consideration long ago took permanent hold of American politics.  Given that these two conditions prevail, yours truly has decided that, for this post, I will offer the President and his Party a strategy based on raw politics.

 

The President ought to announce that his selection to replace Justice Ginsburg on the Supreme Court is Judge Barbara Lagoa of the 11^th Circuit Court of Appeals, which sits in Atlanta.   Why?  Judge Lagoa is a woman, a stipulation that Mr. Trump, who still insists he is a conservative, has made a sine qua non for his nominee.   Judge Lagoa is Hispanic.   Yours truly has always thought the characterization of somebody as “Hispanic” or “Latino” is overly broad and thus dismissive of the cultural diversity among those of our people who themselves, or whose ancestors, hale from Spanish or Portuguese speaking nations to our south, but the moniker seems to work for those for whom categories are all that matter.  But I digress.  To be clear, Ms. Lagoa is of Cuban ancestry.   Judge Lagoa is also from Florida, a key state in the 2020 election, as it is in every presidential election.   Is she the most qualified person to sit on the Court?   Is she even among the most qualified?  Who knows?   Who cares?   Her nomination works politically, and, today, what else matters? 

 

After announcing that Judge Lagoa is his pick to replace Justice Ginsburg, President Trump should announce that he will delay a Senate confirmation vote until after the election.   Then he can argue that he is working vigilantly to nominate the first Hispanic woman to the Supreme Court, but that, in order for him to accomplish this goal, not only must he be re-elected but the GOP must also hold the Senate.   He will remind the electorate of the Democrats’ unceasing, and ultimately successful, effort to block Miguel Estrada from an Appellate Court seat in 2003 for fear that such a result would put a Hispanic in a good position to wind up on the Supreme Court.  He could use Democratic Judiciary Committee staff memos, most notably the memo to Senator Dick Durbin stating that Democratic interest groups insisted that Mr. Estrada not be nominated because “he is Latino,” as evidence of such Democratic perfidy.    President Trump would thus use the pending nomination of Judge Lagoa to attract the votes not only of Hispanics, a “demographic” that, reportedly, is not all that excited about Joe Biden, but also some support among those who think it is a good idea to select people for offices as important as Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court on the basis of their race, ethnic heritage, gender, sexual orientation, etc., a group that apparently includes President Trump.

 

Such a move would help the President not only in Florida, whence Judge Lagoa hales, but also in states like Arizona, Iowa, and the more salient swing states around the Great Lakes that have substantial Hispanic populations, unless, of course, the Democrats can convince Hispanic voters that being Cuban is not “Hispanic” enough to be considered authentic, much like Joe Biden tries to convince Blacks that those among them who do not vote for him are not authentically Black.

 

Would this move be transparent?   Yes.   Would a lot of people, Hispanic and otherwise, see right through it?   Yes.   Would it nonetheless garner a few votes for the President?   Yes.   Is there any downside, politically speaking?   No.  Contrary to the fantasies of Mr. Trump’s most ardent critics, there is nobody among Mr. Trump’s base who will not vote for him because he nominated a Cuban-American for the Supreme Court.    So will a Lagoa nomination, followed by a delay of a vote until after the election, contribute, at the margin, to the President’s re-election efforts?   Yes.

 

Will Judge Lagoa, should this whole effort succeed, turn out to be an outstanding, or even passable, Supreme Court Justice?   Who knows?   She could be the next John Marshall or the next David Souter.  But who cares?    This is all about politics.  Such trendy piffles as qualifications for a multi-decade stint on the Supreme Court pale in relative importance.

 

 

 

 

Since we’re talking raw politics here, you should read both my books, The Chairman, A Novel of Big City Politics and The Chairman’s Challenge, A Continuing Novel of Big City Politics for some REALLY raw politics.

 

 

 

HOLD OFF ON THE SUPREME COURT NOMINATION…AND OTHER QUICK THOUGHTS ON THE DEATH OF JUSTICE RUTH BADER GINSBURG

 

9/19/20

 

As all of you know, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg lost her long and painful battle with pancreatic cancer last night.   She was clearly trying to hold out until our country had at least a Democratic president and, preferably, a Democratic senate, but there are things even the best and brightest of us cannot delay.   Here are four thoughts on Justice Ginsburg’s passing:

 

·         Justice Ginsburg deserves all the accolades she is receiving and will doubtless continue to receive over the next several days and weeks.   Even those of us who disagree with her approach to the law, and who certainly disagree with her politics (which, like the politics of all our justices nowadays, were quite transparent) must admit that she was a titan of the court.   If she and her great judicial foil, the late and great Justice Antonin Scalia, could show mutual respect, and friendship, we should all do the same.   Yours truly, for all the intensity of my political ideas, looks upon the Scalia/Ginsburg friendship as a quaint throwback to the waning days of political civility that should be anything but quaint.

 

·         President Donald Trump and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell should hold off on nominating a replacement for Justice Ginsburg.  After refusing to confirm Merrick Garland, President Barack Obama’s 2016 nominee to fill the Court vacancy left by Justice Scalia’s death, because, the argument went, it was so close to the next presidential election that the next president should make the Court pick, it would be nothing short of blatant hypocrisy for the Republicans to insist that President Trump fill the Ginsburg vacancy at this time.   Judge Garland was nominated in March of 2016, nearly eight months from the presidential election of that year.   It is now more than midway through September, within six weeks of this year’s presidential race.  

 

Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham, who occasionally masquerades as a conservative but in unceasing in his Party loyalty, agreed with my side of this argument back in 2018, arguing that if a Supreme Court vacancy were to come up in 2020 and the primaries had started, he would hold the nomination until after the election.   But he has changed his mind; in May of this year, he argued that the situation in 2020 is different from that which prevailed in 2016 because now the party that holds the presidency also holds the senate.   But that is a canard.  The only difference lies not in the propriety or advisability of the decision but in the ability to implement that decision.

 

Yes, yours truly would love to see, say, Amy Coney Barrett nominated and confirmed, and I understand power politics; after all, I grew up in the 19^th Ward in Richard J. Daley’s Chicago.   But I also recognize hypocrisy, and a Republican rush to nominate and confirm even the most worthy and ideologically aligned new Justice would reek of hypocrisy.

 

·         If both parties needed a further reason to fire up the base, they just got one.   Yes, everyone knew that Justice Ginsburg, had she survived, would have resigned right after the election if President Trump were somehow re-elected or right after the nomination should we be confronted with a President Biden, which still looks to be the case.   But now the vacancy is glaring and has been moved to the forefront of the campaign.    Further, given the (Anthony) Kennedyesque voting pattern of Chief Justice John Roberts, this next pick is likely to be the swing vote the conservatives didn’t think they needed after the ascension of Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.   The Supreme Court has nearly always been a hot issue in presidential and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Senate campaigns.  It is now especially so this year.

 

·         Perhaps this is just a reiteration of the first point, but, as tempting as it is to leap right into the politics of Justice Ginsburg’s passing, a temptation to which yours truly has succumbed, let’s all take the time go give the Justice her due; she was really something and will doubtless hold a prominent place in history.   And, as is always the case in such situations, remember to say a prayer for Justice Ginsburg and her family.

 

THE DEMOCRATS MIGHT BE MAKING A HUGE MISTAKE HERE

 

9/2/20

 

Polling numbers are showing the presidential race tightening and doing so largely because of the violence that continues to plague our cities.   (For an example of such violence, see my last post, the nearly instantly seminal THIS WEEKEND’S MASS SHOOTING AT LUME’S, A PLACE IN THE OLD NEIGHBORHOOD WHERE YOURS TRULY HAS ENJOYED MANY A MEAL.)  In response, both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris read speeches decrying the violence but also both reaffirming their support for the right to peacefully protest and pledging their unyielding allegiance to the ideals behind this year’s protests.

 

The mistake that Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris are making is to assume that the vast majority of people decry the violence but look favorably on the ideals of the Black Lives Matter and related movements.   In reality, a lot of people, and perhaps most voters, oppose not only the violence but also the ideals of the Black Lives Matter movement.

 

I can hear the knee-jerk reaction now:

 

“What?   The hell you say!   How can anybody who is not a reprehensible racist not support the ideals of the Black Lives Matter movement?”

 

To understand how good, well-meaning, well-acting, non-racist people can oppose the ideals of the Black Lives Matter (“BLM”) movement, one must understand that BLM is only the latest manifestation of, while maybe not the oldest extant political trick, a sleight of hand that was almost certainly in Hammurabi’s playbook.   The idea is to put an innocuous, or, preferably, noble name on a set of ideas and objectives that bear at best only the most remote relationship to said innocuously noble title.   Then, when somebody objects to the underlying objectives, goals, and ideas, accuse him or her of objecting to the nobility or harmlessness reflected in the title.   

 

In this case, “Black Lives Matter” is surely a noble sentiment.   Who but the most virulent racist (and here I am talking about real racism, not merely about being on the winning side of an argument with a liberal, which seems to be the only characteristic necessary to be labelled a racist in our brave new world, but I digress) would argue that Black lives don’t matter?   However, the ideals that fall under the title “Black Lives Matter” go beyond racial justice, ridding police departments of people who, by temperament and outlook, have no business being in law enforcement, and other such goals with which no one of goodwill would argue.   The goals of Black Lives Matter include

 

·         an economic system in which government controls and allocates resources and does so largely, or even solely, on the basis of race

·         defunding of law enforcement

·         the censoring of any speech or art form that can somehow be found offensive by any party that considers himself or herself aggrieved, i.e., the so-called “cancel culture,”

·         re-writing, or outright erasing, of history,

·         reparations, in varying degrees of size and severity, and

·         the most salient characteristic of anybody being his or her race/gender/gender identity, etc., not, say, his or her being an American citizen entitled to equal protection under the law, his being especially talented, or not so talented, in some area of human endeavor, or any number of other traits.   The thing that most, or even at all, matters is that someone is Black, White, Hispanic, Asian, male, female, LGBTQ, straight, etc.

 

If one reasonably objects to this agenda, one is thus accused of not caring about Black lives, of, indeed, arguing that Black lives don’t matter.   So cowed and demoralized, the accused meekly surrenders and performs penance by putting a “Black Lives Matter” sign on his front lawn without the slightest idea of what he is promoting by doing so.  Again, this approach is nothing new and often works, largely because people don’t pay attention and are too easily intimidated by people who also don’t pay attention but would like us to believe they do.

 

So there are a lot of people who BOTH decry the violence AND do not buy into the dangerous, near socialist agenda of the Black Live Matter movement.   However, the Democratic leadership, who appear to live in a myopic world in which everyone agrees with the woke nonsense emanating from the places in which their most generous contributors live and work, or who genuinely believe the world would be a better place if the governing manifesto were

 

“From each according to their (sic) race, to each according to their (sic) race”

 

 continue to reassure us that, while they decry the violence that sometimes accompanies BLM protests, they are totally onboard with the entire BLM agenda.

 

It is such an attitude that will lose Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris, along with those running on the Democratic ticket with them, votes from people of all races who, while agreeing wholeheartedly with the notion that Black lives matter, do not want to see their entire society transformed into some kind of Orwellian nightmare so people of privilege can avoid being accused of racism by people who have no idea what genuine racism is.

 

Will the Democrats so lose enough votes as to refuse the Clydesdale of a gift horse that is, or was, the 2020 presidential election?   Probably not; I still think Mr. Biden wins, as I have for a long time.  (See PRESIDENT TRUMP WILL NOT BE RE-ELECTED, 4/22/20 and posts hence.)  However, I am not as confident in that prediction as I was a few weeks ago.   And if the Dems somehow do manage to blow the seemingly unblowable, it will in part be, as many have been saying lately, because of the violence in the streets and the growing sense of lawlessness in this country.   But such a loss will also be attributable to the Democratic assumption that the great masses of people are in complete sympathy with the outlandish set of principles obscured beneath the noble title “Black Lives Matter.”