September Notions

Our recent ramblings have provided little opportunity to post in these pages.  A few notions over the last couple of months:

First, a mea culpa:  I indicated in an August preview of the Democratic Convention, “I suspect that there will be no rising Democratic stars given prime time speaking slots … I doubt that delegates will be offered any opportunity for second guessing, … thinking … ‘“We nominated the wrong ‘guy’.”’  In fact, every rising star I listed by name in that post spoke, as well as everybody who wants to be a rising Democratic star, as well as your Uncle Fred.  Democratic Presidential Nominee Vice President Kamala Harris obviously emerged from the convention stronger than before.  Well, as British Prime Minister Winston Churchill once observed:  “I have never developed indigestion from eating my own words.”  🙂 .

As of the time this is typed, Ms. Harris has run a truly effective campaign.  Keeping in mind that I am frequently – and accurately — chided as Mr. Pessimism, I consider her performance thus far to continue to offer her a real chance for victory against the implacable support of MAGA Presidential Nominee former President Donald Trump.  (I can’t be more bullish than that.)  I thought her debate performance was masterful; she has clearly grown exponentially as a debater since her 2020 run for the Democratic Party presidential nomination.  She baited Mr. Trump while she ignored his barbs and kept repeating her own messages, demonstrating better control than I think I could have mustered.  Yet more intriguing was her strategy to let Mr. Trump talk.  Although Mr. Trump whined about the ABC moderators’ unfairness in the wake of his obvious debate debacle, I counted only three times when the moderators corrected his obvious lies, but many more than three times when the moderators turned his microphone back on, contrary to my understanding of the debate rules, to let him respond to a point she had made.  At the time, I was irritated at the moderators; in retrospect, I realized that she hadn’t objected because she recognized that once she gotten him off-stride, his talking helped her.  All that said, I found her 63%-37% victory in CNN’s snap poll of undecided watchers to be instructive.  In a sane world, she should have won 100% – 0%.  Even so, from the perspective of the real world to which we have become accustomed, I scored it closer — perhaps 55% – 45%.  Hopefully, whomever she swayed in the debate will remain in her camp.  To her credit, Ms. Harris is seeming to continue to run with an underdog mentality.  She had better.

We’ve heard a lot about Mandate for Leadership:  the Conservative Promise, popularly known as, “Project 2025,” the Heritage Foundation 900+ page opus setting forth a policy framework for Mr. Trump or some other MAGA winning the White House.  I try to avoid expounding on a subject without reading the primary source myself.  Months ago, I started visiting the Heritage Foundation website to buy a copy (the Heritage Foundation has posted full test online, but these old eyes can’t withstand 900+ pages onscreen), but for all these months, the volume has remained sold out.  Any political think tank normally looks to grab any dollar it can.  I have read snippets of the work, and think it is fair to infer from the Heritage Foundation’s otherwise curious failure to reprint a sure income generator that the Foundation – as well as Mr. Trump, who has tried to distance himself from it in front of mainstream audiences while embracing it in MAGA conclaves – recognizes that most Americans would find its prescriptions as anathematic as liberals and progressives claim they are.  For those with stronger eyes than mine, a link to the volume’s pdf is set forth immediately below.  

2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf (project2025.org)

I hate it when I am scooped by national media on a Wisconsin-related point that I intended to enter here 😉 ; I will enter it here nonetheless.  On September 20, the New York Times ran an article, “How the Fastest-Growing County in Wisconsin Is Scrambling the Presidential Race,” describing how technology and science workers are flooding into Dane County (where Madison is located) and how these voters may be shifting the statewide balance toward Ms. Harris and away from Mr. Trump.  A link is provided below for those who can get behind the Times’ paywall.  TLOML and I happen to live on Madison’s west side amid burgeoning technology and science concerns.  We see it first-hand.  At rush hour, it is now a struggle to even get on the entrance ramps to Madison’s primary expressway that are respectively east and west of our home.  It has never been this way – not even four years ago, when President Joe Biden narrowly bested Mr. Trump in Wisconsin where the Dane County turnout – not the Milwaukee County turnout – was ultimately considered decisive.  These new Dane County residents are young, highly educated, overwhelmingly progressive, motivated to vote, and present a decided advantage for Ms. Harris.

Feeling good about Wisconsin?  And yet, a note of caution.  Recall that in 2022, White WI Gov. Tony Evers beat his MAGA opponent by three points, while Black WI Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes lost by a point to White Trump Toady U.S. WI Sen. Ron Johnson, who ran a crime-focused, thinly-veiled race-baiting campaign.  This state is a long way from former President Barack Obama’s wins in 2008 and 2012.  The Democrats’ last female presidential nominee, former U.S. Sec. of State Hillary Clinton, lost to Mr. Trump although Mr. Trump had made clear his intent to appoint Supreme Court Justices that would overturn Roe v. Wade.  In both 2016 and 2020, Mr. Trump ended up with a higher percentage of the Wisconsin vote than polls had suggested he would; it is accordingly not unreasonable to anticipate that such might occur again this year.  We won’t know the Wisconsin outcome until late on election night or the next day, when the vote counts in the Republican-leaning counties around Milwaukee report; Mr. Biden won in 2020 – by a narrower margin than Mr. Trump had in 2016 – because these Republican strongholds didn’t give Mr. Trump enough boost to overcome Mr. Biden’s Milwaukee and Dane County totals.

I’ve been cleaning out my study, getting rid of documents that no longer matter (at least insofar as the their impact on the upcoming election is concerned).  It is stunning to see how much water – or better said, bile – has flowed under the bridge since Mr. Trump came down his escalator to start his 2016 presidential campaign:  the Mueller Report; former U.S. Attorney General William Barr’s written attempt to whitewash the Mueller Report; the U.S. Senate Report on Russian interference in 2016 Election on Mr. Trump’s behalf; the Memorandum of the Mr. Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy; the U.S. House of Representatives’ impeachment resolutions against Mr. Trump; the federal indictments handed down against Mr. Trump for defrauding the United States and mishandling of classified documents.  There is so much filth connected to one man that you can’t really mentally grasp it all at once, although we have lived it.  If I had been presented in 2014 with the hypothetical that a Trump-like demagogue could rise in this country – not only preaching populism and racism but carrying all the ancillary personal baggage that Mr. Trump carries, I would have dismissed it as pure fantasy. 

I pitched it all.  Old news.  While one might argue that the sleaze is why so many Americans detest Mr. Trump, the fact remains that today he nonetheless remains an extremely viable, if not the leading, candidate for the presidency of the United States.  It is a frightening example of the powers of propaganda and hate that Adolf Hitler elucidated in Mein Kampf over a century ago.       

A related notion:  an indication how Mr. Trump’s influence has finally completely contaminated the previously-conservative political ecosystem:  the hullaballoo attending MAGA Vice Presidential Nominee U.S. OH Sen. J.D. Vance’s despicable trumpeting of entirely false claims that legal Haitian immigrants are eating cats and dogs in Springfield, OH.  Let’s put aside the irony, noted by some commentators, that in Hillbilly Elegy (which I have read, published when Mr. Vance was a sane voice before morphing into Junior Demagogue), Mr. Vance describes Ohioans’ bias in the 1950s against Mr. Vance’s own Kentucky Hillbilly forebears for allegedly engaging in practices not dissimilar from those for which he now loudly condemns the Haitians.  To me the crucial point is that Mr. Vance has admitted that what he is saying about the Springfield Haitians is a lie – that there is no evidence it is happening – and he keeps on with it anyway.  I’m a political junkie.  As certain as death and more certain than taxes is that all politicians fudge, exaggerate, distort.  They always have; they always will.  That said, before Mr. Trump, I think it was extremely rare to find a politician who would know something was a lie, get called on it, and just blatantly, nakedly, keep on lying.  Mr. Trump has now spawned a whole generation of politicians in his image who have no regard for truth, Mr. Vance now being the scariest of his progeny, because we must now assume that he will keep up his assault on truth à la Mr. Trump if he becomes Vice President, or … President of the United States.         

We had the opportunity to hear former U.S. WY Rep. Liz Cheney speak on September 20.  Although my views vary from Ms. Cheney’s on domestic issues, my respect for her patriotism and, as a Republican, lonely stand against Mr. Trump has earned my unbounded respect.  Although I consider the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, strongly supported if not spearheaded by her father, then-Vice President Richard Cheney, to be the most egregious foreign policy failure of the last 50 years, Mr. Cheney, like his daughter, has forthrightly endorsed Ms. Harris due to the threat to democracy they recognize in Mr. Trump.  For the remainder of my days, no matter how I feel about the Iraq invasion, I will always have the mental qualifier about Mr. Cheney:  on the most important issue of his conscious lifetime (he was, after all, born during World War II 🙂 ) … he got it right. 

At the same time, my current disdain for the reticence of former President George W. Bush cannot be overstated.  I agree with pundits who suggest that given the hundreds of prominent Republicans (including former Trump Administration officials) who have already spoken out against Mr. Trump, additional Republicans endorsing Ms. Harris won’t matter, with one exception:  Mr. Bush.  It is common knowledge that he despises Mr. Trump.  To speak plainly:  if he has any guts, he should issue a statement to this effect:  “During my presidency, I asked our people to give their lives in our nation’s cause.  The least I owe them is to tell them directly what I think is best for our nation.  I consider Donald Trump to present a direct threat to American democracy.  I have honest disagreements with Vice President Kamala Harris on many issues, but she is honorable and will safeguard our way of life.  I encourage you to join me in voting for Ms. Harris in the upcoming election.”  If Mr. Bush fails to issue such a statement within the next couple of weeks – before advance voting starts in earnest across the country — he will for all time confirm what many of us have long concluded:  he was indeed the wanting son of truly remarkable parents.

Finally, something particularly struck me watching the Democratic convention:  it was (to state the obvious) a celebration of the predominantly young, multi-colored, multi-ethnic, multi-gender, multi-faithed.  It presented a gender, youth, and racial revolution away from our traditional male, white, straight, Christian mores which was markedly more pronounced to me this year than it was in earlier electoral cycles in this century when the Democrats nominated other objectively tradition-shattering candidates — more so than in 2008, with Mr. Obama (cerebral, reserved, witty, beautifully tailored, traditional husband and father, Christian, Ivy graduate, incredible orator, another John Kennedy in all ways but skin color, who went to great lengths to not look threatening), or in 2016 with Ms. Clinton (a traditional Democratic presidential candidate in all ways but gender who was burdened, by having been in the public eye for so long, with sufficient baggage that she somehow forfeited the “change agent” mantle to Mr. Trump).  I would submit that the cultural evolution that we have been more or less considering in these last decades is now upon us.  We are at the tipping point.  Ms. Harris represents not a rejection of tradition but the notion that our nation can accommodate more than one cultural paradigm.  Mr. Trump is the embodiment of the posture that there can be only one.  I don’t know which way this struggle will go; but I do believe that whether our nation will flourish or wither over the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren depends upon the outcome.

This is what occurs when one ponders without the attendant opportunity to expound 😉 .   We’ll see what happens.