Monthly Archives: February 2020

02.13.20
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This 2020 Election is Terra Incognita, There’s No Map, Nobody Knows

This election is a year old even though primary voting just started. There were 25 candidates at one point and people were miserable, screaming about 25 CANDIDATES UGH!!!.  And now we’re down to a handful of legit candidates and people are still miserable I DON’T CARE WHO I JUST WANT TO WIN UGH!!! All of life is now like a Cathy cartoon.

From the beginning the absurd emphasis on electability and the panic about finding the one chosen candidate who can beat Trump was nuts.  Nuts but inevitable because, there is no end to the stupid.  And as stupid herd animals we cannot stop ourselves from illogically going over the cliff following the polls and the pundits and the neighbor who had a take that was so weird that you normally would have just ignored it, but this year – MAYBE IT MEANS SOMETHING.  UGH!!!

Do not impose your 1972, 1988, 2000 or 2016 takes on this election, they are not applicable.  There is no conceivable way 40 states vote for Trump if he’s running against a “socialist” as some have said.  The country is remarkably polarized and the part that is against Trump will vote for any Democratic nominee.  So panicking about electability may just be silly.  Note I say “may”.  I’m stupid too.

Think about this:

The two top vote getters so far are a Jewish man and a Gay man.  And the white knight spreading around money like it was water, because to him it is, is also a Jew.  For anybody over 40 this seems nuts, but they just want to win.  Under 40 they do not see it that way and they too just want to win.

Every one of the legit candidates left have issues with non-white people, especially the white knight.  But that white knight has the mayor of D.C. (black) as his campaign co-chair and on the day he was confronted with audio of racist comments from his not so distant past he added the endorsements from three members of the Black Congressional  Caucus (definitely black)!  Black people for the most part will not care that he led stop and frisk and was a terrible mayor of NY for non-white people. They just want to win.

Could a socialist win?  Yeah he could, because lots of Americans have been hurting for a long time and been ignored and thought that government was largely ineffective.  After three years of seeing that government can be wielded in harmful ways by a Trump, they may just imagine that it could also be used for good.  Lots of pundits likely do not know anybody who has not gone to the doctor because they couldn’t afford it.  But most Americans are someone like that or know someone like that. So the word socialism is not going to bother them if it means an effort to make healthcare more democratic and affordable.

Could a Gay man win?  Yeah, why not?  The religious right won’t vote for him, but they’re already on the Trump train.  The vast majority of the country has seen attitudes about gayness change entirely since 2008 when both candidates were against marriage equality.  Once again, it’s this belief that there’s a persuadable group of people who could vote for Trump or the Democrat, but only if its a certain Democrat whose beliefs are more Republican lite.  Guess what the Gay guy is as Republican lite as it gets in this election.  He is a progressive, but next to the socialist and the anti-corruption grandma in this election, he’s a sound, safe, cuddly college Republican from Indiana. The hard core socialists hate him, but they’ll largely vote for him too because they too want to win.

The biggest question is whether a woman can win.  Well, yes, if she’s a non-threatening Midwest woman who, again, is rather progressive, but is perfectly willing to spout Republican talking points in order to get elected.  She went to Yale, but nobody knows that.  She was a cop, and had issues with locking up innocent people of color, as we already explained black people do not care.  Yeah the socialist followers won’t like her but they’ll largely vote for her because they too just want to win. Unless she hits the same wall Warren did, eventually.

There’s that really smart, really energetic, former college professor, anti-corruption grandma woman who may or may not be a legit candidate at this point, but one can imagine scenarios where she could leap up again.  Why not?  Remember – Terra Incognita! She took a hit in the two white states, but white people are a terrible judge of character.  53% of white women voted for Trump and white men are a disaster.  Going into more diverse states means that her more substantive folksiness may get a fresh hearing.  What she has going against her is that smart former college professor thing.  Ask President Adlai Stevenson if the American people will elect a college professor?  The most bullshit part of The West Wing was that the fictional POTUS was a super smart polymath of a former college professor.  That’s not just fiction it’s fucking science SCI FI! Apparently grandma is threatening.  Men can’t imagine sleeping with her (she is 70) or working for her and women with less self-esteem probably just hate her because women hate other women, they just do.  So no, she can’t win.  The best candidate can’t win.  Okay, that’s probably true.

That leaves the white Jewish knight.  He has $50,000,000,000.  So really, he can win.  And in fact, his electability is so self-evident because of all that money that the other facts of his life, every other data point that would make him unelectable if he didn’t have that $50 Billion is completely ignorable.  Lots of people who may have hated the guy 6 months ago love him now, imagining all that money swamping Trump, beating him at his own game. The real billionaire trolling Trump 24/7 while using his wealth to blanket the country with anti-Trump propaganda.

We are definitely on foreign shores without a map or a guidepost or a trusty guide who won’t eat us when the sun goes down.  It’s the C-Span version of Naked and Afraid.  So find some potable water, figure out a crude shelter, with and hunker down for the next 9 months.  Dammit I lost the fire starter.  Fuck me!

02.05.20
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I’m Invoking Pitmaster Privilege and Pushing some Elizabeth Warren On Ya

All I have to say about last night’s SOTU spectacle is that if you say any damn thing about ripping up speech pages when fucking Rush Limbaugh got a Medal of Freedom, then we have to step outside.

I’m a Warren supporter for the simple reason that I think she’d be a great president.  She’s right for the office, right for the moment. Period. Her speech on Monday night reminded me again why I love her. While media melted down and conspiratorial panic took over, as Buttigieg was singing a false note by claiming victory, Warren calmly thanked her staff, her dog and reiterated why we’re all here and where we’re going next, whatever happens. She looked, how you say, presidential?

  1. Post- Iowa Caucus Speech

2. She released a new ad that’s smart and uses the words of Barack Obama to remind people who she is and what she did.

3. But also, too, in addition, there’s a piece in the Nation by Joan Walsh that also states what I see and why I am still kinda sorta optimistic that she can persist. Linked here but I’m reprinting in full in case you don’t have a Nation subscription, it’s a good investment.

Elizabeth Warren Has a Movement. You Just Don’t See It Yet.

Nobody knows who won the Iowa caucuses—but Warren’s support was powered by the feminist spirit of 2018.

By Joan Walsh Twitter

Des Moines—O Iowa! Your picture-perfect winter patriotism: red barns, blue silos, white snow. Your gorgeous sunsets, surreally tropical above all that blinding snow. Your endless roads, bumpy and poorly maintained. Especially in snow. Oh, and your many anti-abortion billboards alongside blaring ads for “adult stores.” In summer and winter. I still don’t get that.

Sadly, this may be my last stand—and yours. I love you Iowa, but your role no longer makes sense: one of the country’s whitest states, taking the lead in the primary calendar with an anachronistic artifact of a different political time, precinct-level caucuses, where neighbors meet in high school gyms and publicly argue for their chosen candidate, for hours. On Monday night, that anachronistic artifact met purported modern technology, and its sad mutant spawn—a botched counting process that prevented anyone from honestly claiming victory as late as Tuesday afternoon, and possibly as late as Wednesday—meant there was likely to be one big loser: Iowa’s treasured first-round presidential nominating status.

“This fiasco means the end of the caucuses as a significant American political event,” declared The Des Moines Register’s dean of caucus coverage, David Yepsen. “The rest of the country was already losing patience with Iowa anyway and this cooks Iowa’s goose. Frankly, it should.”

That might be the one scrap of actual news on this cold Tuesday: a top Iowa political macher admitting that Iowa is over.

Nevertheless, Elizabeth Warren persisted Monday night. She took selfies past midnight at a high-energy “victory” party, where staffers, volunteers and national surrogates said they felt very good about what the campaign had achieved. (Here’s her speech.) Not that Warren declared victory: A thirsty Mayor Pete Buttigieg audaciously did that, while Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign released internal results showing him ahead of both Buttigieg and Warren—with only 40 percent of precincts reporting. After midnight, Warren senior strategist Joe Rospars calmly tweeted, “It’s a very close race among the top three candidates (Warren, Sanders, Buttigieg) and Biden came a distant fourth.” Calm energy is the trademark of Warren’s campaign.

And that’s all we know. It seems pretty clear that Biden, along with Iowa, was another big loser Monday night. Also, turnout was reportedly down, which given the large field is terrible.

Even if Warren finishes third, her vaunted ground game proved itself. And it’s not just a bloodless game of turf-cutting (campaign-speak for identifying potential supporters and getting them out) and door-knocking. Warren has been quietly building a movement, and in the closing days it became apparent that it’s a women’s movement. Whatever happened, she clarified her campaign’s rationale in this state’s grueling Thunderdome.

On Monday afternoon, at one of dozens of small rallies to get people out to caucus, an excited young volunteer named Jackie Sayers, who used to work for Senator Kamala Harris, proudly introduced top Warren surrogate Representative Katie Porter as “part of the blue wave of women who organized and ran and won in 2018.” Porter took that baton, shouting out her class of 2018 “sister surrogates,” Representatives Ayanna Pressley and Deb Haaland, also traveling  Iowa for Warren, noting that the Massachusetts senator’s campaign is the only one whose cochairs are all women. Pressley sounded the same notes at a Warren rally on Saturday. Women have made up the majority of Warren’s donors. And women made up the majority of her volunteers I met along the way—women who’ve fallen hard for Warren.

Warren didn’t set out to be the Resistance Mom candidate. That was New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who had to drop out last summer. But she became one, maybe because of the sexism she faced as the primary unfolded, or maybe because she was trying to be all along. At an earlier “get out the caucus” (GOTC) rally Monday, I met six women from Indivisible Oregon. “We put our lives on hold and came out last Thursday,” Maria Aron of Portland told me. By Monday morning, they’d collectively knocked on 1,500 doors, and were off to do more. “We’re the women who never get written about.”

Mary Kahl was undecided when I met her at a Warren event in Oskaloosa in late May. Now she was hosting this Warren GOTC event in Des Moines. She came over to Warren because she’s a medical professional and she believes in Medicare for All. “I see people die. I see people unable to afford their medicine,” she tells me emotionally. I ask: What about the charges Warren’s plan isn’t truly Medicare for All, because of its longer phase-in time than Sanders’s? She cuts me off, exasperated. “Please. She’s got a great plan. It’s been vetted by economists. It’s because she’s a woman. Men don’t have to answer a damn thing about details!”

On Monday night, I headed to the Des Moines Precinct 60 caucus. (Full disclosure: My daughter was the Iowa political director for Senator Kamala Harris. She caucused with Warren in Des Moines Precinct 60. She is about to go to work for Representative Katie Porter.) At that caucus, where almost 500 people participated—they appeared to be middle and upper-middle class, overwhelmingly white—Warren had volunteer precinct captains named LouLou and Judi, absolute bad-asses, dressed in Warren’s signature “liberty green” T-shirts and wearing Lady Liberty tiaras. I did not get their last names because they were working too hard to herd their people and keep them in line through the grueling, only-in-Iowa process of vote-counting and realigning. The vast majority in the Warren corner were women. During the counting process, I sat next to Wendy Larson, a first-time caucus-goer, who said she came out for Warren because her earlier possible choice, Buttigieg, didn’t have the support of “African-Americans in his community, and that really matters to me.” Larson watched the two-hour spectacle bewildered but firmly decided for Warren.

Warren was more than “viable”—meaning she had over 15 percent—in the first round, as did Buttigieg and Sanders. And that’s when caucus fun starts. People whose candidates weren’t viable—which here, as in many places, included Biden, but also Tom Steyer, Andrew Yang, and Amy Klobuchar—had to decide whether to leave, or back another candidate. A few of the Steyer folks went to Buttigieg, but the majority-female Warren group got 10 of the majority-male Yang gang to come over to Warren. Nobody saw that coming, least of all the Sanders people who courted them heavily.

But here’s another reason why the caucuses have to go: The Klobuchar group made a pitch to the Biden voters that they’d “give” Biden a delegate if the Biden folks “realigned” to make Klobuchar viable. Deanna Kirvin, a veteran caucus-goer who’d lined up for Biden, told me “it’s better than nothing,” before she left. “We got him a delegate!” another Biden supporter yelled, punching his fist in the air. When the results were announced, though, the raw vote was Warren with 129, Buttigieg with 113, Sanders with 109, and Klobuchar suddenly “viable” with 92—and the delegates were awarded this way: Warren got 3; so did Buttigieg; Sanders got 2, as did Klobuchar—Biden got nothing. It is possible Klobuchar delegates could somehow vote to give Biden a delegate at the next level, the county conventions—if Klobuchar and Biden are still in the race March 21—but given new rules that make elected local delegates stick with their candidates at the county conventions, it will be all but impossible.

I’m giving you this much detail because after almost 20 years of covering this bizarre but endearing institution, I finally understand caucus math. It will likely soon be a useless skill—much like learning to use white-out typing correction tape, which I also mastered just as it was becoming obsolete.

So with all that ground game and feminist energy, why didn’t Warren win? (If she didn’t. Who really knows?) Another top surrogate, 2018 Iowa gubernatorial candidate John Norris—a veteran of Jesse Jackson’s, John Kerry’s, and Barack Obama’s campaigns here—told me this: “The intensity of the indecision has been astonishing. She has the best ground game, no doubt. But people are paralyzed by ‘electability.’” He pointed to the roughly 40 percent of Iowa voters who said they either hadn’t chosen a candidate or were open to changing their minds, a few days before the caucuses.

“When your ground game has to focus not only on getting your people out, but persuasion, in the final days…” He trailed off. “That’s a problem.” Why did he line up with Warren? “I believe she has the best capacity to bridge the fracture in the party. And there is fracture.”

There is fracture, to be sure. In the closing days, as the mood of many Democrats I met shifted slightly from electability to party unity—meaning unity between the Sanders camp and everyone else, given polling showing a sizable number of his supporters won’t back another Democrat, though Sanders himself says he will—some progressive momentum shifted to Warren. But as Biden clearly sagged, moderate voters also shifted to Buttigieg and Klobuchar.

Everybody’s best guess is that the finalists are Sanders, Buttigieg, and Warren, in that order. Klobuchar might have finished ahead of Biden, whose campaign is reaming the Iowa Democratic Party for botching its reporting system. I count Biden one of the winners of Iowa, in a perverse way—the inability to declare a winner means we are about to go on to State of the Union madness, and Biden’s apparent fail will not be the blaring headline it might have been.

At the Warren “victory” event, I stood in a corner with some veteran Iowa politicos who did not want to be named. Warren supporters, they were nonetheless sad for Biden. The best information I have is that he will play this out at least through South Carolina, where he hopes black voters will get him through. But I met one of Warren’s South Carolina surrogates at a Des Moines GOTC event Monday afternoon, her spiritual adviser, Reverend Miniard Culpepper of Pleasant Hill Missionary Baptist Church in Boston. He says Warren will do better than expected with black voters in the Palmetto State.

Culpepper met Warren in 2012 “because some folks working with her told me we had common interests—‘the least of these’—and we’re both fighters with strong faith. We both believe in a level playing field.” He’s prayed with Warren before every debate, and travels to South Carolina when he can to sing her praises.

“I have faith we’re gonna have a good outcome tonight,” he told me. But he grabbed a packet to go knock on doors to GOTC. Because “faith without work…?” I asked him, quoting a Bible verse. “Is dead, yes!” He chuckled, and walked out the door.

 

 

 

02.04.20
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Stick it to an Autocrat – Watch Oscar Nominated “Edge of Democracy” on Netflix

The documentary by Brazilians about their country’s slide to autocracy is really amazing. Filmmaker Petra Costa had remarkable access to present and past leaders of the country as she documented Bolsonaro’s attacks on anything that represented democracy, including arresting previous presidents on corruption charges (Trump’s wet dream). Bolsonaro is the Brazilian Trump and so, of course, he and his surrogates are attacking the filmmaker (for whom Bolsonaro did interviews for the film) and the film (which he hasn’t seen).

From the Guardian: Bolsonaro government attacks Oscar nominee Petra Costa as ‘anti-Brazil activist‘

And there’s always a Trumpian connection too:

“I don’t usually waste time rebutting scumbags like Mrs Petra Costa but the level of her absurdities is criminal,” tweeted Eduardo Bolsonaro, the South American representative of Steve Bannon’s far-right group The Movement, alongside the hashtag #PetraCostaLiar.

It’s really worthwhile to see what a country with a fragile democratic tradition can descend to rather rapidly. And as we’re finding out, all democratic traditions are fragile democratic traditions.

02.04.20
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The Return of the Hummer – It’s About That Girth Baby

Yes, everything is about sex. The Hummer always was a massively thick phallus of a car. The electric version of it is admitting that wielding a powerful electric device can also be satisfying.  They sell way more Hitachi Wands than they ever sold Hummers.

Vice explores the history of the worst Earth destroying SUV of them all.

Love this para about the psychological break down of the Hummer purchaser:

Rapaille, a French emigree, believed the SUV appealed—at the time to mostly upper-middle class suburbanites—to a fundamental subconscious animalistic state, our “reptilian desire for survival,” as relayed by Bradsher. (“We don’t believe what people say,” the website for Rapaille’s consulting firm declares. Instead, they use “a unique blend of biology, cultural anthropology and psychology to discover the hidden cultural forces that pre-organize the way people behave towards a product, service or concept”). Americans were afraid, Rapaille found through his exhaustive market research, and they were mostly afraid of crime even though crime was actually falling and at near-record lows. As Bradsher wrote, “People buy SUVs, he tells auto executives, because they are trying to look as menacing as possible to allay their fears of crime and other violence.” They, quite literally, bought SUVs to run over “gang members” with, Rapaille found.

Certainly the perfect car for the Trump era.  With it you can run over machete wielding MS13 members, run over the hordes of undocumented, run over Maxine Waters, crushing their bones beneath your wheels. And now with an electric engine you can hear the lamentations of their women.

02.04.20
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One Year Ago I Wrote This

“Saddest of all is the GOP Senate may very well continue to protect him and stonewall his removal, believing that they are electorally invulnerable in 2020 and 2022.  That’s the only firewall to get him, or Pence, limping into 2020 still in the WH.  But that firewall would doom their control of the Senate.  Like every tragic character felled by overconfidence, they never see that their invulnerability is overrated until its too late. We’ve always been able to count on Republican arrogance leading them to shooting their damn feet off, eventually.  This group of political morons is several generations more deluded by the Fox News base than the group of statesmen (read: realists) that forced Nixon out.”

I would only add one thing:  I think they know that they’re vulnerable in 2020. I think they’ve calculated that it’s more important to be a member in good standing in the Trumpist party even if an ex-Senator. Being a Trumpist ex-Senator is way safer than being an apostate Senator.

 

02.04.20
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Iowa – Caucus Interruptus

After all that time concentrating on Iowa, so much time, so much money, so many corn dogs and butter cows – a much anticipated result DID… NOT… HAPPEN. And people went nuts.

Of course the caucus is undemocratic, an oddity where a teeny tiny, disappointingly small slice of Iowans actually show up for the main event after a year of candidates crisscrossing the state with rallies, town halls, diner visits, living room talks, etc. The ones that show up politely horse trade with each other so that their neighbor isn’t disappointed by their candidate’s lack of viability.  Despite pundits corralling the candidates into the progressive or centrist pens, Iowans looked at them and judged them by who they liked, or who had Midwest values or not, whatever that is.  So “my first choice is Amy, but she’s not viable so I’m going over to Bernie” can happen and did happen and pundit heads short circuited with all that Midwest political acumen.

Ultimately it was a year of foreplay with no release, AND THAT WILL DRIVE PEOPLE NUTS.

There will be results. They just may not be as dramatic as people hoped for because it will happen a day later with no cameras on it – an Iowan form of masturbation to finally clear up that nasty backup after a bad case of blue balls.  If the results are what is believed, Biden and (certainly) Klobuchar are not viable (to use Iowa speak). But likely they’ll go to NH and have that proven again there.

So what happens in 2024.  Likely nothing, although maybe, mercifully, they’ll add a primary to their beloved caucus (that can be totally ignored).  Iowa will remain first because of all the money that gets spent in Iowa over the course of a year. Just think upon all the money spent on advertising, housing, food, etc, by the candidates and the media not over a few weeks, but over an entire year in the state of Iowa.  Iowa’s GNP probably doubles 1 year out of every 4, so they will fight  any effort to move them out of that spot.  But a primary with an actual result at the end of the night, where a much larger number of 90% white people came and voted and went home and actually recorded their choice after all those corn dogs, would be nice.