Winners Wanted, Not Almost Winners

Beto O’Rourke is running for president. The ex-Democratic congressman failed in his bid last November to unseat Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. Sorry, Beto, but I cannot conceive of choosing a candidate for the nation’s highest office if he could not win the support of his own state. We’ve been there before. We muddled through eight years of George W. Bush because Al Gore couldn’t carry his home state of Tennessee. Sure, Beto has more charisma than Al, but I still want a winner, not a close second, as my candidate.

I learned the other day reading a Gail Collins column on Beto that he is so enraptured with the Odyssey that he named his first child Ulysses. Which made me wonder, why didn’t he name his son Odysseus, the Greek name of the heroic character of the epic poem by Homer who spends 20 years away from home, 10 fighting the Trojan War and another 10 on an action-packed journey back to his wife, the ever faithful Penelope? Why did he choose the Roman counterpart name, Ulysses? Was he already playing identity politics because he knew there are more Italian-American voters than those of Greek ancestry? Why didn’t he just call the kid Homer? That way he’d also get the Simpsons crowd behind his candidacy.

For the record, I’m also against Stacey Abrams thinking that coming in second in a tight Georgia gubernatorial race entitles her to think she is the best choice to be the Democratic presidential nominee able to send Donald Trump and his family packing from the White House. 

Ditto for Andrew Gillum, former mayor of Tallahassee and near-winner of the governorship of Florida.  

Where do these people get their hubris? Hubris is another one of those Greek words we should all pay attention to. 

Yes, as Gillum pointed out to Bill Maher last Friday night, Abraham Lincoln failed to beat Stephen Douglas in their Senate race from Illinois back in 1857, but let’s not equate Beto or Stacey or Andrew with our 16th president. 

To Impeach or Not? People who advocate for Trump’s impeachment argue he is unqualified for the job of president. They might be right, check that, they are right, but being unqualified is not an impeachable offense. 

So let’s stop using that argument. Qualified or not, Trump received sufficient votes in states with enough Electoral College votes to win the election. 

The task now is to pick a candidate who can carry states with more than 270 electoral votes. Beto, Stacey and Andrew may excite enough voters to win some primaries but could they win a general election? I’m not convinced.

How Do I Feel? My friend Mark, who will be turning 70 in a few months, asked me the other day if I felt any difference physically now that I am into my eighth decade. Not really, I replied. As a reputed hypochondriac to friends and relatives I told Mark it was all a matter of mind over matter. 

But last night as I was waiting for sleep to overwhelm my too active brain near midnight I cataloged what had transpired since my March 6th birthday:

My dentist told me I needed two replacement crowns and a filling repair. Within a week a temporary crown he installed cracked during breakfast, necessitating a frantic dash to his office;

A prolonged head cold left me with inflamed ear canals; ear drops prescribed by an ENT specialist;

And, most troubling, for the third March in four years I am experiencing back pain near my right kidney. Four years ago I suffered with a kidney stone throughout a most unpleasant flight from London. Fortunately, the pain subsided once I showed up in the emergency room of White Plains Hospital. Exactly a year later what I thought was another kidney stone turned out to be a bladder stone. That ailment required what doctor’s call a bladder blaster procedure and an overnight hookup to a catheter. I get the heebie-jeebies just thinking of that predicament. I don’t know how this new pain will be resolved but I do marvel at its timing, always slightly past the Ides of March. 

Was this ache like the mysterious hip pain that afflicted me for about 10 minutes on my 35th birthday, or could it be traced to a muscle strained Monday morning while chopping some lingering ice along the pathway to our yard? As I lay in bed in the middle of Monday night it hurt if I faced left but not if I faced right or remained on my back. By morning the pain was mostly gone, hopefully never to return, at least for another 12 months.

Who Needs a Moderator?, Trump Asks

Amid all the hullabaloo over Hillary Clinton’s health, perhaps you missed this latest ploy from Donald Trump:

He wants to change the debate ground rules. He wants to do away with moderators at the three presidential debates. He is trying to game the agreed upon system just like he shortchanged contractors out of their agreed upon compensation for work on his construction projects.

Trump is obviously afraid that moderators with more savvy, sense, intelligence and courage than Matt Lauer will point out his fabrications, inconsistencies and overt lies.

Let’s be clear. Both candidates fudge the truth, but Trump’s lollapaloozas are extreme. It does no one a service, other than Trump, to have him spout inaccuracies. Clinton’s misstatements, as well, need to be clarified and cleansed. An objective, informed, intelligent and courageous moderator should take up the challenge. 

Here’s another thing that needs to be clear: The Trump-Clinton debates will not rival the dignity of the hallowed Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. Though they will pit a Republican against a Democrat, that’s where the similarities end. The format of those seven classic meetings was not a give and take of candidates answering questions posed by a moderator, each other or member of the public. Rather as explained by Wikipedia, “The format for each debate was: one candidate spoke for 60 minutes, then the other candidate spoke for 90 minutes, and then the first candidate was allowed a 30-minute ‘rejoinder.’ The candidates alternated speaking first.”

In seeking to remove the moderators Trump is suggesting they would be biased against him. He claims the format is rigged against him (http://www.politico.com/story/2016/09/trump-no-debate-moderator-228016). 

A rigged election is a theme Trump has espoused for several weeks as a counterfoil to a potential loss on November 8. “I’m afraid the election’s gonna be rigged, I have to be honest,” Trump said last month in Columbus, Ohio. 

Perhaps no other comment—from his attacks on Mexicans, Muslims, prisoners of war, a Gold Star family, the military leadership—has been more troublesome as it undermines the credibility of our electoral system and the peaceful transition of power. 

Hardly an election goes by that does not engender cries of “foul.” But from Richard Nixon in 1960 through Al Gore in 2000, candidates who felt cheated out of the presidency have considered the consequences a legal challenge to the outcome would have on our democracy. 

Trump, on the other hand, is feeding a frenzied following fodder for physical dissent should he lose. From the outset of his primary run to now, his campaign has not been a combat of ideas and platform planks but rather one of invective and disdain for the truth. 

In case of defeat, Clinton supports half-jokingly talk about moving to Canada. Trumpsters talk about taking back their government, by force if necessary. Paranoia abounds (http://nyti.ms/2bVLlVg).

Democratic paranoia stems from the possibility that Russia might hack the results in key states to tip the election. Already Russia is suspected of hacking election files in Arizona and Illinois. Computer voting with no paper backup is an invitation to confusion, if not disaster.

For a diverting take on how a computer glitch could determine an election, view the 2006 Robin Williams film, Man of the Year. Williams played Tom Dobbs, a TV host-comedian whose acerbic jabs at politics and politicians not only provoked laughter but also propelled him toward a spontaneous populist third party candidacy for the presidency.

Asked during a debate why he was running, Dobbs sounded Trump-like prescient: “I’ve decided to run because I’m fed up with party politics. I’m tired of the Republican Party,  I’m tired of the Democratic Party. There’s no real difference. They’re all Mr. Potato Head candidates. Basically, you’ve got a figure where here’s the operative word, “party,” because behind closed doors, phew,  I think they’re just having a real good time…the bottom line is they’ve lost track of what they are responsible for. They’re responsible to the people and not party loyalties and definitely not lobbyists. That’s why I’m running for president.”

To no one’s surprise who views the movie, spoiler alert, he wins because of a computer screw-up. Watch the movie to find out what happens next.

By the way, did anyone else see the irony of Hillary Clinton’s failed attempt Sunday morning to keep her pneumonia secret coinciding with the Sunday night airing of Churchill’s Secret, a movie on PBS about the British prime minister’s attempt to keep the world in the dark about a life-threatening stroke he suffered in 1953? 

The movie is based on the book by Jonathan Smith, The Churchill Secret KBO. KBO stands for Churchill’s motto, “Keep Buggering On.” Is that not like what Clinton told CNN’s Anderson Cooper, “I thought that I could just keep going forward and power through it. And obviously that didn’t work out so well,” she said.

By Making Us Relive 1968 Sanders Could Propel Trump Into the Oval Office

Full disclosure: I’m not a Bernie Sanders fan. Perhaps it’s because my memories don’t stop at the year 2000 when some believe Ralph Nader’s third party candidacy cost Al Gore the presidency. Those people have to look further back in time—Bernie Sanders is making us relive 1968. His determined bid to radicalize the Democratic Party, and the zealotry of his supporters, could well propel Donald Trump into the Oval Office, much the same way Richard Nixon squeaked by Hubert H. Humphrey because disaffected Democrats and Independents reluctantly rallied behind The Happy Warrior too late to carry the election.

That indeed would be a radical achievement for Sanders, not one to be proud of, however.

One of the first politicians to openly fight to end segregation, Humphrey was a true progressive from a state, Minnesota, that was truly progressive back then. His loyalty as vice president to Lyndon Baines Johnson kept him from breaking off support for the war in Vietnam until late in the election campaign. 

The anti-war activists never forgave him. By the time some fell in line behind him, Nixon could not be stopped. Instead of burying the Republican Party under 12-16 consecutive years of Democratic presidencies, the disaffected Democrats and Independents provided Nixon and the GOP a life line which ultimately gave us Watergate.

Now Sanders and his supporters could very well be handing the keys to the White House to Trump. Donald Trump!!! Are they so crazed for revolution that they would send our country back in time by enabling a Republican president to be elected to work with a Republican Senate, a Republican House and a Republican-stacked judiciary? Apparently so, as quotes from The New York Times show (http://nyti.ms/25lVOeF).

Enough already! Sanders must stop attacking Hillary and focus all his vitriol at Trump.

Bernie Sanders is Jewish, as am I. He grew up in Brooklyn, as I did. He went to Brooklyn College. Me, too. But there is no joy, no pride in seeing Sanders succeed any more than he has because it would harm, perhaps fatally, Clinton’s election as the first woman president. He is damaging the Democratic Party he just recently joined. He is building a wall his supporters will not cross in November to vote for Clinton if she is the party nominee.

I often wonder how Afro-Americans feel about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. How could they feel any pride when he consistently turns his back on his heritage. Earlier this week he was the lone dissenter on a case that overturned the conviction and death sentence of an alleged killer because Georgia prosecutors had systematically excluded blacks from his trial jury. This was no bleeding heart liberal decision. Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. wrote the opinion and fellow conservatives Samuel Alito and Anthony Kennedy concurred. (http://nyti.ms/244KHo2)

Thomas repeatedly fails to see the recurring discrimination Afro-Americans suffered and continue to endure. Bernie Sanders is the Jewish American version of Clarence Thomas.

Perhaps Sanders, and for that matter any politician who wants to speak authoritatively about the Arab-Israeli conflict, should live in and not just visit Israel. Yes, Sanders spent time on a kibbutz some 50 years ago. Today Israel is much different, as are its neighbors. 

Let him live next to the Gaza Strip for a month. Live with the constant threat of missile and mortar bombardments and the uncertainty that attack tunnels are being dug under your very back yard. Then, spend a month in Gaza and see how Hamas has transformed the land into a military zone among residential communities, how Hamas has diverted home building material into tunnel construction, how Hamas indoctrinates children to hate Israelis and Jews. 

Perhaps then Sanders et al would understand why Israel is justified in retaliating not just in kind but in force when Hamas or its surrogates strikes. Hamas wants to wipe Israel off the map. Wants to kill Jews. Israel just wants to live in peace. 

By his choices for representatives on the Democratic Party platform committee Sanders has displayed no love for Israel. http://nyti.ms/1WUXmLB 

Let’s be clear. I abhor actions that Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu has taken. It is appropriate and acceptable to criticize Israeli policy. But it is neither appropriate nor acceptable to question Israel’s response when its enemy is sworn to its destruction. Survival trumps a proportional response to terror. Only a fool engages in combat hoping for a stalemate.

I am not a one-issue candidate, but Bernie Sanders’ position on Israel has made me more sympathetic to many of my co-religionists who vote Israel right or wrong. In a close election, Jewish voters in New York, Florida, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Illinois, New Jersey and other states who are repulsed by the influence Sanders is trying to wield could pull the Trump lever and send our country into an abyss we could be in for generations. 

What's Next: Super or Stupid Tuesday?

It is dubbed Super Tuesday, the primary intensive day when voters in 11 states will express their preference for whom they want to see as the next president. But depending on how they cast their ballots, it might well be called Stupid Tuesday.

I doubt Democratic voters will anoint Bernie Sanders their favorite. Should he pull off an upset of historic proportions (Barack Obama in 2008 at least had a base of African-American voters to buttress his underdog candidacy), Bernie can expect Republicans to immediately start calling him Comrade Sanders as they imprint on the electorate’s mind the Vermont senator’s socialist leanings.

Based on their behavior during last Thursday night’s GOP debate in Houston, being called a comrade by whomever the Republicans nominate would be tame by comparison to the schoolyard taunts and bickering that emanated from the stage. The three frontrunners who covet being seated behind the desk in the Oval Office (Donald Trump and senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz) belittled not just themselves but the presidency, as well.   

How are we to explain how Trump behaves and his appeal? Conservative columnist David Brooks says Trump is a byproduct 30 years in the making: “People say that Trump is an unconventional candidate and that he represents a break from politics as usual. That’s not true. Trump is the culmination of the trends we have been seeing for the last 30 years: the desire for outsiders; the bashing style of rhetoric that makes conversation impossible; the decline of coherent political parties; the declining importance of policy; the tendency to fight cultural battles and identity wars through political means.” (http://nyti.ms/1LhxX9V)

His progressive colleague at The New York Times, Timothy Egan, thinks Trump acts bizarrely because he suffers from sleep deprivation (http://nyti.ms/1Rs4vgW).

For sheer chutzpah, conservative columnist Ross Douthat places a large part of the blame on Obama’s liberal policies (http://nyti.ms/1RvJOAL).  With an apparent straight face Douthat blames a president dedicated to inclusiveness for the viciously polarizing, demeaning and restrictive tenor of not just the leading candidate of the opposition but almost all of the other candidates. Douthat, no doubt, would absolve a rapist of guilt by asserting a woman provoked the attack because she was a … woman.

My own view is that the Trump-Cruz-Rubio smackdown, aided and abetted by a host of Republican presidential dropouts, is the offspring of years of raucous, aggressive television best exemplified by Maury Povich and Jerry Springer who encouraged extreme behavior, disrespect, physical confrontations, intolerance. 

Those in-your-face shows have inured us to bad behavior. To disrespecting authority. To reaching the point where a congressman could call the president of the United States a liar during a State of the Union speech and boast about it, or congressmen could dis the Office of the President by boycotting attendance during a presidential speech to a joint session of Congress.

When GOP aspirants to the highest office in the land (with the exception of Ben Carson and John Kasich) behave like poor white trash we know our nation’s character is being tested.

Consider for a moment the fact that neither Rubio nor Cruz, or any other Republican candidate or the moderators in any of the debates, have been able to stymie Trump’s advance with penetrating points and questions on policy. 

(Yes, the media have been complicit in Trump’s rise by not pinning him down on policy and contradictory statements. Trump has taken the offensive against the press—the Associated Press reported that during a rally in Fort Worth, Texas, Trump said he “wants to make it easier to file lawsuits against newspapers over what they report. He said that if he’s elected, he will ‘open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money.’ He added, ‘If I become president, oh, do they have problems.’”)

Trump is exploiting the baser instincts of the public. As Egan reported, “After a protester interrupted his speech in Nevada, Trump said, ‘I’d like to punch him in the face.’ The crowd roared. Trump continued. ‘You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks.’ At an earlier event this year, he said a protester should be thrown into the cold without a coat.

If an image of brown-shirted thugs with red and black armbands springs to mind, you’re not alone. And though they were within their legal rights to hold a rally, the Ku Klux Klan’s open display in Anaheim on Saturday was a chilling reminder that bigotry enjoys a divisive hold in too many parts of our country.

So the bottom line is the electorate is to blame for Trump and his cohorts. Voters have not been sharp enough to demand and obtain real answers from candidates. Yes, perhaps the public has been manipulated. Trump, after all, is recognized as a great brand marketer. And a decade and a half before him enough voters chose to want to have a beer with folksy George W. Bush rather than with the cerebral Al Gore. 

So it’s on to Super or Stupid Tuesday at the conclusion of which we might have greater certainty as to the eventual nominees of both major parties. Even if you’re not religiously inclined, let us pray the republic survives these troubled times. 

Supreme Court May Well Decide Next President. Again

History may be poised to repeat itself. For the second time in the last five presidential elections, the U.S. Supreme Court may well decide who will sit in the Oval Office.

The Court has accepted for review another challenge to the Affordable Care Act. The question before it—does the law permit federal government subsidies to the needy in states that do not have their own health exchange programs. In those states the federal government has stepped in to provide subsidies (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/08/us/politics/supreme-court-to-hear-new-challenge-to-health-law.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0). 

If the Supremes declare the subsidies to be illegal, Obamacare may tumble down from lack of sufficient funding. It also would mean millions would lose health care coverage. It’s pretty certain the four justices who voted against Obamacare two years ago would do so again, meaning Chief Justice John Roberts would be the deciding judge. Again.

If Roberts blocks the subsidies and the ACA ultimately succumbs to a Republican-led attack, universal health care once more would become a key campaign issue in 2016. As they have championed it for decades, Democrats, most prominently their presidential candidate, would benefit from such an outcome. 

Given a June 2015 court decision, Republicans would have just over a year to forge an acceptable alternative to a law that has extended health coverage to more Americans than at any other time in our history. That’s unlikely to transpire given the venomous reaction many conservatives have to such a program.

A negative decision and Republican antipathy toward a replacement ACA might also provide incentive to voters to elect more Democrats to the Senate and even possibly return the Dems to the majority in the House. 

It’s an intriguing state of affairs. Having injected itself into state election law in Florida and chosen George W. Bush over Al Gore in 2000, the Supreme Court may wind up influencing who gets elected to the White House in 2016. 

Ah, I’d love to be a fly on the wall in Democratic leadership meetings as they discuss what would be better for the party, and the country, come next June.

GOP Dilemma: Party or Country First?

Florida Republicans will troop to the polls Tuesday (ok, maybe some of them will roll in wheelchairs or shuffle along using walkers, while others drive in pick-up trucks with gun racks) to provide the latest answer to a dilemma facing their counterparts across the country—are they more interested in choosing a presidential standard bearer who could attract a spectrum of support among independents and even some Democrats, or are they more interested in ideological conservative purity deeply tinged with personal and emotional failings?

Polls show Mitt Romney comfortably ahead of Newt Gingrich by double digit figures. The perception of electability, along with confidence he would not be as divisive as Gingrich, his business background and his stain-free past (other than, in the repetitive refrain of Gail Collins of the NY Times, driving to Canada for a vacation with his dog strapped to the roof of the family car) make Romney a formidable challenger to President Obama’s re-election. True, there’s not much passion behind his candidacy, but it’s rare to see an automaton provoke deep feelings in humans.

Gingrich, on the other hand, stirs emotions. He is the personification of the “tumulter,” a term from many languages identifying someone who thrives on “the commotion or agitation of a multitude, usually accompanied with great noise, uproar, and confusion of voices; hurly-burly; noisy confusion.”

The former House speaker says he will stay in the race all the way to the GOP convention (or, more realistically, until the Adelsons stop funding his campaign). If he continues to rile up the conservative base against Romney he’ll be doing double-barreled damage. First, he’ll be providing fodder to Obama’s campaign. There’s nothing better than using fellow Republican smears to smear your Republican opponent in the general election. Obama benefits regardless of who becomes the GOP nominee.

Second, and perhaps more troubling for Romney, will be the cumulative effect on the hard-core right wing of the Republican/Tea Party. Will arch conservatives, evangelical Christians, have enough passion (read that, hatred) in their hearts against Obama to swallow hard, hold their noses and vote for Romney if he’s the candidate, or will they stay home?

Back in 1964, moderate Republicans abandoned the party’s nominee, Barry Goldwater, and voted for President Lyndon Johnson. In 1968, lots of disaffected Democrats failed to rally in time to Vice President Hubert Humphrey, letting Richard Nixon eke out a narrow victory. In 1976, President Gerald Ford couldn’t command enough Ronald Reagan-inspired conservatives to beat back a challenge by Jimmy Carter. Vice President Al Gore couldn’t attract enough of Ralph Nader’s ardent environmental supporters nationwide in 2000 to prevent George W. Bush from eventually getting the keys to the White House handed to him by the U.S. Supreme Court after the hanging chad fiasco in Florida.

Nothing will be decided tomorrow except who gets Florida’s 50 convention votes. But the size of Gingrich’s tally might provide an indication of how strong the anti-Romney sentiment is and whether the GOP in the fall will be able to mount a full-frontal, broadly coordinated assault on the White House’s current occupant.