2016 Election May Be Decided Not by Visions of the Future But by Memories of the Past

Results of the New York primary notwithstanding, the 2016 presidential election is shaping up as a contest between Republican nostalgia for the “good ol’ days” Archie Bunker longed for, or the searing memories Democrats recall of racial, gender and economic bias and inequality.

An unknown factor will be how millennials—women and men—identify with the struggles of their parents and grandparents. Have they forgotten, or never learned, what life was like before women had the legal right to choose the outcome of a pregnancy; before parental child care leave was provided; before voting rights were extended to minorities; before affordable health insurance coverage for pre-existing conditions was largely unavailable; when the glass ceiling kept most women in the steno pool and out of the halls of Congress unless they were pages; when southern politicians and law enforcement officials included their KKK memberships in their qualifications for office; when governors and state legislatures routinely denied rights to minorities, including the right to marry a spouse of a different race? 

Many millennials have been drawn to Bernie Sanders. If he comes up short will they rally behind Hillary Clinton or will they sit November out, forgetting the progressive gains of the last 50 years that would be jeopardized during a Trump, Cruz or Kasich presidency and Republican congress?

Speaking on the Charlie Rose The Week show on PBS last Friday, CBS News chief White House correspondent Major Garrett said, “Republicans will rally around the idea that we’ve been a diffident loser-type country, not that that’s true, but there’s a feeling about that among Republicans, a kind of nostalgia. 

“When Donald Trump talks about General MacCarthur and General Patton, he’s trying to revive a nostalgia for an era that is so greatly distant but nonetheless resident” (in the minds of older Americans who are) looking for a “leader with purpose, vision and direction.” http://www.pbs.org/video/2365718640/

He went on to say Trump supporters “are not hung up on specifics, they’re not even asking for specifics, what they care about is a different and more profoundly aggressive direction for the country and they’re willing to follow it.”

Democrats, on the other hand, would try to remind voters how Republicans mismanaged the economy while George W. Bush was president, said Garrett.

If you’re Clinton or Sanders, reviving memories of times of inequality—in the past and in the present—will sharpen their appeal to party members during the remaining primaries and, they hope, will transfer over to the general election among Independents and Democrats who backed the unsuccessful primary candidate. 

Hillary is trying break the ultimate glass ceiling. Will women, especially millennials who have supported Bernie, accept her candidacy and give her credit for the decades she spent at the forefront of the fight for women’s equality? Will they give her credit for being among the first to champion national health care and the right to parental child care leave? Will blue collar workers stay with a Democratic Party that has fought for decades for their welfare, or will their memories be clouded by the siren song of a candidate who pledges to make America great again but who would lead a party that has advocated reduced social welfare, heath care and education benefits for the masses while pledging tax breaks to the wealthy?

Election campaigns usually focus on the future. Images of change and hope. 2016, however, may well be decided on how effectively each candidate instills in voters’ minds images of the 1950s and early 1960s. Was it a time of prosperity for the middle class amid tranquil, orderly nuclear family life, or was it a time of stifled opportunities  for, and bias against, women and minorities and repressed sexuality? 

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. 

Catching Up on the Mets, Driving, Dressing for Work, Quick Pitching and Debate Winners/Losers

Time to catch up on some random thoughts that have been scurrying around my brain for the last few weeks or so …

I wonder if the owners of the Empire State Building were not all-in behind the New York Mets. While driving across the Kosciusko Bridge one night during the World Series (btw, a spectacular vantage point to observe the grandeur of Manhattan, second only to the drive north along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in Brooklyn Heights), I noticed the top of the iconic building was lit up in green (GREEN!!!) and not Mets blue and orange. Did St. Patrick’s Day change its date this year? I seem to recall blue and white bathing the top of the structure when the Yankees played in the Series. I’m not a Mets fan, but I do believe the Empire State Building dissed the team …

Driving Gilda to and from Manhattan three times a week has given me an insider’s perspective on the quality of drivers in the New York metro region. The worst drivers are those behind the wheel of SUVs. They tailgate, speed and change lanes irresponsibly more frequently than any other drivers. 

I would love to be able to make citizen arrests. Won’t happen. But what I truly would like is a car that includes a retractable rear sign telling a tailgater to “Back Off!” We have horns to warn drivers on our side when they get too close; why not a sign that calls out tailgaters?

There are plenty of Uber drivers out there. Since they are in unmarked cars, mostly black, they are not as predictable as yellow or green taxi drivers who don’t really surprise you when they scurry across two lanes or stop abruptly. But Uber drivers can and do surprise you. 

Of course, trucks and buses pose larger threats. Wednesday I took action after a truck blocked my attempt to change lanes and avoid an exit ramp off the Major Deegen Expressway in The Bronx. I called the telephone number on the truck to report its driver. Last winter I reported the unsafe actions of a city bus driver who changed lanes without regard and almost hit another vehicle. Who knows if the drivers were disciplined but it made me feel good.  

One of Gilda’s favorite pictures of me hanging on a wall in our family room is from my time as a reporter/bureau chief for The New Haven Register some 40 years ago. It’s a black and white photo, taken by Larry French, the chief copy editor, with a telephoto lens during one of the slow periods in the newsroom.

 My desk is a mess of papers piled helter-skelter. A brown paper bag stands upright and open at the top on the side of the desk. My hair is long and bushy, what we used to call a “Jewfro.” My beard has not yet turned grey. I am wearing an open collar plaid shirt, two pens visible in my shirt pocket. My left leg is crossed, the knee perched above the papers. Most likely I am wearing jeans, though khakis are a possibility. 

I bring this to your attention because of an article in Monday’s New York Times on the wardrobe choices for the movie Spotlight, a film about The Boston Globe’s reporting of the child sex abuse scandal within the Roman Catholic Church. The headline for the question and answer piece was “‘Spotlight’ Costume Designer on What Makes Newsroom Chic” (http://nyti.ms/1XValKs).

No one among the hundred or so reporters at The Register could have been considered a GQ devotee. The rare necktie and sports jacket, a corduroy or tweed, were occasionally worn by the New Haven city hall or the Yale University beat reporter. Female reporters were not fashionistas, either. 

But then, the gestalt of the newsroom was not about how spiffy we looked but rather about how well our stories illuminated and informed. Those concepts permeated my years at Chain Store Age/Lebhar-Friedman, as well, but my wardrobe underwent a seismic makeover. 

L-F had a suits-in-the-office policy. A sports jacket and slacks would draw a rebuke from the president of the company. While working at The Register I owned two suits; one of them was my wedding tuxedo. By the time I retired from Chain Store Age my closet boasted (?) some two dozen suits. 

Let me say this: the first thing I did upon entering my office every day was take off my suit jacket and roll up my shirt sleeves. It was the closest I could get to the comfort of my Register reporter’s days. 

It’s a widely held belief that the New York Mets lost the World Series in the bottom of the ninth inning of the first game of the five-game contest when Mets closer Jeurys Familia tried to trick Kansas City’s Alex Gordon, only to have his quick pitch smacked over the center field wall to tie the game at two. The Mets eventually lost the game in 14 innings and lost three out of the next four games to the Royals.

When I regularly pitched for our temple’s fast-pitch softball team, I sometimes interspersed a quick pitch as well. I don’t recall giving up any home runs with the pitch, but I also don’t recall striking anyone out, either. 

Now, during any of my infrequent appearances on the mound, I don’t employ a quick pitch. It has vanished from my repertoire, as has most of the heat on my fast ball.  

You’ve no doubt read reviews (including mine) of Tuesday’s Republican presidential debate. In case you missed it, here’s how The Drudge Report scored the candidates, based on 348,324 poll respondents:  

TRUMP

 34.92%  (121,608 votes)

CRUZ

 23.7%  (82,529 votes)

PAUL

 15.78%  (54,941 votes)

RUBIO

 13.93%  (48,496 votes)

CARSON

 4.82%  (16,780 votes)

FIORINA

 4.27%  (14,885 votes)

KASICH

 1.56%  (5,424 votes)

 BUSH

 1.02%  (3,571 votes)

Go figure!