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.

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? 

Losing It

I’m losing stuff around the house, and I’m not talking about the normal things one can’t find, such as a single sock in the laundry. I actually solved that problem several years ago by safety pinning pairs of socks together. My current laundry loss is one of those plastic dryer balls that replace the chemical dryer sheets like Bounce we used to put in with the laundry. The spiked dryer balls tend to hide in the folds of fitted sheets, but I searched all my bed linens to no avail. Weird.

Also strange are the nearly empty water jugs I kept in the basement following last year’s storms that cut power in many areas. Survival experts suggested you keep several gallons of water on hand, so I dutifully bought a couple of two-gallon plastic containers of water to store in the basement. Last week I noticed they were almost empty. No telltale puddles or water marks around them. So much for disaster preparedness. 

If Mitt Romney wins the election he’s expressed a commitment to eliminate funding for Public Broadcasting Service, including Sesame Street and its signature character, Big Bird. Putting aside the left-wing mind-control argument Republicans have postulated about Sesame Street, the now 43-year-old children’s educational program has been a fount of early learning.

When one of our nephews was a toddler, his mother sat him in front of the television to watch the then new show. Some months later, he stunned her by reading the label of a cereal box. As she and her husband had not practiced reading with him, the only explanation was Sesame Street. 

Gilda and I employed Sesame Street when our kids were young. Saturday mornings we’d let Dan and Ellie watch Sesame Street and Electric Company as we lounged in bed. We, along with tens of thousands of other parents, protested when PBS changed its Saturday morning programming from kid-friendly to politics and business shows. I think we might have stopped sending money to PBS for a while.

Over the Columbus Day weekend Gilda and I visited Dan, Allison, Finley and Dagny in their new home in Acton, Mass. They live in the Fifth Congressional District represented by Niki Tsongas, widow of Paul Tsongas, the former U.S. Senator and one-time Democratic presidential hopeful. I met both of them during a business trip to New Hampshire in early 1992.

Before boarding the shuttle flight to Boston from LaGuardia, I recognized Tsongas. As luck would have it, I sat across the aisle from him. But he never looked my way during our time waiting for takeoff. His body was shifted toward his wife’s window seat. I’m notorious for falling asleep on airplanes even before getting airborne, so I fretted about missing an opportunity to talk with him.

I tried to stay awake by reading The NY Times. I was midway through the first section of the paper when I saw my opportunity. After finishing an article on Tsongas’ chances in the upcoming New Hampshire primary, I tapped him on the shoulder and said I couldn’t resist talking to the man profiled in the article I had just read. He was most gracious. We chatted for several minutes. When I told him I was headed to New Hampshire, he joked he had spent some time there himself. 

Last night while watching the Yankees-Orioles playoff baseball game, I believe I heard John Smoltz, one of the announcers, say he wanted to get a ride on one of the blimps providing overhead shots of the game and surroundings. I can empathize with him.

Back in 1972, as part of a graduate journalism program at the Newhouse School of Public Communications of Syracuse University, my class covered the Florida presidential primary. We were stationed in Miami. I was assigned to follow the campaign of John Ashbrook, a conservative Republican congressman from Ohio. He had little chance of winning, especially in the Miami area, so I had lots of free time. Two of my classmates and I came upon the Goodyear blimp moored at a field. The blimp was there for coverage of a sporting event some days later. We talked up the crew who promised us a free ride the next day. When we arrived Tuesday morning at the mooring site, the blimp was not there. Seems Walter Cronkite’s crew had been ordered to film Miami vistas for that evening’s election coverage. I never forgave Cronkite for pre-empting my chance to float in air.

There’s a truism in sports—never let a weaker opponent stick around. Score points early and often, so they’ll be discouraged and give up. If you let them hang around, they could surprise you and win. What’s true of sports is also true of politics. Barack Obama, an avid sports fan, has just learned the truth of that aphorism with his lackadaisical performance during last week’s debate with Romney. 

What possessed him to breathe new life into his opponent’s chances is beyond anyone’s analytic powers. Perhaps he himself can’t explain why he played the debate the way he did. I can’t explain it any more than I can explain where my dryer ball disappeared to or why there was no telltale sign of my stored water. I can replace the dryer ball and the water. The question is, can Obama replace the lost affection and momentum among his supporters and undecided voters? 

The Future of Downton Abbey

Spoiler Alert: Having predicted much of what transpired during the recent Super Bowl (http://nosocksneededanymore.blogspot.com/2012/02/bragging-rights.html), I thought I’d take a shot at forecasting the plot lines to next season’s Downton Abbey, the last segment of the current run having been shown Sunday night on PBS. For those unfamiliar with the British soap opera of upper class and servant class mores and lives from before and after the first world war, you might want to skip this item. But for the rest of you who are smitten by the lusciousness and the lasciviousness of affairs upstairs and downstairs, here’s my ouija board outlook for season three:

The action will begin five years later, in 1925. Mary and Matthew will have had a child, a daughter.

Sybil and Branson’s child is a son, making him the sole male heir to the estate. Unless Mary and Matthew have a son, he will inherit the claim to Downton Abbey, a turn of events that visibly disturbs both the Earl of Grantham and Branson. The Earl cannot countenance the thought that a revolutionary, a working class chauffeur by trade, an interloper into his household, would sire the son who would succeed to his title. He is constantly urging Mary and Matthew to get on with it and have another child. They comply, but it’s a girl once more.

For his part, Branson is having difficulty adapting his thinking about class and place in society. He imagines all the good he could do splitting up Downton Abbey into parcels of land distributed to the country folk who live on the land. Sybil is torn between her love for Branson’s ideals and her family’s history.

The Countess of Grantham’s mother (a part already given to Shirley MacLaine) will be on hand to further the debate about regular people being part of the wealthy. She will have lively debates with the Dowager Countess of Grantham played by Maggie Smith.

Bates will be in prison for about five years. My best guess as to how he gets out is that the Countess’ maid, Sarah O’Brien, confesses she felt bad about telling Bates’ wife he had returned to Downton, that she secretly went off to London and killed her by lacing her tea with arsenic. Her confession releases Bates into the loving arms of Anna.

Season three ends as the stock market crashes.

Return from the Land of Az

Just back from the Land of Az, otherwise known as Arizonastan, the Land that Progressive Thinking Mostly Forgot.

I found it amusing one of the main roadways from Mexico, I-19, was the only route I saw with posted distance markers in kilometers, not miles. How civil of the authorities to make illegal immigrants feel right at home...

Tucson is an oasis of progressive thought in an otherwise state of repression. Over Saturday breakfast with a dozen men 50 to mid-80s, the conversation rarely veered away from their anathema of the politics of the ruling Republicans and Tea Partyers. They were embarrassed their governor had no more than a GED diploma. They were shocked their state legislators allowed guns to be carried anywhere except inside the state capitol where they might do some good...

Visiting Tombstone, “the town that wouldn’t die,” I encountered my first, and thankfully only, packing pedestrian. He had a Glock strapped tightly to his right hip. Gilda wanted to take his picture. Not knowing how receptive he’d be, I suggested it was not a good idea. She insisted. I bravely walked away from his line of vision. She shot him. He didn’t know what hit him...

A cartoonist and columnist for the Arizona Daily Star, David Fitzsimmons, captured some of the zaniness of life and politics in Arizona with his entry last Saturday. Among his dead-on missives describing state lawmakers: “Most of them think a Rhodes scholar is an asphalt expert and PBS is something that happens to the wife to ‘make her edgy.’”...

Saturday night Gilda and I had a delicious dinner with friends Steve and Judy at a trendy Tucson restaurant. Both couples live roughly two miles apart in White Plains, NY. So we traveled a combined 8,000-plus miles, each way, to break bread together. Only in America.

A Night at the Opera

Tonight at 8, PBS will broadcast a performance of Der Rosenkavalier from the Metropolitan Opera House in New York.

I’ve never seen this comic opera written by Richard Strauss (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Rosenkavalier), but it has special significance in my life. On their first date in the summer of 1942, my father took my mother to see this opera.

They had met days before, at his store on Orchard Street. He was standing on a rolling ladder, the type you see in libraries, when, by pre-arrangement, my mother came to meet him. At the sight of her, he nearly fell off the ladder. She had the most unruly, frizzy hair. Ever the gentleman, Dad went through with the match and agreed to take her to the opera Friday night. When he arrived at her parents’ apartment Friday evening, a beautiful woman opened the door. Knowing she had three sisters, he asked for Sylvia. My mother smiled and said she was Sylvia. They were married Labor Day weekend, six weeks later, September 6, 1942. Their marriage lasted 53 years until her death in 1996.

It is almost exactly six weeks before Labor Day. I think I’ll watch, or at least record, Der Rosenkavalier, tonight.

French Service

Growing up in Brooklyn in the 1950s and 1960s, we lived an upper middle class life. My brother, sister and I attended private school. We enjoyed eight weeks of summer sleepaway camp. Our father bought a new Buick every five or six years. We accompanied our parents to the theater, opera and the occasional weekend in the Catskills.

But of all the affectations of upper crust living, the one I most remember for its qualitative impression of upward mobility was what our mother called her “French Service,” the practice of placing a decorative cabinet plate at each place setting which was removed before any food was served. She reserved this noble gesture for just a handful of celebratory meals each year, for which she’d bring out from storage 10-inch scalloped plates with idyllic scenes of courtship by the 18th century French painter Fragonard. Here’s a picture of what the plates looked like (the sample is pink, but the plates came in a rainbow of colors): http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=380224731353&rvr_id=&crlp=1_263602_263622&UA=M*F%3F&GUID=b2c9d68b1250a0b5833359e3ff833377&itemid=380224731353&ff4=263602_263622

In case you didn’t scroll down, the ebay seller accurately described the plates thusly:

“This beautiful Kuba Porzellan Bavaria Germany cabinet plate measures 10 inches in diameter. The plate features a courting couple in the center with smaller scenes of the courting couple around the border. Each scene around the border is different. The scenes are framed with a gold band that has raised tiny beading. The center scene is bordered with an ornate design in gold with a band of tiny beading below. The center is pink with a gold floral design around the border. The detail on this piece is wonderful. The rim is also trimmed in gold. . . The bottom is marked as shown in the photo and the front is signed Fragonard. A nice piece.”

We have 36 Kuba Porzellan cabinet plates. They haven’t been used since a few years before our mother died in 1996 when she no longer had the stamina or wherewithal to host family get-togethers. Each of her children were to take a dozen plates, but tastes having changed over the years, no one really wanted them. They were a little, okay, more than a little, ostentatious for the type of entertaining any of us did. So they sat in my brother’s basement, waiting for the day one of us would bring a plate to an appraiser and we’d discover untapped inheritance. PBS’ Antiques Roadshow fueled the imagination.

A few weeks ago I took a plate from my brother’s home, determined to discover the truth behind our bequest. A quick Internet search revealed their worth. About $1,000 for all 36 plates. Not an overwhelming find. Especially when one considers the sentimental value behind the plates.

We’ll probably try to sell the plates. No use keeping them boxed in storage. Perhaps they will provide memories for another family.