Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren Present us with a Quandary

Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders present voters with an interesting quandary for the Democrat primary.

On one hand, Bernie Sanders has been plugging away for close to fifty years, on the inaction of the Democrats (and other liberals) concerning the basic problems faced by the poor and minorities in the USA.  Certainly this country has become a melting-pot for the world; more of a melting-pot than other countries, and more able to deal with the changing profile of the population than many other countries.  (The UK and certain European countries are struggling with the incoming migrants, while the US has dealt with this problem—more or less gracefully— for a century.)  Well, if one of the major characteristics of our population is that it is extremely diverse—this is a fact, not a choice—then we have to face the fact that more than a century of free enterprise has created an economic underclass that is frustrated, and which contains a disproportional number of minorities.  And furthermore, this class is unable to deal with certain basic problems: education, health, pollution, discrimination, and a few others.  Democrats have nibbled away at the edges of these problems, but not addressed them head-on.  Finally, it appears that Bernie has gained enough momentum to actually secure the nomination to be the representative of the Democrat Party.

Elizabeth Warren, in contrast, is a relative newcomer.  She is about a decade younger—which is not saying much—but appears to be in better health.  She is not as abrasive, and more patient (which women of all sorts have found to be a survival characteristic), and has been frustrated in a different way.  She has ideas about how to prevent the large-scale financial system from victimizing the poor, and to prevent people who run the financial establishment from making their millions off the backs of unwary consumers.  Poor consumers simply do not have the resources, the networking, the financial support of friends and family, to fight the depredations of predatory lenders, vicious credit card companies, unscrupulous health services, and laws that are not friendly towards the working poor.  She has been blocked repeatedly by the financial industry (who rightly see her as viewing their easy profit methods with hostility), and hindered by her male colleagues, simply because men are conditioned to elbow out women without thinking.  Bear in mind that single mothers are a rapidly expanding sector of the working poor, which congress is slow to recognize.  While the problem of sexual harassment of women is something that society is reluctantly beginning to face, the daily grinding down of poor women and their families is still something that goes under the radar.

Both of these candidates deserve to have a chance at being the nominee of the Democrat Party, for many of the same reasons, and for slightly different reasons in addition.  And now it comes down to the electability calculus, which is, this year, particularly difficult to work through!

The problem with being one of the Radicals

We all know that the conservatives (and the media) have brought back this label, to describe those in the Democrat Party whom they consider to have extreme views.  Bernie Sanders embraces this label, but insists at the same time that his plans are not too radical.  Only his plan to provide Medicare For All is at all radical; everything else he wants to do is common sense.  As it is, education up to High School (up to secondary level) is free in the US, though of course there’s nothing to prevent a doting parent from paying to send their child to a private school.  Bernie wants to extend free education up to the college level (up to tertiary level).  It makes some sense to provide this at government-supported colleges and universities; there would be trouble if private colleges and universities were required to provide free education.  Of course this will take money and work.  The Upper Middle Class objects to this as requiring too much money (and obviously raising taxes on the rich), but it has the potential for crowding the pool of applicants for good jobs.  With easy access to education, the problem of educational elites has to be addressed.  In addition to increasing the numbers of qualified people applying for any job, there is the small problem that certain types of occupation are shunned by those with higher education, and those of us who are well educated are keeping an eye on this effect as well.  So far none of the candidates are talking very much about it, because it is politically problematic.  Even the very poor hate to be working on levees and roads and sewers and landfills.  (But someone has to.  There, I said it.)

Elizabeth Warren refuses to be labeled a Socialist.  Many of her policies protect the poor, and place a greater tax burden on the most wealthy (i.e. The Rich).  But this has been done in the US for decades.  Making credit-card banks follow laws that prevent them from throwing poor families into bankruptcy is not at all unfair, for instance.  Raising taxes to provide so-called ‘Socialized Medicine’, as is done in Canada and the United Kingdom, by no means comes close to making the US a socialist economy.

Thinking about these issues gives people headaches, especially if they’re unused to thinking about difficult problems regularly.  Well, after the weekend, some issues will become clearer (for instance: should we give Joe Biden a chance?)

After the South Carolina Primary, I predict that Bernie Sanders will still head the candidates at the polls; Elizabeth Warren will probably be either third or fourth, with Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden, and Amy Klobuchar filling in the gaps.

After Super Tuesday, it’s anyone’s guess as to who will be left in the race.  (Running for president is such a waste of money, time and energy for most candidates; this is why the choices have been so bad for the Democrats for so long.  For Republicans, there’s all those luscious corporate dollars waiting for them.  Democrats, too, have their rich friends, but most people know who they are; and Democrats, unlike Republicans, are mildly embarrassed by their rich friends.  But this election, Democrats are all fired up.  We should be grateful to have so many candidates jumping into the ring, and to have to pick from among so many talented people.  (Make no mistake: when politics returns to the usual boring grind, we will dearly wish to have this set of candidates back.)

If Elizabeth Warren survives Super Tuesday, I am inclined to support her.  I wish she would quickly turn to supporting the down-ballot races (that is, Democrat candidates for congressional, senate and state and local representative, which are so important, not least to encourage states to work with the federal government to offer new health care plans, for instance).  In our part of the world, Democrats are not even running for certain congressional slots, and Republicans of limited ability are running unopposed.

That’s all for now!  Nothing more can be said until, well, Wednesday, or Sunday, the earliest.

Relax.  Nothing is achieved by worrying.  Bear in mind that everyone deserves a compassionate thought, though some people may have sucked all the compassion out of us.  Think about all those parents involved in the debacle of faking entrance to exclusive colleges!  And think of the poor, spoiled kids, who now have to endure the taunting of unsympathetic classmates.  (It is the less-qualified classmates who probably do most of the taunting, but that's probably no big consolation.)  As I was telling an old friend recently, the older I get, the more I think of all the terrible things that people do as being forgivable.  For the most part.

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What to Make of the Latest News about The Elections

The media carried some reports about Russian interference in the past week.

One said that the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee (or the full House; I can't remember) was briefed by Intelligence officers that Russian agents—on whom the Intelligence people are spying, presumably—have been conspiring to assist Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign.  Another said that Bernie Sanders has reported that his campaign was contacted by the Russians about receiving help—or they were told by US Intelligence that Russians were interested in helping their campaign.

What we’re to make of this:  Most experienced Russia observers—and the past four years have given these folks a lot of experience—know that, or guess that, it is more beneficial to Vladimir Putin to have American at loggerheads with each other than it is that a particular candidate on either side should win the nomination of his or her party.  In other words, they don’t care which candidate runs for election as much as that the nominee should get his party riled up.

Well, we all suspect that the Russians were fooling with the elections in 2016; they tried to hack into the Clintons’ personal mail server.  They tried (and maybe succeeded) in hacking into the mail server of the Democratic National Committee.  They seem to have hacked into the server of Wikileaks.  They have been sending the information that they have stolen to whoever would get people most upset, rather than a particular person who would win the election.

What both Trump and Sanders should have done, and certainly told the Press, is: “No, I’m not interested; we would very much like to win this election based on the votes, thanks.  We’re not banking on voter anger to win; we’re more interested in voters choosing us because of our policy choices, and our values.”

Mr. Trump thought immediately (or at least claimed to have thought) that this was a disinformation campaign dreamed up by the Democrats.  He said at a campaign rally that it wasn’t him, Trump, that the Russians wanted to help, it was the Democrats.  Bernie Sanders said something similar (about Trump).

This is disappointing.  But unfortunately, both Mr. Trump and Mr. Sanders are working themselves up into full battle mode, and neither of them are interested in thinking just how much this public animosity between the various political interest groups is hurting the country.  The media (except for possibly NPR) is also interested in a good old drawn-out battle; there’s nothing that sells TV time as much as a good fight.  The prices of advertising has probably risen.  (We don’t watch the news; if you notice that Lawyers, Drugs and Automobiles have cornered the advertising slots during news segments, you have to suspect that they all favor the country going completely crazy during this election season.  These are the biggest advertising spenders.  If a law were passed not allowing advertising by law firms and pharmaceutical companies, they would scream at the tops of their lungs.)

Now, I really like Bernie Sanders, and I would not be disappointed if he won the nomination.  But he is instinctively mobilizing the anger of regular people, and the poor, who daily have to fight for survival*, versus the very wealthy, who flaunt their ill-gotten gains everywhere we go.  So even if his appeal is not anti-Trump hate, it may as well be.

The GOP, meanwhile, has, for a long time, supported Democrat-baiting.  They push a lot of actions, some of which benefit only a very narrow sector of society, for instance very large businesses, saying that it would really, really piss off the Democrats!  The Alt-Right folks cheer like mad, because it was, in 2017, and probably even today, a bigger deal to piss off the Democrats than it is to improve the lives of ordinary people, including low-income Republicans.  So hate is something the Alt-Right sort of enjoys.  Unfortunately, hate is something the Alt-Left also enjoys!

And, very possibly, all this delightful hate has been at least partially fostered by the Russians, and possibly others.  It weakens the USA as a nation, which makes it possible to take advantage of the USA economically.

Perhaps it is not a bad thing if foreign nations were to take advantage of the USA in some ways.  The poorest of the poor nations, such as those in Central America, depended in the past on charitable aid from the US, but over the years Congress has taken away this aid, and only narrowly funneled it into the coffers of dictators who were friendly to us.  The Dictators, unfortunately, eventually got on our wrong side (after having happily accepted our contributions for a few years), and then there is often a fiasco.  Sometimes we continue to help, sometimes we help their opponents, and whatever we do in times like that is counterproductive; it helps neither the dictator, nor the country.  But I am not an expert; foreign aid is a very difficult thing to carry out.

There is no longer any point to watching the Democrat candidates accusing each other at public debates.  The fewer debates there are, the better; I want to take away every opportunities for the candidates to make rhetorical faux pas, because some of the candidates who misspeak at the debates might very well be the best choice for a President.

Another interesting point a commentator brought up—I think it was Harry Reid, the former Democrat senator from Nevada, and the leader of the Democrats in the Senate—that he was not concerned about Medicare For All.  It would never happen, he said, until everyone was comfortable with it, and certainly not without the support of Congress.  Congress, of course, is not likely to rush into Medicare For All (MFA); it is supported by a large Democrat minority, but there’s not enough support to make it law anytime soon.  But if there is at least one plan offered by the government, it seems very likely that all plans will have to quickly become better, in response.  But again, I’m no expert; US Insurance companies are very tricky.  Harry Reid's exact quote was to the effect that a radical running for election becomes a moderate once he or she is in office.

What to do about the Russians?  We have to be much more intelligent about political information on our social media platforms.  For instance, I have a friend whose posts on my wall are always the most vicious attacks on the President.  Sometimes they are factual; sometimes they are parodies; sometimes they are hypothetical: this is what he is likely to do in these circumstances, and what follows is a humorous take on the situation.  I have blocked her for about a year.  Now my facebook feed is a lot calmer.  I have a Twitter account, which I never check.  These sorts of strategies are very helpful in avoiding the Democrat-baiting that comes from either the Alt-Right, or the Russians.  Of course, this forces us more into our bubbles.  But at least it prevents us from snapping at our conservative friends, whom we cannot avoid!

What to do about Me Too?  What to do about Stop and Frisk?

The battle of the genders is a difficult thing to deal with.  As a male, all I can do is to be more respectful of women, and realize that guys were not this well-behaved in the past.

A woman has a more difficult job dealing with harassment she encounters daily, and harassment she encountered in the past.  Each incident has to be handled differently, and no male can advise a woman about what to do.  One thing you have to take into account is that you have to judge people by their lights.  This means that you can’t reasonably burn Julius Caesar’s diaries just because he groped teenagers in his youth.

Young men, for the last several decades, have often been involved in petty crime, and gone on to violent crime, often involving firearms.  In bad times, law enforcement, and people in charge, such as mayors and police superintendents, get sick and tired of dealing with violent crime one incident at a time, and in desperation decide to deal with it statistically; that is, they take some dramatic action to deal with a lot of the crime once and for all.  Stop and Frisk, we can see from hindsight, was the beginning of what we know today as profiling, where people who look like they’re a bad lot, get treated as if they were a bad lot.

In the case of Michael Bloomberg, we have to admit that it was a major administrative error, and, honestly, we can expect him to make similar errors if he becomes President.  Trump makes these errors several times a day, and even if Bloomberg only makes one a month, that’s too many.  However, we have to judge Bloomberg by the lights of the time he was in office.  The immediate post-9/11 atmosphere in NYC may have been conducive to taking extreme measures.  Bloomberg is still culpable, but perhaps not as culpable as the News Media makes it sound.

Anyway, watch the debate if you must.  If you don’t know these people by now, you will never get to know them.  Realize that what you want to find out is whether their values come close to your own.  Don’t panic about Medicare For All; once they’re in office, they will be a lot more moderate than they appear on the debate stage.  Also, make allowances for the septuagenarians on stage; when you’re seventy-something, it’s hard to make a snappy comeback to any challenge.  You think of possible ripostes only when you’re sipping that post-debate Geritol cocktail!

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*Personally, my wife and I cannot claim to be among the poor; we are semi-retired, and live in a working-class neighborhood in Williamsport, and do very well.  We own two cars, and a pick-up which hasn't passed inspection.

How to Get Someone Elected President

This is not the subject I wanted to write about, but if I spend too much time thinking about the perfect title, I won’t get started in time to finish the post.

First, you have to select a candidate.  If you have a particular favorite in mind, then you’re that much further ahead than if you don’t.  But what if the reports you get of which candidate is trending to win the nomination make you change your mind?  It seems to me that it’s better to keep an open mind until the party convention makes an irreversible decision to select the party nominee.  (Otherwise you get mad, emotion rears its ugly head, and you waste a lot of energy adjusting to the nominee.)

What do we look for in a nominee?  As our friends and fellow party-members get their knickers in a knot trying to figure which candidate to support, let’s try and get our criteria lined up.  (A lot of this is stuff I have been posting for more than a year, so be patient with stale information.)

Criteria for a Candidate.  These are in no particular order.  In addition, some of these items only make sense in special circumstances; for instance, this time around, because we’re more dissatisfied with how Trump is doing than we were with how George W. Bush was doing in 2008, some of our criteria* are going to be specific to this election.  But it is quite possible that, from now on, every election is going to have special problems.  Once again, these are in no particular order, at least not intentionally.

Presentability.  I mean, how the candidate conducts him- or herself.  I suppose my thinking about the charisma and the conduct of a candidate or nominee could be quite different from those of others.  I would like a candidate/nominee who tends to understate matters rather than exaggerate.  I would like a candidate who doesn’t carry on like a maniac, though honestly there are matters that would drive anyone insane.  And remember: a lot of foreign friends (and, I suppose, enemies) are watching reports and video of our candidate, and our nominees, and our president; and though they ought not to influence who wins the vote, their attitude towards our leader is an important consideration.

Rhetoric.  The manner of speech—something hinted at in the previous item—is important.  Perhaps the cautious, learned, measured speech of presidents through the years have struck the Alt-Right as the speech of an insider.  But when you come right down to it, there are big problems with a figurehead who talks like a child with a vocabulary of a Labrador Retriever, repeats themselves, and has no concern for veracity.

Intelligence.  I’m not suggesting that our president needs to be a genius; in most matters that need careful thinking, there will be people who can help figure things out.  But the president needs to have the intelligence to spot (a) which problems are important, (b) realize that they actually are problems, (c) see at least some of the implications of those problems, and (d) accept possible solutions from among those that are presented.  And, it remains true that at least a part of Intelligence is the ability to gather round them advisors and specialists that can really help to put good and imaginative solutions together, and the wisdom to sequence them in the most effective order.

Prejudice-Free.  This is a matter both for us, and for our candidate.  We cannot ask that our candidate (or nominee or our president) adopt all of our prejudices.  Obviously, we would prefer him or her to have our prejudices than some other prejudices; and there are some attitudes that we would like our candidate / nominee / president to have that we would consider to rise above mere prejudice.  For instance, we would not consider a candidate who took a stand against fossil fuels to be ‘prejudiced against fossil fuels.’  There are reasons why we would like our administration to take a strong stand against fossil fuels in the long run, even if they allowed limited use of particularly clean fossil fuels in the short term.  Fareed Zakaria has a video on this.  It is appropriate for a candidate to have strong feelings about certain things: justice, equality, fairness, decency, etc.  Hostility to a particular industry, e.g. Exxon Mobil, or Amazon, or Coal, or Verizon, is less attractive in a president.  He or she could be critical, but not hostile.  Bernie Sanders has had it in for Medical Insurance.  So have I.  But I don't think it is seemly to bring up that hostility onto the podium.

Ethical.  I don’t think a lot needs to be said on this issue; not that it is unimportant.  Anyone who thinks that ethics need not be a big deal in this election, or any future election, is obviously not on my wavelength, and may stop reading right now.

Attitude to Fellow Candidates.  This is one thing I liked about various of the younger candidates, and even Elizabeth Warren: they seldom lashed out at their fellows.  The candidates have coaches, who instruct them on what to say, and when to say it.  I’m not sure which of these have done this, but some of them are encouraging their candidates to attack their fellow candidates with a little more edge.  They believe, apparently, that the voters like to see a little blood. I for one do not.  I hope that Andrew Yang, and Eric Swalwell, and Kamala Harris, and Cory Booker, did not need to drop out for not having attacked their opponents strongly enough.

A sense of Humor.  Honestly, all our candidates have a sense of humor.  The best of them apply their sense of humor to their speeches.  (Deplorably, some of the moderators appear to need to take their humor vitamins a bit more regularly.)

Perhaps the most important attribute of any leader in US politics for the next decade or two is a sense of urgency about the climate.  But there are other things that are just as important, because, among other things, they could delay or derail climate action.  The chief among these is the problem of corruption, or money in politics.  It is the power of the Fossil Fuel Lobby and the Automobile Lobby that together have destroyed past plans to curtail the destruction of the environment, and the Greenhouse Effect**.  As soon as these lobbies are de-fanged, climate legislation can proceed with all deliberate speed.  To the extent that these lobbies have the power to influence weak-minded congressmen, Congress will find itself powerless to make laws that are unpopular with the Fossil Fuel Industry. Even worse, these lobbies will undertake to write legislation on the behalf of Congress, which will end up with Congress enacting legislation that will be actually ineffective.  There are a myriad laws that exist to make the job of gas exploration as painless for the Fossil Fuel Companies as possible, and these must be unraveled decisively and completely.  But it is folly to expect these lobbyists to do it on our behalf.

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* "Criteria" = Standards.

** "Greenhouse Effect" = A tendency for certain gases in the air (e.g. Carbon Dioxide, which is what is released when we burn paper, gasoline, wood, etc) to send back heat down to the surface.  The earth maintains a steady average temperature only if the extra heat is allowed to escape out to space.  If the heat is reflected back due to the Greenhouse Effect, the earth will continue to heat up.

Short-term versus Long-term goals in US politics

A great many Democrats and liberals are preoccupied with unseating (or defeating, if that’s the preferred word) our current president.  His policies reflect those of the Republican Party, oddly enough—I would have imagined that the president’s personal imperatives would have trumped those of the party—but almost everyone finds that the tone he adopts is jarring.  Even some Republicans, or former republicans, anyway, do not like the tone he adopts.  There are many crude and jarring actions he takes, which undermines the values that the party has stated that it stood for for many decades.  There is a great deal of the equivalent of elementary school playground brawling, of locker-room boasting, the sorts of white lies that get bandied about, moving into grey lies, and blue lies, contradictory statements that first assert some fact, and then deny it; all of which would get in the way of hiring the president as, for instance, an executive of a large company.  But he does not need to behave with any sort of decorum, since he has his own company.  And because ethics are not considered of much importance by our president, members of his party have mostly abandoned being concerned with ethics.  It is as if they’re saying: if we were an established party, we could be concerned with ethics; but this is the battle of our lives; if we don’t keep this president for a second term (in which he can attempt to make it impossible for the Democrats to ever win an election, and impossible for any person of ordinary means to ever win a case in court) we may as well all get out of politics.

Both parties are fighting like cornered rats.  They’re both acting as if their backs are against the wall.

Part of the problem is that the Republican strategy of taking the gloves off has backfired.  They’ve provided all the excuses that (they think) the Democrats could need, to equal or exceed the level of crudeness the Republicans have shown this presidential term.  As most criminals do, they expect their opponents to think like them, though it is likely the Democrats will not stoop to some of those depths.  The Democrats that we have grown up with would never try to disenfranchise people; nobody would be turned away from the polls.  But there is a new breed of Democrat—several new breeds, and I do not view all of them with dislike, but nor do I embrace any of them who consider with favor some of the more unethical ploys that the Republicans have adopted—and we have to suspend judgement until we know how these folks will roll.

The most important problem Congress, the Senate, the President, the Supreme Court, the Press, the Justice Department, and the Security Forces face now and in the future, is corruption.  Part of this problem is, indirectly, money in politics.  Warren and Sanders, and several of the other candidates and former candidates have signaled this by not accepting large donations to their campaign funds (their so-called War Chests).

As long as campaign finance plays such an enormous role in how the elections go (and my cynical friends assure me that it is unreasonable to expect that it will not; think how many people TV stations, and advertising companies, and private advertising agencies, the people who create the ads that the candidates use, how many people these companies employ!  Do we want to throw these people out on the street without a job?  Yes.) money is going to distort how these choices are made.  I have made up my mind that Michael Bloomberg should not win the nomination of the Democrats.  This is sad, but it is necessary.  I’m thankful that this is a good excuse for not considering Tom Steyer either, because I think anyway that he just isn’t photogenic enough to win the presidency, though we have to bear in mind that Nixon won, despite being not an attractive man!

I am privately alarmed at the fact that at least four of the candidates are in their seventies.  Though youth alone is not a liability, I feel sorry that this election might take a great toll on the health of these people, who could be such a fabulous resource for our nation, even if not in the White House.  Age alone is no guarantee of sanity, as we have seen in the elections of 2016.

I really liked Congressman Swalwell, who dropped out of the race very early on.  I miss Kamala Harris, Michael Bennett, and to a lesser extent, Beto O’Rourke and Cory Booker, and even Marianne Williamson.  Some of these dropped out because of their lackluster poll results, and some dropped out because of fundraising weaknesses.  See?  Even the poor poll results are due to problems with money.  Evidently history is trying to teach us something: Don’t try anything in modern America if you don’t have money.  Does this mean we can’t be critical of Bloomberg and Steyer trying to buy elections?

It won’t stop me.  I will continue to support those candidates who only accept small donations, until the campaign is over.  But People’s United has to be overturned, and then some public financing of federal campaigns will have to become law.

I did not mean to omit Ms. Tulsi Gabbard from the discussion.  Hillary Clinton has written that Tulsi Gabbard appeared to be someone the Russians would select to be the focus of a third party ploy to disrupt the elections.  This is not, on the face of it, a criticism of Ms. Gabbard, but it does seem like a veiled criticism of her.  I’m beginning to think that Ms. Gabbard is not bent on winning this nomination, but hopes that this run will give her a diving board for a future run for president.  I wish her all the best, no matter what her legitimate objectives are!  And the same goes for all the other candidates, including those who have dropped out.

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Political Noobs Get Mad on Social Media!

A lot of folks are waxing indignant on facebook.

The funny thing is that these people are just now getting mad over things that we have been following for decades, and we have been getting mad at, too!  "The rich are getting richer!"  (Where have you been, kid?)  "Wall street doing great doesn't mean people are doing better!"  (We knew that.)  "Unemployment is going down, only because some businesses first laid off their employees, and now, under Trump, are re-hiring those former employees part time.  It looks like unemployment is going down, but people have lost their benefits!"  (An old, old trick.)

It takes a lot of self-control to be patient with these folks who are just now discovering the dirty underbelly of politics!  But we have to be patient; the political system we have is basically that what most people want is what we have to live with, and if we want something different, we have to persuade our fellow citizens that our objectives are better.  Just getting angry is not enough!  (And, it isn't guaranteed that what most people want is what we get, either; and that's why we're so angry that Trump tried to get Ukraine to help him throw shade on the Bidens.  There is nothing that Ukraine could really bring into the news, except that young Biden was earning a lot of money for doing practically nothing, which is not illegal; Trump and his family have been doing it for years.  He just wanted the story to hit the news; Fox would have taken it from there.  It didn't have to be true!  Playing Ping Pong with lies is a new trick, about which we're all upset.  But all the other things: unemployment, racism, sexism, gerrymandering, taxing the poor---we've been watching that for decades.)  All the italics are for the benefit of those who don't read a lot.

Well, we knew we would have to pick ourselves up off the floor after this impeachment thing.  It wasn't going to happen.  Trump, if you notice, is not as thrilled as you would have expected, to have evaded being removed from office.  What sorts of reactions do you think the voters would have, to have seen this entire thing take place?

Some of the Alt Right are probably rejoicing that Trump escaped unscathed.  But I can imagine that some members of Alt Right families are watching things a little more carefully---even in families with less than a full mental quiver, there must be a few outliers with more perception than their siblings---and these must be realizing the sense of what the Dems were angry about.  Without the opportunity to vote without interference, we have nothing, not even the little that we have now.

Those who were hostile to Trump are probably more hostile than ever.  Well, this is not surprising.  The one positive thing that could come out of this is that they will turn out for the elections.  If all the Dems had voted in 2016, Trump would never have come near the White House.  (Even he was surprised when he won, though he pretended that he expected to win all along.)  Some Democrats were all upset at Hillary having won the nomination, and stayed home.  This is a big lesson: in today's politics, we cannot afford to sulk.

Over the next several months, we're going to be subject to a large amount of both propaganda and basic political messages.  The trick is not to get mad, not to get jaded, but focus on finding out whom to vote for, both for President, and for Senators, and Congressmen.  (And Mayors, and Judges, and members of school boards, and state representatives.  Bear in mind that there are many people running for office under the Democrat banner who do not deserve to hold any sort of office: people who rub everyone the wrong way, people who want to channel the people's money into the coffers of their friends; and general slimeballs.  Do not vote for them, just because of their party.)

Try to get a feeling for how things have changed over the past ten or fifteen years.  Note how the Republicans take credit for things the Democrats have done.  Note how the Deficit that Republicans were so upset about was actually paid down by the Democrats.  Note how the Republicans claim to protect the part of Obamacare that prevents Insurance from denying coverage for pre-existing conditions, but actually work behind the scenes to weaken it.  Note how Republicans claim to want to lower taxes, but have actually raised taxes in a few instances.  (They may not do it in the future, because they know the Democrats will pay off the deficits eventually!)

A lot of Republicans are afraid of Trump's tweeting.  Trump has a lot of followers, and he used to be able to ruin the chances of a person running for office with a single tweet, calling him some crazy name, such as Little Mike, or whatever.  That has been a little less successful of late; Trump's favorite for the Alabama Senator lost, his favorite for Kentucky Governor lost, and it looks as though McConnell might lose his seat in the senate.

Lastly, the Alt-Right rank and file (not the crooked leadership) must, on their own, take note of whether their lives are really better.  So far they have been satisfied with having Trump tell them that their lives are better.  One of these days Trump will make a claim that even his followers, who have bought everything that Trump has sold thus far, will notice as being false.  He had better not push his luck too far.

But, look, let's not make fun of Trump's family: his wife, his youngest kid.  I don't think we need to go that far at being hostile to Trump.  (He himself seems not to care too much about them, but that's no reason we should take cheap shots at them.  I dislike targeting the families of people in office on principle, but if you need a practical reason for desisting, remember that if a Democrat is voted in, we would not like his family being harassed.)

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The Iowa Caucus Has Problems

Though the Iowa Caucus has been a great idea, it is becoming increasingly difficult to get great ideas working as they should, in this new improved world of ours!  (Last I heard, someone had created an App for the leaders of the Iowa caucuses to send in their numbers, and either the App did not work as advertised, or the leaders didn't use the App appropriately.  Apps are tricky things.  And furthermore, any and all Apps can be made to report to people and websites of which the users don't know anything about.  I'm not saying that happened in Iowa, but . . . the fewer Apps, the better, if you know what I mean.)

Anyway, its going to be a while before the information from Iowa comes out, but the null hypothesis there is (in other words, what we would believe if new information is not forthcoming) that the top four contenders are running neck and neck: Biden, Sanders, Warren and Buttigieg.

Now it is time for us to worry less about what everybody else thinks, which is what most of us have agonized about thus far, and settle what we think. 

Those who simply focused on getting rid of Trump (to put it crudely) have wondered which candidate can get the most votes at the general election.  Well, for those who are afraid that the most radical candidates will alienate moderate voters, listen: a Democratic president cannot simply put things in place without the active participation of Congress.  (Well; he or she might be able to do this, but it will create a stink from both the conservatives and the liberals.)  So the most far out schemes of both Bernie and Elizabeth Warren will be toned down to the sort of plans that Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg are likely to try to float anyway.  So let us not worry about our nominee being too radical.

As far as the unaligned moderates out there: we can't do better than choosing someone who is not looking to antagonize the GOP.  None of the Democrat candidates are looking for a fight with the GOP (though, to be honest, we do think that they have betrayed themselves, and the conservative part of the population, by going this route of hostility to migrants, and belligerence to foreign nations.)

Biden: historically, he has been willing to compromise with conservatives (to the extent of talking in conservative language, occasionally).  But I'm afraid that, as some commentators have pointed out, if he is elected, Republicans could try to impeach him simply based on the Ukraine fairy tales that Trump and Giuliani have manufactured.

Warren is against the usual Washington shenanigans, but (she claims) she isn't prejudiced against the GOP as such.  I believe her; the question is whether the moderate rank and file believe her.  She has a few months to make them believe her.  She can be an excellent president, and in fact, I don't believe we can do better than her.

Sanders is becoming increasingly belligerent.  I think he would win if we have a massive Democrat turnout at the polls in November, but he is likely to get the Republicans all fired up as well.  I don't see a lot of healing taking place with Sanders on the ballot.  Now, bear in mind: Sanders is not mad at the GOP as such (or rather, he hasn't been.  After this impeachment, he is likely to be quite angry and disappointed in the conservatives), he is angry against money in politics, and corruption in government, and against the tax laws.  But those who are against money in government (and the tax laws) must also have conservatives among them.  It has only recently been the case that those who call themselves Republicans have been OK with the sorts of shenanigans that they have got into recently: with Russia, and bribery, and spreading false rumors, etc.  It is as if they're saying: we can't beat the Dems legitimately, so let's hand over the elections to Trump and these crooks, and see what we can get.

Yang is really a millennial moderate.  The young folks who have phones surgically planted in their palms see Yang as a hero, and he isn't really bad.  He hasn't alienated the conservatives, and he has retained a large number of liberal Democrats who are not interested in getting hostile with the Alt Right.  He calls himself 'a numbers guy,' and he seems at home with the numerical gymnastics that the economists like to play with: let's cut taxes by this much, and people will spend that much, and the unemployment rate will fall that much, and Wall Street will do that much.  I don't like these sorts of calculations, but if he must be the one who gets the nomination, I guess I can stand four years of him.  He at least knows the language better than Trump.

Buttigieg is a moderate.  Electability-wise, we have to consider all those whose view of the White House is that of a distinguished-looking guy in the Oval Office, and a gracious woman standing behind him, ready to help host a few nice parties for bigwigs from Europe.  I only know a few people among my neighbors.  I don't think having Buttigieg in the WH will be a disaster, but I have a feeling that it would be a tough sell.  Heck, a woman president would be a tough sell, but people have done it, and it has worked nicely.  But in these matters, the USA is not a trail blazer; we wait until it has been done in, say, Netherlands, or Russia, before we elect a gay president.

Klobuchar (Amy to her friends) is also an excellent choice, but she can't do it alone; she needs to be backed up with a strong army of administrative supporters, but I'm sure she can get one together.  She isn't committed to any of these Health Reform plans that have got some people all upset, but neither is she very hostile to any of them.  Honestly, a Health Reform plan must come from some sort of committee; I don't think it needs to be a detailed Take It Or Leave It plan.  A president needs to have the will to make it palatable, and not likely to be repealed by the GOP if they win the next election.  (The difficulty the GOP has had with repealing Obamacare simply goes to show how well the latter was put together.)

Bloomberg.  I hope he doesn't win the nomination.  If he does, it will go to show that only someone who can mobilize big, old-fashioned pots of money can win this election.  Maybe Trump has set us back a decade or two, and the idea of Big Money Can Win has captured the electorate, but I fervently hope not.  The same goes for Tom Steyer.  They both have excellent ideas, but they're sort of a tough sell; many people are tired of the bi-coastal power wielders to let them keep the leadership of the nation.  All the other candidates except Buttigieg and Klobuchar are bi-coastal types, but these two billionaires are obnoxiously bi-coastal.

So that's my take on the acceptability vs. electability conundrum we're faced with.  Of course, these issues will be decided one state at a time first.  But unless we stand by whoever the Party picks, no matter how lame, we're screwed.

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