Category: Politics

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Cats and Dogs for Lunch and Trump’s Demise

Enough words have been spilled on this, but you have to listen to those with some authority―e.g., Frank Luntz, the long-time Republican pollster on how Trump has blown his chances in the election:

Luntz said he thought it wasn’t that the Democratic nominee won the debate, but “I think more accurately, is that Donald Trump lost.”

“And this is not the worst debate performance I’ve seen in my career, but it’s very close to it,” he added. . . . “I think that he loses [the election] because of this debate performance.”

Luntz cited in particular the comments about people in Ohio eating dogs and cats. We all know how this went down. (There are 46.5 million cat owners in the U.S., and 65.1 million own dogs.) Thankfully, my cat does not live in Ohio.

Let’s not fail to mention Trump’s comments about Democrats killing just-born babies.

Harris’s reaction shots throughout were priceless, worth more than any verbal commentary.

On another note, I thought she fumbled her message on the economy, where she clearly trails Trump in the polls. Harris offered a lot of hollow phrases, like “the dignity of home ownership” in her “opportunity economy.” One writer says she needs to address people’s real problems more directly:

You deserve the freedom to live a good life. No one gets to take advantage of you to get rich. If you are growing up in West Virginia or rural North Carolina, you should be able to find a good job where you are and not have to leave seeking work. When you have kids, a big tax credit will help you to decide for yourself whether to work or stay at home. Reproductive freedom includes the chance to raise a family without choking economic stress.

I’d be more specific than that. Republicans now offer their own bogus answers to these problems, and their partisans have no choice but to believe them. Only Harris can stop this inanity. And she will have to do it with plan specifics, not high-sounding generalities. “Democrats are the party of the system this year, and if they don’t show that the system can change radically, the advantage will pass to those who promise to break it.”

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Harris’s Overhyped Interview: We Learned Nothing

The problem was not so much with Dana Bash, though she let Kamala off the hook too often. The problem was that the Vice President kept hiding behind Biden’s coattails and spoke mostly in generalities. She kept saying, “My values haven’t changed.” Dana should have asked, “Well then, what are your policies for carrying them out?” It would have been telling if Dana had used a few hard-hitting questions instead of the puffballs she tossed out.

Kamala gave up on the Green New Deal, she said, because Biden’s new climate plans coopted most of it. Well, in fact they didn’t, and a good interviewer would have questioned that. The whole point of the exercise seemed to reinforce what she had already established at the DNC—her good-guy, middle-class likeability. There she did make an excellent acceptance speech, hitting all the right notes. But personally she blew it for me when she reinforced the Biden arms for Israel policy while calling blandly for a cease-fire. And sadly, there was nothing on abortion.

So thanks for an hour of apple-polishing and raising questions that got pro-forma answers. CNN is more disgusting by the day; how many inane commercials kept interrupting this unproductive show? Kamala couldn’t even give straightforward answers to her role in the border security mess. She babbled on about price gouging and giving first-time home buyers $25,000 in down payment support. How’s that going to help lower inflation? She sometimes sounded like Tim Walz who when challenged about his DUI arrest appeared evasive. And what was he doing there at all?

The Harris campaign has to do better than this.

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Sen. John Goodman (D-IL) Speaks to the DNC

Let me borrow the words of a favorite author, Saul Bellow. He opened his novel Augie March this way: “I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city―and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.”

Unlike Augie, I grew up in a wealthy Chicago and its suburbs, living a pretty innocent life, finding it hard to knock on doors and understand a world delimited by stern Republican boundaries. It took the McCarthy era to open my eyes to the incontestable conservative authority that then moved the world. Chicago was its capitol. Trump is its debased inheritor who puts the old party to shame.

The history of Chicago political conventions will not be lost on some of you. Now we have the “Happy Days Are Here Again” Kamala revelry which we can’t help but treasure and enjoy. Yet, for us oldsters, 1968 won’t go away. Vietnam split the party irrevocably, and there are still echoes of that in the dissent over the war in Gaza, which simmers in the background. Thousands of protesters are kept under wraps by Chicago’s good cops.

Party heavyweights have rightly kept the celebration going but there will have to be a reckoning. How Kamala handles this knottiest of issues, whether and how she will break with Biden’s wretched policy of arming Israel will be her biggest challenge. I have a hunch she will be up for it. Everything in her history predicts it.

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More Conversation Stoppers

Michigan Central Station before restoration
    • Your “Check Engine” light is on.
    • Do cat ladies wear cat suits?
    • She “all of a sudden decided to become a Black person.”
    • “Welcome to the ‘Underconsumption Core’ TikTok Trend—Dog Owner Edition” (Newsweek)
    • Next time you’re in Paris, go for a swim in the Seine.
    • Reporter Evan Gershkovich: “The food was really good.”
    • Mingus to a pushy nightclub patron: “Your breath stinks. Get away from me.”
    • If Trump had been wearing ear muffs. . .
    • Overheard: “Your midlife crisis don’t mean shit to me.”
    • A Jewish Vice President?. . . Talk to your doctor.
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Harris and Mingus

Maybe she looks a little looney here because this photo was cribbed from a video of her jazz-buying spree in DC last year. Kamala Harris and her husband are big jazz fans, as some of you may know. Husband Doug Emhoff was written up in The Atlantic last month:

The second gentleman, who might also be called the first jazz fan, is such a devotee that he named his children, Ella and Cole, for Ella Fitzgerald and John Coltrane, two of his favorite musicians. . . .He said, “Jazz isn’t constructed. It’s a little messy, like democracy can be at times.”

Anyhow, Kamala calls Mingus “really one of the greatest jazz performers ever.” Well, who is going to argue with that?

The fact that she bought Mingus’s most ambitious (and his favorite) album, Let My Children Hear Music, impresses me. She has good taste. The music is a little messy and a little disciplined, like democracy. Here is the opening number from the album, which has an almost classical feel to much of it, despite the title―“The Shoes of the Fisherman’s Wife Are Some Jive Ass Slippers.”

To accompany the album Mingus wrote a strong extended essay, which got some notoriety. Here’s part of what he said:

I think the music on this record is serious in every sense. I say, let my children have music. I said it earlier. For God’s sake, rid this society of some of the noise so that those who have ears will be able to use them some place listening to good music. When I say good I don’t mean that today’s music is bad because it is loud. I mean the structures have paid no attention to the past history of music. Nothing is simple. It’s as if people came to Manhattan and acted like it was still full of trees and grass and Indians instead of concrete and tall buildings. It’s like a tailor cutting clothes without knowing the design. . . .

Sy Johnson―my good friend, now deceased―orchestrated, arranged and conducted much of the Children album. You can find his comments throughout my book Mingus Speaks. Here’s one such: Mingus’s “music is just full of earth and it’s always got its feet in the dirt. I mean it’s jazz, it has human cries in it, and it’s full of humanity.”

I’d like to think that may be what appealed to Kamala. Her humanity is the foundation of her appeal. It’s what people tune in to. And it’s more important than all the money she’s raised and all the memes that have taken hold online. That is what will beat Trump.

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“Let Me Get My Shoes”

That’s what he said three times while the Secret Service was hauling him off the stage. Wounded and bleeding, he was worrying about his shoes. Why haven’t people commented more about this strange fixation on his footwear? It may be one of his notable oddities, of which there are many.

One theory has it that he wears elevator shoes, which come off easy, and he didn’t want people to see him three inches shorter than normal. Sounds like Trump, doesn’t it?

You may remember the first gold sneakers he was hawking online. That first offering, as the NYMag informs us, was “the $399 gold Never Surrender high-tops, which the website indicated were limited to only 1,000 pairs and had sold out within a day of their release.” There were other designs like the Potus 45 and the T-Red Wave, all with highly inflated prices. A psychologist writes:

If you frequently wear high-top sneakers, you’re perceived as having an avoidant attachment style meaning that you care little for the opinions of others and are incredibly self-reliant [read self-absorbed].

The Trump Store is moving beyond sneakers to lots more Trump schlock, from bibles and coolers to Trump teddy bears

and kitchen essentials and even dog leashes.
But the fixation on shoes continues. Here we have the Trump Golf Shoe.

And now the Assassination Special, the Fight Sneaker.

A whole load of other stuff was being hawked to lovers of trumpdreck at the convention. He must be as broke as Rudy Giuliani. These things will serve as fond mementos of a defeated and demented candidate who barely avoided death. They appeal to women as well as men.

Gals of a certain age with prominent veins should avoid such displays. An addiction to shoes often applies to women. Some of us will remember Imelda Marcos and her 3,000 pairs of shoes. We will remember Trump far longer.

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President Quixote

Ron Klain as Sancho Panza

I had written this satirical piece about President Biden, and then suddenly last night the Former President endured an assassination attempt. Another horrible indictment of the violence in this country. So it might not be in good taste to publish the piece right now, but the political battles will go on and Trump will survive.

Fintan O’Toole may have written one of the sharpest and saddest takedowns of President Biden, our current Don Quixote. In his NYR piece Savior Complex he explained it this way: “Biden’s tragedy is that he has come to feel that he alone can rescue America.”

As Biden sees it, his destiny is to defeat Trump, his magic dragon, his doppelganger, his antithesis and nemesis. Like Don Q, Biden is obsessed with his honor, here it’s the notion of “finishing the job.” Unfortunately, like the Don, the disconnect from his own reality has become palpable for all to see.

As I write this, we’re on the cusp of discovering whether a grand council of Democratic sages (Pelosi, Schumer, Obama et al.) might prevail on Joe to step aside and get off his high horse. They don’t have a lot of time. If I were able to consult with Joe, I might render it this way:

“Look, man, here’s the deal. Let me put it to you from one aged American to another. You seem to think you can outrun Father Time. You’re also fond of quoting your father: “Joey, don’t compare me to the Almighty. Compare me to the alternative.” You keep trying to beat the devil, and nobody’s buying it. In fact, what you need is simply to face the discordant music of getting old.

“Getting old means relinquishing a lot of things, and not just your car keys. You have a history of communication failures―lapses, gaffes and solecisms―all compounded because of the complexity and uncertainty of issues you must deal with daily. Your tasks get more difficult, and aging makes them more formidable. Your delivery gets worse, and sound bites are hard to package, as you should have learned. You’ve been a good president, Joe. But now the signs of senility are hard to miss, and you don’t want to end up like Dianne Feinstein, do you?

“I’ve been retired for fifteen or more years, my friend. Of course we all hate the word and the concept behind it. But you don’t have to sit on the front porch of your Rehoboth beach house. If it’s honor that moves you, let it come to you as a highly revered figure of U.S. politics, not as the man who tried to beat the devil.”

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Joe Must Go. Politics Ain’t Beanbag.

Some of us remember Lyndon Johnson renouncing the presidency in 1968, one of his finest moments. Some of us remember Nixon being forced out under pressure. Now we hold our collective breaths to see what Joe Biden will do. If he doesn’t resign, there is no hope of beating Trump in the next election. The results of which we leave to your imagination.

In one sense his decision will rest in the hands of his family, his wife Jill and his longtime followers. The more senile Joe has become, the more they have protected him. He offers us few press conferences, infrequent unstaged interviews, clichéd speeches, and the same old downhome Scranton working class bullshit. Senile people forever keep on referencing the past.

As someone who has done debate prep, it appeared to me that he likely had no professional coaching and relied solely on his White House cronies (Ron Klain, Bob Bauer et al.). James Carville said it too: “He doesn’t have advisers. He has employees.” Odds are they stuffed him with the obvious issues and canned responses. No professional coach would have let him appear as he did. Pee in your pants, call in sick, for God’s sake.

Presidential debates generally are more style than substance, and they are a perfect vehicle for a convincing conman.  Trump rapidly floats his same (or worse) whoppers and gets away with it uncontested. He paralyzes our analytical powers and takes obvious joy in manipulating people. Many want to believe him because it’s their form of heroin. In the flood of this the truth cannot prevail; people like Truthful Joe cannot prevail.

Part of the problem is that Biden has usually wanted to avoid being in the public eye―and the public hasn’t been crazy about seeing him either. Lili Loofbourow in the WaPo nicely put it this way: “Biden’s unwillingness and inability to court attention has, for example, made it difficult for him to sell the public on his achievements.”

There have been many comments urging Biden to quit—and many urging the opposite. Among the best and most forthright of the former is Tom Friedman’s. He urges his friend Joe Biden to step aside.

I had been ready to give Biden the benefit of the doubt up to now, because during the times I engaged with him one on one, I found him up to the job. He clearly is not any longer. His family and his staff had to have known that. They have been holed up at Camp David preparing for this momentous debate for days now. If that is the best performance they could summon from him, he should preserve his dignity and leave the stage at the end of this term.

Finally, it’s not overly dramatic to say that the state of the nation is at stake and we face a  drastic challenge to democratic rule. Your decision, like it or not, is a political one―to win the election. You can discount everything else: the mess that will be wrought on the Democratic convention if Biden drops out, loyalty to the party and the president, the shortcomings of other challengers. Trump made it this way. He cannot survive.

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Debate Prep: A Remembrance

On Thursday evening comes CNN’s ballyhooed clown show with two unsympathetic candidates. Neither of them is very good at debating, and one has eschewed all preparation. Many will watch to see who stumbles the most, not who wins.

The attraction of a political debate is more than seeing who scores the most points. It’s to discover whom we finally can identify with. The Kennedy-Nixon televised debates in 1960 set the pattern: JFK was relaxed, prepared, and showed some style. Nixon’s presentation was cold-blooded and his tense body language gave him away. TV made all the difference, this for the first time. Though we know political media is very different now, the visual truth remains, despite AI.

When I was teaching presentation skills, I got a great mashup video cassette of those debates from a friend at American Express, where we were coaching some execs. I wish I still had it. Let’s hope that whoever is coaching Biden shows them that tape.

Biden is a hard man to identify with, while Trump is just a bomb-thrower. And debate prep is more than bringing your client up to speed on the issues and your opponent’s weaknesses. You must enable him to show his character, his realness, that he’s not just the guy you could have a beer with but someone you could warm to and respect. Reagan sets the example here.

I worked with two Rhode Island governors in the 1980s, Ed DiPrete, a Republican who later went to jail, and Bruce Sundlun, a Democrat. They battled each other several times for the governorship, and finally Bruce won in 1990 with a landslide 74% of the vote. I coached him in his presentations (speeches and press conferences, etc.) and prepared him for his first debate in 1986. He was not an easy person to work with.

Besides being irascible and unpredictable, Sundlun had had an incredible career as a WWII bomber pilot flying B-17s over Germany, getting shot down and surviving with the French Resistance, then postwar becoming a very successful businessman, which led him into a life of public service and, finally, politics.

I worked with him on the contentious issues, of course, but the main thrust was to get him to relax and open up about his present life―and his goal to make Rhode Island a destination for tourism and business. It was challenging to convince him to talk openly about himself without being pompous. “Captain Blowhard” the Providence Journal called him. Well, the man had a lot to be pompous about. His wife-to-be Susie was sometimes present in our sessions and she hassled him about that.

There are some techniques to get a client to open up and reveal who he really is. One is getting him to tell stories about growing up and remember being a kid again. Bruce finally got the message to humanize himself, I think, even though he lost that race to DiPrete.

Our sessions were also a real lesson to me about what moves people and how persuasion works on television. You’ll see once again on Thursday whether debate prep matters.

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Alice in Bump Stock Land

Down the rabbit hole into the dreary land of SCOTUS came Alice, looking for clarity and judgment and finding none. She simply wanted to know if those things they called bump stocks―devices to make those nasty guns they called assault rifles―could be modified to kill even more people. Her White Rabbit was the ATF which had banned the stocks after a gun nut shot and killed 60 people out of a hotel window in Las Vegas.

Years had passed since then and Alice, like quite a few others, thought killing people at random should not be for fun or made-up revenge. The Mad Hatter told her that deer don’t shoot back. He maintained that firing off 30 rounds in 11 seconds would be sufficient to assault a school or Walmart with no problem. Who needs a bump stock? Maybe the justices were smoking some shit?

At the Mad Tea Party the jaundiced justices promoted the theory that you had to keep pulling the trigger to activate more firing. This entirely incorrect notion presented by Clarence the Cheshire Cat concluded the bogus trial, while three justices loudly dissented and the cat kept grinning.

Alice finally recognized that the whole thing was a house of cards.