November 1, 2016--Ode to J. Edgar

With the current flap about FBI director James Comey making an even bigger mess of the already-messiest presidential election in history, reading recently about the reign of J. Edgar Hoover, during this politically perverse year I've been asking where is J. Edgar when we need him?

Hoover was all the terrible things you know about him and then some. And I'm not talking about his penchant for black sheath dresses and extra-high heels. By today's standards that makes him more interesting and even amusing.

What I am missing in Hoover is his ability to get things done and to keep certain kinds of high-level matters where they belong--under control and out of the public eye.

For example, he had the goods on John F. Kennedy both before and after he assumed the presidency. He told brother Bobby, who was JFK's Attorney General, that he, Hoover, would keep the lid on Kennedy's womanizing (now there's a word for you), philandering that makes Bill Clinton seem celibate, as long as Kennedy let him remain FBI director and cooled his fooling around with Mafia mistresses. In other words, Hoover was devoted to his own prerogatives and to keeping things running on a version of even keel.

Comey, in contrast, whatever the email denouement, is nothing if not totally disruptive.

When in July he issued his report on the first swatch of Hillary emails, finding that she had been "extremely careless" but not indictable, Democrats raced to praise him while Republicans saw a pro-Hillary conspiracy involving Comey, attorney general Roberta Lynch, and Bill Clinton who, now famously, had a tarmac tete-a-tete with Lynch during which he allegedly promised her that she could continue as AG after Hillary is elected if she squelched the FBI probe.

And now, when on Friday Comey sent his incoherent letter to the congressional committee investigating Clinton's emails, just 10 days before Election Day, Democrats are excoriating him (Harry Reid says he may have committed a crime) for supposedly sandbagging Hillary.

And though Comey is a registered Republican and was an appointee of George W. Bush's, the same Republicans (i.e. Donald Trump) who lambasted him for his initial findings, this time around are praising him for going rogue with the now renewed investigation.

About this resumed scrutiny, here is one paranoid scenario about what is unfolding.

(Note--during this literally psychotic election season nothing one might imagine happening is paranoid since the craziest behaviors have become the norm--at least once of day in Trump's case.)

Though he is a Republican, Comey is of the old school of Republicans--a rare moderate--and thus he despises Donald Trump and wants to see him soundly defeated.

So he issues this seemingly inappropriate letter even before anyone in his office has looked at any of the emails recently found on Anthony Weiner's laptop (talk about psychotic) and then, after being massacred in the mainstream media, appears to backpedal, saying that FBI agents will fast track an analysis of these emails and report to the public perhaps even before Election Day if there are (or aren't) any emails that haven't been seen before that might convince him that Clinton is indictable.

The fact that nothing remotely like this has ever happened in all of American history aside, we are where are and, for sanity's sake, here's what might really be going on--

• Agents using metadata search methods will quickly review the Weiner emails and Comey will report by the end of this week, three days before the election, that there is nothing new and Hillary is finally and fully in the clear.
• The voting public goes crazy. 
• The Trump people cry foul and claim this shows once again that the election is rigged.
• The Hillary people are ecstatic and rush to the polls in record numbers.
• She wins in both a popular vote and Electoral vote landslide--52-45% in the vote count and 450-90 in Electoral votes.
• Comey sees the results he wants and goes down as a footnote to history.
• Two years from now, when his FBI job ends, Comey secures a $5.0 million advance to write his memoirs. He makes the rounds of all the talkshows. This is the last time he is ever heard from.
• Hillary doesn't take Huma Abedin with her to the White House. She hires a replacement "body woman." So Huma, after finally dumping Weiner, joins CNN as a political commentator. On the side, she resumes her no-show job at the Clinton Foundation.
• Anthony Weiner is convicted of sexting a minor and gets 3-5 in the slammer.
• And, yes, the Trump disaffiliates do not march on Washington with pitchforks and torches. They retreat to their finished basements more devoted than ever to six-packs of Bud.

March 11, 2014--White Men

Democrats finally are paying attention to the fact that in the 2012 election Barack Obama received just 35 percent of the white male vote, down from 41 percent four years earlier.

He won the election because he received more than half of women's votes (55 percent), 93 percent of the African-American vote,  71 percent of the Hispanic vote, 75 percent of the Asian vote, and 60 percent of voters between 18 and 29. That was his winning coalition.

But in the meantime, though Democrats kept the White House, largely because the overwhelming percentage of white male votes went to Republicans, the GOP maintained its majority in the House of Representatives and are threatening to wrest control of the Senate later this year.

This should not be new news. No Democrat running for president has received a majority of white men's votes since 1964 when Lyndon Johnson trounced Barry Goldwater, carrying 44 states.

What's the problem?

These men voted for Democrats for decades--from at least Franklin Roosevelt's time to LBJ's. But then they began to drift toward the right. Most notably, Ronald Reagan was elected not just because Jimmy Carter and four years later Walter Mondale were weak candidates but because he figured out how to appeal to what came to be known as Reagan Democrats--disaffiliated white men.

Many of these white men felt abandoned by the Democrats because the party began to be perceived as too devoted to civil and women's rights. These men who felt they had worked hard to achieve middle-class status were appalled by their perception that New Deal and subsequent Great Society programs, including affirmative action, were unfair to working people. And, of course, there was a healthy dose of racism and misogyny in the mix.

On the other side of the political spectrum, liberals and progressives began to caricature these men with equal passion and overstatement. If liberals were not tree-hugging N___ -lovers, conservative white males were not all redneck, trailer-trash six-pack guzzlers. In fact, characterizing these Reagan Democrats as such only drove more of them further right as they felt mocked and ignored.

Fellow progressives, let's be honest--we do tend to show not-so-thinly-veiled contempt for these white men. We do not want to engage as equals the less-educated and the unwashed. In our hearts we know too many of us feel this way and those who we largely mischaracterize are not unaware of what we think about them. From this kind of contempt, one cannot expect to widen one's political coalition.

The Democrats' plan seems to be to let demographic changes solve their problem. Hispanics are among the fastest growing segment of the population and as soon as there are enough of them in, say, Texas, just carrying Texas, New York, and California will give Democrat presidential candidates a leg up on an Electoral College majority.

But--and this is a big but--just as we might expect to see a series of Democrats elected to the presidency, we will simultaneously see increasing Republican majorities in Congress.

Waiting for demographics to overwhelm white men, then, will not get the job done. So what to do?

First, acknowledge that the 35 percent of white men's votes Obama received in 2012 (as unpopular as he was and as African-Ameircan as he is) is not insignificant. Nor was the 41 percent in 2008. The challenge for Democrats, then, is how to at least retain that 35 percent and inch back to Obama's 2008 41 percent.

To begin to do this we have to stop making fun of, showing contempt for these frustrated and unhappy men. In addition, we should try to figure out why they feel so disaffiliated. Polls tell us that they think the Democrats are the Mommy Party, more concerned about giving everyone food stamps and welfare than standing up to the unions, communists, and terrorists.

We shouldn't go along with the call to keep the "military option" on the table when confronting Russia in Ukraine; but we should listen respectfully to that argument and not mock it.

When they chastise liberals for pandering to gays, we should calmly state why gays should be given the same rights as the rest of us, and not make fun of their alleged homophobia. We should back off from accusing them of "waging war on women" (war is not the most appropriate or fairest metaphor) and talk with them about their hopes for their daughters.

And in the policy realm, Democrats should look to embrace approaches that would address the concerns and needs of these men. There should be tax breaks as much for them as for the wealthiest. We should make it easier and less costly for their children and grandchildren to go to college. We should improve veterans benefits and emphasize health care that focuses on men's issues, not just reproductive issues.

Above all, we should emphasize approaches to helping low-income people become self-supporting. We should agree with these men that it is not a good thing for people to need government assistance. It should be the last resort. A guaranteed annual income, for example, which many conservatives support, would obviate the need for most of our current safety net programs and offer dignity to those unable to fully support themselves.

For the progressive in me, to come up with a list of viable policy suggestions is not easy. Better minds than mine should be able to come up with an agenda, which isn't pandering, that could increase Democrats' appeal to these alienated white men. Fairness requires this as does smart politics.

September 13, 2013--Remember Benghazi?

Wednesday was the first anniversary of the attack on a U.S. diplomatic consulate in Benghazi, Libya where our ambassador and three embassy staff were killed by terrorists.

What did and didn't happen there became a hotly contested issue during the 2012 presidential campaign;  but since that time--as with other unpleasant news that the public wants to move on from--the story about what has happened during the past 12 months to apprehend the killers has receded to the back pages. If even that.

Some would say that this attack was a response to direct U.S. military involvement in Libyan affairs that began in 1986 when then President Ronald Reagan ordered the air force, navy, and marines to bomb various targets in Libya in retaliation for Libyan involvement in the bombing of a Berlin discotheque frequented by American troops. Targets in Libya included Muammar Gadaffi himself and members of his family. It is alleged that an adopted daughter of his was among those killed and that he was wounded.

Reagan did not seek congressional or UN approval for these raids or the targeting of Muammar Gadaffi. He simply ordered them.

Then in 2011, with UN sponsorship, but again with no congressional authorization, America joined with other nations to aid rebels who were seeking to overthrow Gadaffi. We took the lead in enforcing a no-fly zone and had B-1 and B-2 stealth bombers attack at least 100 targets in Libya.

The assault on the consulate in Benghazi and the murder of four American diplomats needs to be seen but not excused in this context. No matter the past history, it was a heinous act and should not be relegated to the back pages.

But this year, on the 12th anniversary of 9/11, the New York Times, on its back pages, published a follow-up story about our attempts to bring the Benghazi perpetrators to justice. And there is quite a story to tell.

We know who carried out the raid on the Benghazi compound. One of them is such a well-know, audacious Islamist terrorist that he has granted interviews to reporters. We also know his accomplices. We even know where they are located. We have drones positioned over them to keep them under surveillance at all times.

And they have been indicted for murder by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Bringing them to trial should not be that difficult. Libya would still be ruled by Gadaffi if it weren't for American intervention. For at least a few days after Gadaffi's overthrow and death, Americans were publicly thanked by Libyans and the stars and stripes were on display in parts of the country.

So one would think that our Libyan friends would round up the suspects and either try or extradite them.

This, though, is not happening.

Those clan leaders in the Benghazi province where the murderers live are not willing to do either. For one thing, Libyan government authorities feel they would be unable to bring them out of their villages since they are protected by well-armed militias. Militias, I suspect, who are using weapons that we provided to Libyan rebels.

And, then, these same officials say, the U.S. is now so unpopular--including because we are now considering an attack on Syria--that it would be politically unpopular for them to become allied in a matter of importance with the United States.

Also, though we are considering a drone strike to "take them out," to quote the Times, Libyan officials are also not too happy about that--

A number of Libyan political figures have expressed wariness that any unilateral military action by the United States, like a drone strike, would fuel popular anger and add a destructive new element to the uncertain security situation in Benghazi.

On the other hand, there was not much "popular anger" among Libyans when the U.S. took military action two years ago to help depose Gadaffi.

What a difference a year can make.