June 13, 2019--Trump Slump

We've been in Maine more than five weeks and I have spent about five minutes watching Morning Joe. 

Not each day, but five minutes totally. And for at least half that time I wasn't paying attention.

This is me who back in the city was about addicted to Joe Scarborough's early morning show and Nicole Wallace's on MSNBC later in the day.

My rationalization for tuning out is that the 2020 election is more than 17 months away and I do not want to peak too soon in my effort to help dispose of Trump.

But though I may be pooping out, or, as I prefer to think about it, pausing, Trump at 73 is tirelessly racing around the country appearing at pep rallies and spending hours each day tweeting up storms of noxious abuse that he hurls against his opponents. Mainly recently, Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden. 

Forgotten for the moment is that the week before there were others who bedeviled Trump and as a result were mocked by him--remember Robert Mueller and Bette Midler among others? Yes, "Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy" Bette Milder, who he called from the beaches of Normandy, on D Day, a "washed-up psycho."

And that's sort of the point--he sends out such a continuous stream of political gas that he creates a new norm, and unless one is careful it is easy to get sucked into it or want to retreat to the sidelines.

So I am finding, not just anecdotally, that many people are seeking distractions. Even Trump people. His rallies are less well attended and somewhat less rapturous. But just as I expect Democrats to return to the fold, or minimally resume following the campaign, I expect most of Trump's people will as well. So I don't see much of an edge there.

Conventional wisdom (which with Trump has not always been that wise) suggests that in national elections people do not start paying attention until the Labor Day before Election Day. And in the current case, if this holds true, we're talking about two Labor Days from now. The one this year and another in September 2020.

Yes, the Democratic nomination process kicks into high gear in 13 days when there is the first debate, spread over two days, among the 20 or 75 candidates seeking the nomination. (Another debate will follow in July so by August I'm afraid that hardly anyone will be paying attention to the Democrats.)

Party activists, though, will track what is happening as the debates are viewed as elimination rounds where those who languish in one-percent land at the end of June will begin to drop out. New York City mayor, Bill de Blasio, for example.

And, yes, on the other side of the equation the debate is an opportunity for someone or two to emerge from the pack. Elizabeth Warren or Pete Buttigieg, for example, who recently have been doing well in the polls. In Iowa at least. 

Many Dems seem to be looking for an alternative to oldsters Sanders and Biden, both of whom are looking as if they are readier to move into a care facility than the White House. Though 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is the ultimate care facility. The president even has his own in-house physician and emergency room.

In spite of what I've just said, I suspect for some time I won't be tuning in to "Morning Joe." Except, perhaps, for a couple of days later in the month just before and after the first debate. 

Though it appears that Joe himself these days hardly ever turns up for his own show.

December 7, 2018--Off And Running

Below is a list of the 35 or so 2020 potential Democratic nominees for the presidency.

Does anyone look like a winner to you? I don't mean capable of winning the nomination but becoming president?

My favorite, Joe Biden, is approaching 100 and thus I am worried.

Alphabetical list of individuals who have expressed an interest in running for president:

• Michael Bennet, U.S. Senator from Colorado since 2009
• Joe Biden, Vice President of the United States 2009–2017; U.S. Senator from Delaware 1973–2009; candidate for President in 1988 and in 2008
• Michael Bloomberg, former Mayor of New York City 2002–2013
• Cory Booker, U.S. Senator from New Jersey since 2013; Mayor of Newark 2006–2013
• Sherrod Brown, U.S. Senator from Ohio since 2007; U.S. Representative 1993–2007
• Pete Buttigieg, Mayor of South Bend since 2012
• Bob Casey Jr., U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania since 2007
• Julian Castro, U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development 2014–2017; Mayor of San Antonio, Texas 2009–2014
• Oscar De La Hoya, boxing champion from California
• Tulsi Gabbard, U.S. Representative from Hawaii since 2013
• Eric Garcetti, Mayor of Los Angeles, California since 2013
• Kirsten Gillibrand, U.S. Senator from New York since 2009 U.S. Representative from 2007–2009
• Kamala Harris, U.S. Senator from California since 2017
• John Hickenlooper, Governor of Colorado since 2011; Mayor of Denver 2003–2011
• Eric Holder, U.S. Attorney General 2009–2015; Acting U.S. Attorney General in 200 from Washington, D.C.
• Jay Inslee, Governor of Washington since 2013
• John Kerry, 2004 Democratic nominee; U.S. Secretary of State 2013–2017; U.S. Senator from Massachusetts 1985–2013
• Amy Klobuchar, U.S. Senator from Minnesota since 2007
• Terry McAuliffe, Governor of Virginia 2014–2018
• Jeff Merkley, U.S. Senator from Oregon since 2009
• Martin O'Malley, former Governor of Maryland from 2007-2015, former Mayor of Baltimore 1999-2007, candidate for President in 2016
• Duval Patrick, Governor of Massachusetts 2007-2015
• Beto O'Rourke, U.S. Representative from Texas since 2013 Democratic nominee for United States Senate election in Texas in 2018
• Tim Ryan, U.S. Representative from Ohio since 2003
• Bernie Sanders, U.S. Senator from Vermont since 2007; U.S. Representative 1991–2007; candidate for President in 2016
• Tom Steyer, billionaire hedge fund manager, philanthropist, environmentalist, liberal activist, and fundraiser from California
• Eric Swalwell, U.S. Representative from California since 2013
• Elizabeth Warren, U.S. Senator from Massachusetts since 2013

The following people have been subjects of speculation about their potential candidacy within the last six months, although they have neither personally expressed interest nor declined to run:

• Steve Bullock, Governor of Montana since 2013
• Andrew Gillum, Mayor of Tallahassee 2014-2018, Democratic nominee for Governor of Florida in 2018
• William H. McRaven,  retired United States Navy Admiral
• Adam Schiff, U.S. Representative since 2001, from California
• Howard Schultz, former CEO of Starbucks, from Washington
• Mark Warner, U.S. Senator from Virginia since 2009, former Governor of Virginia 2002–2006

You can use this as a scorecard, as I did, by crossing Duval Patrick's name off the list of contenders. He withdraw from consideration as I was working on this. I hope that's not a case of cause and effect.

More soon will begin to drop like flies and others, like New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, will declare. He, like almost all the others, has no chance, but running, going forward, can be good for one's brand.

August 29, 2017--Trump's Trap

Democratic strategist and CNN contributor Paul Begala got it right--President Trump set a political trap and Democrats stepped right into it.

The ugly demonstration in Charlottesville more than two weeks ago was about plans to remove statues of Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson  The white supremacist thugs rallied there to protest plans for their relocation. 

Sensing this would be an effective wedge issue that would pander to his alt-right base, Trump generalized efforts to move, even teardown forcefully, what he referred to as "our beautiful statues and monuments."

Trump's call to keep in place these statues were dog-whistle references to those memorials primarily honoring leaders of the Confederacy. All supporters of slavery. This Trump knew would be red meat for his core constituency, including the  K.K.K. and neo-Nazis. 

Trump tweaked the situation by mocking those in favor of removing these memorials by speculating that to be consistent liberals should also call for the removal of statues of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson since they were slave holders.

Good point, many on the left felt, not noticing the trap set for them. 

On the right, Trump supporters, tongue-in-cheek, suggested that perhaps while we're busy taking down memorials we should also give serious consideration to, say, getting rid of the statue of Christopher Columbus that graces New York City's Columbus Circle. 

As preposterous as this may sound--though Columbus' "discovery" of America ultimately meant that European settlers would over a few centuries "remove" "Indians" from their ancestral lands--as extreme as this might seem, it is reported that NYC mayor Bill de Blasio is giving this idea serious consideration.

Columbus Circle, you may also know, is also the location of Donald Trump's tasteless International Hotel and Tower. A blight on the Central Park landscape, which, in a better world, would be what we would be thinking about taking down.

So we are descending into a paroxysm of political correctness, this time about statues. 

Thus the wedge issue calculated to deepen the division between Trump's people and the rest of Americans, thus the trap to which Begala alerted Democrats.

In Philadelphia there are moves to remove the statue of Frank Rizzo, who in the late 60s was the tough-cop mayor. He was best known, as was Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio who was just pardoned by President Trump, for his heavy-handed, even brutal treatment of the city's minority population.

Instead of talking about Trump's racist comments after the Charlottesville riots and murder, those on the left are in a swivet about all memorials to the Confederacy and anything in any way associated with racism and slavery. 

There were failed attempts to rename buildings and academic programs at Princeton University because Woodrow Wilson was a white supremacist and there is a movement afoot to rename Faneuil Hall in Boston since Peter Faneuil was a slave owner.

George W. Bush's brain, Karl Rove was a genius at thrusting wedge issues into political contests. Rather than talking about the state of the economy or the hollowing out of the middle class, he got Americans to fight with each other about same-sex marriage, support for Planned Parenthood, prayer in school, and evolution.

Trump is employing the same strategy. When he senses political trouble as after Charlottesville or revelations about his possible complicity in encouraging Russians to intervene in the 2016 election, he riles folks up by bashing the media, inflaming feelings about immigrants, and more recently raising the issue of transgender members of the military.

But most effective, surprisingly, is the hot-button ability to get Americans agitated about statuary. 

Trump already figured out that millions of Americans--his base and many more--are affronted by the political correctness and identity politics they feel Democrats promulgate, particularly on college and university campuses.

Things such as costume codes for on-campus Halloween parties and forbidding people from referring to brown paper bags as brown paper bags since that might offend some people of color. Knowing that pointing to faux issues of this kind quickly enflames people who feel looked down upon and directly affected by the self-righteousness of coastal elites, the president keeps picking away at them in an attempt to make things more contentious and distracting.

While struggling to make ends meet, they see spoiled college kids imposing speech codes and driving conservative speakers such as Ann Coulter off campus, as they did recently in Berkeley.

To some this feels like good citizenship. To me it sounds a little too much like the Taliban.

Columbus Circle

January 2, 2015--In the Line of Duty

There is movement to repair the tattered relationship between New York City mayor Bill de Blasio and the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, the police union.

The union chief savaged de Blasio even before he took office for his pledge to limit the controversial stop-and-frisk program that de Blasio and many others claimed unduly targeted minorities. And more recently, after the chocking death of Eric Garner on Staten Island, there was more invective hurled at the mayor because he took a balanced position about the incident, including, after praising the police in general, acknowledging that he counsels his bi-racial son Dante to be extra careful when encountering law enforcement officials. What parent wouldn't.

The union president went so far as to claim that there was "blood on the mayor's hands" after two officers were brutally assassinated two weeks ago. He made the invidious connection between what de Blasio said about the strangling on Staten Island and the murder of the officers.

As a result, as well as to loom large in the public eye, the PBA president has been urging members to fill out forms demanding that the mayor not attend their funerals if they are killed in the line of duty and approved of cops booing and turning their backs on the mayor when he spoke from the heart last weekend at the funeral of the first of the slain officers.

So, with the intervention of the widely-respected police commissioner, Bill Bratton, de Blasio met for two hours on Tuesday with Pat Lynch, head of the PBA in an attempt to begin to patch things up.

Little was expected to come of this and the parties to the discussion did not disappoint--they reported no progress, no meeting of the minds.

I hope (but doubt) that there was an attempt to put things in context, very much including how dangerous a job it actually is to be a member of New York's Finest.

For example, did anyone point out that "only" 324 police officers have been shot and killed in the line of duty--324 since 1806, in more than 200 years.

This is obviously too many but no one said police work was like office work nor did anyone likely point out that in New York City more people are killed in office accidents than in police work. Or that many more firefighters than police officers die on the job each year, as do many, many more construction workers, taxi drivers or, for that sad matter, school teachers.

Again, this is not to be insensitive to the sacrifices than many policemen are asked to and volunteer to make, but let's not pretend that being a patrolman on the streets of New York is as dangerous as being a Navy SEAL on a mission in Yemen.

December 8, 2014--A Conversation About Race

Every time there is an outrageous example of how the justice system in America works differently for white people and people of color, political leaders, the press and clergy say that we have to have a serious, dispassionate national conversation about race so that we can at long last overcome our still fraught racial history.

This call was raised after the OJ Simpson trial when it was obvious that whites and blacks experience the justice system almost as polar opposites--the vast majority of caucasians saw him to be guilty of homicide while blacks in overwhelming numbers cheered the jury verdict.

For a week or two after the verdict a version of that national conversation occurred; but here we are again, nearly 20 years later, with two grand juries--one in Ferguson MO, another on Staten Island--failing to indicate two white police officers who killed unarmed black men. Again there are street demonstrations, 24/7 media coverage, and renewed calls for that discourse about race.

But before we can even get started talking across the racial divide, people are criticizing New York City mayor Bill de Blasio (who has a biracial son and daughter) and Barack Obama (who is obviously African American) either, as in the case of the former, for "throwing the police under the bus" (as ludicrously claimed by the president of the NYC patrolman's union) or, as in Obama's case, for not speaking out passionately or personally enough.

The Washington Post over the weekend wrote explicitly about this--"N.Y. Mayor Bill de Blasio Spoke Bluntly On Race, Policing in Ways Harder for Obama."

Yes, the mayor spoke bluntly--actually he was more compassionate than blunt--praising the vast majority of police officers who protect citizens black and white while calling for the need to retrain them in the appropriate use of force and then "spoke from the heart" as a father of a dark-skinned son who sports a huge Afro while Obama spoke more professorially, less as a black man and father of two daughters.

Obama may have tempered his remarks out of concern that they might interfere with his Department of Justice's investigations of both cases, exploring whether or not the victims' civil rights were violated though they will be difficult to press since the DJ would have to prove intent. He may have wanted to avoid the legal storm that arose after Trayvon Martin was killed when he, with emotion and truth, said Trayvon "could have been me."

Yes, any President needs to tread carefully when talking about on-going criminal investigations, but surely there must be ways, there must be appropriate words for our first African-Ameircan president to speak publicly about race in less than his usual dispassionate way. For him, if you will, to testify about what it is like, what it feels like to be a black man in America and the father of teenage children who must worry when his children are out and about, even with Secret Service protection. And how he must have residual fears about his own safety when in public. Fears exacerbated by the fact of his skin color.

I understand that during his first term, for political reasons alone, he did not want to come off sounding like a "black president." He was and is the president of all the people, even those who disagree with and even despise him. Further, considering the underlying racism so pervasive in America, he did not want to give bigoted whites the excuse to have their views confirmed that he is the proverbial boogie man (epithet intended)--a militant Angry Black Man.

But now, with the last midterm elections over (and lost) what continues to hold him back from truly speaking his mind and leading the long-overdo conversation? He has nothing significant to lose. Now more than ever we need his perspective and passion.

September 11, 2014--The Poor Door

I am beginning to feel badly for New York City real estate developers. You know, the ones who build condo towers that they squeeze into the cityscape that rise 50, 75, 100 stories. Where third-floor apartments start at $10 million and top prices soar even higher than the triplex penthouses. It is not unheard of for some Russian oligarch or Persian Gulf gazillionaire to plop down $75, $90 million for a pad of their dreams that they inhabit at the most a few weeks a year.

The new mayor of New York City (who replaced Mike Bloomberg who is worth $33 billion), Bill de Blasio, a self-proclaimed man of the people, in now insisting that to get city approval to add a few more stories beyond the allowable limits, as part of the deal, builders have to agree to add some "affordable housing" units to the otherwise gilded towers.

As you might imagine, these real estate moguls are not happy about this. They fear that someone willing to shell out tens of millions for an apartment will not be eager to share an elevator with the unwashed. Much less the in-house gym, pool, game rooms, spa, or concierge services.

So what to do?

One project that hit the news a few weeks ago is at 62nd Street on Riverside Boulevard, a tony address facing the Hudson River where there will be 33 floors of condos with bargain basement  prices beginning at about $5 million and ranging up to only $25 million

They figured out how to handle the problem--build separate entrances, elevators, and facilities for those lucky enough to win the affordable-housing lottery. (That's indeed how buyers earning less than $50,000 a year will be selected--their names will be drawn from a hat).

Liberals in the city--most of whom are themselves affluent and living in their own upper-middle-class enclaves--are outraged, calling this plan separate but unequal and have labeled the alternate entrance a "poor door."

Under pressure, the developer agreed to spiff up the entrance with marble veneer, tasteful furnishing and appointments, and chandeliers.

Others have figured out even cleverer ways to protect their high-end clients from, well, the rest of us.

Reported in the New York Times a few days ago are plans for a new loft building in one of the city's highest-rent downtown districts--Soho.

The ten lofts there will go for $8.7 to 25 million, averaging about $3,200 a square foot.  But that's not the news. These days that's chump change.

The real news is about the ten underground parking spaces.

On a first-come-first-serve basis each will sell for a cool million. To be fair, they will be generously proportioned, about 200 square feet, so there is little danger of getting too many of those annoying dings in your doors.

But here's the real news--at a million each, depending on the actual size of the parking spaces, the square foot cost is much more than for the apartments--ranging from $5,000 to $6,666.

More news--you don't actually own the parking space. Rather, for your million, you'll get only a 99-year lease.

That shouldn't be a problem for most of us except, perhaps, for my 106 year-old mother. What would she do with her old Buick?