August 11, 2020--Biden's Bunker

With friends I was debating Joe Biden's pre-election strategy.

Specifically, if his decision to spend the campaign in his Delaware basement office was wise or misdirected.

For the most part my friends were all right with it.

"He's way ahead in the polls," one put it, "Including in almost all the swing states, so why mess up a good thing with his making controversial comments and gaffs."

Others chimed in, "Look, all that we should care about is getting rid of Trump so if this means Biden remains isolated, we shouldn't care. If he's elected there will be plenty of time for him to be out and about."

"I'm coming to have a different view," I said,"I'm concerned that his remaining in self-imposed  quarantine can be attacked politically. Trump, who is out and about, can say Biden is too old to be in public because he's afraid he'll catch the virus and die. Or, Trump can say Biden doesn't want to be unscripted because he'll say something stupid. I remember Jimmy Carter running for reelection from the confines of the White House. Not wanting to be seen campaigning because the Iranians were holding dozens of Americans hostages. They called it the Rose Garden strategy. How did that workout?"

"Reagan was elected," I said.  "So, I worry about Biden."

"In addition Trump gets to fly around the country claiming he's trying to get money to the unemployed while Biden is holed up." 

"Not a bad point," one of my friends said, "Biden emerged from his bunker the other day for an interview with the Association of Hispanic Journalists and stepped right in it, saying that there's more diversity among Latinos than black people. These kind of gaffs aren't doing him any good."

Another friend summed it up, "So back to the basement he goes."

February 25, 2016--Jose the Fanatic

Of the many startling things about Donald TRUMP's decisive victory in Wednesday's Nevada caucuses, beyond the fact that there was an historic turnout and he garnered more votes that Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio combined, was the fact that he also won easily among Latinos.

So much of both parties' campaigns is challenging conventional wisdom--that to win one needs a powerful, big-data-directed ground game (TRUMP has won three of four primaries and caucuses with hardly any ground game at all); that it's all about who can raise the most money (Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz did and look what happened to them--TRUMP raised hardly any, spent even less, and look who's leading); that Americans won't vote for a socialist (Bernie Sanders take note); and Latino voters overwhelmingly vote for Latino candidates (ask Rubio and Cruz about that) the same way blacks tend to vote for blacks, Jews for Jews, and so on.

In Nevada, TRUMP ran away with 45 percent of the Hispanic vote. Note, in 2000, George W. Bush was elected largely as the result of appealing successfully to Latino voters--he got an historic 40 percent nationally.

So TRUMP, who pretty much everyone having access to a microphone said would be lucky to get 10 percent of the Hispanic-American vote considering how he castigated illegal immigrants (mainly, to him, Mexicans) defaming them by labeling them "murderers" and "rapists" and promising that he would deport 12 million, that Donald TRUMP thus far, especially with the Latino-rich voters of Nevada, has run the table. How it might translate to the general election is for the moment another matter.

But his "appeal" to Hispanic voters is worth some thought. Why would any vote for him?

For insight I am reminded of one of my favorite Philip Roth stories--"Eli the Fanatic."

It is also one of his most overlooked, perhaps because of the direct way in which it deals with and excoriates secularized, seemingly-assimilated Jews.

Set in suburban America, it concerns a non-observant Jew, lawyer Eli Peck, who is hired by his Jewish neighbors to convince a recently-arirved group of orthodox Jews to close the yeshiva they established in their midst. The other Jews in town are embarrassed by the visible presence of these Hasids, fearing they will call attention to them and thereby interfere with their desire to blend in among the largely gentile residents of Woodenton.

To make a short story short, Eli fails in his attempts to get the ultra-orthodox to back off, including abandoning their traditional ways of dressing, and, after an epiphany of his own, gives up his normal wardrobe and appears before his stunned and outraged Jewish neighbors in Hasid garb, thereby exposing the ethnic roots of all of them.

Could it be that TRUMP's appeal to a large and growing percentage of Latino voters is because increasing numbers counter-intuitively support his views about illegal immigrants--that many favor building the wall and deporting those here without proper documents?

As in Roth's Woodenton, those Hispanics in the United States for decades and for others in the Southwest for many centuries, from even before Europeans landed at Plymouth Rock, for Latino citizens, for Hispanics who are comfortably "Americanized," having so many other Hispanics here illegally threatens their sense of relatively unobtrusive assimilation.

For Roth's secularized, well-educated, and affluent Jews, having Hasids in their midst, they feared, exposed them to their Christian neighbors who would not distinguish between them and the ultra-orthodox. Seeing them both in the same light and thus out of step with American culture, still rooted in Eastern European beliefs and superstitions, and wanting to live and cling together in self-imposed ghettos.

Perhaps the United States' most successful and assimilated Latinos, who are not self-hating, have some of the same kinds of feelings and support TRUMP as one way of declaring loyalty to the great American immigrant narrative, not wanting their place in society to be confused and conflated with those who came here illegally and live insufficiently in the shadows.

Philip Roth

June 18, 2014--The Six Americas

I hesitate to bring him up, he was such a . . . you know what, but John Edwards, during the 2008 primary campaign, reminded us that there are two Americas--"the privileged and the wealthy and the America of those who live paycheck to paycheck."

He of course was oversimplifying--for example among the less-privileged there are the working poor and those, without hope of work, who live in unrelenting poverty. And then there are the "privileged" who are the wealthy one percent and the simply affluent. This could then be thought of as four Americas.

But his reductionist two-Americas lens was still a good one through which to see the United States. It continued to be as the Occupy Wall Streeters reminded us.

The two-Americas idea was not entirely new, not even in it phrasing. It was derived from the findings of the presidentially-appointed Kerner Commission, which, after the urban riots of the 1960s, in 1968, reported that the United States was "moving toward [becoming] two societies, one black, one white--separate and unequal."

The Kerner conclusion about race adds two more Americas for a total of six. And though the commissions findings were and are essentially true, they too lacked nuance. For example, the report barely mentioned how poorly many other millions of color, Hispanics for example, were doing. And it did not take even a glance at how women were faring or look at the stratification within the black community.

But as with Edward's summation, it too attracted attention, debate, and led to some palliative social policies.

Thus one could say that are more than two Americas. Six at least and even eight.

I've already noted that there is an America for most people of color, not just for African Americans, and that the socioeconomic divide if far more complex and its complexity is more important to pay attention to than Edwards' simple wealthy-versus-paycheck people.

And it may be almost equally important to consider the two ideological Americas, which also has a geographic component.

A recent study conducted by the Pew Research Center found that the partisan divide stretches way beyond Congress. Liberals and conservatives prefer to live near people of like minds and want their children to marry those with similar political views.

More distressing, beyond having differing views that are subject to debate and compromise (both essential to a functioning democracy), Pew reported that 27 percent of Democrats and 36 percent of Republican see the other party as a threat to the nation's well-being.

Then there are the two cultural Americas, both closely aligned with the two ideological Americas. Some have declared the Culture Wars ended with "victory" for the progressive perspective that, among other things, supports same-sex marriage.

It is true that in a crescendo of court decisions and actions by voters and state legislators it is now legal in 17 states for men to marry men and women to marry women; but in states and cities along both coasts, in contrast to pretty much everywhere in between, battles rage about what to teach children--evolution or intelligent design; abortion, in spite of Roe v. Wade, is available on demand in only four states; and various forms of Christian prayer at public meetings, recently declared constitutional by the Supreme Court, now occurs commonly in much of America, including in Congress.

So how many Americas do we have? Ten? A dozen? Much to understand. Much work still to be done.