March 29, 2016--Still Feeling the Bern

"Did you hear Bernie's speech this weekend?"

One of our very young friends was calling. It was clear she was excited.

"After winning the caucuses in Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii. He really trounced Hillary."

"He's good at caucuses but not so much so in primaries where people actually vote."

"You're always so pessimistic about him."

"I think I'm being realistic. I keep my eye on the delegate count. Like it or not, they will select the nominee. And by my calculation, and that of pretty much everyone else, Hillary should win easily."

"I'm never going to vote for her." I felt badly that what I said deflated her.

"If it comes to that--I mean Hillary versus Trump or Cruz or whomever, you'd think of voting for one of them."

"Never."

"So . . . ?"

"So, maybe I won't vote at all."

"That sounds defeatist to me. Not voting for Hillary is just like voting for Trump or whoever."

"Now you sound just like my parents."

"Well," I said, trying to lighten the mood, "Sometimes even parents get it right."

"I didn't call to get you to convince me to give up my ideals. I'm young and I want . . ."

"Touché. I hope you'll except my apologies. Listening to myself, I think you're right. That's what I was trying to do. Get you to be 'realistic,' to compromise."

"There's time for that."

"Yes, I did hear his speech. I haven't listened to a speech of his for quiet awhile and thought . . ."

"Because you already gave up on him?"

"Probably true. Probably true. With so much going on on the Republican side I admit I haven't paid much attention to the Democrats. So I . . ."

"Tuned out Bernie. For what it's worth, I excuse you for that. What's going on with the Republicans is more fun." She laughed, and I was glad to hear she was back to being her usualy enthusiastic self. "I don't know about you, but I thought he was amazing."

"I was impressed. Too bad . . ."

"There you go again being negative. Even if he doesn't have much chance of winning the nomination, didn't you feel that everything he said was true?"

"I did. But even if he somehow manages to get elected, I doubt he could get Congress to go along with Medicare for all much less free tuition at public colleges and universities."

Ignoring that, she said, "And weren't you impressed with what he had to say about minorities--he went down the full list, including Native Americans. No one else even mentions them much less as compassionately and honestly as Bernie."

"True. We could go over his speech point by point and probably agree with pretty much everything."

"Particularly what he said about what he said about women. As a woman, a young woman I was excited about that."

"Doesn't he say similar things as Hillary? About equal wages, abortion, childcare leave?"

"Yes, but I wasn't as impressed about the list of specific issues as how he spoke about the importance of both women and men working together on them. Not just women. If these are family issues, he was saying, that has to include men."

"I noticed that and I too was impressed."

"This is not the way Hillary speaks about the next things that have to happen to secure more rights for women. She makes it sound as if it's only a women's issue when in fact it's a women's and men's issue. I think this difference between Bernie and Hilary is one of the reasons so many young women are supporting him."

"I haven't heard anyone mention this. So good for you."

"I've got to run in a minute, but one more thing."

"Sure."

"My feeling that you were pushing on me to be realistic, to compromise . . ."

"I already apologized for that."

"And I heard and appreciated that. But here's what I want to say about that--it's too soon for me to give up my ideals. Isn't that what young people are supposed to do--maintain their ideals? Weren't you like that when you were my age--not willing to give in? What with the antiwar and civil rights movements?"

"Fair points."

"And also, though I know it's unlikely, probably impossible for Bernie to win, if by some chance or fluke he manages to do so, I'd still want him to press Congress to raise Social Security benefits and make health care a right. And the rest of his agenda"

"But wouldn't he have to compromise to get anything done?"

"Not in advance the way I feel Obama tended to do. If we agree that everything Bernie said in his speech the other night is both true and right, to accomplish his goals, wouldn't it be smart for him to lay them all out in specifics and fight for them? Maybe he wouldn't win, but at least he'd get the discussion started and, who knows, maybe he'd get a few things done and set the agenda for the next decade or two."

"Go on."

"I know you like history."

"Yes."

"Isn't it true that Truman was the first president to call for universal health care, something even Nixon advocated, and then decades later Obamacare was approved and upheld? So who knows--maybe the things that Bernie wants to do could over time have the same results."

"Could be."

"Who was it who said that journeys of a thousand miles begin with a single step? Even revolutions."

I sensed she was smiling. Feeling good about herself.

"You know what?"

"What?"

"I love you. Very much."

March 3, 2016--Super Tuesday: Who Really Won? Who Really Lost?

The New York Times banner headline on Wednesday morning was, "TRUMP AND CLINTON FEAST AS 12 STATES VOTE."

Putting aside the funky "feast," did the NYT get it right?

One could make a case that they missed the real stories. For both parties.

That case would claim that the apparent biggest winner--Hillary Clinton--with by far the most delegate votes (she has 1,001 while Sanders has only 371) was really a loser.

She has thus far benefitted greatly, disproportionately, by being propelled into the lead by rolling up a powerful stream of victories in mainly southern states with large concentrations of Democratic African-American voters while she is doing less well in other, more demographically balanced states. States such as Colorado, Minnesota, Oklahoma, and Vermont, all of which Sanders won on Super Tuesday.

Further, over the next few weeks there will be mainly winner-take-all primaries in states such as Kansas, Nebraska, Maine, Illinois, Michigan, and of course Ohio where Sanders may be set up to do quite well.

And a large portion of Clinton's delegates (more than half her total) are so-called "super delegates," chosen by local party elites. These delegates could turn out to be evanescent if Sanders gets on a roll.

Remote as this may be, this is still possible and a good reason for the Clintons not to do too much premature celebrating since, according to this analysis, Sanders sort of won and Clinton sort of lost.

On the GOP side, if I were Trump I would be a little nervous. Many pundits said he was sure to carry all 11 Super Tuesday states, with the exception of Ted Cruz's Texas. Cruz did in fact win there with a margin of 17 percentage points, more than double what was predicted.

And then he went on to defeat Trump in Oklahoma (Tuesday's most unpredictable state with Cruz and Sanders winning) and the Alaska caucus.

Also, the otherwise hapless Marco Rubio managed to win the Minnesota caucus while Trump wound up a weak third.

Add to that that Trump, on average, is getting only 35-40 percent of the popular votes and if you add up all the GOP delegates thus far awarded, he has only 45 percent of them.

Not exactly a New York Times feast.

If Kasich wins Ohio and Rubio manages somehow to win Florida, Trump could be in trouble. Minimally a brokered convention would be a distinct possibility where the remaining party bosses and big-money people would rig things for Paul Ryan or Mitt Romney.

So for me the Republican winners might be Kasich, who did pretty well in Vermont and Massachusetts and should do much better during the next two weeks, and without doubt Cruz, who is the current stand-out number two.

Then again, Ben Carson may turn out to be the biggest winner. If he "suspends" his candidacy, as expected, he'll no longer have to appear on stage side-by-side with these people.

October 27, 2015--Poor Marco

Poor Marco Rubio.

Like so many Americans, he hates his job.

He literally told that to a friend.

That he hates his day job as senator.

On Sunday he said that he's seen enough and thus won't run for reelection. He failed to note he would not be able to run concurrently for the Senate and the White House--it's against Florida law.

But he apparently doesn't hate it enough to quit. He must like pulling down that $174K a year Senate salary.

And it's unlikely he'll get fired even though for at least the past two years he pretty much stopped showing up for work. Apparently senators get paid by the taxpayers even if the are AWOL. No one clocks them in or out. No one supervises them as they would be if they had a real job.

It not that he hates being in DC. Quite the contrary.

He hasn't been seen in the Senate because the job he wants, also in Washington, is the presidency and he has spent all his waking and dreaming hours campaigning for it. Not at his own expense, mind you, but supported by campaign contributions and as a result of the largesse of his principal backer, Norman Braman, a south Florida car dealer and billionaire.

Norman's been slipping cash to Marco and his wife for years and in return, as he had said publicly, when he telephones his protégée, he gets his calls returned pronto.

You bet.

When pressed last week by Matt Lauer about his no-show job on Capital Hill, Rubio, with moral indignation and a straight face, said, "I'm not missing votes because I'm on vacation. I'm running for president so that the votes they take in the Senate are actually meaningful again."

Clever boy.

Still with a straight face, he went on to say, "My ambitions are for the country and Florida. [If I'm elected] we can begin to fix some of these issues that I've been so frustrated we've been unable to address during my time in the Senate."

He isn't frustrated enough about life in the Senate to motivate him to say--

"Enough. I've been in Washington now for four and a half years years and from the inside I know how things work. I am so disgusted [are you listening Tea Partiers?], and so I quit.  You might wonder," he could add, "why I am running for the presidency, the most Washington-establishment job there is. Good question. I am doing it to shake up and change everything. To scale back the government we all hate."

And, he might add, he's not doing it just for the money. Though the president gets paid $400K a year, pockets another $175 more for expenses, and has that wonderful big jet to fly around in.

This is a lot more than Rubio's been getting from Godfather Braman.

But that would require more integrity than he has thus far displayed.

In the meantime, he's planning to keep depositing his Senate salary checks and not showing up very often.

Norman Braman and His "Boy" Marco Rubio 

September 14, 2105--What's With Ben Carson?

Not only has Dr. Ben Carson surged into second place in polls of Republican voters, almost in a statistical dead heat with Donald TRUMP, but national polling shows him doing best among GOP candidates in the all important head-to-head with Hillary Clinton.

According to the latest CNN poll, TRUMP and Hillary are tied, Clinton bests Jeb Bush by 4 percentage points, but loses to Carson by 5 points.

It's still very early, but this makes one think.

An African-American, evangelical, conservative surgeon?

So he is not just an unexpected and unusual Republican favorite but his appeal goes beyond the evangelical base of the Grand Old Party and includes many Democrats and Independents.

Of course he has that anti-government thing going. Along with Carly Fiorina and Donald TRUMP, the three non-establishment candidates, they garner well over 50 percent of potential Republican primary voters.

We tend to think of African Americans as pretty automatically voting for Democrat candidates. The last three Democrat nominees for president received on average about 90 percent of black votes.

One question, then, about Dr. Carson--would he get more than 10 percent if he were the nominee? Obviously, yes, and that would give him quite a leg up in key swing states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania,  Florida, and Virginia. In the general election if he could carry those four states he'd be well on his way to winning the presidency.

But that's political inside baseball. It does not say much about Crason's clearly wide appeal.

Some remind us that there is a long tradition of Black conservatives who have thrived on the national political scene. Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts and Colin Powell come to mind. Many feel Powell would have been able to win the GOP nomination in 1996 and had he done so would have had a good chance of defeating Bill Clinton.

Carson's cultural conservatism appeals not only to large numbers of blacks (about one-third self-identify as social conservatives) but also to white and Latino religious conservatives. His views on abortion and same-sex marriage (he opposes both) are cases in point.

Like other African-American conservatives who preceded him, he comes off as comfortably non-militant. He doesn't threaten as many whites as did Jessie Jackson and even Barack Obama.

I think, though, that there are other reasons why he is doing so well. Primarily because he is a physician, not just because he is anti big government. Then, there is kind of surgeon he is (neuro) and the fame that accrued to him from his successful, highly publicized effort to separate conjoined twins.

Many feel we are in our national core virtually terminally ill and in need of treatment. Metaphorically, of course, but those who feel this way, considering the state of our national health, may be thinking why not call on a doctor to heal us?

And then there is the further metaphor of his work with Siamese twins. As with them, we were at one time a conjoined body politic, but in recent decades have lived separately and angrily in our partisan corners. Little gets done. We barely speak to each other.

Carson is someone who understands the difference between being united and being separate. And how to do both successfully.

By this logic, I doubt if he would have the same appeal if he were, say, an orthopedic surgeon.

One the other hand, remember George W. Bush who declared himself, "a uniter, not a divider"? Though we know how well that turned out, we did elect him with an assist from the Supreme Court.