Republicans Have Thwarted America's Response to Covid-19

Americans find themselves about to be banned from traveling to Europe as that continent begins to reopen for tourism.  Meanwhile a number of red states - notably Florida and Texas - are seeing surging cases of Covid-19 with no end in sight. Republican governors who failed to impose mandatory face mask rules (Virginia has had a face mask requirement for weeks now) and continued social distancing are belatedly listening to the appeals of mayors whose cities are seeing soaring rates of infection.  The rates are soaring not because of more testing but rather because the number of infections are in fact soaring.  How did America find itself in this mess?  Like so many other problems facing America, the thanks - or more aptly, the condemnation - belongs to the GOP and Der Trumpenführer who put trying to revive the economy and Trump's reelection chances ahead of public safety.  With Trump's approval rate plummeting, it seems many voters, including GOP leaning seniors are waking up to the disaster Trump and the GOP have wrought.  A column in the New York Times looks at the fiasco.  Here are excerpts:

Earlier this year much of America went through hell as the nation struggled to deal with Covid-19. More than 120,000 Americans have now died; more than 20 million have lost their jobs.

But it’s looking as if all those sacrifices were in vain. We never really got the coronavirus under control, and now infections, while they have fallen to a quite low level in the New York area, the pandemic’s original epicenter, are surging in much of the rest of the country.

And the bad news isn’t just a result of more testing. In new hot spots like Arizona — where testing capacity is being overwhelmed — and Houston the fraction of tests coming up positive is soaring, which shows that the disease is spreading rapidly.

It didn’t have to be this way. The European Union, a hugely diverse area with a larger population than the U.S., has been far more successful at limiting the spread of Covid-19 than we have. What went wrong?

The immediate answer is that many U.S. states ignored warnings from health experts and rushed to reopen their economies, and far too many people failed to follow basic precautions like wearing face masks and avoiding large groups. But why was there so much foolishness?

Well, I keep seeing statements to the effect that Americans were too impatient to stay the course, too unwilling to act responsibly. But this is deeply misleading, because it avoids confronting the essence of the problem. Americans didn’t fail the Covid-19 test; Republicans did.

After all, the Northeast, with its largely Democratic governors, has been appropriately cautious about reopening, and its numbers look like Europe’s. California and Washington are blue states that are seeing a rise in cases, but it’s from a relatively low base, and their Democratic governors are taking actions like requiring the use of face masks and seem ready to reverse their reopening.

So the really bad news is coming from Republican-controlled states, especially Arizona, Florida and Texas, which rushed to reopen and, while some are now pausing, haven’t reversed course. If the Northeast looks like Europe, the South is starting to look like Brazil.

Nor is it just Republican governors and state legislatures. According to the new New York Times/Siena poll, voters over all strongly favor giving control of the pandemic priority over reopening the economy — but Republican voters, presumably taking their cue from the White House and Fox News, take the opposite position.

And it’s not just about policy decisions. Partisanship seems to be driving individual behavior, too, with self-identified Democrats significantly more likely to wear face masks and engage in social distancing than self-identified Republicans.

The question, then, isn’t why “America” has failed to deal effectively with the pandemic. It’s why the G.O.P. has in effect allied itself with the coronavirus.

Part of the answer is short-term politics. At the beginning of this year Donald Trump’s re-election message was all about economic triumphalism. . . . He and his officials wasted crucial weeks refusing to acknowledge the viral threat because they didn’t want to hear any bad news.

And they pushed for premature reopening because they wanted things to return to what they seemed to be back in February. Indeed, just a few days ago the same Trump officials who initially assured us that Covid-19 was no big deal were out there dismissing the risks of a second wave.

I’d suggest, however, that the G.O.P.’s coronavirus denial also has roots that go beyond Trump and his electoral prospects. The key point, I’d argue, is that Covid-19 is like climate change: It isn’t the kind of menace the party wants to acknowledge.

It’s not that the right is averse to fearmongering. But it doesn’t want you to fear impersonal threats that require an effective policy response, not to mention inconveniences like wearing face masks; it wants you to be afraid of people you can hate —people of a different race or supercilious liberals. . . . It’s “kung flu,” foisted on us by villainous Chinese. Or it’s a hoax perpetrated by the “medical deep state,” which is just looking for a way to hurt Trump.

The good news is that the politics of virus denial don’t seem to be working. Partly that’s because racism doesn’t play the way it used to: The Black Lives Matter protesters have received broad public support, despite the usual suspects’ efforts to portray them as rampaging hordes. Partly it’s because the surge in infections is becoming too obvious to deny; even Republican governors are admitting that there’s a problem, although they still don’t seem willing to act.

The bad news is that partisanship has crippled our Covid-19 response. The virus is winning, and all indications are that the next few months will be a terrifying nightmare of rampant disease and economic disruption.

Trump’s Racism Will Bring the GOP Down with Him

The title of this post states what hopefully - and deservedly - will happen to the GOP.  By extension, it hopefully applies to white evangelical Christians - 49% of who attend church weekly or more frequently say Trump was "anointed by God" according to the Christian Post - as well since their racism strongly overlaps with that o the GOP and the white supremacists key to Trump's base of support.  In an op-ed in the Washington Post, Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman, explains why Trump and his racism (against all non-whites) should be the Republican Party's undoing.  Especially when combined with Trump's massive failure on the Covid-19 pandemic which is alienation older voters some of who rightly believe the GOP is willing to allow them to die in exchange for reopening the economy.  Here are column highlights:   

President Trump can’t help himself. The former reality-TV host was warned by White House staff, his campaign team, financial contributors and Republicans on Capitol Hill that his afternoon news conferences were causing political damage. But after a weekend of tweeting out conspiracy theories about former presidents and insults aimed at cable-news pundits, the president was at it again Monday.

And, true to form, Trump burned himself.

His coronavirus “update” ended abruptly after he hurled a bigoted remark toward an American journalist who grew up in West Virginia. When CBS News’s Weijia Jiang asked Trump about his misleading testing comments, the president blurted out: “You should ask China.” Jiang’s family emigrated from China when she was 2. For what it’s worth, Trump’s own mother immigrated to the United States when she was 18, and his wife, Melania, gained an “Einstein Visa,” reserved for those of “extraordinary ability,” in 2001. After Trump’s snarling China comment, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins pressed Trump until he abruptly retreated from the presidential podium.

As he stumbled away, one couldn’t help but be reminded of Trump’s racist 2016 attacks aimed at Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel. The then-candidate said he couldn’t trust Curiel because he was “Mexican,” but Curiel is an Indiana native; his parents immigrated there from Mexico before he was born.

Four years later, Trump’s Republican Party has become numbed to its party leader’s daily outrages — the racist attacks, the 18,000 lies (and counting), the petty insults, the breaches of constitutional norms, and the gross incompetence that has worsened the covid-19 crisis in the United States and has driven America to the edge of a depression. These GOP politicians have long believed that ignoring Trump’s unfitness for office is their best political play, but the Democratic Party’s historic landslide in 2018 along with their Southern gubernatorial victories last year suggest just the opposite. Public and private polls are looking worse for Republicans than they have since 2008.

If Democrats win back the White House and control of the Senate in 2020, much of that will be because black and Hispanic voters continue to reject Republican candidates. But Monday’s ugly display also brought into sharp relief another glaring problem for the Party of Trump: Asian Americans. . . . By 2014, Democrats were winning 49 percent of Asian Americans, and after two years of Trump in the White House, that number jumped to 77 percent. With outbursts such as Monday’s, one wonders how much worse things will be for Trump’s Grand Old Party this fall.

Republican incumbent senators in Arizona, Colorado, Montana, Maine and North Carolina face serious threats from their Democratic opponents in recent polls. Once-safe states such as Kansas and Georgia are in play, and Trump himself is losing head-to-head matchups with presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Florida. Recent polls show the two are even tied in traditionally Republican strongholds like Georgia and Texas.

With the prospects of a historic Democratic landslide building with every Trump news conference, every deranged tweet, every racist remark, wouldn’t now be the time for Republican candidates to stand up, speak out and finally stop following a man so ill-equipped for the presidency?

To quote Trump himself, with control of Congress and the White House slipping away: “What the hell do they have to lose?”

Pete Buttigieg Lasting Impact for Kids Who Are Different

For many in the LGBT community Pete Buttigeg's decision to end his presidential campaign was bitter sweat.  While his reasoning to withdraw made sense, to see the first openly gay presidential candidate to achieve a high level of success to end his campaign still hurt.  That said, Buttigieg has done an amazing job in setting an example for LGBT youth and others deemed "different" by mainstream society. In fact, Buttigieg made some moving statements which can be found here.  One can only hope that across America LGBT youth be they in rural red states or in reactionary family clinging to religious based ignorance will take hope from "mayor Pete's" example.  I am from and older generation that faced job loss and endless quantities of self-hate, so I hope Pete Buttigieg's example will help many see a positive future despite short term travails.  The Advocate looks at Pete's amazing example.  Here are highlights:

History-making candidate Pete Buttigieg ended his presidential campaign Sunday afternoon. Shortly after, he delivered a speech in his hometown of South Bend, Ind. in which he spoke about the impact of becoming the first gay candidate to get as far as he did in a race for the presidency. 

"We sent a message to every kid out there wondering if whatever marks them out as different means they are somehow destined to be less than, someone who once felt that exact same way can become a leading American presidential candidate with his husband at his side," Buttigieg said to a cheering crowd in a speech that followed an embrace and a kiss with his husband Chasten Buttigieg. 

The move to drop out came after finishing fourth in the South Carolina primary, which overwhelmingly went to Joe Biden. 

"The truth is the path has narrowed to a close," Buttigieg told the crowd in South Bend. "Therefore, it's time for him to step aside." 

As one who was racked by self-hate for many years while in the closet and who had two serious suicide attempts along the path of my coming out journey, I hope that Pete Buttigieg's example will save many LGBT youth and others from experiencing the self loathing and at times hopelessness that I and others felt.  Pete will always be a hero to me. As long time LGBT activist Evan Wolfson said. “Americans responded to these urgently needed qualities, and to Pete’s demonstration that gay people can be just as talented, just as effective, and just as patriotic as anyone."

The Coronavitus Will Cause a Political Pandemic

As a column in the Washington Post notes, so far Donald Trump's handling of the coronavirus has been less than a study in building public confidence.   Indeed, Trump and his sycophants continue to suggest that the entire health care scare is a hoax and his regime is trying to censor statements by medical experts.  Trump's main concern is not public health and citizens dying but instead the stock market level.  Having a malignant narcissist in the White House during a potential pandemic is decidedly not a good thing. Here are column excerpts:

Political interference with that process will almost certainly backfire by corroding public confidence and abetting confusion. Some of Trump’s public comments have not been helpful because they suggest that the president is not entirely in agreement with some of his medical advisers.

No doubt [Trump] the president is unhappy with the dramatic decline in the stock market. He has clearly indicated that he expected to make the market’s spectacular gains a major theme in his bid for reelection.

This will be harder now, maybe impossible. But if Trump responds by searching for scapegoats or blaming his economic and health advisers, he will make a bad situation worse — for him, the country and (possibly) the world.

A piece in Vanity Fair looks at the potential political consequences of a spread of the virus in America may mean in the context of the presidential election.  Here are highlights: 

If trends hold, the coronavirus will soon upend daily life here in the United States. Schools in some cities will close for a while; supply chains will be disrupted; people will stay at home; and the economy will suffer a blow. Even now, stock prices have continued to fall, and surgical masks have been sold out for weeks. Yesterday, we could read about the first case of so-called community transmission, after a patient in northern California tested positive for coronavirus despite having no obvious link to anyone else with it. Despite assurances from Donald Trump this week that “we’ve had tremendous success” in containing the coronavirus outbreak, Americans are unconvinced.

Coronavirus is going to be everybody’s running mate in 2020, and the question is who will fare worst as a result. In what’s normally a zero-sum game, whatever hurts one candidate helps the other. But coronavirus won’t be so clear-cut. A lot depends on how bad things get and who is running against whom.

On the Republican side, we know we’re getting Trump, and early signs of his approach to the virus are unpromising. An engaged president would be on the phone daily with CDC officials, members of Congress, military leaders, cabinet officials, medical experts, and even companies like 3M, which produces the masks on which people will be relying. Trump instead sounded like someone who got a few scattered briefings. Asked about why the CDC—which, as feared, has been stumbling out of the gate—has tested only about 500 people, versus the thousands of tests being conducted in other countries, Trump couldn’t hide that he was winging it, . . . before going into a recitative about washing hands. Trump hasn’t been sounding much of an alarm, for fear of setting off panic and seeing stock prices fall further, so life has continued as normal. He has no evident master plan, and yesterday he was trafficking in the-flu-is-worse clichés that were last in fashion weeks ago. He’d be better off as the border fanatic that people believe him to be.

If we get through the next couple of months without a big outbreak, then Trump will be in okay shape. While he might not get a lot of credit for preventing disaster (because people rarely do), he won’t suffer for it, and he’ll be able to boast of aggressive measures taken, regardless of what we did. If things get very bad, however, then Trump will have a tough time hanging onto office. We can see he knows this is a possibility, because he has appointed Mike Pence to oversee the federal response. This is a lot like China’s leader Xi Jinping assigning a similar task to Premier Li Keqiang. If things get bad, you can blame it on the bumbling lieutenant.

Meanwhile, among Democrats, coronavirus has a quite different effect. Trump’s loss is their gain, in the big picture, but they are also running against one another. In the most mundane realm, self-quarantining means that people don’t leave their homes. They don’t vote, don’t caucus, and don’t show up for rallies. This limits the ability of candidates to mobilize people, and it favors those who get a lot of attention even without campaigning on the ground. It’s okay for Mike Bloomberg, who has ads running all day on television, but it’s less ideal for the others. Bernie Sanders fires up his supporters with enormous rallies, as Donald Trump and Barack Obama did before him. Those would have to cease for a while.

Coronavirus will have people looking for plausible managers. Bloomberg, of course, has been mentioned in that regard, and it will help him. Elizabeth Warren, who claims to have plans for most things, might also get a lift. Blandness will become a virtue, as well, so Amy Klobuchar will look stronger. On the other hand, Joe Biden would not be likely to gain much ground. He has no real reputation for management, and he also lacks the vigor characteristic of effective leaders in crisis.

Bernie Sanders is less of a manager, but he would have a different and important advantage in the middle of an epidemic, which is commitment to “Medicare for all.” It sounds too drastic for many Americans when things are normal. It doesn’t sound so drastic during a pandemic, when infected people will be avoiding doctor’s appointments for fear of bankruptcy. As things stand, it’s all too plausible that, within a few weeks, people will be safer in Shanghai than in New York, because in China people are vigilant, and cases are finally on the wane, while here things are looser, and just getting started. The coronavirus will shuffle the political deck for everyone, the more so the longer it continues. But no matter who profits or loses politically with this epidemic, sane people can only hope that it comes and goes fast. The less effect it has on our politics, or anything else, the happier we’ll be. Even Mike Bloomberg would agree.

The Reemergence of the Moderate Democrat

Bernie Sanders supporters remind me of Virginia Republicans except for the fact that rather being knuckle dragging Neanderthals who relentlessly said (and continue to say) the only way for the Virginia GOP to win is to run "true conservatives" while Sanders' crowd says only running an extreme liberal - a socialist in fact - will lead to a Democrat victory in November 2020.   Obviously, the 2019 Virginia elections demonstrated that the far right GOP line of reasoning was false as the GOP ran reactionary candidates and suffered a huge defeat.  Similarly, in 2018, outside of liberal strongholds, moderate Democrats fared better than extreme liberals in the 2018 mid-term elections. These objective lessons in reality continue to be lost on both the GOP far right and the Democrat far left. So far, the two Democrat rounds of the 2020 nomination process have similarly shown that the vast majority of voters want a moderate candidate.  A column in the Washington Post looks at this reality and suggests that the media claims that the Democrat Party has moved far left is a media trope.  Here are column highlights:

For all the thunder on the Bernie Sanders left, the most interesting trend in the Democratic campaign this year may be the reemergence of the moderate wing of the party, led by charismatic new voices: former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar.

In our barbell view of politics, where all the weight seems to be at the two ends, this reality may be obscured: Far more Americans (42 percent) described themselves as independents than as Democrats (27 percent) or Republicans (30 percent) in the most recent Gallup survey of party affiliation. The percentage of people who see themselves in this broad middle has rarely been higher.

The Iowa caucuses fiasco robbed Buttigieg of the impact of his victory there. But it was a startling performance by a young, relatively inexperienced candidate whose strongest message has been the impracticality of social programs proposed by Sanders and other progressives.

While Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont, posted a win Tuesday in New Hampshire, the bigger stories there, arguably, were Buttigieg’s strong second-place showing and Klobuchar’s breakout performance in finishing third. The two moderates together carried 44.2 percent of the vote, compared with Sanders’s 25.8 percent. Even if you add Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s 9.2 percent to Sanders’s total, the balance is toward the center, not the left.

The more voters have looked at progressives’ expensive programs, the warier they have become. Warren never recovered from her embrace of compulsory Medicare. Voters see former vice president Joe Biden as a spent force, but they still want a pragmatic candidate who can beat President Trump. That yearning for a strong moderate helped Buttigieg and Klobuchar, but the next beneficiary could be former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg in the March 3 Super Tuesday primaries.

Here’s another theme that’s often overlooked: The 2020 successes of moderate Democrats are a continuation of the 2018 midterm election results. The left wing of the Democratic Party, led by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), got the attention then. But it was the centrist candidates who swung Republican districts into the Democratic column and thus delivered the House for Democrats in 2018.

“Moderate” is one of those limp political descriptors, like “centrist” or “bipartisan,” that suggest a soggy lump in the middle. But the campaign proposals from Buttigieg, Klobuchar and even Bloomberg offer significant change — and in achievable ways. They get that the status quo isn’t working for most Americans. Their proposals for dealing with climate change, wealth inequality and health care share a common virtue: They could actually be implemented without busting the budget or further polarizing the country.

Trump seems to think he can win reelection by dividing the country even more savagely. But for a frazzled, fatigued electorate, maybe this is the season for the “fix it” faction that offers realistic plans for solving problems.

The Democrats can blow this election, for sure. Moderates may have the numbers in the aggregate, but aggregates don’t win elections. Sanders has passion, and unless Democrats can coalesce around a pragmatic rival, the Milwaukee convention could be a bloodbath and the November election a blowout for Trump.

Trump tosses new stink bombs every day. His fans love this carnival of resentment, but polls have shown since the beginning of his presidency that a majority of Americans don’t. Trump World is about raw power, to be sure. But there are some interesting, easily overlooked signs early in this 2020 campaign that maybe the shouters won’t win.

Convincing Sanders' base of this reality may prove as impossible as convincing the GOP far right in Virginia that their extremism is their biggest obstacle to electoral victory. 

Will Trump Fatigue Hurt Him and the GOP in 2020?

Outside of Trump's white supremacist/right wing extremist base, I'm not sure how many people enjoy, much less listen to his constant outrages that make most reality TV shows pale in comparison.  I will concede that I despise the man and when driving and listening to satellite radio, I immediately change the channel or hit the "disc" button rather that hear a syllable of him speaking since I (i) cannot stand the sound of his voice, (ii) know that the odds are that anything he says is a lie, and (iii) believe that he is doing immeasurable harm to the nation's economy, environment, and moral fabric. From the many comments I hear even from self-labeled conservatives, many of them share a similar anathema for the man and the never ending chaos of his regime and the fact that serious matters are being neglected as we suffer through a daily reality show of his rants and antics.  In a piece in Politico, the editor of National Review argues that outside of the Trump base, many may vote against him in 2020 if for no other reason than to end the daily shit show that is his administration and his daily Twitter equivalent of verbal diarrhea.  Here are column excerpts: 

We are in Week 2 of the president of the United States and his communications director of six days feuding on Twitter and cable TV.

The Trump-Scaramucci smackdown has, at times, distracted from the Trump-Denmark fight, which has been eclipsed, in its turn, by the Trump-Omar/Tlaib battle that has somehow morphed into a clash between Trump and Jews who vote for Democrats.

This is only a schematic account of events of the past few days that leaves out minor, supplemental controversies over Trump retweeting a supporter calling him the King of Israel, Trump insulting his Federal Reserve chairman, Trump retweeting a suggestion that a federal prisoner might have been assassinated by one of his predecessors in the Oval Office, and Trump blasting Fox News over a poll he didn’t like.

Trump makes the hyperactive, voluble Teddy Roosevelt, whom H.G. Wells called “a big noise,” seem shy and retiring by comparison. . . . Trump reportedly told aides before taking office that they should think of each presidential day as an episode in a TV show, a goal that turns out to have been too modest. Trump acts like he need to produce enough programming to fill a 24-hour news network, with outrages, internal melodrama, legal fights and endless plot twists . . . .

Obviously, the fundamentals will be most determinative of Trump’s fate in 2020. Is the economy still growing? Are we at peace? How does the trade war with China stand? But the backdrop to it all will be the level of public tolerance for, or exhaustion with, Trump’s antics and provocations.

In other words, can Americans bear for the show to go on? The threat to Trump isn’t Trump Derangement Syndrome, . . . . The threat is Trump Fatigue, a condition that could spread more broadly and make swing voters harder to reach.

The latest high-profile spats are characteristic of the Trump era. The fight with Anthony Scaramucci has a performative aspect you’d expect of two showmen. One is the master, a former reality TV-show host who cashed in his notoriety for the presidency. The other is an up-and-comer, who made the most of notoriety gained by brief proximity to the master, including a brief appearance on a reality TV show himself . . . .

The Greenland flap is classic, too. . . . it becomes a real diplomatic incident, with insults and hurt feelings on both sides and a presidential trip to Denmark canceled for now . . .

What all these controversies have in common is that they fill the hours while nothing much really happens. Is Anthony Scaramucci actually going to organize a primary challenge against Trump? No. Is Greenland going to be sold, or Denmark fall off as a U.S. ally? No. Is Israel’s fate going to rise or fall on the travels of a couple left-wing backbench U.S. congresswomen? No.

There’s no doubt that the constant Trump static hurts him grievously among suburban, college-educated women. But no doubt that for his supporters the show is part of his appeal, . . . .

What’s the political balance for Trump? I believe it’s negative, . . . Even if Trump is hurting himself with his sensory overload approach to the presidency, the Democrats nominate someone dull at their own risk.

Just imagine how calming it would be to have a sane, non-narcissist in office who spent his/her time attending to the nation's business and not picking fights and stroking an overweening - and, in my view, psychotic - ego.  One can only hope that a longing for normalcy will lead many to vote against trump merely to change the channel so to speak. 

How Democrats Defeat Donald Trump

My biggest fear surrounding the 2020 elections is that Democrats will by default reelect Donald Trump.  How?  By straying too far to the left and lose moderates and independents - and even the small percentage of Republicans sickened by Trump - and/or those so obsessed with "purity" or allegiance only to their preferred candidate - think Sanders supporters - staying home from the polls.  If one is candid, this latter phenomenon is what put Trump in the White House in 2016. The world and the nation have NOT been a better place for it and a Clinton presidency would have done far more to advance their supposed goals than what has occurred under Trump/Pence.A column in the New York Times looks at this danger and suggests what Democrats should do. The only question is whether the mainstream media will not make the same mistakes of false equivalency and allowing itself to be manipulated by Trump.  Here are column highlights:

Surprise, surprise: Donald Trump has no bottom. Just when you think he has sunk as low as he can, he stages a rally like that atrocity in North Carolina on Wednesday night and sinks lower. But the key takeaway isn’t that he’s a demagogue or a racist: These were facts put into evidence long ago. It’s that Democrats can’t afford to take unnecessary risks, dream deferrable dreams and engage in avoidable distractions as they set about the urgent work of defeating him. The 2020 election isn’t about getting everything that Democrats want and that Americans deserve. It’s about getting rid of Trump, because the price of not doing so could be this nation’s very soul.

The Democratic Party and the Democratic candidates for president need to be smarter, more realistic and more disciplined than they are now. Enough with internal feuding. Enough with taking the president’s bait and bumbling into his traps. If he sets the terms of the political discussion, he wins.

He wants to spend the 15 months between now and Election Day talking about “the squad” . . . Democrats mustn’t follow suit. Absolutely they should defend the four congresswomen, and make clear that they are every bit as American as Trump is.

So say that once, loud and clear. Maybe say it twice. Then move on. Trump wants to define all Democrats in terms of the squad, when they’re but a part of a diverse party and hardly its ideological proxies. So don’t let him.

[N]o one’s talking about health care or jobs: the stuff that actually turns elections and will turn this one. If Trump has his way, this campaign will be a bogus referendum on a bastard definition of patriotism. It will be a race-obsessed and racist jubilee. Don’t play along.

We used all those words in 2016 — racist, demagogue, fascist — and he won. Voters saw indelible examples of this same behavior, and he won. The Wednesday rally wasn’t a new Trump, just a bloated one.

Stop talking so much about the America that he’s destroying and save that oxygen for the America that Democrats want to create.

Stop hypothesizing about Democratic voters’ political priorities and policy appetites and look at the actual evidence of where Americans really are. That’s the 2018 midterms.

It may have minted young progressive superstars like the congresswomen in the squad, but they aren’t especially popular beyond their progressive fan clubs. . . . . so their campaigns weren’t lessons in how to move voters from one party’s column to the other.

Other first-term House candidates’ bids did offer such lessons, so look harder at that crew. Lauren Underwood in the exurbs of Chicago, Xochitl Torres Small in southern New Mexico, Abigail Spanberger in the suburbs of Richmond, Va., and Antonio Delgado in upstate New York — these four defeated Republicans in districts where Trump had prevailed by four to 10 percentage points just two years earlier. None of them ran on the Green New Deal, single-payer health insurance, reparations or the abolition of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

They touted more restrained agendas. And they didn’t talk that much about Trump. They knew they didn’t need to. For voters offended by him, he’s his own negative ad, playing 24/7 on cable news.

Of the roughly 90 candidates on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s list of 2018 challengers with some hope of turning a red House district blue, just two made a big pitch for single-payer health care. Both lost. . . . The party did pick up 40 seats overall — just not with the most progressive candidates.

According to a May analysis by Catalist, a data-analysis firm, 89 percent of the Democratic vote gain in 2018 was from swing voters. That’s just one set of numbers, one way to slice the pie, but it does raise questions about the progressive insistence that partisan turnout and a surge in new voters, attracted by bold policy positions, is the path to victory in 2020.

But that hasn’t stopped the leftward lunge of leading contenders for the Democratic nomination, several of whom want “Medicare for all” and many of whom support the decriminalization of illegal border crossings.

That puts them on shaky ground. Polling has shown that when voters are told that Medicare for all would mean an end to private insurance or an increase in taxes, support for it drops below 40 percent.

And according to a Politico/Morning Consult survey published a few days ago, 51 percent of voters support the sweeping raids by ICE that the president trumpets, while just 35 percent oppose them. That suggests that anything that smacks of open borders — which is how President Barack Obama’s secretary for homeland security, Jeh Johnson, described Democratic presidential candidates’ positions in a recent op-ed essay in The Washington Post — puts those candidates at odds with public opinion. Voters see them answering Trump’s extremism with extremism of a different kind.

Nancy Pelosi knows this. It’s why she hasn’t been talking up the Green New Deal, single-payer insurance or impeachment, and the suggestion that this makes her some squishy centrist pushover — some musty relic from a timid era — is bunk. She has her eyes on the most meaningful prize, one she pursued successfully in the midterms: Democratic victory.

So Democrats should listen to her. They should also remember Obama’s legacy correctly. I keep hearing that his 2008 election makes the case for an unconventional, daring Democratic nominee. To a certain extent, it does. But don’t forget that he in some ways ran to Hillary Clinton’s right that year, and he spoke constantly of national unity, bipartisan amity and turning down the temperature of Washington politics.

Many voters still hunger for that. Many are wiped out by the raucous reality show of this presidency. And the way to promise something different isn’t to return Trump’s fire with even more heat. It’s to be dignified and deliberative.

I wonder what would happen if the Democratic nominee simply refused to talk about Trump. No responding to whatever stupid nickname he comes up with. No sweeping denunciation of some deed of his that any sensible American already knows is wrong. Just the articulation of better solutions to America’s problems. Trump would go mad with the lack of attention. And maybe then, thank heaven, he’d go away.

Are Never Trump Republicans Worth Democrats' Efforts?

As a former Republican - I left the GOP many years ago - I watch the antics and hand-wringing of never Trump Republicans with some skepticism.  For years as the GOP drifted towards becoming a party controlled by white supremacists and far right Christian religious extremists - the base that elected Donald Trump - these never Trumpers continually acted as apologists for GOP extremism and the war against Barack Obama waged by Mitch McConnell in the U.S. Senate and a who's who of the falsely named Christian Right.  Worse yet, in the 2016 election, many either held their noses and voted for Trump or voted for hapless third party candidates who had a snow ball's chance in Hell of winning so that such votes were a defacto vote for Trump.   Now that the handiwork of their actions has been fully realized and the GOP has become something truly hideous, some of them have the audacity to argue that Democrats ought to be kissing their asses and courting their votes. I'm sorry, but a vote for today's GOP and its candidates is, in my opinion, a vote for evil.  The ONLY alternative and way to fight that evil is to vote a straight Democrat ticket. A piece in Politico looks at the argument made by Mona Charen, a long apologist for the GOP and its worse policies who thinks she needs to be courted by Democrats.  I believe that the 2020 Democrat presidential candidates need to pursue moderation in their policies to win moderate voters, but I doubt the likes of Charen will ever be won over from the GOP that, like it or not, they helped create. Here are excerpts:

Dear 2020 Democrats—all 23 of you who are running for president:

You are itching to be rid of Donald Trump. Who can blame you? Of course, if this were a normal Republican presidency, I would not share your feelings. Not remotely. As a lifelong conservative, I think your policy ideas are ill-advised. But this cycle, other Trump-disgusted Republicans and I can contemplate voting Democrat. We could do so not because we’ve become progressives, but because we think it’s in the long-term interests of conservatism and the country to be rid of Trump. If he gains a second term, conservatism may well be irredeemably tarnished.

[L]et me make the case that you should court Republican refugees like me in 2020.

You may think you don’t need us—but you’d be wrong. I know things are looking good for you: Trump’s approval rating has never topped 46 percent, and among younger voters, millennials and Gen Zers, his support is 30 percent or below. But Trump was elected with the lowest approval ratings of any major candidate in history. Polls can disguise as well as reveal. The “shy Tory” phenomenon—in which voters seem disinclined to tell pollsters that they support conservatives—is real across the globe, as evidenced most recently by the upset victory of the conservatives (called “liberals”) in Australia. Right-wing populism continues to show strength worldwide as recent election results in Brazil, India, Hungary, Poland and the Philippines attest.

And if the results of the 2018 midterms have you feeling confident, you should look to the not-so-distant past. Democrats were pasted in the 2010 midterms and yet President Barack Obama glided painlessly to reelection in 2012.

While we’re on the subject of the midterms, remember that your 2018 victories were not a left-wing triumph. Your 40-seat pickup was due in no small measure to Republicans and independents who voted Democrat. In other words: Voters like me.

Democrats are well-positioned to win in 2020 by embracing political normalcy again. . . . Trump’s tenure has not, thankfully, featured pestilence or war. It’s more like the Three Stooges than the Four Horsemen. Still, today, many of us are prepared to put our long-term goals of balanced budgets and less government-controlled health care aside to feel some sense of political equilibrium again.

But that’s not the tone you are adopting. First, you seem taken with the idea of executive overreach. . . . This is precisely the kind of power grab that Trump engaged in when declaring his spurious state of emergency to redirect funds to his border wall. And though Democrats’ frustration with his lawlessness is justified, this would represent a total vindication of it. If Democrats respond to Trump’s arrogation of power by doing the same thing, our constitutional system is threatened.

The assertion of unlimited executive power is not just contrary to the Constitution; it’s also a recipe for rising political tensions. If I believe that a Democrat will propose legislation with which I disagree, I know I stand a good chance of having my representatives modify or even block it. That’s not true of executive action. The stakes of each presidential contest thus get ratcheted up, as both sides fear that the next president, unconstrained by Congress, can lurch the country in a dramatically new direction. That severely decreases the chances that all of you, hopeful Democrats, can bring more centrist voters over to your side.

Second, have some respect for the norms and institutions that undergird our system’s stability. You claim to be dismayed by Trump’s norm-shattering ways, and yet your proposals are political earthquakes.

Harris and Buttigieg also favor packing the Supreme Court. The court has had nine justices since 1869. Remember, when FDR attempted to pack the court in 1937, he was thwarted by his own party. If Democrats take this step, it will invite further erosions of tradition by the next Republican majority. And, like executive orders, it will heighten the sense that presidents are would-be emperors.

Sanders, Cory Booker, Harris, Warren, Julián Castro and Andrew Yang have endorsed the “Green New Deal,” and Amy Klobuchar and Gillibrand support the “aspirations” of the plan, if not the details. The plan would demand a vertiginous (in fact, impossible) reordering of our entire government and economy—for instance, by requiring the refurbishment of every single building in the country.

There’s a clear way forward, Democrats, and it is grounded in the Constitution. Do what you think is right—propose legislation to fix Obamacare or spend more on basic research of climate change or whatever—but in the constitutional way. No sweeping, federalism-smashing plans to overhaul everything in the name of your preferred policies. And please, don’t call for the abolition of traditions and constitutional structures, like the Electoral College, that make voters nervous about your stewardship.

Democrats would be wise to embrace that sensibility, in the person of Biden or another, not just because it could win, but because it’s important for all of us, right and left, to turn our faces away from Caesarism—of the right or the left.

Perhaps Democrats Have Not Moved So Far to the Left After All

I have noted many times my fears that the far left of the Democrat Party would push too hard for far left policies not popular with a majority of Americans and, as a result nearly guarantee the re-election of Donald Trump - something I see nothing less than a catastrophic.   While it is very, very early in the 2020 Democrat nomination process, something is happening that suggest that perhaps the far left of the party has been living in a bubble and is simply out of touch with even the mainstream of Democrats much less the mainstream of all voters. Other than Bernie Sanders, the far left favorites are struggling to gain traction and Joe Biden - written off as a has been - is leading the pools by a for now commanding margin.  In third place behind Biden and Sanders is Pete Buttigieg who the far left is attacking for being "too white" or "too privileged," taking identity politics to an extreme. Taken together, the Biden and Buttigieg supporters suggest that a majority of Democrats are moderates and simply do not want what the far left is selling.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at the phenomenon.  Here are excepts (note the reference to how wrong the far left was on Virginia's blackface debacle where the far right played the far left like a fine violin): 

Over the past five years, the Democratic Party has seemed to race leftward so fast that its recent standard-bearers are considered no longer qualified to lead it. Bill Clinton? An embarrassment not welcome on the campaign trail. Barack Obama? A neoliberal whose half-measures should not be repeated. Nor does the new crowd of Democrats qualify by the stringent standards of ideological purity: Cory Booker has ties to Wall Street; Kamala Harris was a prosecutor; Beto O’Rourke once mused about cutting Social Security.

But nobody is thought of as more retrograde than Joe Biden — “a deeply flawed candidate who’s out of step with the mood of his party,” Politico wrote last year. Biden’s heresies are comprehensive . . . . And Biden, being Biden, has articulated these positions with cringey sound bites that make the situation even worse.

The prevailing mood toward a Biden candidacy has been a combination of anger that he has the temerity to lead a party that has left him behind and sympathy that he’s too addled to grasp his predicament. A genre of op-ed has developed out of liberals pleading with Biden, with such headlines as “Why Joe Biden Shouldn’t Run for President” (The Week, The Guardian); “I Like Joe Biden. I Urge Him Not to Run” (the New York Times); “I Really Like Joe Biden, but He Shouldn’t Run for President” (USA Today); and, as exasperation has sunk in, “Again, Joe Biden, for the Love of God: Do Not Run for President” (The Stranger).

[I]nitial polling has revealed that a large number of Democrats have not left Biden behind at all. He begins the race leading his closest competitors, including early front-runner Bernie Sanders, by as much as 30 points. Perhaps it was the party’s intelligentsia, not Biden, that was out of touch with the modern Democratic electorate.

The conclusion that Biden could not lead the post-Obama Democratic Party is the product of misplaced assumptions about the speed of its transformation. Yes, the party has moved left, but not nearly as far or as fast as everybody seemed to believe. Counterintuitively, House Democrats’ triumph in the midterms may have pushed their center of gravity to the right: The 40 seats Democrats gained were overwhelmingly located in moderate or Republican-leaning districts.

Biden’s apparent resurrection from relic to runaway front-runner has illustrated a chasm between perception and reality. The triumph of the left is somewhere between a movement ahead of its time and a bubble that has just popped.

This is not to say we imagined the whole thing. . . . News accounts have emphasized the growing share of self-identified liberals in the party as well as the diminishing stigma of socialism among younger Democrats. But political parties are large groups of people, and they change very slowly. Socialism may be growing less unpopular, but it remains quite unpopular.

While the liberal share of the Democratic electorate is rising, it’s only just caught up to the combined share of Democrats who call themselves moderate or conservative. A small majority of Democrats say they wish the party would move in a more moderate direction.

So why did the media spend the past few years getting the state of the Democratic Party so wrong? One reason is that a numbers of factions had an incentive to hype the rise of the left. The left itself came out of 2016 giddy with its conviction that Sanders lost to Hillary Clinton only out of inertia (or even, the more radical members of the movement claimed, party manipulation). Sanders had won the young, and therefore the future.

In reality, Sanders received lots of votes from people who either appreciated his earnest persona or objected to Clinton for a variety of reasons, including her being too liberal. . . . . The Sanders movement convinced itself that his success reflected an unsated demand for socialism. The rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—young, nonwhite, native to social media—gave the movement the ideal image of its ambitions. Their plan to take over the party involved repeating that they had already done so.

In this project, they enjoyed the support of the conservative media. Saddled by his own unpopularity, Trump cast his opponents as radical socialists. . . . Right-wing media focused almost obsessively on Ocasio-Cortez and a handful of her closest allies, including Minnesota’s Ilhan Omar, Massachusetts’s Ayanna Pressley, and Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib. That these had a habit of supplying TV-ready controversies made the cycles of outrage perfectly symbiotic.

On top of it all, the familiar cast of centrist independents cycling through the greenrooms of CNN and MSNBC found the left to be a convenient balancing tool. Trump’s gross bigotry and authoritarianism threatened to place them in the uncomfortable spot of blaming the country’s problems on a single party.

The most important ingredient in the delusion was Twitter. It is hard to exaggerate the degree to which the platform shapes the minds of professional political observers. Part of Twitter’s allure to insiders is that it creates a simulacrum of the real world, complete with candidates, activists, and pundits all responding to events in real time. Because Twitter superficially resembles the outside world’s political debate — it does, after all, contain the full left-to-right spectrum — it is easy to mistake it for the real thing.

One striking example of the disconnect took place earlier this year in Virginia. An old medical-school yearbook showed Ralph Northam, the state’s Democratic governor, in a picture featuring a blackface costume and Ku Klux Klan robe and hood. If you followed the debate on Twitter, as nearly all political reporters did, Northam’s resignation was simply a given. The debate turned to when he would step down, who would replace him, and what other prominent people would have career-ending blackface yearbook photographs.

Virginians, however, were split in ways the political elite would never have guessed. Whites and Republicans favored his resignation, while African-American voters believed, by a 20-point margin, that Northam should not resign.

Pete Buttigieg Continues to Prompt Evangelicals to Show Their True Hate-Filled Nature

The presidential candidacy of Pete Buttigieg - and the fact that he is running in third place currently - has evangelical Christians, or at least the "professional Christians" who make a living disseminating hatred and falsehoods under the guise of religious belief, to go into absolute apoplexy.  Constant shrieks and flying spittle are the norm, especially for a group that has labeled itself as the Gone2Far Movement which has a piece in Christian News Wire - a typically far right Christian "news" outlet.  

As blogger friend Joe Jervis noted - Joe and I have been tracking far right anti-gay "Christian" extremists for over two decades - Gone2Far is a relatively new coalition of long time anti-LGBT extremists Scott Lively, Peter LaBarbera, Brian Camenker, and alleged ex-gay Stephen Black, who Joe, I, and other LGBT activists have tracked for many years as they have peddled anti-gay lies and bogus science.  New to the group is what Jie describes as "a gaggle of hater nobodies you’ve never heard of"  who I suspect are motivated by a desire to get onboard the anti-gay financial gravy train among evangelical circles.   With luck, these hate merchants will finally be seen by the larger public for what they are - extremists who are leeches who prey on the ignorant and gullible while they line their pockets with money made from speaking circuits and books peddled to the sheeple.

On a related note, some say that I am far too hard on evangelicals and that some are decent people.  My problem with such people is that they are cut out of the same cloth as the "good Germans" who did nothing to stop the rise of Hitler or the Holocaust. Good, decent people cannot remain silent in the face of hate, deliberate lies and evil.  Yet the silence of the majority of evangelicals in confronting groups like Gone2Far is deafening.  By their silence, rightly or wrongly, they have tacitly allowed such hate merchants to define them.  If they have a problem with how I describe them, all they need do is speak up and condemn folks like those involved in Gone2Far.  

Meanwhile, here's a sampling of the lunacy and animus being spouted by Gone2Far as set forth in the Christian News Wire piece (note that per these lunatics Buttigieg's candidacy is part of a larger gay conspiracy):  

Mayor Pete Buttigieg is publicly challenging the definition of what a Christian is in the public square.

The culmination of the culture wars has now turned to redefining Christianity. The LGBTQ community has used media, entertainment, and the law to codify their view of sexuality. They have convinced Americans that the homosexual lifestyle is normal and an acceptable practice in the public square. They have, in effect, successfully introduced a neo-morality into the culture. In fact, the LGBTQ community is claiming victory over the traditional values of evangelicals.

Mayor Pete represents the "kill shot" launch by the gay community to now re-define Christianity. This neo-Christianity is made out of their feelings into their image. Pete Buttigieg is the face of their new theology. Buttigieg claims that "God made me this way." An incredible claim in light of the fact the Bible teaches homosexuality is a sin. However, this claim is far more dangerous and sinister than it appears. This claim creates a contradiction and brings into question the coherency of truth claims in the Holy Word of God.

Also, the claim makes the God of scripture a hypocrite. Why would He make people homosexuals and then condemn them as sinners? Buttigieg is challenging underlying assumptions in the infallible word of God. I submit he is redefining Christianity. This attack has been brewing for a long time. The LGBTQ has been seeking ways to diminish the influence of the Bible's unswerving teaching against the gay lifestyle. 

Note the use of the term "gay lifestyle" is derogatory in itself and pushes the lie that sexual orientation is a choice and can be changed.  Never mind what medical and mental health experts say and never mind that the Old Testament to which these folks point to for their authority - the New Testament is silent on homosexuality - was authored by ignorant Bronze Age herders.  The real problem Buttigieg poses for these extremists is two-fold: (i) he shows that gays are normal, responsible people like so many others in society and not the drug addicts and alcoholics the Christofascists have depicted us as for decades, and (ii) he is putting a spotlight on the archaic and untrue myths the Christofascists have based their lives and exclusionary and divisive dogma on. They simply cannot tolerate anything or anyone that makes it clear to others that they have lived their lives based on lies.  They will lash out and try to destroy anyone who exposes their false beliefs.  Mayor Pete had best fasten his seat belt. Their hysteria and hate-filled attacks will likely only increase.

Many in GOP would like Nothing More than Sanders as Democrat Nominee

Sometimes seeing who those on the opposing team see as must vulnerable ought to make one think twice about their own choice.  Rational people might pause and question their support when the opposing political party see your choice as the easiest one to defeat.  Most likely, such thoughts will not register with Bernie Sanders whose peevishness put Trump - a man diametrically opposed to what they claimed to espouse - in the White House in 2016.  Many Democrats fear a reprise of 2016.  As a piece in Politico reports, many Republicans are salivating at the prospect of Sanders winning the 2020 Democrat nomination.   I share their views of Sanders' potential liabilities, especially the risk of losing moderate and independent voters.  Note how Republicans also view a Sanders nomination as a boost to their effort to retain control of the U.S. Senate.  Here are article highlights:

Republicans like their chances of keeping the Senate in 2020. But there’s one thing they think would all but seal the deal: Bernie Sanders as the Democratic presidential nominee.

Some GOP incumbents are practically cheering him on, confident there’s no way a self-described democratic socialist could win a general election against President Donald Trump and that he’d drag other Democrats on the ballot with him.

“It would be good for us to have a nominee like that,” said Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), who is up for reelection next year and sounded downright giddy about the prospect of Sanders representing Democrats at the top of the ticket.

Trump and the Senate GOP have explicitly designed their 2020 strategy around Sanders, beating the anti-socialism drum incessantly and attempting to tether every Democrat on the ballot to what they call a creep away from capitalism and toward collectivism.

“A lot of people think that in that crowded field, he could break out,” said Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.). He added: “If we can run a race against a person that’s an out-of-the-closet socialist and promoting socialist ideas, it’s a great contrast for us.”

The strategy shows Republicans are much more comfortable talking about Sanders and tying other Democrats to his brand of socialism than they are in defending this year's meager legislative agenda. But Republicans could be making the same mistake Democrats made four years ago, when Trump launched his presidential campaign and they began salivating over the prospect of a Senate sweep.

That misunderstanding of Trump’s appeal is now the subject of repeated examination by Democratic politicians and strategists.

“I would suggest they underestimate me at their own peril and I hope they do,” Sanders said in an interview. Republicans are unlikely to run on their own forward-leaning agenda, he added, “So they have to figure out some boogeyman that they think they can run against.”

Though Republicans will try to attach the socialist label to anyone who endorses sweeping expansions of government health care programs and climate change legislation, GOP lawmakers and Trump allies concede it would work much better against Sanders than it would against some of his rivals. Independent voters tired of Trump might hold their nose and back him again if Sanders were the alternative, the GOP logic goes, in turn lifting vulnerable Republican senators to victory. However, one Democrat working on Senate races said a Sanders nomination could help individual Democratic congressional candidates assert their independence from their party in key races.

Democrats have a clear but narrow path to the Senate majority that hinges largely on picking up seats in states like Colorado, Maine, North Carolina, and Arizona, and defending incumbents in Michigan, Alabama, New Hampshire and Virginia. Democrats need to net at least three Senate seats to win the chamber.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is urging at-risk Republicans to emphasize to voters that the GOP Senate is a “firewall against socialism in this country.” And apparently they're listening.

Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner, perhaps the most endangered Republican up next year, is lacing into Sanders’ proposal to let prisoners vote as “not who America is” and the “antithesis [of] our values.” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), up for reelection next year, said his fortunes will improve if he gets to run against Sanders because he can cast his race as "a referendum between free enterprise and socialism."

[S]ome Democratic senators said privately they agreed with Republicans that a Sanders nomination would be too easy for the GOP to demagogue. Some fretted about the down-ballot effect he would have on Senate and House races if he were to win the nomination. They declined to speak publicly because it's early in the race and they didn't want to exacerbate tensions within the party.

Two moderate Democrats, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Jon Tester of Montana, both acknowledged that the GOP’s strategy of painting the entire Democratic Party as in lockstep with Sanders could work in a national election. But Tester, who won reelection in deep red Montana last year, said Republicans are merely deflecting, given their own heartburn over Trump.