TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS

TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS

I have been thinking about Christmas this week.

Actually, I have been thinking about Christmas Eve, which is today. And which, it seems to me, captures more of the essence of Christmas than even the day itself.

Christmas is about anticipation. About what will happen, not what has occurred. It's about the future, whether that future is mere hours in the offing or a millenia away. And it unites, in perhaps a way that no other holiday can or does, the pedestrian with the profound. In fact, it makes the pedestrian profound.

Kids will go crazy tonight. Most won't be able to sleep. Those not afraid of some cosmic retribution will sneak a peak out the window or down the stairs in search of Santa Claus. Others will become inveterate Holmes-es (Sherlock, that is), carefully processing every errant sound from a squeaky baseboard to determine if he has come down the chimney, with care or otherwise, along with a satchel of goodies. A few years ago, a friend told me his son had come into his bedroom in the middle of the night, swearing to his father that "Rudolph was in the driveway."

Two thousand years ago, it was all about anticipation too. We have encrusted that day with layers of theological speculation, so much so that we are now almost in need of theo-archaeologists to carefully remove the layers without destroying the initial insight. It was, after all, about the future, about hope -- cosmic and otherwise. Lots of us call it salvation, and tonight or tomorrow, when many of us cross the church threshold (some for our biennial visit, others for the second time this week), we will hear the ancient story of the incarnate One and be told it was the day we were saved.

Which has, of late, got me to wondering.

What for?

And the best answer I can come up with is . . .

Tomorrow.

And so that's what Christmas is about for me. Tomorrow. All the endless tomorrows. With their hopes and dreams and disappointments. Their risings and fallings. And tears and laughter. Even on the day I die, when tomorrow will be unpredictably exciting. In fact, especially then.

A friend recommended a book earlier this year by a theologian named John Haught. In it, Haught talked about the need to square Christian theology with the fact of evolution. One point he made is that theology should never compete with science, that the truths of the latter are not to be denied by the former, and vice versa. So the earth and all its inhabitants weren't created in six days, the universe (or multi-verse, we really do not know) is billions of years old, the human story represents hardly a nanosecond in this evolutionary time line, and the possibility of intelligent life in spheres beyond our third rock from the sun is hardly remote. The one thing certain is that, whoever and whatever we and our world are, it will not be the same tomorrow.

In fact, in the deep time of our evolutionary tomorrow, it's gonna be very different.

Which brings me back to Christmas. Or more precisely Christmas Eve. The one day when we think about nothing but tomorrow. And really look forward to it.

I am ready this year. All the presents are wrapped. The house is clean (I vacuum). Charles Darwin and Jesus Christ have become bosom buddies in my mind, the former telling me that nothing is forever as the world and its inhabitants constantly morph into newer forms, the latter teaching me that this in itself is a good thing and that somewhere over this evolutionary rainbow there is still a tomorrow that embraces us all.

And I have a shovel ready.

In case Rudolph leaves something in the driveway besides a missing sleigh bell.

Merry Christmas.

(This post was first published on Christmas Eve 2008.  A lot has changed since then. But not my view of Christmas.)

THE BIG DOG CAN STILL BARK

THE BIG DOG CAN STILL BARK

So, there I was on Saturday, walking into my favorite independent bookstore in Pleasantville, NY.

And there he was at the check out counter,  buying a hundred bucks worth of books and . . .

Holding forth.

This was surprising at two levels.  On the one hand, it's not very often that you run into  Bill Clinton dressed down for a lazy Saturday afternoon sauntering about the local bookstore.  And on the other, given that we know the soon-to-be President doesn't even read books, I'm certain I will never run into Trump in that bookstore . . .

Or any other.

Bill Clinton is approachable.  And he is smart.  And he likes to chat.

So for about forty-five minutes that day, a group of us -- maybe a dozen or so in number -- did that.

Here's what he said.

(Caveat emptor -- I wasn't taking notes and nothing that follows is a quote (unless it is). It's my memory, now three days old, of the basic sense of what was said.)

Why did Hillary lose?

My take on his take is that there were basically three reasons -- Comey, a media that ignored policy in favor of emails, and the larger problem that we now live in a "fact free" world.  

Comey violated Justice Department policy when he announced ten days out that the FBI was looking at new evidence on the email front. And he set a dangerous precedent.  Clinton thinks that mattered big time. People believe the FBI plays it straight.  So when they don't, it hurts. And that, Clinton thinks, is why Hillary didn't do as well as she should have in the Philadelphia suburbs, especially with women, or in Michigan and Wisconsin and Florida and Ohio.  

It's also something we all need to worry about going forward.

Because the day law enforcement stops being politically neutral is the day we start down the slippery slope to illegitimacy.

I agree.  

On both counts.

Ten days out, Hillary was seven points up in the polls and poised to go positive.  In other words, instead of telling us why Trump shouldn't win, she was going all in on why she should.  Her policy menu -- which so many said sounds canned but in fact is real and do-able -- would have been manna from heaven in that last week. 

Because increasing the minimum wage, making college affordable, expanding health care and forcing hedge funds and the mega-rich to pay taxes would have spoken to exactly the concerns all those struggling members of the middle and lower middle class claim went unnoticed.  

Comey upended all of that.  Instead of being able to tell us what she would do, her numbers tanked and the only remedy was to remind voters of how bad Trump was.  Most of us got that message and voted for her. 

About a hundred thousand strategically placed fellow citizens did not.

The larger problem, and President Clinton spoke on Saturday to this as well, was that the whole email issue was made entirely too much of.  As Clinton put it, the issue was a "nothin' burger."  Hillary's use of a non-state.gov email was the same thing two of her predecessors -- both Republicans -- had done, and no one ever complained.  She also didn't imperil national security.  Indeed, some of the after-the-fact "classified" material turns out to have been  attachments of articles from the New York Times, and the rest seems mostly to have been more or less a matter of agencies -- and some politicized Inspectors-General in those agencies -- protecting their own turf vis a vis their perceived competitors. In short, it was more about bureaucratic in-fighting than anything else.

So why did it matter?

Here, I think, was Clinton's largest point of the day, one that counts far beyond its effects on a single election.  We now live, says the President, in a "fact free" world.  People read fake news.  Media outlets report it. Would be candidates can now thrive on it.  

This is what Trump did. 

His lies never mattered because facts no longer matter.   It's a pretty basic point.  If facts don't exist ... or can be made to not exist . . . or are so malleable that they may as well not exist . . .

The first casualty is truth.

You can, as Casey Stengel would say (this part is me, not Bill Clinton), look it up.

The dictionary says a  lie is a false statement of fact.  If there are no facts, there can be no lies.

At the same time, the media-- easily played by the endless charge of "liberal" bias-- often ignore lies in their ostensible search for balance, which largely means reporting something bad about one candidate if you report something bad about the other one. 

Trump relied on this as well.  His reported negatives, which were endless and easy to ignore given their sheer volume, always had to be served up with one of hers, and since she had so few, the email "nothin' burger" became the media's go to staple. 

The media do not work this way because they favor one or the other political party.  

They work this way because a close election is an inherent part of their business plan.  

Or, as the President more or less put it, they aren't interested in a blow out. 

That's also why there was so little coverage (32 minutes as it turns out) of policy by the three major networks during the campaign, and why Hillary-as-wonk got so little traction.  A politician who talks about policy and getting issues resolved is boring.

A politician who curses is not.

Where to from here?

Clinton is careful.  And, despite the current cultural fad, he won't speculate or make judgments that extend beyond the facts. 

Thus . . .

Whether the Democrats should oppose all the extreme right wingers making their way into Trump's cabinet, or just pick a couple and focus their energies, he won't say.  He doesn't know all the people and won't speculate.  Whether the Democrats are ready to do battle, he also won't say.  In his opinion, the Senate's new minority leader, Chuck Schumer,  thinks he, Schumer, can negotiate with Trump because he knows Trump.  Clinton does not appear convinced.

The real push-back, Clinton thinks, could come in the courts.  

He believes there may be numerous legal challenges to the new Administration, especially if it goes the fact-free route on policy.  He also believes there are many judges more than up to the task of keeping Trump honest.

The other real push back could come from Republicans.  In fact, Clinton thinks the two most important Senators these days are Republicans Lindsey Graham and John McCain.  Neither likes Trump and both have standing among their fellow Senators.

On policy, he's not entirely anti-Trump.  Infrastructure was a big piece of Trump's campaign.  The Trump approach is to get private equity to pay for it.  If that happened, it would amount to a two-for. The roads, bridges, airports, railroads and broadband would be re-built, but the deficit wouldn't go up. So Clinton understands why Trump wants to do it this way, and thinks it's not entirely a bad approach.  In other words, it can work in some places.  The only problem, and the President pointed this out as well, is that it won't create new infrastructure in rural communities or in sparsely populated ones because the projects can't be monetized in those areas. Meanwhile, we'd be fools not to go all in here, especially on improved broadband, which creates enormous economic growth.

On jobs, his eyes rolled when the Carrier deal was mentioned.  He negotiated deals like that "every month" while he was Governor of Arkansas.  The real key is to get the economy zooming.  He thinks we are on the cusp, but I did not get the impression he thought GOP trickle down would provide the energy to push us over the edge.  It certainly hasn't in the past.

As he was leaving and half way out the door, one of our group shouted out that he should stay involved.  He turned back with a last piece of advice -- "You stay involved, that's what's necessary." Among those 65 million plus who voted for Hillary on November 8, that's a big ask.  Most of us are still in shock.

And, frankly, pessimistic.

But not Bill Clinton.

He still does believe . . .

In a place called Hope.

MR. SECRETARY

MR. SECRETARY

I'm running for Secretary of State.  

I'm not qualified.  But Trump isn't qualified to be President and Rudy isn't qualified to be Secretary of State.

So let's not get picky.  

I understand one does not usually "campaign" for an appointive Cabinet position.  But I have also noticed that all of the cable news stations have been breathlessly reporting on who the "front runners" are for State.

And Trump himself keeps parading his potential nominees before the cameras, their hats in hand as His Hairness assumes the throne and gives his thumbs up.

So it looks like a campaign.  

Plus, there have been no exhaustive analyses of each "candidate's" positions .  Just the de riguer ten seconds where the stand ups outside Tower of Trump -- or the golf course -- tell us whether so and so supported Trump or hates him. 

So not only does it look like a campaign.

It also looks like a Trump campaign. 

I have analyzed all the candidates and am pretty certain I can beat them.

First, like Rudy, I have foreign policy experience.  Rudy's comes from walking north on Church Street in New York City  on 9/11 after the towers fell.  I too walked that day, in New York City, north from near my office downtown to Grand Central Station to go home after the towers fell.  

It wasn't on Church Street.  

It was on Broadway.  

But they are parallel.

Rudy claims he has security experience, also because of 9/11.  Far as I can tell, however, his only experience was locating the City's Office of Emergency Management in Tower 7 over the objections of security experts who knew  the site was a terrorist  target on account of the fact that it already had been.

So, Rudy's security experience is more or less of the boneheaded variety.

Me too.

Before my walk on 9/11, I made the foolish decision to actually take the subway downtown knowing at least one tower had been attacked. The train stopped between Brooklyn Bridge and Fulton Street for over a half hour, and then reversed itself back to Brooklyn Bridge. When I left the station, the gray ball was moving toward me as hundreds of people ran away from it. 

Anyway, the Judge I once worked for called me his "stupidest law clerk on 9/11" on account of that decision.

Yeah, sure, Your Honor.  

But I bet you never thought I'd be competing against Rudy for State.

Second, like Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman and Robert Gates, three other mentionees, I can't stand Trump.  I criticized him non-stop during the Presidential campaign.  Thought he was a con, charlatan, totally unqualified to be Commander in Chief.  Of the ten blogposts I wrote about the campaign, all of them went negative on Trump. 

Like Gates, I also voted for Hillary.  

Romney and Huntsman probably left the ballot blank or wrote in some other Republicans.

What chickens!

Third, like General Petraeus, I have made mistakes and learned from them.  True, my mistakes have not involved criminal violations of the Espionage Act.  But I am younger than Petraeus and was a Hillary supporter.  So once at State, who knows what trouble I can get myself into.  I mean, according to Trump, Hillary out-Petraeused Petraeus.

Fourth, I know more people from Taiwan than PEOTUS.  

While I'm on the subject, as we all know, PEOTUS is an acronym that stands for President-elect of the United States.  It's a take-off on POTUS, the acronym for President of the United States.  Anyway, how is PEOTUS pronounced?  Is it "Pee-oh-tus"?  If so, that sounds mildly obscene.  

Which, in this unique case, is perfectly appropriate.

Anyway, back to Taiwan.

Pee-oh-tus should know that I know lots more Taiwanese than he does.  It looks to me like he knows one -- the President of Taiwan. He says she called him yesterday to congratulate him, a call that has now caused quite a kerfluffle.  Everyone at Foggy Bottom is worried that Trump is flying blind and has no idea how upset this makes the other Chinese, you know, the ones with nukes.

I can help here.  I know at least a dozen  Taiwanese.  For ten years I worked with a Taiwanese lawyer and represented Taiwanese clients. And they're probably people Beijing won't mind Trump talking to.

Also,  just so you know Donald, I've never been to China. And haven't borrowed any money from the Bank of China.

Never even used one of their ATMs.

Finally, I have met John Bolton and Kellyanne Conway.  They were both at a dinner I em-ceed honoring that Judge I worked for, who is friends with Bolton and once hired Conway's husband. 

I am certain they laughed at all my jokes that night. 

So, whaddaya say Mr. Pee-oh-tus?

Did I mention I grew up on the streets of Brooklyn . . .

Before Hillary ruined them.

THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE

THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE

In 1996, a friend of mine was on her way to Albany to cast her vote as a member of the Electoral College in the State of New York.  

She was travelling with the then Chairman of the Democratic Party of the county where she worked. She was also driving and going a little too fast. When the inevitable State Police vehicle pulled her over, the Chairman told her to let him do the talking.

The policeman approached and asked for her license and registration. She gave it to him.  When he asked if she knew why she had been pulled over, the Chairman stepped in, explaining that she was on her way to the Electoral College and a little late.

The cop said nothing and went back to the squad car to write the ticket.

When he returned, the Chairman tried one more time.  "But officer," he said, "there really should be an exception here.  She's on her way to the Electoral College and cannot be late."

The trooper handed her the ticket and said "Buddy, I don't care what school she is going to.  She was speeding."

Then he walked away.

Prior to 2000, not many people knew what the Electoral College was and even fewer could explain how it worked.  Then George W. Bush received 500,000 fewer votes and, for the first time in more than 112 years, the popular vote loser became president because he won enough states to give him an Electoral College majority.

Now, Hillary Clinton has beaten Donald Trump by more than 2 million votes but Trump will presumably be the next president by virtue of having won enough states to garner more than 270 electoral college votes. Unlike in 2000, however, there has emerged at least a modest movement to encourage the electors to vote their consciences and deprive Trump of the Presidency.  

Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig wrote a Thanksgiving day op-ed in the Washington Post arguing that the Electoral College "is meant to be a circuit breaker -- just in case the people go crazy."  In his view, they didn't. Clinton received more votes, a lot more votes, and the electors should confirm that by making her President.  At the same time, a lawsuit is about to be started by a Colorado elector who wants the courts to declare unconstitutional laws in twenty-nine (29) states binding electors to cast their Electoral College vote for the candidate who won in that state.  So now, unlike in 2000, there is at least some effort afoot to, as it were, free the electors.

Would this be legal?

The answer is almost certainly . . . 

Unclear.

The Electoral College was established in the provision of the Constitution -- Article II, section 1-- that sets forth how the President and Vice President were to be "elected." It provides that "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress"; that the "Electors" were to "meet in their respective States and vote by Ballot for two Persons"; that the signed and certified list of those for whom the electors voted was to be transmitted under "seal" "to the Seat of the Government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate";  that the Senate President -- "in the presence of the Senate and the House of Representatives" -- was to open the certified lists and count the votes; and that the person having the majority of votes was to be designated the President and the runner-up the Vice-President. 

In 1804, following the embarrassing election of 1800 in which both Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr were named by an equal number of electors despite the fact that they had run as a ticket with Jefferson in the top spot and Burr his vice-presidential second,  Article II was amended to require the electors to actually cast two ballots, one naming the individual for whom they voted for President and the other the individual for whom they voted for Vice-President.

As with many other provisions of the Constitution, the first to comment at length on the Electoral College was Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 68.   Though Hamilton assumed that the electors who formed the Electoral College would be "chosen by the people," he no doubt thought popular input could take the form of either a legislative appointment of electors, the legislatures themselves having been popularly elected, or a direct vote of the electors by the people. In any case, however, that was where popular input was to end insofar as electing the President and Vice-President was concerned.  

As to the actual election of President and Vice President, that -- Hamilton thought -- was to be "made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station and acting under circumstance favorable to deliberations," and by a body which would exercise "a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice."  In his mind, "[a] small number of people, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass" would "most likely . . . possess the information and discernment requisite to so complicated an investigation." 

Hamilton clearly believed the choice made by electors would be deliberative and considered.  He praised the Electoral College as an instrument that would "afford as little opportunity as possible to tumult and disorder," a possibility he deemed "evil" in selecting a President.   He also thought that dividing the choice by selecting groups of electors who then convened and deliberated in each of their respective (but separate) states made it less likely that the election of a President would "convulse the community" with the type of "violent movements" that a focus on one candidate might create. His theory was that meetings in several states would limit the possibility that a single populist demagogue could control the ultimate outcome.  

He believed that the college, by virtue of being a newly elected and temporary body formed solely for purposes of  a single Presidential election,  helped guard against "intrigue and corruption," especially by "foreign powers" who might otherwise find it easy to "gain an improper ascendant in our councils."  To that same end, he praised the fact that Senators, members of the House of Representatives, and all other "officers" of the United States were excluded from the Electoral College; their absence made it less likely that they could control the President via their electoral votes.  He also thought the college would generate independence in a President, essentially by making it unlikely that, once elected, the President could identify (and lobby or help) those who would be responsible for his re-election.  

For Hamilton, all these advantages flowed from the Electoral College members' "transient existence and . . . detached situation." They would be free  from  "sinister bias, " a phrase he took to include both corruption and the failure to do one's "duty,"  and would elect the President and Vice President based on "reasons and inducement . . . proper to [the] choice."  He thought this would eliminate from the office of the Presidency those who only possessed "[t]alents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity".  Instead, the mechanism chosen would create the "constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters preeminent for ability and virtue."

Thus spaketh Hamilton.

His view of how the Electoral College would proceed  had a very short shelf life. 

It worked as he predicted in the initial election of Washington in 1788.   Thereafter, however,  the notion of independent deliberation by a council of wise electors more or less ended and electors simply voted for candidates to whom they had previously committed their votes. Commitment, however, was not required by the Constitution, and today commitment is only required by statute in twenty-nine (29) states.  All the others, in theory at least, allow electors to vote as they please. 

Are those twenty-nine (29) commitment statutes constitutional?

For Hamilton, the answer would be "No."   It is clear that he thought the right of state legislatures to determine the "manner" in which each state appointed its electors merely entitled those legislatures to establish  the mechanism through which one became an elector. States could decide to have the legislature itself appoint the electors; they could have those electors chosen by popular vote and they could decide the districts in which that vote could be taken. What they could not do is instruct the electors how to vote.  That, for Hamilton, Article II forbade.

Whether the Supreme Court agrees with Hamilton is another story.  

There has never been a case testing whether any of the various statutes which order electors to vote a certain way are in fact constitutional.  The closest we came to resolving that issue was in Ray v. Blair, a 1952 case in which the Supreme Court held constitutional an Alabama statute that required those running to be nominated as  electors on the Democratic Party line to sign an oath committing, if elected, to vote in the Electoral College for the national party's nominee.  

Over dissents by Justices Douglas and Jackson, the Court said this was permissible.  On the question of whether the Constitution "demands absolute freedom for the elector to vote his own choice," the Court noted that, though the Constitution "says the electors shall vote by ballot," it doesn't "prohibit an elector's announcing his choice beforehand."  The Court also noted that even if such pledges were "legally unenforceable because violative of the assumed constitutional freedom of the elector under  . . .  Art[icle] II," that would not make such a  pledge by a candidate in a party primary unconstitutional.  As the Court put it, "Surely one may voluntarily assume obligations to vote for a certain candidate."

So, if Hamilton is your guide, the electors cannot be committed by statute to vote for any particular candidate for President and instead must be free to choose.  If, however, the Supreme Court is your guide, the rule is uncertain.  So far as we know now, an elector can voluntarily commit to voting a certain way beforehand.  

Whether he or she can be ordered by statute to do so has not been decided.

Stay tuned.  

Professor Lessig, that Colorado elector ready to file suit, and millions of disaffected Hillary voters are hoping enough members of the Electoral College will disregard any commitment statutes and refuse to give Trump the Presidency.  For them, Trump is a bridge too far, an amoral, narcissistic demagogue to whom the country's future, let alone its nuclear codes, cannot be entrusted.  With them, it's not about ideology or party or policy; it's about the  inherent danger of appointing as President a pathological liar who has utter contempt for the rule of law. 

On this view, Hamilton's Electoral College is all that stands between the country and utter disaster. And Federalist No. 68 is a road map on how that body should work to avoid such a disaster.  In fact, for them, Hamilton was prescient. During the election, Trump showed little other than "talent for low intrigue"  as a "foreign power" tried to manipulate the electorate in favor of a demagogue.

If they are right, and can convince enough electors to refuse Trump, the notion of "all hell breaking loose" will acquire new meaning. Republicans will sue and the case will get to the Supreme Court in five seconds.  It will also get to a Supreme Court with only eight justices, so the way in which any case comes up will matter.  In fact, whether a Circuit Court of Appeals enforces commitment statutes in its circuit or holds such statutes unconstitutional and frees the electors to vote their conscience, if the Supreme Court later deadlocks on whether that appellate decision was correct, the Circuit Court decision will stand.

In that case,  the next President will have been chosen not just by unelected judges ,  but by unelected judges neither appointed to nor working in the Supreme Court , whose jurisdiction as  Circuit Court judges is limited to only a small part of the nation.

None of this has even happened before.

The way to bet is that it won't happen now.

That, however, was also the way to bet on November 8.

THE DEATH OF ARGUMENT

THE DEATH OF ARGUMENT

As I've  talked to friends throughout the country over the past ten days, we have spent enormous amounts of time wondering what went wrong this past election and consulting a bevy of commentators weighing in on the subject.

The answers have ranged from the reasonable -- lower turnout among erstwhile Democratic voters, the enthusiasm gap, frustration among old economy workers, the media's obsession with "info-tainment" as opposed to information  -- to the ridiculous -- anyone who voted for Trump is stupid . . . or racist . . . or sexist.

I have a different culprit.  It is . . .

The death of argument.

I am talking about "argument" in the classical sense, not in the screaming-at-your-drunk-uncle sense. Real argument, as classically taught, is about premises, facts, logic and conclusions that follow.  It abjures -- in fact, disdains -- personal insult, grandstanding, and the mindless repetition of unproven assertions.   Apropos of the disdain for personal insult, there is even a short-hand term used to disqualify any embrace of that approach;  you just point out that your adversary is engaging in ad hominem attack, that he or she is attacking your person but not your position,  and the attack  is rejected.

Not so long ago, political argument occupied  a place in the world where it at least lived close to that classical construct.  There was always hyperbole and campaigns trucked in dirt and tricks and everything in between as they strove to render their opponents not just unqualified but also unfit. Still, however, if you read transcripts of the Lincoln-Douglas debates from 1858, or even the Kennedy-Nixon debates from 1960, and then compare those to what was on offer for the past year and a half in our most recent election season, the difference is beyond striking.

It is scary. 

It's hard to even imagine Lincoln, Douglas, Kennedy or Nixon going after an opponent because their "face" (as in "Look at that face") was unacceptable, but that is what Donald Trump did to Carly Fiorina. Nor can one imagine those storied combatants commenting on their opponents' height (Stephen Douglas was short) or propensity to sweat (Nixon under the lights), but that was a routine trope from Trump and others in the GOP debates.   

We now live in the world of Twitter.  140 characters and no more.  It is a world that makes argument in the classical sense impossible. There isn't the space to structure the required fact-based premises that lead to reasonable conclusions.  

This is bad enough when it comes to characterizing interactions between friends and family on a host of every day back-and-forths that matter -- personal relationships, for example,  that require trust and the type of transparency abbreviated computer-speak can hardly encourage. It is fatal, however, in the context of serious public decision-making -- as in, for example, a Presidential election.

Put differently, I am more than happy to embrace Twitter as a functional and efficient tool that either helps avoid mix-ups (tweeting "Please pick up a quart of milk" to your spouse at the store) or sends someone to a link that actually develops an argument.  

I do not, however, want it to become the President's default means of communication.

And therein lies the problem.

I am being told by assorted relatives and others that I must give Trump a chance.

To do what?

Tell me in a tweet that everything on his transition is going smoothly when I can see with my own eyes and hear with my own ears as heads roll, names are taken, and national security experts like Mike Rogers and Eliot Cohen are black-listed?

When I observe erstwhile allies consigned to the dungeon because they were not allied enough when those Access Hollywood tapes were disclosed  (I am thinking of you Chris Christie), and early appointees include those who have trucked in white supremacy (that'd be you, Bannon)?

Trump has many problems.  In fact, he has too many problems (misogyny, racism, dishonesty, inattentiveness, a hair trigger temper, boorishness, vulgarity, narcissism, etc.).    He is lucky the list is so long.  It has led to a sort of public ennui.  No one can focus on any one problem and explain how it will hurt us because in the time it takes to do so Trump has exhibited yet another fatal flaw. Meanwhile,  no one -- or at least not enough "ones" -- noticed that, amidst the ever-growing litany of negatives, Trump offered no positive arguments, no thought out positions defended with facts where logic was brought to bear and a conclusion followed from a reasonable premise.  

It was all assertion.  

Punctuated with barnyard epithets, and wrapped in the attitude that the only appropriate response to opponents is the middle finger, an attitude that 140 characters encourages . . .

Because an argument requires many words but "fuck you" requires only two.

This is Trump.  Build a wall.  Deport 11 million illegals.  Lock her up. Cut taxes. The lying media. We will win. And be great again.  

Government in seven slogans.

But no why. . . or how . . or truth.  In short . . .

No argument.

Many are worried that acceptance of Trump, or even a generalized calm in the face of his ascension to  the Presidency, will "normalize" his behavior, that it will now be acceptable to become or be President via a tweetstorm of third-grade rank outs and garish insults.

Really?

I have news for you. 

Look at the internet, at Facebook, at Twitter.  

We're already there.  

We killed argument.

And along with it decorum and decency.

And now the consequences are on their way to the White House.

OH, BOY

OH, BOY

I was wrong.  

I never thought the country would vote for a candidate who called Mexicans rapists, bragged about grabbing women's genitals, mocked the disabled, for years supported the birther fraud, had no policies he could explain in any coherent fashion, is narcissistic and probably clinically ill at some level, and is not at all prepared to be President.

We are in big trouble.  

For proof, see second paragraph.  

The argument from Trump's supporters is that he is not the racist, sexist, inarticulate charlatan I think he is.  The problem with that argument is that the evidence for these realities comes from Trump's own mouth and behavior.  Earnest supporters of the Donald nevertheless assert the contrary, saying the problem with people like me is that I take Trump "literally but not seriously" while they take him "seriously but not literally."  

That's cute.  

Now all of Trump is reduced to a metaphor. 

Still, however, I am perplexed. 

Because . . . 

I cannot, for the life of me, conjure in my mind the metaphorical meaning of "grab[bing]" women "by the pussy."

The pundits are having a field day.  All of them are doing apologetic cartwheels as they fess up to missing the possibility that His Hairness could actually win.  As with all things "punditry," however, these should be taken with a large grain of salt.  Clinton won the popular vote and lost all the states she was predicted to win -- Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan (perhaps; the final vote is not yet in), and Wisconsin -- by small margins.  She even lost some states she was predicted to lose -- Arizona, Georgia, Texas -- by smaller margins than would normally have been the case had past been prologue. The pundit notion that Hillary was thus a uniquely flawed candidate is a bit over the top.

So is the notion that Bernie . . .  or Elizabeth Warren . . . or Joe Biden . . . 

Would have won.

All would have been painted as out of touch and unacceptable in the 24/7 negative campaign that was Trump's.  

To be painfully honest, going negative is what Trump does best. Always has been.  He learned it at the feet of Roy Cohn, Joe McCarthy's doppelganger in the 1950s who made lying with a straight face a habit until Donald Trump turned it into an art form.

So Bernie would have been painted as a Communist,  Warren as an unvarnished Harvard professor who never created a job in her life, and Biden as . . . well . . . Biden -- an over-the-top. loose-lipped, forever politician (remember, Biden was elected to the Senate when he was 29 and has literally been a politician for more or less his entire adult life).  

And, oh, by the way, lunch-bucket Joe also  lives in a mansion in Wilmington, so the Scranton working-class-roots thing would have been a bit too much as well.

None of this would have been fair.  Bernie is not a Communist; Warren is a courageous and informed policy wonk whose programs, especially those involving oversight of Wall Street, would actually work; and Biden is authentic.

But none of that would have mattered to our President-elect, the Tweeter-in-Chief.

Where to from here?

Though -- in light of my track record this year --  I shouldn't, I will venture some predictions.  

The first is that all those white, working class voters in the rust belt are about to be very disappointed.  

Bernie had a program for them.  It involved something on the order of an FDR-like New Deal where government spending created jobs in places from which they have fled, and big-ticket expenses like health care and education were paid for publicly.  

That's not what Trump will do because that is not what the institutional party he now controls will deliver for him.  

They will cut taxes, eliminate Obamacare, repeal Dodd-Frank, and tell you the free market will take care of the rest.  

But they will be  wrong.  

We have seen this movie once before.  

Health savings accounts cannot fund medical care for poor people who have no paychecks or for the shrinking and struggling middle class living paycheck-to-paycheck.  Wall Street unregulated is Wall Street run amok,  at the end of which one is delivered into a financial meltdown tantamount to a depression.  And tax cuts from Washington do not create jobs in Flint.  They didn't during the last Administration in which the GOP controlled the House, Senate and Presidency, and they won't in this one either.

Now, auto-industry bail outs, like the one Obama created at the beginning of his Presidency when Chrysler, Ford and GM were on their heels and about to die, do create jobs in Flint.

But Trump and his fellow-travelers were against that legislation and presumably still are.

The second is that the trade deals that exist won't be repealed and the one on offer (TPP) may still pass.  

The fact of the matter is that free trade significantly increases our nation's wealth.  The problem with free trade is that the wealth created is very unevenly distributed.  Were, however, free trade to end, the economic pie would shrink, dramatically,  and the GOP Trump now runs won't give him the votes to do that.  Instead, the new administration will tinker at the edges, bringing more claims under the deals to try to stop currency manipulation or dumping.  In other words, on free trade, the Trump administration will pretty much do what would have been done in . . . a Hillary Administration.

The third is that there are now a host of national security experts who are very afraid.  

This I know for a fact,  from sources I cannot disclose.  

Trump is dangerously uninformed and misinformed on issues of national security and needs to be set straight fast.  Putin is not an ally.  The middle east will not move forward if American troops are used to try to create the peaceful order only the people living there can create.  Water-boarding didn't stop acts of terrorism in the past, won't do so in the future, and is a crime.

The good news is that Trump spent 90 minutes with Obama yesterday, a meeting that no doubt amounted in large part to a polite tutorial on the subject of national security.  The other good news is that all the "Never Trump" DC policy mavens who swore they would not help him are now coming back because they think they have a patriotic duty to stop a potential train wreck.  The bad news is that the President-elect is that wreck.

The fourth is that the Supreme Court is lost to the right-wing if Trump gets to pick three Justices and  actually appoints the people he says he will.  

All of them -- and I mean "all" -- will overturn Roe v. Wade (and the right to gay marriage, if they get a chance), and radically shrink the federal government's ability to pass regulatory legislation founded on the Constitution's commerce clause.  A friend yesterday predicted that this latter reality means an end to the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act. 

That remains to be seen.  

But it is worth noting that the kind of federal role right-wing jurists envision is basically the role the federal government had in the 19th century.  That role is pre-gay rights, pre-abortion rights,   pre-civil rights and pre-New Deal.  

Or -- to put it bluntly -- a world you and I . . . 

Will not recognize.

Trump's supporters will say that my parade of horribles either will not be that horrible or will not happen.  They'll assert that Trump is a pragmatist, a businessman, a fellow used to getting things done.  

That, however, is not what I see at first pass.

What I see  is a guy totally enamored of himself with a penchant for holding grudges and skewering rivals by whatever means, foul or fair, will work.  To that mind-set is  married a character loyal only to those who never waver in their support.  

His core advisers consist of his kids, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, the three GOP amigos (Rudy, Christie and Newt), and (maybe) Mike Pence.  I am not convinced any of them can tell him "No" and make it stick, and of the pols in the room, all are destroyers, not builders. Rudy and Christie come at destruction from the vantage point of prosecutors with sharp elbows and pols who shut down bridges, Pence from the vantage point of a right-wing talk radio industry (where his political career began) that demeans much more than it informs, and Newt from his early days in the House where he used the politics of personal destruction to end the Democratic Party's control of that body.  In these advisers, Trump has found soul-mates.

For some, Hillary Clinton didn't lose the election last Tuesday.  She lost it in 1787 when guys in wigs created an anomalous (and anti-democratic) institution called the Electoral College that in two of the last five Presidential elections has awarded the office to the popular vote loser. The country is seriously and significantly divided.  Anti-Trump street protests have already erupted in dozens of cities. There are enormous questions concerning the President-elect's temperament, competence and good faith.  His "victory" is hardly a mandate.

A humble administration in these circumstances would govern non-aggressively, strive mightily for bi-partisanship, and delete the twitter account. 

Unfortunately, these folks are not that humble.

I was wrong about this election once before. 

I hope I am wrong again.

C'MON AMERICA

C'MON AMERICA

You're not really serious, right?

You're not about to elect a pathological liar, transparent sexist, more or less confessed racist, and inattentive charlatan to the Presidency.

You don't want an authoritarian con-man in the White House.

You'll reject the notion that being Commander-in-Chief is a position suitable for anyone with a part-time attention span and full-blown narcissism.

You don't want a President who will out-source the job to anyone who praises him because he hasn't a clue about policy and no desire to learn.

You've had it with a campaign from a GOP nominee which in truth has amounted to nothing but insult.

You understand that Presidential elections are not won by exhibitions of bad taste, adolescent immaturity writ large, and a foul mouth.

You get it that we don't want a thug in the White House,  or even a non-thug who encourages the thugs among us.

You understand that the history of this great country does not guarantee its survival in the wake of a fascist ascension, that the blood shed on battlefields throughout the world is not honored if we give away our country to a fool who brags about assaulting women, punching dissenters, disparaging foreigners, and playing us all for chumps.

You understand that you are tired of the sheer boredom of him, and of all his nonsense . . . and meanness . . . and utter lack of empathy or fellow-feeling.

You think that being President is not about how rich you are, or the amount you inherited (or were loaned), or the number of concrete edifices adorned with the forever (and often faux) boast of your name.

You understand that quips are not policies, that ad hominems are not arguments, and that the ad nauseaum repetition of promised victory, the path to which is never explained because (i) he can't explain it and (ii) it doesn't exist, is just a canard hiding the absence of any real campaign.

You know that being smart is not a crime, that being polite is not merely "politically correct," that those who disagree with you cannot automatically be deemed "corrupt,"  and that winning is about a lot more than promoting yourself and running down everyone else.

You don't want  a President who stiffs the little guy because he can and then calls it good business, or one who stiffs the taxman and calls himself smart and the rest of us, by implication, dumb.

You know that women are not numbers, assault is not sexy, immigrants are not criminals, and athletes in locker rooms are not pigs at a troth.

You understand that this complex and challenging world cannot afford the four years of neglect his election would guarantee.

Finally, you understand that the two people running this year are not remotely comparable; that the both of them are not "equally bad"; that  she is a smart, competent professional, flawed in some respects but possessed of enormous intelligence, fortitude and good faith; and that he, on the other hand, is an unmitigated disaster in waiting, ego and id and apparently nothing else, and not remotely qualified for the job he would have us give him.

And now, America, that you understand all of this . . .

Do the right thing.  

She has a name.  

Hillary.

BLAMING THE VICTIM

BLAMING THE VICTIM

In the wake of disclosures in which he bragged about "moving" on a married woman like a "bitch" and grabbing women's genitals, Donald Trump spent this past weekend in his two favorite places.

One was the 60th floor Fifth Avenue penthouse in New York City that he calls home.  Where he was holed up on Saturday and part of Sunday, surrounded by advisers and the faux city-scape used for his middle of the night "apology" on Facebook.  The other was . . .

The gutter.

Where he spent most of Sunday.

We have never had a candidate like Trump. Or, if we have, they have kept it very-well hidden.  Years ago, when I was a kid, Seven-Up ran ads calling itself the "un-cola."  Trump is the un-candidate.

Un-embarrassable, un-repentant and un-moored.

After somewhere in the neighborhood of anywhere from twenty-four to forty-eight hours consulting his brain trust of Rudy, Bannon, Christie, Conway and The Kids, he decided that his implied if not explicit confession to sexual assault in 2005 was mere "locker room talk" for which he has now apologized and must be forgiven.  As Republican after Republican finally abandoned the sinking ship that is his Presidential campaign, and as his own running mate called to inform him that he had to fly solo on this one, Trump dusted off  the right-wing's old playbook and decided the only way to staunch the bleeding was to parade Bill Clinton's victims to a watching world before and during Sunday night's Presidential debate, the claim being that Hillary's decades-old defense of Bill now absolves The Donald of his own recent and present sins.

This is a new role for Hillary.  She apparently can be turned into a forgiveness machine, some sort of priestess without portfolio, bearing the power to absolve perfect strangers of their sexual transgressions on account of the fact that she once absolved Bill of his.

Trump, of course, didn't put it quite this way.  In his telling, his sins are forgiven because Hillary attacked Bill's ostensible "victims" and because his mere words are not in the same category as the former President's supposed acts.  Of course, those "acts" (as well as the claim that Trump is guilty of mere "words") are more assumed than proven, especially the heinous claim that Bill Clinton raped Juanita Broaddrick thirty eight years ago. The only two people who know tell categorically different stories; there is no physical evidence that could corroborate the claim; no case was brought all those years ago; and Starr did not include those claims in his impeachment referral (though he shared his uncorroborated evidence with the House of Representatives).  This does not mean Broaddrick is wrong, nor do the same lacuna in the cases of Paula Jones or Kathleen Willey make them wrong . But it does not make them right either.

And whether they are one or the other really has nothing to do with Hillary, who is the only Clinton now running for President.

Broaddrick asserts Hillary was effectively a participant in Bill's acts because Hillary thanked Broaddrick for helping Bill shortly after the attack, a  thank you Broaddrick claims came with a look and a tone that scared her into silence.  This too, however, is impossible to verify and, in any case, implausibly assumes that Bill Clinton confessed to his wife, not just that he was a cheater, but much, much more as well.  And with Willey and Jones, there were no specific attacks on these women from Hillary Clinton.  In fact, the closest one can come to a Hillary defense that may be out of bounds is her now famous claims that Monica Lewinsky was a "narcissistic loony toon" and Gennifer Flowers a failed cabaret singer, both of which fall short of the sort of "slut-shaming" victims justifiably abhor and society now condemns.

As I watched last night's debate, I actually felt sympathy for Hillary Clinton.

The reality here is that Hillary defended her husband without knowing the truth.  He wasn't just lying to the rest of the world.   He was lying to her as well.  She was more (or as much) a victim than (or as) an enabler, and psychologists will tell you that even if she fell into the category of enabler, sweeping suspicion under the rug the way the spouse or children of alcoholics fashion survival out of denial, that does not make her less a victim.

It makes her human.

Something apparently lacking in Donald Trump.

Trump's charade last night was appalling.  He took people who are hurting and turned them into props designed to shield him from the consequences of his own sexism.  On Saturday, in that middle of the night Facebook post, he supposedly apologized for saying that, as a "star," he could "grab" women "by the p**y."   By Sunday, however, that apology had been turned into a farce, reducing his comments first to mere locker room banter and then to claims that  they were somehow less offensive given another female victim's sometimes false defenses of her husband's bad conduct.  

Meanwhile, Trump himself has been accused of raping a thirteen year old and sexually assaulting Jill Harth, a one-time girl-friend, both would be victims who Broaddrick, Willey and Jones presumably believe if they are sincere in asserting that their own claims must be taken as true.  The difference, of course, is that Harth and the thirteen year old are making rape and sexual assault  claims against someone who actually is running for President.  Broaddrick, Willey and Jones are not.

All of this is par for Trump's course.

The essence of Trump is that his failures are always someone else's fault. Calling women fat slobs or pigs is Rosie O'Donnell's fault. Being called out on this conduct at the first GOP primary debate is Megyn Kelly's fault. And now, even the conduct he described to Billy Bush in the Access Hollywood tapes is someone else's fault. 

Look closely at what he said. The run up is as important as the jarring use of the p-word: "You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them.  It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star,they let you do it.You can do anything."

"They let you do it."

The trope is as old as time. It's her fault.

Ten years ago, it was the fault of the women at the pageants or on the set. They let him do it.

Last night, in the twisted world Trump inhabits, his perversion was turned into the fault of . . .

The woman running against him for President.

WORSE THAN NIXON

WORSE THAN NIXON

In the annals of American history, one President stands alone in his infamy.

That President is Richard M. Nixon.

Of the forty-four men to become President of the United States, only Nixon has resigned.  Among that same group of men, it is also clear that only he, upon being impeached, would have been removed after a Senate trial.  In fact, he resigned only after the House Judiciary Committee had sent a bi-partisan bill of impeachment to the full House.  Republican leaders in the the House and Senate -- Arizona's Rep. John Rhodes and Sen. Barry Goldwater and Pennsylvania Sen. Hugh Scott  -- then marched to the White House to tell their Republican President that the gig was up. 

The good news is that Nixon was unique in his ignominy.

The bad news is that, if Donald Trump becomes President, things will be worse.

Nixon's "high crimes," the standard required for impeachment and removal, are well-known.  He covered-up the break-in, burglary and bugging of the offices of his political adversary, the Democratic Party. His cover-up was explicit and fully endorsed.  Within days of the arrest of the burglars, the White House tapes show him instructing the CIA to have the FBI stop its investigation on the trumped-up ground that its continuation would impede national security, and promising to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars in hush-money for those arrested. 

In July 1972, at the time Nixon committed his crimes, he was about to be re-nominated for President, and the Democrats were about to nominate South Dakota's Sen. George McGovern.  

McGovern favored American withdrawal from Vietnam, amnesty for draft evaders, a close to 40% cut in defense spending, and a de facto guaranteed annual income. He would become the most liberal nominee ever put up by the Democrats.  Consequently, he was Nixon's dream opponent --  an unwashed leftie whose supporters were at war with a mainstream America comfortable at that time with neither acid, amnesty nor abortion, the three-word sobriquet hung around McGovern's neck. 

Watergate, therefore,  was an act of unmitigated self-destruction.

Volumes of ink have been spilled attempting to explain Nixon's behavior.  He has been deemed paranoid, irredeemably dishonest, and at times unhinged.  In fact, though he may have been all of these at one point or another, his flaws were much more quotidian.  His lying was selective, his obsessions particularized.  As President, he had governed largely from the center, annoying conservatives not as much as liberals, the latter of whom by 1969 could not stomach any more (let alone four more) years of Vietnam, but a lot nevertheless. In fact, his creation of the EPA and OSHA and his endorsement of wage and price controls and the Family Assistance Plan (which would have guaranteed an income to all)  sent conservatives off the deep end.  And as a politician, he no doubt thought that what he was covering-up in the summer of '72 was nothing other than what his opponents had been doing for years.  

About this, of course, he was wrong.  

But not so wrong as to be deemed crazy.

Politics was dirtier then.

So, Nixon deserved what he got.  But withal, he was and remains a recognizable political entity.

Not so Trump.

Trump does not lie about a few things or select things.  He lies about more than most things.  Fact-checkers at PolitiFact have rated 69% of his statements as either false, mostly false, or "pant-on-fire" false. Unlike Nixon, Trump's narcissism knows no bounds.  His only apparent requirement (from anyone) is adulation.  Nixon obsessed about his enemies in general and the Kennedys in particular.  Trump obsesses about himself and condemns anyone who either refuses to join in the obsession or says anything at odds with its self-congratulatory assertions of personal triumph, unparalleled intelligence or sexual prowess. Nixon was stuck in some sort fear that Ivy Leaguers never respected his intelligence.  

Trump is just stuck . . .

At about age 13.

Despite his flaws, Nixon also was a student of policy.  He was at home in the world of legislative mark-ups, in-depth briefs, and give and take with  Henry Kissinger and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, two of the many Ivy League intellectuals who actually worked for him. Trump has the attention span of a gnat and is at home with Steven Bannon, the alt-right take down artist adept at put-downs and put-ups.  To his credit, Nixon actually ended segregated schooling in the south and enforced the Supreme Court's landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision.  Trump, on the other hand, was catapulted onto the national scene via the racist lie that Obama was born in Kenya, a lie Trump continued to tell until just last week.

Nixon turned out to be a crook.

Trump will turn out to be a lot worse.  

On foreign policy, which Trump somehow thinks is his strength in this election, the comparison is even deadlier.  Nixon spearheaded detente with the Soviet Union and the opening to Red China.  The opening was a product of strategic design.  He and Kissinger wanted to send a message to the Soviets that their monopoly on bi-lateralism with the Chinese was over.  And it worked.  After the Chinese thaw, Nixon began to negotiate SALT II (the second Strategic Arms Limitations Talks). President Ford achieved a significant breakthrough in those talks in 1974, and President Carter signed the SALT II agreement in 1979.  Though never ratified by the Senate, both the Carter and Reagan Administrations abided by it,  and ultimately President Reagan did his dance with Gorbachev that later brought the Cold War to an end.

Now, compare Trump.

On the one hand, he begins his negotiations with insult.  Exhibit A -- Mexicans are rapists.  On the other, he praises the autocracy that has emerged in Russian under Vladimir Putin.  Nixon is turning over in his grave (in fact, on this point, so is Reagan).  Were he going one on one with Putin, the last thing Nixon would do is give Putin leverage.

But that is exactly what Trump has done (and the reason Putin likes him).

Trump alienates NATO allies by turning American's unconditional defense against any Russian incursion into a defense conditioned on the payment of back dues, a move that simultaneously emboldens Putin into believing America will turn a blind eye to any designs he has on the Baltics and ultimately end the sanctions designed to reverse his seizure of Crimea.

Similarly, Trump weakens the leverage inherent in America's nuclear superiority by announcing that, maybe, the Japanese and South Koreans should go nuclear to defend themselves from North Korea, on the one hand watering down America's guarantee to defend Japan and South Korea and on the other endorsing nuclear proliferation in a world that needs to move in the opposite direction.

This is not strategy.

It is stupidity.

Trump constantly supports his absurdities with the line that he doesn't want "to show his hand" in any subsequent negotiations.  But in his all-the-world's-a-real-estate-deal that only he can close, he isn't holding his cards; he's just proving he has no idea what is in the deck or how to use it.  Nixon didn't weaken NATO before he went to China or negotiated with Brezhnev.  He didn't open relationships with China by insulting the Chinese.

And then, of course, there is Trump's temperament.  Solipsistic, mercurial, bombastic and totally unfit to be anywhere near the nuclear codes.  The list of seasoned foreign policy operatives opposing him grows by the day.  And that list is replete with Republicans, ranging from Brent Scowcroft and Robert Gates to numerous officials who served in the Reagan and both Bush Administrations, all of whom believe Trump does not have the temperament to be Commander-in-Chief.

The verdict is in.  Trump has all of Nixon's flaw and none of his talents.

It did not seem possible in 1974.  But with Donald Trump as President, we would in truth have someone . . .

Worse than Nixon.

THINKING

THINKING

I am tired of pollsters asking me what I think.

And I am tired of them asking you what you think.

We all need to stop thinking about what we are thinking.   We need to just . . .

Think.

This week's post-Labor Day, now-is-the-real-start-of the-campaign news is that Hillary and His Tweetness are starting to get pretty close in the polls.  No matter that Clinton still has a 75% plus chance of winning when all the relevant data is analyzed.  No matter that the Donald literally has to run the table on close to all of the eleven states in play to have any chance of winning.  No matter that he is close to losing in Texas, which hasn't voted for a Democrat for President in forty years.   No matter that Trump still refuses to disclose his tax returns . . . or his medical history . . . or, for that matter, any policies beyond those he can squeeze into 140 characters.  Indeed, no matter that, regardless of what he says, anything coming out of Trump's mouth has the half life of a mayfly.

We are now told the race is close.

This is also the new conventional wisdom.  Writ large, Trump's disaster of a Republican convention and Hillary's eight point bounce in the wake of her own has now supposedly  evaporated into the hair-splitter that campaign professionals always predicted.   Trump can do no wrong great enough to disqualify himself and Hillary can make no mistake  small enough to be ignored.  Neither is loved so both must be equally hated.

Hence the current cynical stalemate all the polls are selling us.

Are you buyin' it?

I -- decidedly -- am not.

Roughly 126.8 million Americans cast ballots in the 2012 Presidential election.  In the 2008 election, that number was 129.4 million and in the 2004 election it was 121 million.  If any of those numbers accurately predict the 2016 turnout, more than 60 million people -- and a lot more if the 2008 or 2012 turnout numbers apply -- will have to vote for Trump for him to win.  And a good chunk of those votes will have to come from non-white, Hispanic, female and college educated white male voters, all of whom Trump is now losing by large margins, in places like Arizona, Nevada, Florida and Colorado, where in all places he is currently behind.

That is not going to happen. 

So, what explains the current this-is-too-close-call narrative?

Here's my answer.

First, we have become so enamored of polls that we no longer understand they are just snapshots, and wildly divergent snapshots at that.  The real data driven wonks who accurately predict these things (think Nate Silver) long ago told us not to be taken in by any single poll.  They warned of outliers (polls consistently biased in one direction or the other), and constantly reminded us that the Presidential election is really fifty separate contests, making national polls pretty useless when it comes to predicting results (just ask Al Gore).  Polls fluctuate.  Turnout models can be wrong, as was the case with all the polls that predicted a Romney victory in 2012.  And these fluctuations and underlying models matter.  

If the notion that millions -- perhaps more than ten million -- of your neighbors changed their minds between August and now, and not once but twice, strikes you as strange, that is nevertheless what the polls are telling us.  These people went from liking Trump enough to get him close to Clinton, to hating him enough for her to be thinking landslide, to now liking him enough once again so as to once again make it close.  If this is the case, this race will not be decided by whoever wins the undecideds.  It will be decided by whoever wins the indecisive.

But I'm not convinced people are really that indecisive.  Maybe they're just tired of being asked about it so much and are just playin' with the pollsters.

Second, the political reporting class really cannot analyze anything other than the horse race.  Their collective expertise on issues of policy is embarrassingly shallow.  They simple do not have the ability to talk about the relative worth of each candidate's actual policies.  

Here's a good example.  Trump's economic policy is to cut income taxes and corporate taxes  (without touching Social Security or Medicare), as well as unspecified regulations in general, and repeal Dodd-Frank, all ostensibly in order to generate jobs. He would also impose high tariffs on imported goods from countries he thinks got the better of us on trade deals, and deport undocumented workers. Clinton's is to increase the minimum wage, cut middle class taxes, fund an infrastructure bank, pre-school and national R & D (principally on scientific research), and strengthen unions.  She would also retain Dodd-Frank and re-jigger the capital gains tax rate so that long term (but not short term) gains got preferential treatment.  The latter policy is intended to help change Wall Street's time horizon and wean it off its addiction to short term financial fixes designed to goose quarterly share prices. 

To evaluate either set of policies, journalists would have to analyze whether those policies would generate the fiscal stimulus needed to put money in people's pockets and boost demand.   This type of analysis is complicated and dry.  It has none of the excitement of shifting polls, His Hairness' latest insult, Hillary's meandering accounts of her emails, or Bill's sex life.

In my opinion, any fair evaluation would make it a no contest. Trump's approach will either weaken or at the very least not strengthen demand because it will raise the deficit, kill the ability of the government to fund infrastructure spending, put money in the pockets of the rich (who won't spend it) and corporations (who will hoard it, as they do now, waiting for a rebound in consumer demand that won't happen). It will not put cash in the pockets of the middle and lower classes (who need it and will spend it). Hillary's approach, on the other hand,  would increase short-term demand, albeit slowly depending on how fast the infrastructure bank and R & D is funded and the minimum wage hike comes on line; and it would increase long term demand assuming labor law reforms that actually boost the power and membership rolls of unions. The proper criticism of her approach is that it is still weak tea (or not enough immediate tea); the proper criticism of Trump's is that it is no tea at all.

Third, and for the same reason they focus on the horse  race, the media is in love with a "both of them are equally hated" narrative. Part of this love affair is due to the fact that it's true -- Hillary and Trump are the two most disliked candidates for President in polling history.  The problem, however, is that one of them will be President.  It would therefore be nice if the media were able to distinguish between the reasons each of them is disliked and provide something other than either the false equivalence that characterizes much reporting (as in the both of them are equally bad) or the grading-on-a-curve now being applied to Trump.

This last problem is critical.  As Paul Krugman pointed out in his Sunday column  in The New York Times, the media is doing to Clinton and Trump what it  did to Al Gore and George W. Bush in 2000 . Clinton's mistakes are being magnified beyond reason and Trump's ineptness is being forgiven with abandon. 

This has to stop.  

The Clinton Foundation was not some pay to play adjunct of the State Department while Hillary ran Foggy Bottom. To the contrary, it has a stellar record of providing much needed medical and other assistance to some of the most impoverished parts of the world and has been given high marks for transparency and efficiency by all  the charity watch-dog groups.  Moreover, if helping Bill Clinton cure AIDS or malaria in Africa was perceived as the requirement for a ticket to see Secretary Clinton, I'm not particularly clear on why that was such a bad thing.  Similarly, Hillary's private email server was not remotely a crime, nor was it designed to allow her to avoid the need to archive her public records. The latter problem bedevils even today's government servers as we attempt to get our hands around the complex task of saving and archiving virtual data.

Similarly, Trump's demonstrated lack of knowledge about large swaths of policy and his penchant for lying and insult whenever he is challenged does not evaporate if he behaves for the next two months as his handlers (or, more likely, his kids) finally dog-house his inner beast. Put simply, Trump's demonstrated racism and sexism, along with his thin-skinned bullying that often appears to border on the psychotic and in any event simply shields enormous gaps in knowledge and attention to policy detail, has already disqualified him from getting anywhere near the nuclear codes.  And silence for the next two months will not etch-a-sketch away that disqualifying past.

Where to from here?

That's simple.

Hang up when the pollsters call.  Stop telling them whether you're still thinking, or what you're now thinking, or what you will be thinking about thinking in the two months ahead.

Just think.  

It will have the desired outcome.   Your eventual vote will not be the product of an ennui brought on by prognosticators telling you how bad the choices are.  Or the product of an ignorance brought on by a drumbeat of false equivalence.  Or even the product of a desperation born of the desire that it just be over.

It won't be any of this.

Instead, it'll  be . . .

Thoughtful.