And we're in the dog days of summer.
Probably the "doggiest" summer in years.
Many of us are unemployed.
All of us are stressed and tired . . .
And clearly challenged.
Boy are we challenged.
A world-wide pandemic has resulted in over 5.3 million cases here in the United States and 165,000 deaths. Worldwide, there have been over 21 million cases and over 759,000 have died. Though our population of 330 million is about 4.3% of the world's inhabitants, 25% of its coronavirous infections have found their way to our shores, as have more than 20% of its related deaths.
Over the pandemic's course, Presidential leadership has for the most part been absent and in many instances inept. Early intelligence was ignored when following it could have been determinative. Expertise was sidelined when embracing it would have saved lives. The amount of denial -- it'll all go away "miraculously" -- and delusion -- ingesting bleach, for example -- and sheer idiocy -- wear a mask, it's not a political statement -- has been breathtaking.
Over the pandemic's course, Presidential leadership has for the most part been absent and in many instances inept. Early intelligence was ignored when following it could have been determinative. Expertise was sidelined when embracing it would have saved lives. The amount of denial -- it'll all go away "miraculously" -- and delusion -- ingesting bleach, for example -- and sheer idiocy -- wear a mask, it's not a political statement -- has been breathtaking.
Fifty governors, most of them now broke, have tried to put together effective responses. Their approaches have varied, as has their effectiveness. The stars of the show -- Governors in the northeast and northwest -- quarantined earlier than many others, were guided by science, and were disciplined in phasing in re-openings. That is the reason New York, once America's coronovirous capital and still the jurisdiction with the highest number of total infections and deaths in the young life of this disease, reduced its daily new cases from a high of 6,377 on April 6 to 69 just a few days ago. The state's rate of positive test results has also declined, from a high of 70% of those tested in April to below 1.4% now.
The current unemployment rate, all due to the pandemic, is 10.2%. Though the springtime CARES Act put needed money in the hands of small business, the unemployed and state governments, and thus prevented an incipient depression, that aid has now ended or run out. Senate Republicans, meanwhile, refuse to pass a new bill. About twenty GOP Senators are opposed to appropriating any additional money at all, and the rest are insistent that any supplemental not exceed $1 trillion, which is about a third of what the Democrats initially proposed and only half of where they agreed to go to as a compromise.
As is typical of much of the GOP, their stinginess is heralded as concern over the ballooning deficit, a concern never expressed -- indeed, assiduously ignored -- whenever they propose tax cuts for their rich friends and donors. Not to be outdone, Trump entered the fray last weekend, signing an Executive Order ostensibly raising unemployment payments by $400/week. Because, however, a President cannot appropriate money and state governments cannot afford to throw in their required share, it is not clear where the additional funds would come from or whether any of it will ever actually wind up in America's household accounts.
In this morass, national politics has played out along our now-standard tribal lines. Though crises usually unite Americans, even if only for their duration, this pandemic has been an exception. For that, President Trump is principally to blame. It is difficult in the best of circumstances to navigate the sea of lies, half-truths, vulgarities, neuroses, inanities and sheer stupidity that Trump and his band of grifters and C-minus enablers unleash on any given day. But it becomes dangerous when the products of these transparently flawed characters are the prisms through which ostensible policy, if not actually made, must still travel.
Trump's nakedly coarse take on all this is that "it is what it is".
The Democrats take is that what "is" need not be much longer.
Joe Biden announced his Vice Presidential running mate this week, California Sen. Kamala Harris. Both Harris and Biden are center-left members of the Democratic Party and both have lengthy political resumes. Biden was a Senator for thirty-five years and Vice-President for eight. Harris is in her first term in the Senate but previously served as California's Attorney General for six years and San Francisco's District Attorney just shy of seven.
That, however, is where the similarities end.
Biden is old school. He was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania in 1942, which is New Deal, not new wave. He lived there for ten years until his family moved to Delaware, where his father found work. He wasn't poor but his family knew economic struggle. They had moved in with his grandparents while in Scranton after his father lost work and in Delaware they lived in a crowded apartment until they could afford another home. In school, he was an athlete, not a scholar. And the part of him that is Irish, from his mother's Finnegan side of the family, is loyal, sentimental and, in the tradition of most Irish pols, flexible.
Harris is not New Deal, she's America's New Real. Born in Oakland, California to an Indian-immigrant mother and Jamaican-immigrant father in 1964, there's an echo of Obama in her background -- mixed race, educational over-achievers (her father is an emeritus professor of economics at Stanford; her mother, who died in 2009, had a PhD and was a renowned biological researcher ), adolescence abroad (she attended and graduated from high school in Montreal where she, her Mom and her sister lived for a time following her parents' divorce), followed by college (Howard), law school (UC Hastings) and a climb up America's greasy political pole (ADA, state board member and then commissioner, DA, AG, Senator). Along the way, she had an important boyfriend in Willie Brown, but that help only got her in two doors; the performance afterward was all hers.
Biden and Harris are a unique combination of competence, boredom and reflection. Each of them knows how to run a government, something Trump doesn't even pretend to do (see Pandemic).
In his Senate career and as VP, Biden shepherded important legislation through Congress (the Violence Against Women Act), helped pass and manage much of Obama's critical stimulus and recovery program in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown, and was bi-partisan (John McCain was one of his closest friends). His ability to navigate the complicated ideological minefield that has been the Democratic Party over the last forty years, which some see as evidence of unprincipled hypocrisy, is actually the sort of pragmatism from which incremental progress is in fact wrought.
It's not always exciting.
But it gets the job done.
That, however, is where the similarities end.
Biden is old school. He was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania in 1942, which is New Deal, not new wave. He lived there for ten years until his family moved to Delaware, where his father found work. He wasn't poor but his family knew economic struggle. They had moved in with his grandparents while in Scranton after his father lost work and in Delaware they lived in a crowded apartment until they could afford another home. In school, he was an athlete, not a scholar. And the part of him that is Irish, from his mother's Finnegan side of the family, is loyal, sentimental and, in the tradition of most Irish pols, flexible.
Harris is not New Deal, she's America's New Real. Born in Oakland, California to an Indian-immigrant mother and Jamaican-immigrant father in 1964, there's an echo of Obama in her background -- mixed race, educational over-achievers (her father is an emeritus professor of economics at Stanford; her mother, who died in 2009, had a PhD and was a renowned biological researcher ), adolescence abroad (she attended and graduated from high school in Montreal where she, her Mom and her sister lived for a time following her parents' divorce), followed by college (Howard), law school (UC Hastings) and a climb up America's greasy political pole (ADA, state board member and then commissioner, DA, AG, Senator). Along the way, she had an important boyfriend in Willie Brown, but that help only got her in two doors; the performance afterward was all hers.
Biden and Harris are a unique combination of competence, boredom and reflection. Each of them knows how to run a government, something Trump doesn't even pretend to do (see Pandemic).
In his Senate career and as VP, Biden shepherded important legislation through Congress (the Violence Against Women Act), helped pass and manage much of Obama's critical stimulus and recovery program in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown, and was bi-partisan (John McCain was one of his closest friends). His ability to navigate the complicated ideological minefield that has been the Democratic Party over the last forty years, which some see as evidence of unprincipled hypocrisy, is actually the sort of pragmatism from which incremental progress is in fact wrought.
It's not always exciting.
But it gets the job done.
Harris is where, at least demographically, America is going. By mid-century, white Americans will be less than 50% of the country. The rest will be Black, non-white Hispanic, Asian (including Indian) American and mixed, and today, those groups already constitute a majority of young Americans. These changes have already had political effects, turning solidly red states like North Carolina and Arizona into swing states and even creating the possibility of additional swings in places like Texas.
Choosing running mates because they help you carry their state or region is a thing of the past (last effectively done, in fact, by JFK in 1960).
But choosing one who helps you appeal to the changing face of America is not.
And Harris helps Biden do that.
(Note to the Lingering Unsatisfied: Indian-Americans are the second largest immigrant group in the country, and there are more of them in each of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania than Trump won those states by in 2016.)
At the same time, however, Kamala (pronouced "comma-la" even if Tucker Carlson doesn't care) is much more than a face, something that was lost in her erstwhile Presidential campaign and is not being sufficiently emphasized even now.
As a prosecutor, she significantly improved the San Franscisco District Attorney's office, helping the City drastically reduce violent crime while also pushing for bail reform and and a novel re-entry program focused on education and community service that materially reduced recidivism. As California's AG, she created a Mortgage Fraud Strike Force in 2010 in the wake of foreclosures brought on by the financial crisis, and in 2012 she successfully fought to increase (by 400%) California's share of the National Mortgage Settlement with the nation's five largest servicers. In the Senate, tapping her inner-Clarence Darrow, she rendered at least one of Trump's enablers -- Attorney General Barr -- more or less speechless.
Though paramount, the 2020 election has to be about more than getting rid Trump.
It has to be about more than that because Trump has done more than any president in my lifetime to destroy governmental capacity.
Some examples:
Two crown jewels of American government -- the Department of Justice and the intelligence agencies -- have been decimated in an effort to make them either a vehicle of Trump's personal pay-back (in the case of DOJ) or one in which facts take a back seat to presidential disposition (in the case of the intel agencies). For its part, the State Department literally has dozens of critical positions that have remained unfilled for the past three plus years, and mindless deregulation has turned the environmental agencies into pollution machines. As for the Department of Education under Betsy DeVos, it is basically a misnomer, more an adjunct of the NRA, corporate leeches and private schools as it has sought to arm teachers, defend lenders and phony on-line colleges, and cut public school funding.
On January 20, 2021, the nation's To-Do list will be overwhelming.
By then, we are likely to be well into our winter's pandemic of discontent. At best, the economy will be struggling to regain its former exuberance, as will America's middle class, lower middle class and poor. At worst, if nothing has been done by way of relief beforehand, their position will be dire.
Whatever intelligence minefields have been kept from or ignored by Trump will have to be immediately tended to by Biden. The rule of law will need to be restored at Justice and under-secretaries and staff found to re-people State. A whole host of Executive Orders will keep an army of typists at work day and night repealing Trump's assaults on immigrants and the environment.
Unless the GOP has some sort of heart transplant (or mind meld with the ever-affable Biden), the Senate filibuster will have to go (lest, literally, nothing gets done). And voting rights will have to be protected for the tens of thousands Trump and his state supporters have thrown off the rolls.
New York's Mario Cuomo once remarked that America's elected officials "campaign in poetry but govern in prose". Trump, of course, is the exception. He campaigns and governs more or less in a perpetual state of spite. As for Biden and Harris, neither is particularly poetic as a matter of course, though Biden clearly recognizes it when he sees it and Harris by dint of background has actually lived it even if she appears loathe to give public voice to it.
All that, however, is of no moment right now.
America is not starving for poetry.
It is starving for competence.
It wants a President who shows up for work before noon, doesn't think midnight tweets are part of the job description, deals in facts and truth, listens to experts, reads the daily intelligence brief, won't defend foreign fascists (or home-gown ones either), obeys the law, avoids impeachment, checks a good part of his ego at the door, and gets things done.
The last time the country faced such a daunting challenge, Franklin Roosevelt was President.
When Joe Biden was born.
The last time it produced a transformative sea of legislative progress was in the mid-1960s.
When Kamala Harris was born.
He's the New Deal.
She's the New Real.
And it's time for a couple of encores.
Choosing running mates because they help you carry their state or region is a thing of the past (last effectively done, in fact, by JFK in 1960).
But choosing one who helps you appeal to the changing face of America is not.
And Harris helps Biden do that.
(Note to the Lingering Unsatisfied: Indian-Americans are the second largest immigrant group in the country, and there are more of them in each of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania than Trump won those states by in 2016.)
At the same time, however, Kamala (pronouced "comma-la" even if Tucker Carlson doesn't care) is much more than a face, something that was lost in her erstwhile Presidential campaign and is not being sufficiently emphasized even now.
As a prosecutor, she significantly improved the San Franscisco District Attorney's office, helping the City drastically reduce violent crime while also pushing for bail reform and and a novel re-entry program focused on education and community service that materially reduced recidivism. As California's AG, she created a Mortgage Fraud Strike Force in 2010 in the wake of foreclosures brought on by the financial crisis, and in 2012 she successfully fought to increase (by 400%) California's share of the National Mortgage Settlement with the nation's five largest servicers. In the Senate, tapping her inner-Clarence Darrow, she rendered at least one of Trump's enablers -- Attorney General Barr -- more or less speechless.
Though paramount, the 2020 election has to be about more than getting rid Trump.
It has to be about more than that because Trump has done more than any president in my lifetime to destroy governmental capacity.
Some examples:
Two crown jewels of American government -- the Department of Justice and the intelligence agencies -- have been decimated in an effort to make them either a vehicle of Trump's personal pay-back (in the case of DOJ) or one in which facts take a back seat to presidential disposition (in the case of the intel agencies). For its part, the State Department literally has dozens of critical positions that have remained unfilled for the past three plus years, and mindless deregulation has turned the environmental agencies into pollution machines. As for the Department of Education under Betsy DeVos, it is basically a misnomer, more an adjunct of the NRA, corporate leeches and private schools as it has sought to arm teachers, defend lenders and phony on-line colleges, and cut public school funding.
On January 20, 2021, the nation's To-Do list will be overwhelming.
By then, we are likely to be well into our winter's pandemic of discontent. At best, the economy will be struggling to regain its former exuberance, as will America's middle class, lower middle class and poor. At worst, if nothing has been done by way of relief beforehand, their position will be dire.
Whatever intelligence minefields have been kept from or ignored by Trump will have to be immediately tended to by Biden. The rule of law will need to be restored at Justice and under-secretaries and staff found to re-people State. A whole host of Executive Orders will keep an army of typists at work day and night repealing Trump's assaults on immigrants and the environment.
Unless the GOP has some sort of heart transplant (or mind meld with the ever-affable Biden), the Senate filibuster will have to go (lest, literally, nothing gets done). And voting rights will have to be protected for the tens of thousands Trump and his state supporters have thrown off the rolls.
New York's Mario Cuomo once remarked that America's elected officials "campaign in poetry but govern in prose". Trump, of course, is the exception. He campaigns and governs more or less in a perpetual state of spite. As for Biden and Harris, neither is particularly poetic as a matter of course, though Biden clearly recognizes it when he sees it and Harris by dint of background has actually lived it even if she appears loathe to give public voice to it.
All that, however, is of no moment right now.
America is not starving for poetry.
It is starving for competence.
It wants a President who shows up for work before noon, doesn't think midnight tweets are part of the job description, deals in facts and truth, listens to experts, reads the daily intelligence brief, won't defend foreign fascists (or home-gown ones either), obeys the law, avoids impeachment, checks a good part of his ego at the door, and gets things done.
The last time the country faced such a daunting challenge, Franklin Roosevelt was President.
When Joe Biden was born.
The last time it produced a transformative sea of legislative progress was in the mid-1960s.
When Kamala Harris was born.
He's the New Deal.
She's the New Real.
And it's time for a couple of encores.
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