FEWS-MAKERS 

There appear, these days, to be two  types of news.

There is the type that reports what has happened or is currently happening. And there is the type that reports what will happen. The second is not really news.  It has not occurred. At best, it is a sort of future news. It is, however, increasingly occupying space on our front pages. So much so, in fact, that we now need new word for it.

Here’s mine.

"Fews".

Pronounced fewz or fuze.

Short for “future news”.

As with its parent, this neologism will have many offspring.  

Fews-papers. 

Fews-casts. 

And, of course, fews-makers.

The biggest fews-makers these days are pollsters. 

It is a disturbing reality that most or at least a very large part of the reporting on this year’s midterm elections is about polls predicting what will happen less than two weeks from now. This is disturbing mostly because it upends the notion, central to America's founding, that a free press would be the best way to generate the informed electorate needed to create a representative but functional government. Polls do not tell us anything particularly relevant about the here and now of the actual candidates — what they believe or how and why they came to believe it. Even worse, the cynics among us, and there are many,  view polls as the (only) reason for that how and why. In their world, candidates do not espouse considered positions. Instead, they mindlessly regurgitate whatever “polls well”.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of truth in that cynicism.

Since Donald Trump, the Republican Party has embraced its own version of poll-tested mindlessness.  

In 2020, for the first time ever, the GOP did not publish any party platform. In Trump’s narcissistic “l’etat c’est moi” world, policy was irrelevant because he was the only one who mattered. 

Without him, however, not much has changed.  

In late September, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the GOP’s putative Speaker-in-waiting, published his party’s so-called  “Commitment to America”. The document fit on a pocket card and was basically just a list of wishes (“We want an economy that’s strong” and “a nation that’s safe”). Devoid of actual policy, its attempts to be specific (“expand US manufacturing” or “lower costs”) were empty.

The same type of mindlessness attaches to the GOP's candidates. 

Half of them deny that Trump lost the 2020 presidential election,  including three of their most prominent standard bearers --  Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, Kari Lake in Arizona, and Herschel Walker in Georgia. In a world where policy is irrelevant, any experience forming or creating it is useless. So,  instead of the old GOP, the one Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1980 said had become "a party of ideas", there is this  new one headlined by election deniers who are TV personalities (Lake and Oz) or  erstwhile fullbacks (Walker).  

It is, of course, not the case that talking heads and professional athletes are inherently idea-less. Ronald Reagan was an actor with ideas, and Jack Kemp and Bill Bradley were athletes with them. Lake, Oz and Walker, however, are not even pale imitations.

For their part, the Democrats are running these days on policy.

The fews-makers, however, are getting in their way.

Though you would not know it from the front pages, over the course of the twenty-one months that have been the Biden administration, Democrats have produced.  And they did so on all the hot button issues, the ones the fews-makers say voters really care about.  

Depending on the week, and how fewsy any newsie wants to be, the order of that hot-button list changes. 

But,  regardless, here's the Democrats' report card on it.

On inflation, Biden and the Democrats  put shots in the arms of the entire country to help bring Covid under control, empowered Medicare for the first time to negotiate drug prices, and closed the coverage gap in Obamacare that was increasing health care costs by 20% for those who just missed qualifying for subsidies. Given that a large part of the current inflation was caused by supply chains broken by Covid, and that roughly 8% of every American family's annual budget goes to health care,  these legislative gains saved us . . . 

A huge chunk 'o change.

And it didn't end there.  

Everyone's yelling about crime. I can't turn on the TV these days without being told that my sub and ex-urban Congressman has authorized a district wide crime spree, even though no such spree has sprung.  It was more like a noticeable leak.   Unlike the GOP, however, the Democrats actually did something about it.  Fact: Biden has put more cops on the streets and taken more guns off of them than anything the GOP did when it last ran the country. 

Then, of course, there's the real elephant in the GOP's room otherwise empty of policy.

That would be . . .

Abortion.

In his Senate debate this week against John Fetterman in Pennsylvania, Dr. Oz said that abortion should be between "women, their doctors and local political actors".

Uh-oh.

Bad move.

Even in Pennsylvania.

I have been in and around politics, candidates and campaigns for the better part of the last forty plus years.  I have met scores of "local political actors".  I can say with near certainty that, as a class, they are the last group of people who should be weighing in on anyone's decision regarding abortion. 

Don't get me wrong.  

Many local political actors do God's work . . . 

When God's work is about paving streets, fixing pot-holes, granting zoning variances and cleaning parks.  

If you include members of school boards, it gets dicey. Some clearly do God's work by empowering educators.  Others --  the book burners and trans haters --  are more in league with the Devil.  

None, however, should be telling any woman what to do with her uterus.

The mid-terms should not be a contest. Crazy is on the ballot and crazy should lose.

But, say the fews-makers, they won't

Or that it will be close.

I have no idea.

I read today that Dan Pfeiffer, a big-foot who once had the ear of President Obama, just wrote that "all polls should be ignored".   He said they "serve no purpose. None. Zero. Zilch." He called them "mood-altering statistical drugs."

He's right.

No one knows what is going to happen on November 8.  

That's why it's called . . .

Fews.