THANKSGIVING 2022 -- ON WEDDINGS, WAVES AND ONE GREAT WOMAN

It's that time again.

Thanksgiving.

And this year, I have a lot of thank-yous on my plate.

My daughter Courtney got married last month.  About 150 of our family and closest friends nestled ourselves along the Delaware River at the historic Glen Foerd mansion in north Philadelphia to watch the beaming bride and groom author their own vows.  Dad stifled a few tears even as he managed to get through the obligatory toast. The happy couple partied long into the night.  The Moms (step and groom's) were radiant.

The old (cynical) saw is that weddings are a triumph of hope over experience.  This is supposedly a concession to our data driven world in which half the marriages dissolve.  My own view, however, is that the cynics are really the boomers assuming their past is their children's prologue.

Even if it isn't.

My first thank you this year is that my kids are smarter than me.  

They know that dysfunction can be generational.

But does not have to be.

Choice . . .

And therapy . . .

Can break any pathology. 

Which gets me to my second thank you.

As I danced along the Delaware this October, America's background noise was forecasting a depressing November.  Pathological even. Depending on where you looked, the country's mid-term election -- its first since Trump's attempted coup on January 6, 2021 -- was about to deposit anywhere from 20 to 60 newly elected Republicans in the House of Representative, 5-7 newly elected Republicans in the Senate, half a dozen election-denying GOPers as Secretaries of State, and two nut-jobs (Kari Lake , or what Trump would be if he were trans, and Doug Mastriano) as Governors in Arizona and Pennsylvania, respectively.

None of this happened.

So . . .

Thank you,  America.

For the wave that wasn't.

But please do not become complacent or over-confident.

Arrogance has destroyed many a political party.  And it still may be in the process of destroying the Republican Party.  The pundits -- or at least Rupert Murdoch -- are all agog over the supposed end of Donald Trump as the GOP's anointed leader.  Trump, however, hasn't read the memo.  He announced last week that he was running for President yet again, and shortly thereafter told every Republican to get behind him "ASAP" or suffer the consequences. The week before, he threatened Murdoch's current favorite, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. If DeSantis runs, bellows Trump, the Donald will have a lot to say "about him that won't be very flattering".

This is Trump's standard mob-boss m.o.

But no one knows that it won't work.

The best analysis  on the issue so far has come from John Ellis, nephew and cousin to the President Bushes, former journalist and current venture capitalist.  

According to Ellis, Trump’s ability to survive is contingent on his ability to generate ratings for Fox. "Whoever is the Fox News candidate for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination will have an enormous advantage over his or her competition," says Ellis, "Republican primary voters and caucus attendees are the core of the Fox news audience".   In 2015, he continues, Murdoch discounted Trump until it became clear that Fox's ratings doubled when Trump was on.  Thereafter, Fox had to "either become the Trump channel or watch another network become the Trump channel." 

In this cycle, if Ron DeSantis can do for Fox what Trump did four years ago, Ellis thinks Murdoch will dump Trump.  If, however, DeSantis over time is either a ratings flop or ratings fade and Fox viewers return to their "first love", Murdoch will have no choice but to drive the Trump train once again.

Rupert Murdoch probably has some data suggesting that the Trump of today is not the Trump of yesteryear.  The owner of Fox, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post  has not made a world-wide media-based fortune misunderstanding his audience and we should not assume he is doing so now. For his part, however, Trump has weathered the squalls of declining popularity before, even in the aftermath of January 6 when his core support started to dissipate, only to emerge phoenix-like from the ashes.  There is no guarantee he will not do so again.

Trump's other advantage is that the Republican Party today is a grievance party, not a governing one. It's base lives off anger, and its new (but slight) majority in the House of Representatives will be stoking that anger non-stop for the next two years. They have already announced that they plan to investigate Hunter Biden, Dr. Fauci and the FBI.  In each case, the pre-determined outcome of these efforts will enable Trump's lesser lies (that Hunter compromised Joe; that Fauci destroyed the economy; that the FBI planted evidence at Mar El Lago) while giving him the space to repeat his greatest one (that the 2020 election was stolen).

In these circumstances, DeSantis's ratings could easily fade.

Unlike Trump, he has a day job.

He is a Governor.

Which the GOP base finds boring.

My best guess is that, until the boil is lanced and Trump is forever gone, the GOP has no real chance of creating an electoral majority based on any coherent governing plan or policy.  

Stoking anger has made the Republican Party competitive.  

It has not made it successful.

What would?

If one were to generate a list of vilified politicians over the past thirty years, Trump would clearly be at the top. So, however, would Nancy Pelosi. In fact, in 2010,  toward the end of her first period as Speaker, her favorability rating was under 30% .  Trump's never got that low.  Even after January 6, 38% of America still gave him their thumbs up.  Nevertheless,  Pelosi is loved by her people, all of them, and Trump is merely tolerated (and in many cases silently despised) by a sizeable portion of his.

Why?

The reasons are too numerous to count.

But this Thanksgiving, here is another one.

Nancy Pelosi is the Speaker of the House of Representatives.  It is a job she held from 2007 through early 2011 and one she has held again from 2019 until now.  She will leave the job on January 3, 2023.  Though she will continue to serve in Congress as a Representative from California's 12th Congressional District in San Francisco, she will no longer be the leader of her party in the House.  Other than for her time as Speaker, she has led the Democrats in the House for the past nineteen years.

On Thursday, she gave her valedictory speech as Speaker in the well of the House.

It was a speech for the ages.

As a practical matter, she is a child of the House.  At birth her father was a Congressman from Baltimore and as a six-year-old she went there for the first time with her brothers to see him sworn in for his fifth term.  Forty years later, she returned on her own as a California Congresswoman.

When she stood with her father in 1947, she watched "as he took a sacred oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic".  It is the oath, she noted, that "all . . . who have served in [the] House" have taken, "the oath that stitches us together in a long and storied heritage".

"Colleagues who served before us are all our colleagues."

Lincoln, Webster, Chisolm, Lewis.

"In this room," she said, "our colleagues across history have abolished slavery, granted women the right to vote, established Social Security and Medicare, offered a hand to the weak, care to the sick, education to the young and hope to the many."

As a child of history, she has a devotion to it.

"American democracy is majestic," she explained, "But it is fragile."

"Many of us have witnessed its fragility firsthand," she intoned, "tragically in this chamber."

"So," she warned, "Democracy must be forever defended from the forces that wish it harm."

"Last week," she concluded, "the American people spoke.  And their voices were raised in defense of liberty, of the rule of law and of Democracy itself.  With these elections, people stood in the breach and repelled the assault on Democracy.  They resoundingly rejected violence and insurrection. And in so doing 'gave proof through the night that out flag was still there.'"

The week before  Francis Scott Key first wrote those last words in 1814, he had watched the British bombard Fort McHenry all night and marveled that the flag was still standing as morning broke.

In 2022, America's electorate was able to give its own “proof through the night" because, on January 6, 2021, the nation's first female Speaker calmly marshalled the forces that took back the House, ended an attempted coup, completed an electoral count, and saved the nation she loved from the pretender who would have destroyed it.

That is why Nancy Pelosi is loved.

Thank you, Madame Speaker.