THANKSGIVING 2023 -- JACK, ROSALYN AND THE PEOPLE OF ABRAHAM

It's Thanksgiving 2023.

Actually it's two days after.

I am a little late with the thank yous this year.

Because I was paralyzed.

By this question.

Is the world too far gone for gratitude?

Consider these facts:

Hamas massacred 1,200 innocent civilians over a month ago. Those killed included babies, children and the elderly.  Intercepted communications disclosed killers calling home to announce all "the Jews" they had murdered.  Approximately 250 innocents were taken hostage and removed to the tunnels beneath Gaza from which Hamas operates.  There, it is shielded by the millions of civilians who live above, civilians Hamas regularly sacrifices as it attempts (often successfully, never correctly or morally) to create sympathy or false equivalence when their terrorism is followed by the justifiable Israeli response.

Meanwhile, back here at home, Donald Trump is still the prohibitive front-runner in the race for next year's Republican presidential nomination and the new GOP Speaker of the House is a Christian nationalist who thinks the Bible (or, more accurately, his view of the Bible) trumps (irony intended) the Constitution. Whether Donald Trump has ever read the Bible or even cares about what it means, Christian nationalists have made him their avatar, the sinner who slew Roe v. Wade and will pave America's way to legislating another (either the fourth or fifth; the history is presently up for grabs) Great Awakening.

The union of religion and politics is always fraught. It can breed intolerance. In the history of the world, the number of those killed in the name of one god or another is much too large to count. It is also much too large to justify.  But those who would do so persist.

This week, Thanksgiving was sandwiched between bookends telling us it was not always thus and need not be so now. 

John F. Kennedy was assassinated sixty years ago this past Wednesday.  Earlier in the week, former first lady Rosalyn Carter passed away at the age of 96.  The forever young president and the aged first lady reminded us of what we have lost

On the day Kennedy was inaugurated in 1961, the world was a dangerous place.  The United States and the Soviet Union were locked in a Cold War of  nuclear terror. Half of Europe was controlled by Soviet communists.  Who only four years earlier had violently crushed dissent in Hungary.  The global south was poor. And angry. Uncertain on where it belonged.  Or who it wished to emulate. 

Speaking to this world, Kennedy could have proffered a series of excuses.

Instead, he offered a series of pledges.

To allies, the "loyalty of faithful friends". 

To those in "half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery", "our best efforts to help them help themselves". 

To our "sister republics south of our border", "good words" converted into "good deeds" in a "new alliance for progress". 

To the United Nations, the "last best hope where the instruments of war have far outpaced the instruments of peace", a pledge "to prevent it from becoming merely a forum for invective". 

And to our "adversaries", a "request" that "both sides begin anew the quest for peace"

Kennedy knew at least two things as he uttered these pledges.  The first was that his list was long.  "All this," he said, "will not be finished in the first one hundred days". "Nor," he continued, "in the first one thousand days" or "the life of this Administration".  "Nor even perhaps," he concluded, "in our lifetime on this planet." The second was that  waiting would not make things better.  So, he insisted, "let us begin."

In her life, Rosalyn Carter was all about beginnings.  

Her family was poor but she never knew it (though her family had no money, she explained, "neither did anyone else").  Her father died when she was 13. Without bitterness, she said it was the end of her childhood. She helped raise her younger siblings and her mother's dressmaking business. 

She was the first person in her family to graduate from college. 

She married a graduate of the Naval Academy and then managed his peanut farm after he left the service. 

When he ran for the state senate, Governor (twice) and President (twice), she was his most important surrogate. When he was president, she spearheaded efforts to improve mental health care in the United States. After he lost, she began a second life of service, building houses, establishing an institute advocating for unpaid caregivers and continuing her mental health advocacy. 

In his 1961 Inaugural, JFK's most famous line came in his peroration: "And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country."

Rosalyn Carter got the memo.

Yesterday, Israel paused its campaign in Gaza to allow for the release of fifty hostages being held by Hamas and the delivery of desperately needed food, water and fuel for Gaza's civilians.  Many, including President Biden, are being praised for having advocated for the pause and helped with the negotiations that made it and the hostage release possible.

Israel, however, deserves the most praise.

For its courage.

Academics and others can talk about the law of war and the need for restraint and proportionality when civilians are at risk, but Israel's soldiers are on the ground in Gaza putting their lives on the line every minute.  The only reason Gaza's civilians are endangered in this conflict is because Hamas hides behind and under those civilians.  Full stop. It is impossible to avoid civilian casualties under those circumstances and very difficult to apply the legal principles of proportional response in assaying each potential target. Israel, however, is attempting to do so.  Even while Hamas regularly violates the laws to which Israel is being held.

Israel is the only democracy in the middle east.  

Another full stop. 

It is surrounded by those who would eliminate it and Judaism from the face of the earth. It reasonably fears another Holocaust.  And in the face of October 7, it had no choice other than the course upon which it embarked. As a democracy, its government responds to and is bound by the will of its people. And those people have once again risen to the occasion.  "Never again" and "Bring them home" are commitments that co-exist in Israel.  

They do so despite their inherent tension.

But because of the courage of Israel's citizens.

When Kennedy finished his Inaugural Address, he gave us a glimpse of his God.  He said: "With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God's work must truly be our own."

JFK never made God an excuse or something to hide behind.

Neither did Rosalyn Carter.

Neither is Israel doing so today.

And, despite my fears, their examples prove that  the world today need not be and is not too far gone.

So. . .

This Thanksgiving . . .

At this difficult time . . . 

And in a difficult week . . .

I thank them.

DISTORTING AMERICA'S CHOICE

The New York Times opened its digital edition yesterday with a banner headline telling the world that Donald Trump would win the next presidential election.

The paper did not say it that way but in essence it could have.  Instead, the paper reported that, according to the latest New York Times/Siena College  poll,  Trump now leads President Biden in five of the six so-called battleground states likely to decide next year's contest.  The surveyed states are Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.  Biden won them all in 2020 but Trump is ahead everywhere today except in Wisconsin, and there, Biden holds only a two-point lead.

The poll talked to 3,662 registered voters in the six states.  The margin of error in each of the six states was around 4.5%.  Trump leads Biden by five points in Michigan and Arizona, six in Georgia, nine in Nevada and four in Pennsylvania.  The poll attributes these results to Biden's age and supposed mental acuity, the view that Trump would better manage the economy and the world, and an erosion of support for Biden among non-whites voters.  The latter, it claims, is especially stark given that Biden beat Trump by more than forty points among non-whites in 2020.  In the poll, he is now leading in that group by considerably less; among non-whites under age 45 he has lost thirty-three points.

It's almost impossible to take these results seriously.

It becomes even more unlikely when you look at the cross-tabs in the poll.

In those cross-tabs, the same voters who reject Biden in favor of Trump immediately switch their votes when they are asked who they would vote for in a race between Trump and an  "unnamed generic Democrat".  In that match-up, the unnamed generic Democrat beats Trump handily.  He (or she) does so by three points in Nevada, seven points in Michigan and Georgia, eight points in Arizona, ten points in Pennsylvania and eleven points in Wisconsin.  To put this in context, the race switches from one in which Trump wins comfortably in these battleground states to one in which the Democrat wins by even greater margins (and in two states -- Pennsylvania and Wisconsin -- by what today would be considered landslides).

The cross-tabs also report some other . . .  er . . .

Anomalies.

For example, did you know that Vice President Kamala Harris would come closer than Biden to beating Trump in these six states?

I didn't.

But, alas, the poll says Harris is better than Biden by six points in Georgia, by three in Michigan and Nevada and even by one in Scranton Joe's Pennsylvania.  The two lose by the same margin in Arizona. And Harris actually loses Wisconsin by one point (where Biden wins by two).  

Here's another.

According to the New York Times and Siena College,  11% of those who would vote for Kamala Harris for President  would not vote for Biden. Though most in that group said they would not vote at all or would vote for some other Democrat, 16% of these Harris-but-not-Biden voters said they'd "definitely" vote for Trump.

On issues, the poll is a Rorschach Test of projection.  Those surveyed trust Trump more on the economy, immigration, national security and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.  On abortion, they favor Biden. On who will better preserve democracy, the poll reports that 48% favor Biden and 45% favor Trump.  

Given this poll, one of two things is now true.

Either this poll is nuts.

Or the majority of voters in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Georgia and Arizona are.

My vote is on the poll.

The poll, like its confreres, is preternaturally pointless.  The pollsters are asking people to make a decision today that they will not have to make for almost a year.  They are doing so  in an environment that is at best context-aberrant and at worst context-free.  Unlike the electorate that will exist next fall, the electorate the pollsters now question is tuned out,  turned off and inundated with information they have neither the time nor inclination to fully process.

To wit:

Some of the questions asked are not remotely on the mind of voters today.  And won't be a year from now either. No one, for example, is wondering (or will) how any generic unnamed Democrat would fare against Donald Trump.  They are not doing so because (i) they are not now thinking about an election a year away and (ii)  there is no such thing as an unnamed generic Democrat.  Nor is anyone seriously contemplating whether to vote for Kamala Harris, who is not running for President.  Or saying to themselves "I would prefer Harris for the top spot and will therefore dump her for the second and vote Trump for the first".    

It is also hard to believe that, in the space of a few months, voters have gone from believing Biden reconstituted NATO and our European and global allies into an effective counterweight to Russia in Ukraine to now thinking Trump will magically end the war on terms acceptable to us and the west. In any case, none of the questions disclosed in the polls did any kind of deep dive into the scores of decisions Biden made to get us where we are today or wondered which were approved and which were not.

Ditto on democracy.

The poll would have us believe that . . . 

After fraudulently demanding that state officials "find" him votes; telling the Vice President to unilaterally refuse to count certified electoral votes;  openly encouraging the violent January 6 insurrection; refusing for hours to call it off; watching for those same hours as his people ransacked the Capitol and called for the hanging of Vice President Pence; being indicted on ninety-one charges in four separate jurisdictions; falsely accusing General Milley of treason and calling for his death; finding "fine people" among neo-Nazis; being found liable for both sexual abuse and business fraud; lying pathologically; and exhibiting unbounded narcissism . . .

45% still think Trump is a better bet to preserve democracy.

Or that Biden, at 48% on this issue, is only slightly better.

I want to meet these people.

The media world we live in today is grossly asymmetric. 

Because Biden actually is president, he has been subject to a barrage of criticism from the day he took the oath of office.  Among the mainstream media, no Biden foible or lapse has gone unnoticed  and no charge levelled  (too old, sloppy speech, Hunter, the dogs, alleged bribe-taking) has gone unreported. At the same time, FOX News and the MAGA echo chamber (Breitbart, Bannon et al.) has been running a veritable infomercial for Trump.  They literally broadcast his vitriolic insults, fact-free ramblings, repeated lies and MAGA fictions on a continuous twenty-four-hour loop.

In this environment, objective truth is often the first casualty.  

The economy last quarter grew at a record 4.9%, which was unheard of in the Trump years.  Unemployment is at 3.9% (having topped out at 14.7% in April 2020 while Trump was president  during the pandemic).  Inflation is at 3.7% and  has been cut by more than half in the last year. 

None of this, however,  has seeped into voters' consciousness.

Why?

Three reasons.

First, in the short term, MAGA has spent two plus years pretending Trump's economy was perfect even though it wasn't.  In particular, unemployment hit 14.7% during the pandemic and Trump himself was either AWOL or mindless in managing the nation's response to it.  Contrary to his claims, bleach was not medicine. And contrary to the far right's idiocy, the Covid vaccine was effective.

Second, in the intermediate term, the pre-pandemic economy that Trump and his GOP supporters brag about was not one he created.  It was one he inherited.  The person who rescued the economy from the Republicans near-depression in 2007 and 2008 was Obama, not Trump. And growth was glacial, not fast, between 2009 and 2016 because the GOP refused to fully fund the needed investments (and continued to do so after Trump was inaugurated).

Third,  over the past forty years, conservatives created a winner-take-all economy  that moved wealth to the top 1% and turned the middle class into a heads-just-above- water group of strivers a paycheck, illness, spousal death or lost job away from poverty.  Biden is trying to change all that with infrastructure spending, the return of domestic manufacturing and pro-labor victories. 

America's choice next year will be between a prosperity built on an ongoing reversal of that winner-take-all mentality or a continuing anxiety and long-term decline based on preserving it.

America's choice will also be between a democracy where all vote and the law is neutrally enforced and universally respected . . .

Or a dictatorship in which January 6's coup-plotting criminals are pardoned, the federal government's civil servants emasculated, and Trump's revenge -- like his narcissism and disdain for truth -- boundless.

In short . . .

Between freedom.

And fascism. 

An "unnamed generic Democrat" will not be on the ballot.

Nor a reformed, honest, empathetic, studious or law-abiding . . . 

Donald Trump.