SUMMER HEAT

The New York Mets are a National League baseball team.  

For most of their fifty-nine year history, the team has been star-crossed.  At their birth in 1962, they lost 120 games, a record that stands to this day.  In their first seven seasons, in a then ten-team league, they finished last five times and second to last twice.  After professional baseball divided the leagues into divisions, their miracle in 1969 and another World Series appearance in 1973 were followed by eight years of mediocrity punctuated by the disaster of having given Tom Seaver away in 1977.  

In the mid-'80s they rebounded but never achieved the heights their talent foretold.  They were champions in 1986 and won a hundred games in 1988 (only to be eliminated by the Dodgers in the divisional series). They made the play-offs in 1999 and snuck into the World Series as a wild card in 2000 (which they lost) .  And they made the play-offs again in 2006 and went to the World Series again in 2015 with a solid record (but lost that one as well). Between these intermittent successes, they have basically been a .500 team.  Along the way, they were even one of Bernie Madoff's Ponzi victims.

For a while this year, it looked like things might be better.

A lackluster April was followed by a lights out May, when they went 17-9 (a .604 percentage).  In June and July they held their own.  All told, they were in first place  for ninety days.

And then came August.

They are 6-15 in August. 

They aren't hitting.  Of the thirty teams in the two leagues, their team batting average (.234) puts them in 26th place. So does their slugging percentage.  In runs batted in (RBIs),  they place third to last.

Their two best pitchers are on the injured list (IL).  

One -- Noah Syndergaard -- hasn't played all year and is still recuperating from Tommy John surgery.  The other -- Jacob deGrom -- was putting together a Cy Young season with an unheard of 1.08 ERA but was sidelined with right forearm tightness on July 18 and has been on the IL ever since.  He won't be back at the earliest until mid-September (and there are rumors he won't be back at all this season). On July 18, their starting shortstop, Francisco Lindor, also went on the list and will not be returning until next week.

The Mets aren't losing because they are poor. They are a major market team. They have the third largest payroll in baseball, behind only the Dodgers and Yankees.  They are losing because they have had a bad August.

The conventional wisdom is that the Democrats have had a bad August too.  

This is not just a view shared by Republican Trumpers, for whom any month is a bad month for Democrats regardless of facts.  

Even the non-Trumpers are exhaling a bit, confident that an actual factual record may energize their comeback in lieu of the voter suppression they previously depended upon (and which the party itself has no intention of pulling back).

Inflation.

Cuomo.

The California recall.

Afghanistan.

Just as the Democrats were hitting their stride, a bi-partisan infrastructure bill having passed the Senate and budget reconciliation (allowing for a second and larger package) satisfying early procedural votes, the combined effect of which was to paint the party as the adults in the room setting the rusty wheels of government  in motion and getting something done, they ran into . . .

August.

The first thing to say about August is that it requires perspective.  

Inflation at this point is probably a short-term response to supply chain bottlenecks brought on by the pandemic and not a signal that the economy is overheating on account of on-going pandemic relief or stimulus.  The Federal Reserve, moreover, has its eyes on the data and is more than able to hit the brakes if that becomes necessary.  

The California recall effort is a regional issue and the result next month will depend largely if not exclusively on whether Democrats in that state take the possibility of a Larry Elder as Governor seriously enough to create the result -- defeat of the recall -- everyone expected only a short time ago.  Elder is a libertarian radio talk show host who promises to end mask mandates and vaccine requirements. The expected result is now in doubt only because recent polls show energy among  Republicans to approve the recall and boredom among everyone else over the fact that it is even happening.

Memo to California Democrats -- get off your asses and vote.

The two A's -- Andrew (as in Cuomo) and Afghanistan -- were and are more serious.

Cuomo will resign tomorrow.  This follows a report by the state Attorney General's office concluding that he sexually harassed eleven women and otherwise was difficult to work for.  His rebuttal, such as it was, was that he didn't do any of the physical stuff and didn't understand that the verbal stuff crossed any lines (which he claimed had changed over time).  There was no full on trial on any of the claims and the soon to be former Governor argues that the lawyers who conducted the investigation were biased.  

Though the bias claim is difficult to square with the reputations of the actual lawyers, the absence of any ability to confront the charges and cross examine the complainants is a fair criticism.  Be that as it may, however, there is some truth in numbers on the serious physical claims (harassment is generally not a one-off event and there is more than one accuser here),  and the verbal allegations to which he appeared to cop some form of an I-didn't-think-it- crossed-the-line plea reasonably provokes one big "C'mon".  Did he really think it was OK to ask a married aide if she'd cheat on her husband?  Or disclose to twenty-something female employees that he would be fine dating anyone their age? 

Maybe some of that wasn't harassment.

But it was creepy.

Afghanistan is, of course, a tragedy.  Not because we should have stayed.  If the mission was to get Osama bin Laden and degrade Al Qaeda, we did that long ago.  If the mission was to stand-up a western democracy, we probably should have known long ago that we were not succeeding and that throwing additional resources at the region was not going to change the likely outcome.  The ethnic and tribal rivalries in Afghanistan had thwarted the efforts of one empire (the British) and one superpower (the Soviet Union) before we arrived in the wake on 9/11.  And those rivalries were not put on hold once we got there.

This does not mean the initial invasion was wrong. 

Al Qaeda killed more than 3,000 Americans on 9/11 and the Taliban supported them and gave them a base from which the attack was launched.  Taking them and bin Laden out was more than right; any President who refused to do so would have rightly been shown the door.  In retrospect, the problem was staying beyond that point.  The new government was corrupt, and the military incapable or unwilling to fight.  The good that was done, especially in freeing women from the Taliban's inhuman interpretation of Sharia law and allowing a generation of girls to go to school, remains and will be difficult to undo.  More than 60% of the Afghani population is less than 20 years old and has no allegiance to either the Taliban's past or its sexist exclusions.

What remains is the chaos that enveloped our withdrawal and the on-going efforts to retrieve Americans still there and Afghanis who supported us and will now be targeted.  

For the past week or so, the airwaves have been agog with claims that Biden has screwed up, that he had intel predicting the Afghani government/military's imminent collapse, and that in any case he should have planned for a more orderly removal of Americans and those Afghanis who supported us.

Here, too, however, perspective is in order.

As well as historic accuracy.

To begin, this is not Saigon in 1975.  The vast majority of Vietnamese refugees did not leave on American planes or helicopters as Saigon was about to fall.  They left in boats over time -- sometimes years later --  and were allowed to enter the US as refugees.  In contrast, and as Matthew Dowd pointed out yesterday on CNN, over 20,000 people were removed from Afghanistan in the last week without one American death.  More will be coming out in the weeks ahead.  Is it the smoothest process?  No.  But is it Saigon 1975, or Dunkirk 1940, two events to which critics have compared it?  Not even close.

Biden owns this problem because he is the sitting President.  Unlike his immediate predecessor, he is not ducking responsibility or shifting blame.  The success of the current evacuation has been and will be his responsibility.  The cause of the implosion, however, cannot be laid at his feet.  Almost uniquely among executive officeholders in the last twenty years, he opposed mission creep.  He wanted us out when he was Vice-President. Trump to his credit wanted us out when  he was President.  

But Trump  wouldn't pull the trigger.

Why not?

Because the generals told him it would be messy and Trump didn't want the bad pictures.

What Biden understood and accepted, and Trump just avoided, is that it was always going to be messy.  There was not going to be a time when the addition of 5,000 troops tasked with evacuating Americans and at-risk Afghanis was going to proceed in an environment where the Afghani government retained control and its military fought effectively.  To the contrary, any evacuation at any time was going to be a signal to those institutions that American support was over and they were on their own, a signal they would almost certainly have taken as a green light to the abandonment they ultimately practiced. 

To forestall chaos or defeat or whatever anyone wishes to call what is now going on would have required troops on a more or less permanent basis and more of them as the Taliban’s control increased.  And those like Liz Cheney who wanted that forever war outcome are a distinct minority in the country at large.

So August has been bad.

For the Mets and the Democrats.

But it has not been fatal.

Largely because both the team and the party have weak opponents. 

In the National League’s Eastern Division, where the Mets sit, their opponents are more or less .500 teams as well. The Mets are seven games behind at this writing. But a May in September could resurrect their hopes. 

As for  the Democrats, they have the Republicans.

The Trump-supporting, insurrection-inciting, COVID-denying, vote-suppressing Republicans . . .

Who refuse to get rid of the sexual harasser-in-chief  in their own ranks. 

August is almost over.

SEARCHING FOR UNITY -- CELEBRATING THE FOURTH ON THE LAKE

It's raining on the Great Sacandaga Lake this 4th of July.

The great lake occupies a little more than forty-one square miles at the southeastern edge of New York's Adirondack Park.  

Both the park and the lake were government projects. In 1885, New York designated publicly owned lands in the Adirondacks and Catskills as "forest preserves" and in 1894 the state mandated that those preserves would be "forever wild". In 1902, roughly 2.8 million acres of that wilderness was then defined as the Adirondack Park, and in the hundred plus years since, it has grown to over six million acres.  For its part, the great lake was created in 1930 following six years of study and construction that damned the Sacandaga River at Conklingville to create what was initially called a reservoir. In the '60s, the name was changed to the Great Sacandaga Lake.

If it seems that very little in the nature of public works has ever gotten done in America without some argument in favor of economic growth, that is because . . .

Very little in the nature of public works has ever gotten done in America without some argument in favor of economic growth.

The park and the lake were no exceptions.  

The former owed its genesis to an incipient tourism industry that took root there in the mid to late 19th century combined with lawyer-engineer Verplanck Colvin's 1875 survey report warning that lumbering was destroying the Adirondack watershed and imperiling the survival of the Erie Canal, then a major source of New York's economic empire. And the latter was basically a flood control project. The Sacandaga River flowed into the Hudson, which in the spring surged and flooded Albany.  Damning the Sacandaga helped to regulate that surge and abate the flooding.

Back then, the Republican Party ran New York and supported both projects.  And  when he became the nation's 26th President, New York's Republican  former governor, Theodore Roosevelt, championed both the  conservation of the nation's  natural resources -- signing legislation that created five national parks and executive orders that preserved 150 million acres of forest -- and the regulation of its waterways. In 1907, he created the Inland Waterways Commission,  and after World War I highlighted the nation's rail congestion crisis, the work of that commission over time resulted in completion of the Atlantic and Gulf intercoastal waterways projects that created navigational barge channels from Maine to the nation's Mexican border, re-canalization of the Ohio River, and later development of both the Columbia River in the west and the St. Lawrence Seaway in the east.  

All of this was supported for the most part by the Republican Party and, when added to Democratic Party projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority (which electrified the south)  or completing the Hoover dam (which irrigated the southwest), made infrastructure truly bi-partisan.  That unity continued into the 1950s when President Eisenhower inaugurated construction of the interstate highway system and was even preserved into the early '70s when President Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and signed the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the latter of which required that federal projects be assessed for their environmental impact.

NEPA, however, was as far as the GOP would go.  Two years after it was passed, Nixon vetoed the expanded Clean Water Act, and though his veto was overridden by the Democratic Congress two hours after it was issued, it marked something of a limit for his party.  Since then, the party has been at war with itself on the environment.  On the side of de-regulation and rollback were Reagan and Trump, whose appointed heads of the EPA -- Anne Gorsuch (mother of the current Supreme Court Justice) in Reagan's case  and Scott Pruitt in Trump's -- pushed to weaken the anti-pollution laws.  On the side of accomodation were the two Bushes, both of whom championed so-called market-based solutions to pollution like cap and trade.

Today's America, it now goes without saying, is polarized in the extreme. 

Trump's voters still believe the lie that he did not lose last year and GOP legislatures are turning that lie into statutes designed to suppress Democratic voter turnout in future elections, limiting all the measures (early, mail-in and absentee voting) that significantly increased turnout in 2020.  Meanwhile, at the federal level, the anti-majority rule  filibuster survives and was used to kill the Democrats' voting rights bills that would have mitigated the GOP's state legislative assaults.  On the cable shows, the right wing is all abuzz on critical race theory, pretending it will destroy George Washington's legacy.  And in Texas, Republican Governor Greg Abbott says he'll build Trump's border wall with federal Covid  relief funds . . .

Even though Abbott has no authority to do so. 

If, therefore, you are looking for any signs of governmental or political unity on this 4th of July, the pickings are slim to non-existent.

Except on infrastructure.

Where the are some green shoots.

Earlier in the year, President Biden and the Democrats proposed a $2 trillion infrastructure bill designed to fund the nation's desperate need to re-build its roads, bridges, highways, airports and water and rail systems and extend broadband to the nation's rural and ex-urban precincts.  The proposal, however, also sought to increase spending on electric cars and charging stations, on green energy, on child care and on health care.  These latter efforts were proposed as down payments on the need to combat climate change and in recognition of the fact that things like child care and health care often drive employment decisions.  Put simply, you can't work if the kids have no baby sitter or you are sick without insurance and can't afford care.

The GOP opposed the Democrats' proposal more or less in unison.  It claimed that anything other than traditional infrastructure (the so-called hard stuff like roads, bridges, airports and railroads) was just a  mask for the Democrats' socialism (which is what the GOP calls all measures  that expand health coverage or child care, combat climate change or are advertised as part of the so-called Green New Deal), and that anything increasing taxes was a non-starter.  Into that breach, however, stepped a group of ten Senators (five Democrats and five Republicans) who -- mirabile dictu -- came up with a bi-partisan bill.  That proposal was substantially higher than what the GOP had offered Biden early on but did not include the Democratic proposals on climate change and health and child care.  For those, the Democrats will have to fashion a second package and pass it via the budget reconciliation procedure to avoid a filibuster.  

So there you have it.

As you pledge allegiance to the flag on this 4th of July, the nation -- thanks to the Civil War -- is still indivisible.  

Thanks largely to Trump and his continuing hold on the fact free, however, it is still very much . . 

Divided.

But then there is the Adirondack Park, the Great Sacandaga Lake , and their progeny . . .

Which remind me, even in the rain, that it was  not always thus.

And Joe Biden and Joe Manchin and Mitt Romney and Rob Portman et al's infrastructure compromise.

Which reminds me that even now . . .

It does not have to be.

Happy Birthday America.

ON PSALMS AND SONNETS -- BIDEN'S DAY 146

It's Day 146 in the Biden Administration.

There is nothing particularly special about this day.  

No historian ever praised FDR for what he accomplished in the first 146 days of his administration.  There are no 146-day wars. Or diets.  The number itself is not featured in any song.  Or poem. Nor is the number  devilishly transcendental (like 666).  

At the same time, the number is not meaningless.  

Far from it.

Two of the world's most famous authors used it to identify some of their work.  One was Shakespeare.  He wrote Sonnet 146. The other was the Biblical psalmist with his (or her) Psalm 146. 

The Bible's 146 is one of the five "praise psalms" that end the Book of Psalms.  It tells us not to "put [our] trust in princes, in human beings, who cannot save."  The sonnet is equally forbidding, lamenting the soul's bodily imprisonment.  In the end, both advocate escape.  To "the Lord" in the psalmist's case, He who feeds the hungry, gives sight to the blind, "frustrates the ways of the wicked" and "upholds the cause of the oppressed". To "Death once dead" in Shakespeare's, where the body's end can become the soul's immortal beginning.

The Bible and Shakespeare are enigmatic. 

Even when they pretend not to be.  

The psalm and the sonnet capture their enigmas almost too perfectly.  It's easy to read the psalm as a pox on politics ("Do not put your trust in princes"), on a world that cannot be saved by us in our time.  It's also easy to read the sonnet as a call to ascetic withdrawal ("Poor soul, the centre of [our] sinful earth, [Feeding] these rebel powers that thee array").  Neither view, however, works. The psalm embraces God in the here and now to "frustrate" the wicked, feed the hungry and vindicate the oppressed.  And the sonnet's "rebel powers" embrace passions and affections (like love) that can enliven far more than they ever imprison.

If we let them.

So, on Day 146 . . .

Is Biden letting them?

The administration is receiving and deserves high marks for its thorough and completely competent response to the pandemic.  It organized and delivered vaccines to America in record time. As of this writing, 65%  of those 18 or older have received at least one dose and  55% are fully vaccinated. Among those 65 or older, more than 80% have received at least one shot.  All this has made an enormous difference.  The number of daily deaths from Covid has declined by more than 90% since January, and the rate of death among those 75 or older has been cut in half.   

Biden wants 70% of all adults at least partially vaccinated by July 4 and is pulling out the stops to get there.  If we don't make it, vaccine hesitancy will be the cause.  The rate of vaccinations has slowed measurably since April, and the infection and death rates that still exist are being driven largely by the unvaccinated population. Thirty states are unlikely to reach Biden's July 4 goal even if the nation as a whole does.  And a handful of states are projected to fall anywhere from six months to a year short.

Pandemic policy is not supposed to be political and with Biden it has not been.  That was not the case, however, with Trump, and his effects linger.  Vaccine hesitancy has been more pronounced in Trump states and among Trump voters.  And while it is important not to over-generalize here (hesitancy is also more pronounced among Black Americans and they are not Trump voters), as late as April, 40% of identifying Republicans said they would not get a shot.

Biden, however, believes in government and knows that progress is incremental. 

On the pandemic and vaccinations, he will not give up.

On other fronts, however, he is being stymied.  

After passage of the $1.9 trillion pandemic relief bill,  the administration's biggest legislative priorities -- its infrastructure plan and its voting rights bills -- have not been passed.  They haven't even been voted on.  On voting rights, the Republicans have made it clear that they will not support the bills and will filibuster any attempt to bring them to a vote. This is critical because, in the first five months of this year, fourteen states have already enacted restrictive voting laws designed to put statewide offices out of reach for Democrats.  These include Georgia, Florida, Ohio, Arkansas, Texas and Arizona.  In Texas, that state's attorney general even admitted that Biden would have won there had the GOP not succeeded in stopping Harris County (home to Houston) from sending out absentee ballot forms to all registered voters.

To make sure nothing like that happens, Republicans are creating regimes that suppress turnout among Democrats in future elections.  Two-thirds of registered Republicans have swallowed Trump's lie that the 2020 election was stolen and that Biden is not a legitimate president, and GOP elites and elected officials have for the most part either embraced that lie or silently allowed it to fester.  In both instances, they have also used the lie to justify the new voting restrictions, claiming the new laws are needed to restore confidence in the integrity of our elections,  the lack of which was generated by the lie in the first place.

Orwell is turning in his grave.

Meanwhile, the GOP is playing rope a dope on the infrastructure bill.  After Biden shut down talks with the GOP on infrastructure, a bipartisan group of Senators (five Democrats and five Republicans) emerged to claim they had agreed on a bill that approaches the numbers Biden himself has indicated might be acceptable to him in any final package.  Those numbers are way short of the President's initial $2 trillion proposal but also far north of the Republican's original counter-offer. The problem, however, is that this group has not said it can deliver enough votes to avoid a filibuster by the rest of the GOP caucus and unless it can, there is no reason Biden should compromise when he can just go ahead and pass his original bill (or something close to it) via reconciliation.

Biden, however, desperately wants a bipartisan package.  He wants this for two reason.  First, he still believes Congress can work and wants to deliver on the promise he made during his campaign to lower the temperature and create at least some semblance of unity in the wake of Trump's civil wars.  Second, he (and the Democrats) have what can charitably be called a Joe Manchin problem.

Manchin is West Virginia's lone statewide Democratic office holder.  Trump won the state with almost 70% of the vote last year, and in 2018 Manchin himself saw his statewide margin decline to around 3%.  He has steadfastly refused to even think about ending the filibuster (which means it is here to stay) and has also refused to vote for the Democrats' federal voting reform bill (designed to counter the GOP's state-based restrictions), claiming it is too partisan. 

On infrastructure, Manchin is part of the so-called group of ten claiming to have found a bipartisan alternative. But he also has not said it can avoid a filibuster.  Earlier in the year, when legislation to create a bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol was coming up for a vote, he seemed pretty confident that there were "ten good solid patriots within [[the GOP] conference" who would vote to end debate and send the bill to the floor of the Senate for an up or down vote.  When they didn't, Manchin said the GOP's actions were "unconscionable".

Not, however, unconscionable enough to get Manchin to kill the filibuster.

Or even vote for S1-- the voting reform bill.

Democrats can argue with Manchin until they are blue in the face.  It will be useless. He represents a massively Trump state.  He has always been more conservative than his Democratic colleagues, especially on social issues.  He voted to confirm Gorsuch and Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court and would have voted to confirm Coney Barrett but for the fact that her nomination was made only weeks before the election. 

So, he is not changing.

What should Biden do?

Three things.

1. Pass the infrastructure bill.  If the group of ten can deliver a filibuster free bill, pass it.  Otherwise, pass anything under reconciliation that Joe Manchin will vote for.  I said above that he is more conservative than his Democratic colleagues on social issues.  But he likes infrastructure and his state thrives on it.  His mentor, Robert Byrd, more or less turned West Virginia into a federal office park, and no matter how many Trump voters it produces, the state would die without the massive amounts of federal spending that annually flow into it.  Manchin will vote for something. And that something will be a lot of what Joe Biden is now demanding.

So, as the Nike people say, just do it.  

2. Litigate on voting rights.  If S1 can't be passed -- and it can't be -- the only solution is to take the GOP's restrictive voting bills to the courts.  The bills are designed to thwart Democratic turnout and disproportionately burden minorities.  Make the Supreme Court decide whether that is OK.  When John Roberts overturned the pre-clearance provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, he did so  on the ground that the country "has changed".  The 350 plus voting restriction bills now passed or coursing through the nation's various Republican led legislatures refute that claim. 

Tell him. 

It's a lot harder to pretend things have changed if you start looking like Roger Taney and your decisions start sounding like Plessy v. Ferguson.

3.  Keep governing. And keep doing it calmly.

It is impossible to over-estimate the relief America wakes up to every day knowing that the current President of the United States will not be burning the house -- or the world --  down.  Drama is a fact of life in politics, especially in  the polarized politics of this era.  Trump made that worse.  He was all drama all the time, a pathological liar,  and pretty much nothing else.  On his best days, he was exhausting; on his worst, dangerous and frightening.  That is over, at least for now.  As I write, President Biden is in Europe revitalizing alliances and resurrecting dialogue. They're less exhausted too.

In the days ahead, there will be more drama.  

This week, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB)  may decide that the church should not give Joe Biden communion on account of his political views on abortion.  The Pope has advised against this but the USCCB has many within its ranks who like neither Francis nor Biden. So who knows.  The church whose members could not become president before 1960 because the rest of the country feared they'd take orders from its Princes may be on the verge of excommunicating the second Catholic president because . . .

He refuses to take orders from its Princes.

Biden is a devout Catholic.  In many respects, he is more devout than JFK (whose wife thought it would be a shame if he lost the presidency on account of being a Catholic, principally because, as she put it, he wasn't a particularly good one). If Biden is excommunicated or refused communion, he will suffer.  

But he will not change.

And he shouldn't.  

Pro-choice Catholicism is more than defensible at a number of levels.  Embryos aren't people. They are cells. The church itself has been all over the map on why abortion is wrong, and two of its guiding lights -- Augustine and Thomas Aquinas -- never thought embryos were ensouled or that killing them was murder; they thought abortion was a form of birth control and any likely sin venial.  Apart from all that, the notion that prelates can establish binding moral rules is dangerous.  They are human and can be wrong. 

Morality is too important to be left simply or only to priests. If the right or wrong of abortion is a moral matter, the Catholic Church is not necessarily an expert on matters moral; individual conscience still matters. And if it is a theological matter,  no one who respects the Establishment Clause should be legislating anything.

The psalmist was right.

"Do not put your trust in princes."

Not even those who wear red hats.

CADDIE SHACK, 2021 -- PHIL FOR THE AGES

His mother was trying to get a message to him.  His sister told her she'd try to contact his brother. They both thought the brother was the only one he would  listen to. 

But they were wrong.

He was way beyond all that.  

By the time he hit the back nine, he was listening to himself.

And maybe God. 

On Sunday, May 23, 2021, on a spit of land off South Carolina's coast, Philip Alfred Mickelson was making history.  Only weeks short of his fifty-first birthday, he was winning the PGA Championship, one of golf's four majors. In so doing, he became the oldest golfer ever to win a major.  Older than Jack Nicklaus, who pulled a rabbit out of the hat at Augusta in 1986 to win the Masters at 46.  Older  than Old Tom Morris, one of golf's legends, who won The Open (the British one to us unschooled Americans) in 1867 to became the oldest winner of that tournament, also at the age of 46.  Older than even journeyman Julius Boros, who won the 1968 PGA Championship at the age of 48. 

It would be Mickelson's sixth major, his second PGA Championship victory, and . . . 

His umpteenth or so miracle.

Phil Mickelson is golf's everyman.  In a sport that penalizes both daring and  courage, counsels patience, and routinely frustrates out-of-shape middle aged codgers who wail away every weekend, he is one of us.  Nicklaus, with 18 victories at majors, and Tiger Woods, with 15,  are golf's perfectionists,  logicians who always knew the percentage shot and  never let the field catch them by acting otherwise.  

Mickelson?

He never met a lead he did not threaten to give away.

Or a ball knee deep in fescue, surrounded by canopied trees,  that he'd take a drop on.

Phil just always had to give it a go.

Hence, the miracles.

On Sunday, per usual, he toyed with the weak hearts of golf's middle kingdom, those of us north of fifty and beyond who were glued to our couches and television sets (we still call them that, smart or otherwise) waiting for something to go wrong.  

And, of course, it did.

Even his mother was worried.

As he made the turn, that message she was trying to get to "Philip" (that's his proper name; you know, the one she used when he was a kid to let him know she really meant business) was simple.  Just shoot par.  No need to be spectacular.  Or, as she put it, "activate [the] calves." 

Good luck with that.

On the thirteenth hole, Phil let his  approach shot leak into the meandering ocean inlet to the right of the green. And on the par 3, 238-yard fourteenth, his six iron couldn't climb the fairway front and promptly fell back twenty yards from the green.  Two holes, two bogeys.

And just like that, a five shot lead was down to three.  

A birdie at fifteen paired with a bogey at seventeen (on this 223-yard par three, his tee shot raced through the green to long back rough)  reduced the lead to two when his pursuers -- Koepka and Oosthuizen -- each picked up a shot with their own birdies at fifteen.

So there was Phil. 

Standing on the teebox at 18 with a two shot lead.  

No one my age was anything less than very nervous.  

In 2006 at the US Open at Winged Foot, Mickelson had a two stroke lead with three to play and stood on the 18th with a one shot lead, only needing par to win.  (I was at the 18th green that day, waiting with the multitudes, ready to crown our king.)  He then drove his tee shot into a corporate tent.  (The  multitudes groaned in unison.) He should have pitched out with his second, which would have allowed him to get to the green on his third with a putt for victory and two for a tie.   But Phil, being Phil, had to go for the green, which basically required anywhere from a 30-to-40 degree slice around trees and a two hundred yard carry. 

The shot hit the trees.  (The multitudes groaned some more.)

And Mickelson double bogied his way  into a three way tie for second place.  (The multitudes  cried.)

So, at Kiawah Island on the 18th in 2021, it could have been "deja vu all over again".

But it wasn't.

Why not?

Because the other thing Phil proved on Sunday is that you can teach an old dog new tricks.  

The Phil playing these days is a plant-based shell of his former self.  Gone are the diet soft drinks, extra helpings  and extra pounds.  He'll wax eloquent on the anti-oxidant effects of his special blend of coffee. Channeling Arnold Palmer, golf's first everyman, he still responds to the crowd with a ubiquitous thumbs-up. And there's no absence of the old magic.  On five, just to remind us, he holed his bunker shot, and on 15, he outdrove the field.  But he was otherwise zen-like as he moved from shot to shot, sun-glassed and studious as he and his caddie, brother Tim, planned the next offering. 

From the left rough on 18, his second shot, a nine iron  from 150 or so yards out, landed sixteen feet from the hole.

At which point his biggest problem was escaping the post-Covid crowd that could not contain itself.

In 1980, Caddie Shack used golf as a comedic window on life's theatre of the absurd.  On Sunday at Kiawah Island, however, what was once thought to be absurd was turned into something real.

Age was just a number.  

Maybe.

When it was all over, a reporter asked him to identify the biggest sacrifice he had made on his way to Sunday's rendezvous with destiny.

"Food," said Phil.

At home, those for whom age is not just a number heard that . . . 

And  popped another beer.

MOTHER'S DAY 2021 — LISTENING TO LIZ

Sunday is Mother's Day.

At least it is here in the United States.

Norway had its celebration in February.  

Argentina won't celebrate until October.

Georgia (the country, not the state) had its in March.  

So did Ireland.  

Sometimes the Irish Mother's Day is in April.  For them, it occurs on whatever Sunday happens to be the Fourth Sunday in Lent.  

Five other countries, including the United Kingdom, do the same thing. And for this group, it's not called Mother's Day.  It's called Mothering Sunday and its origins are medieval.  Christians in the middle ages visited the church in which they were baptised, or their "mother church", on Laetare (Latin for "rejoicing") Sunday. 

This occurred around the middle of Lent and was a respite from a season that otherwise involved fasting and penance.  The epistle for the day was from St. Paul's letter to the Galatians in which he celebrates the church's birth in Jerusalem, the "mother of us all".  This was twinned with the Gospel narrative of Jesus turning the loaves and fishes into enough to feed five thousand hungry followers.  

So, on Mothering Sunday, medieval Mass goers took to their church in the morning and a feast in the afternoon.  

On Monday, it was back to Lenten penance and fasting.

Which was no fun in the Middle Ages.

In the United States, the creation of Mother's Day was actually a political act.  In 1870, Julia Ward Howe, a suffragette and peace activist, issued her so-called Mother's Day Proclamation.  It called upon mothers throughout the world to promote the "amicable settlement of international questions" and "the great and general interest of peace."  In 1872, she asked that June 2 be set aside as a "Mother's Day for Peace". 

In 1907, Anna Jarvis, the daughter of Julia's friend and fellow peace (and "Mother's Day for Peace") activist, Ann Reeves Jarvis, held a memorial for her mother at a Methodist church in West Virginia. This caught on, and by 1911 all U.S. states were observing Mother's Day.  In 1912, Jarvis herself trademarked the phrase "Second Sunday in May, Mother's Day, Anna Jarvis, Founder", and in 1914, President Wilson declared the day a national holiday. 

As the years flew by, Jarvis soured on her creation.  She thought that confectioners, florists and Hallmark were over-commercializing the day. In 1923, she protested at a candy makers convention in Philadelphia, and in 1925, she was arrested for disturbing the peace at a meeting of the American War Mothers. The war moms were selling carnations, by then a Mother’s Day staple, to raise money.

Jarvis wasn't really against the war moms. She just wanted Americans to take Mother's Day . . . 

Seriously.

And in 2021, she may be getting her wish.

This year, America's most serious Mom is Liz Cheney.  

She is the mother of five, the daughter of a former Vice President, and Wyoming's sole member in the US House of Representatives.  She is also one of the few Republicans telling the truth about Donald Trump and his big election fraud lie that led to the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol.  

It is a lie Trump is still telling and one that two-thirds of self-identifying GOP voters now believe.  It is also a lie that GOP office holders for the most part refuse to confront and excise. Even those like Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, both of whom condemned Trump loudly on January 6, have gone soft. Cheney, however, will not bend.  She voted to impeach Trump for inciting the insurrection last January and has regularly condemned him since for repeating the false claim that he did not lose last year’s election. She just as regularly has told the GOP it cannot continue to either ignore or endorse Trump’s lie if it is to remain a viable party in a viable democracy.  

For that truth-telling act of political apostasy in what passes for the current Republican Party, Cheney is about to lose her position as Chair of the House Republican Conference.  That is the third-ranking leadership position within the GOP's House caucus. She will probably be ousted next week.

Being a good mother is difficult.  

It requires honesty . . .

Intelligence. . . . 

Love . . .

And the ability to meld all three qualities into a sort of north star capable of responsibly guiding a child from infancy to adulthood and beyond.  

Done well, its dividends multiply and compound.  Good parents, especially good mothers, beget children who become good parents. Either by dint of genes or example, and probably a little of both, they model conduct, the Darwinian results of which cannot be overstated or under-appreciated. They are all positive and they are multi-generational.

Done poorly?

Well, that's what keeps psychologists in business.

Today's Republican Party is a mess.  

It is still being parented by Donald Trump.

When it desperately needs Liz Cheney.  

Trump is neither honest, intelligent nor particularly loveable. He's actually pretty much the exact opposite on all three counts. As the titular head of the Republican Party, he now has his children -- GOP voters -- drinking the kool-aid  that says the 2020 election was stolen.  In turn, those kids are the reason GOP legislatures throughout the country are proposing or enacting so-called election integrity statutes (over 350 at last count) designed to lower turnout in non-Republican precincts and accomplish via voter suppression what the GOP cannot accomplish via legitimate elections.  

This is bad for the GOP and even worse for America.  

The country needs two viable, functional and responsible political parties.  The GOP’s inability to repudiate Trump, however, has turned it into a toxic echo chamber. 

In the 2020 election, record numbers of voters turned out, approximately two-thirds of those eligible, and afterward county boards of election throughout the country counted all the ballots, often under intense oversight. States successfully navigated the pandemic with expanded mail-in voting, early voting, drop boxes and outreach. It turns out that when government makes it easier to vote, more people vote.

We should be singing its praises. 

Instead, Trump and his band of acolytes are pretending that his orders to “find votes” and Rudy Giuliani’s rejected legal claims were proper and should now be turned into the law of the land. In the newly enacted Georgia (the state, not the country) statute, in addition to limiting early, dropbox and absentee voting, Republican state legislators have made themselves the judges in any future disputes over what votes to count and certify. Other Republican redoubts are following suit.

These are the fingerprints of fascism.

In their run-up to ousting Cheney next week, Republican House members are claiming she cannot continue as conference Chair because her anti-Trumpism is stepping on the party’s anti-Biden messaging. They are correct. It is. But that merely unearths the Faustian bargain that is today's GOP. Its ability to oppose Biden and its future electoral success now depends on it holding onto Trump’s fascist wing.

Without them, the party splits.  

With them, however, America dies.

The two necessary conditions for the survival of the American republic are democratic elections and peaceful transitions.  It has always been thus.  Repudiating them in 1860 resulted in a Civil War that killed over 700,000. Repudiating them today will have equally dire consequences. As the American population continues its statistical march toward diversity, a politics that hamstrings these new voters by consciously making it more difficult for them to vote and then not counting their votes when they do is the road to illegitimacy. The winners and whatever policies they enact will be disregarded. In Yeats’s famous formulation, the center will not hold.

Cheney knows this.

She is no liberal. People like me disagree with her on taxes, the war in Iraq, water boarding, abortion, the Supreme Court, her opposition to Biden’s pandemic relief and infrastructure plans, her overwrought attacks on “wokeness”, etc.  In short, we disagree with her on pretty much . . .

Everything.

But not on this Trump-thing.

On this she is dead right.

So Republicans, especially all you evangelicals, on this Mothering Sunday . . .

Listen to one of the few people standing between you and the devil.

Listen to Liz.

  

LOST CAUSES -- THEN AND NOW

One hundred fifty-six years ago almost to the day, Robert E. Lee surrendered his surrounded, starving and thoroughly beaten Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant.  

Shortly thereafter, the Civil War came to an end.

Grant's terms, as historian Ty Seidule points out in his recently published and extraordinary volume, Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning of the Myth of the Lost Cause, were generous: "No humiliation.  No prisoner of war camps. No trials and no hangings . . . Go home under parole and do not take up arms against the U.S. Government."  

Lee should have said thank you and silently retired.  

Instead, and almost immediately, he gave birth to and began the South's decades long adherence to what became known as the myth of the Lost Cause.

Seidule's book is about the cost of that myth.

Principally to black Americans.

But also to himself.

It is also about the courage needed to confront the myth and kill it.

On April 10, 1865, the day after his surrender, Lee issued General Order No. 9. It was his farewell to his troops.  In it he claimed their forces had been "compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources".  In a letter he wrote two days later to Jefferson Davis, Lee said he'd been outnumbered five to one.

Thus began the myth.

Like most myths, this one was hydra-headed.  In fact, the multiplicity of lies and half-truths that form its core account for its staying power.  It pretended to explain everything on the one hand while saving the defeated from humiliation and responsibility on the other.

The myth's first and most immediate claim -- made at the point of surrender -- was, as Seidule points out, "that only numbers and supplies caused Confederate defeat." 

This was not true.

As Seidule explains, Grant did not have the numeric superiority military professionals deem necessary for attacking troops, and though Lee's letter to Davis claimed he had only ten thousand soldiers left at the end, "more than twenty-eight thousand applied for parole in less than a week."  Lee's army had also fought at home within easy reach of food, supplies and a supportive citizenry.  And the Confederacy itself was large -- as Seidule notes, "The United States had to defeat multiple armies over a territory twice the size of modern France and Germany." 

The Confederacy didn't lose because it was outnumbered. It lost, as Seidule concludes, because the US Army "was better" -- the "best-led, hardest-fighting, best-provisioned, and most strategically and tactically proficient combat force [then] on the globe." It also lost because the Confederacy's "cause was so flawed." And because the north's leadership -- in Lincoln, Secretary of War Stanton, and the Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs, who accomplished the herculean task of supplying troops over a fairly vast sub-continent --  was "unmatched."

The myth's next claim was that the cause of the war had been states' rights.  Southerners asserted they were being fleeced by tariffs that helped northern manufacturers but diminished the value of their exports (principally cotton) and that, in taking up arms, they were merely protecting their land against hostile invaders.

Wrong again.

The cause of the war was slavery. Or more particularly, the fear in the south that Lincoln's Republicans would succeed in limiting the institution in the western territories and that, over time, new non-slave states would combine with existing non-slave states to abolish the institution throughout the nation.  This was a reasonable fear. It was made possible by the Constitution itself, which permits both the creation of new states and amendments to the actual document. It was hardly, however, a foregone conclusion.   In the forty years leading up to the election of 1860, new states had been added and the issue of slavery had been hotly contested as that occurred. 

That Constitutional contest would have continued.

When Abraham Lincoln won the full, fair and free presidential election of 1860, however, the South decided that contest had to end.  Or, as he put it in his Second Inaugural: "Both parties deprecated war but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish."

"And war came."

Following secession, the Confederates wrote an openly racist constitution for themselves.  Unlike its federal counterpart, that constitution  enshrined slavery.  Unlike the Declaration of Independence, it also enshrined white supremacy.  Because it forbade any Confederate state from ever ending slavery, one irony -- as Seidule also notes -- is that it also gave the lie to any notion that states' rights mattered.  On slavery in the new Confederacy, only states that were for it had rights.

As America moved through the 19th century and well into the 20th, part of the myth of the Lost Cause was that slavery would have died a natural death.  This too, however, is a claim impossible to square with the actual facts.  In mid-19th century America, slavery was actually expanding. The cotton gin had made the south's plantation economy extraordinarily wealthy and the number of slaves, particularly in the deep south, was growing.  In fact, between 1840 and 1860, the number of slaves had almost doubled. 

Another part of the myth was that slavery was actually good for the slaves. 

That it civilized them.  

That Margaret Mitchell's "happy slave" in Gone With the Wind was real.

When in fact it was just another lie.  

Slaves were property.  Slaveholders whipped and beat them.  Black slave women were regularly raped by them.  Their mulatto children became slaves themselves.  Their own fathers denied them. And after the war and the brief period of Reconstruction, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan, segregation and monument mania took over.  Collectively, and well into the 20th century, they terrorized blacks, stopped them from voting, lynched those who talked back (or dated whites), rigorously enforced segregation and racial apartheid, and pretended the Confederacy had been a noble cause defending a traditional society that benefited all its inhabitants.

Seidule is a professional historian and a retired brigadier general in the Army.  He grew up in Virginia and Georgia, got his bachelor's degree from Washington and Lee University and his masters and  PhD from Ohio State, served in the Army for over thirty years and taught at West Point for seventeen of them.  

His book is unsparing in its account of how the Lost Cause permeated all of those places and institutions -- how public schools were closed and private academies financed  to avoid desegregation in Virginia and Georgia; how the South in general and his college in particular turned Lee into a secular saint,  whitewashing his slaveholding past with false claims of opposition or gentility and erecting hundreds of monuments to an individual who was a traitor; how the Army named dozens of bases after slaveholders and secessionist soldiers, allowed its own hallowed burial ground at Arlington to honor them, for a time endorsed openly racist views of black "fecundity", and  resisted integration even after President Truman ordered it; and how West Point initially condemned those of its alumni who violated their oaths in fighting for the Confederacy, only to later erect memorials to them.

Today, a large part of the South along with other "red" or Republican states or legislatures are re-enacting their own version of the Lost Cause in passing so-called election reform laws.  

At last count, more than 250 of those laws had been proposed or passed.  Typically, they increase voter- identification requirements, shorten early voting periods, reduce the number of drop boxes in which voters can deposit their ballots, make absentee voting more difficult, and limit the ability to correct minor errors (like failing to put one's address on the envelope in which an absentee ballot is returned to be counted) or extend voting hours (a not uncommon occurrence in large metropolitan -- and therefore Democratic -- districts).  Though these changes disproportionately burden minorities, that is their point.  In the last election, Democrats and minority-voters used these mechanisms in much higher numbers than Republicans.

The genesis of these faux reforms is, like the genesis of the myth of the Lost Cause, the Big Lie.  

In the post-Civil War era and beyond, it was the lie that slavery was benign and irrelevant and that the Confederacy was outnumbered in its legitimate efforts to repel invaders and preserve its traditional society and economy.  

Today, it is Trump's lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and that he in fact won.  Republican state officials knew Trump's claim was false and therefore refused, in spite of his demands,  to "find votes" or throw out those that had been legitimately cast. Because, however, Trump has persisted in repeating -- ad nauseum -- this Big Lie and 60% or so of self-identifying Republicans now believe it, Republican office holders face a dilemma.  Having failed to do Trump's bidding in 2020, either they can vote for these phony reforms and avoid again angering him and those he has brainwashed, the latter of whom vote in large numbers in Republican primaries . . . 

Or they can be honest, vote against them, and risk losing.

Guess what they have decided to do.

Just kidding.

If all of these so-called "reforms" become law, a large part of America in the 21st century will resemble the post-Civil War America of the late 19th and early to mid-20th.  Instead of voters getting to  choose their representatives, the representatives will get to choose their voters. This, of course, is exactly what happened in the post-bellum South.  By disenfranchising blacks en masse, erstwhile Confederates were able to ensure that white officials were elected and re-elected for more than a hundred years. In so doing, they were able to . . . 

Preserve segregation.

And flibuster anti-lynching and civil rights laws.

Even when the country made progress in the New Deal, FDR's program had to exclude blacks in order to garner the southern votes needed to secure its passage.

The supporters of today's proposed changes cry foul when anyone compares those proposals to what happened after the Civil War.  They argue that the right to vote doesn't include the right to vote on Sunday or the right to vote during a three week early voting period or the right to be called in to correct address mistakes on an absentee ballot or the right to have special pandemic-related rules turned into the norm.  

But why not?  

Even if the right to vote cannot preclude all sorts of administrative regulations, it is certainly inconsistent with regulations that disproportionately burden or exclude minorities.  In the old days, the South used poll taxes and literacy tests to kill the franchise for blacks.  Today, Republicans are removing mechanisms that facilitate minority voting but do not have any impact on the base Republican vote.  

To justify these new exclusions, the GOP is claiming that the reforms are needed to combat perceived  election fraud.  There is, however, no such fraud, certainly none at a level beyond the present system's ability to discover or cure.  Indeed, when ballot harvesting -- the collection by third parties of absentee ballots that the third parties then deliver to election officials -- has resulted in fraudulent votes being cast, it has been easily discovered and prosecuted.  And even those cases are rare.  In fact, I know of only one.  

It is true, of course, that the "perception" of election fraud is widespread among Republicans.  

But that is because a former President of the United States has been telling them this lie for more than five years.

The dirty secret is that Republicans do not want everyone to vote.  And to whitewash that desire, some of them are even arguing that everyone should not be able to vote, that the "quality" of the vote is as important as its "quantity."  

It is unclear precisely what the GOP means by this.  Is it that some people are not smart enough to vote?  Or that low-information voters, those who do not study the issues to any real degree or take much time deciding, are to be weeded out?  Or that voting will be undertaken more thoughtfully to the extent it is not made any easier?

I do not know.

What I do know is that it is not meant to exclude those who rallied to Trump on January 6 and then invaded and trashed the Capitol.

All of whom seem to have swallowed Trump's Big Lie . . .

Becoming, if not low-information voters, then at the very least bad-information voters. 

And many of whom, given the choices they made that day, can hardly count as particularly smart.

Intelligence, however, was never a feature of the post-bellum myth of the Lost Cause.

Nor is it a feature of . . . 

Today's.

BETTIN' ON BIDEN

"You are a lost generation."

In the original French: "Vous etes une generation perdue", attributed to Gertrude Stein during the inter-war years, who got it from an auto-mechanic in Lyon, France.  It was then popularized by Ernest Hemingway, who made it the epigraph in 1926 to The Sun Also Rises.

The auto-mechanic was not trying to be profound.  He was just frustrated that a young employee wasn't fixing Stein's car fast enough. 

Not enough focus.  

When Stein returned to Paris, however, she had something deeper in mind. The carnage of World War I had both destroyed a young generation and disillusioned its survivors.  Old values like patriotism or courage seemed pointless because they had been. Ennui took over, an aimlessness born of the notion that nothing really mattered, and decadence often followed.  It's easy to live in a bottle, or a loveless hook-up, when there is no future.  

The problem was that, Stein's young mechanic and passel of young writers having been sidelined by psychological torpor, the fools who created the initial crisis lived on, free to create the next one. 

Which they did.

You do not get Hitler's fascism without the draconian peace imposed under the Versailles Treaty that ended World War I.  The treaty itself was never accepted by Germans, who thought the "war guilt clause" an utterly unfair re-writing of history and for whom the treaty's required reparation payments were among the principal causes of the hyper-inflation in the 1920s that destroyed what little was left of the German economy and helped pave the way to Nazism. 

French conservatives, however, were hell-bent on insuring against the re-emergence of a powerful Germany, and American conservatives were hell-bent on killing the League of Nations, where diplomatic efforts backed by America might have empowered the more progressive views of Keynes and others who knew that austerity for Germany (or anyone else for that matter) could only end badly.

In the wake of the war, each nation's old guard -- Clemenceau in France and Robert LaFollette in the United States -- soldiered on, having learned the wrong lesson in Clemenceau's case (that Germany could or should be returned to a pre-1871 dis-united and dis-empowered state) and having failed to learn the new one in LaFollette's (that the hard and frustrating work of diplomacy was the only path to peace in what would be an increasingly inter-dependent world).

Even the old guard in Britain soldiered on.  When he was Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1924-1929, none other than the later-to-be acclaimed Winston Churchill insisted on yoking Britain to the gold standard of tight money that would ultimately help to unleash the Great Depression.

From this unhealthy stew of nostalgia for a past that could not exist and unwillingness to think anew either economically or politically, fascism was born.

America today is not in the same position as Europe in the inter-war years.

But there are disturbing parallels.

The first is that, as a matter of policy, there are no longer two political parties in America.  On policy, the Republican party has pretty much ceased to exist.  Although you hear occasional bursts of old complaints -- spending too high, deficit too large, border crisis -- the energy in the party is focused elsewhere.  In Congress, it is on preserving the filibuster and voting in block against any legislation proposed by the Democrats or the Biden administration. In the states, thirty of which have Republican controlled legislatures, it is on proposing laws (more than 250 at last count) that would restrict voting among Democratic constituencies.  

Toward that end, Georgia yesterday signed into law a measure reducing early voting from three weeks to one, banning mobile polling places, prohibiting third-parties from collecting absentee ballots, eliminating drop boxes outside early voting locations (and entirely in the four day period before election day), requiring driver’s license or equivalent identification (in lieu of matching signatures), reducing the number of Sundays for early voting, criminalizing the distribution of food or drinks by non-poll workers to those waiting on line to vote, cutting the period by which counties must certify their votes from ten to six days, reducing the period for runoff elections to four weeks, and requiring election workers to count the final vote in one sitting, however long.  

All of these measures disproportionately affect large counties, Democratic voters in those counties and large cities, and minority voters.  Some are ridiculous to the point of absurdity.  For example, one of the purported reasons for the changes was to ensure accuracy but at least two of them -- limiting the certification period and forcing counters to work all night -- make errors more, not less, likely.

As to minorities, "Pews to the Polls" has become a standard in black churches, where congregants were taken to the polls to vote after Sunday services; the days to do that have been reduced.   In majority non-white Fulton County, home to Atlanta, half of the 146,000 submitted ballots in 2020 were deposited in drop boxes. Throughout the state, wait times to vote were six minutes on average in precincts where 90% of the voters were white and 51 minutes in precincts where 90% of the voters were non-white.  In those non-white precincts, organizers often distributed free food and water and voting hours were extended to accommodate the long wait times.

The only provision removed from the legislation before it went to the Governor for his signature was a proposed ban on no-excuse absentee voting.  But that was done because absentee voting is used largely by those over the age of 65, and that group has been trending Republican.

Republican legislators claim the new statutes were needed to combat election fraud.  Though there is no evidence of such fraud on any widespread basis (and very little on even any basis), more than two-thirds of self-identified Republicans now think the 2020 Presidential election was stolen.  They think this, moreover, despite the fact that the claim has been rejected by both the courts which reviewed the election and the state officials -- including Republicans themselves -- who certified it.

The reason they do so is . . . 

Donald Trump.

Trump has been proclaiming and pushing the election fraud lie since the day he started running for the Presidency in 2015.  In the run-up to the 2016 election, he said he could lose only if there was fraud. After he won, he (falsely) claimed he lost the popular vote only because more than 3 million "illegals" voted.  That never happened.  In the run-up to the 2020 election, he recycled his claim that he could lose only by virtue of fraud.  And then when he lost, by seven million popular votes and 303-232 in the electoral college, he spent the entire period from Election to Inauguration Day claiming he had won.  On account of that lie, rioters stormed the US Capitol on January 6, delaying certification of the electoral college vote in Biden's favor, ransacking portions of the building (including the Speaker's offices), and resulting in five deaths.

Trump and the GOP legislators in thrall to his big lie are the closest America has come to actual fascism -- authoritarian diktat cloaked in a statutory garb that gives it faux legitimacy.  Though the party could have been rid of him once he lost, the fact that his lie has taken root within its base has frozen elected GOP officials throughout the country.  

Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy excoriated Trump on the evening of January 6 in the wake of the attack on the US Capitol, but neither of them was willing to impeach him. McCarthy has since visited and praised Trump, and McConnell has said he would again vote for him.  Their not-so-subtle about-faces were the product of fear that Trump's voters would beat them in primaries.  That fear, moreover, is rational.  All ten of the Republicans who voted to impeach Trump after January 6, including Wyoming's Liz Cheney, now have Trumpist primary opponents in their next elections.  For the same reason, GOP state legislators are all-in on the vote fraud lie.

The GOP base did not get this way overnight.  

It did not wake up one morning in the last five or so months, or five or so years, and say "Voila.  It's election fraud causing us all our angst."  The lie took root for the same reason the lost generation led to Hitler.  They did not think they had much else to live for.  And the elites, including those in the Democratic Party, were not convincing them otherwise.  

I remember the '90s.  I ran for Congress twice then, once in 1992 as the Democratic Party nominee in New York's 19th Congressional district and two years later in the Democratic primary when the seat became open.  I lost both times and have one particularly searing memory of the '94 campaign. I ran as an unabashed New Deal Democrat. I believed Clinton needed to be the next FDR and the Democrats had to make life better for the falling-behind middle class.  I did not want "the era of big Government" to be over. Taking it all in, one of my opponents said "You're good on your feet but I'm not hearing any new ideas."

He was right.

I thought the old ideas would work just fine.

Fast forward to 2008.  After a near Depression, America elected Obama and his "audacity of hope", a mind-bending act of racial progress pregnant with unlimited apparent potential. Somewhere between Election and Inauguration Day, however, hope became less audacious.  It wasn't Barack Obama's fault. Ditto for Bill Clinton.  They both wanted to do big things. They both tried.  They were both stymied. 

By mid-term losses.

And the filibuster.

And the holy grail of bi-partisanship.

Meanwhile, the middle class, and especially those in ex-urban and rural areas removed from the computer-productivity growth taking hold in big cities and their suburbs, were either running in place or falling behind. Many if not most of them were one job loss or illness away from foreclosure or worse. And when worse arrived, opioids were not far behind.  

Poverty sucks.  So does forever falling behind.  And worrying about either for your kids sucks even more.  It's easy to get depressed.  I know very few who haven't (one is a cousin, and if his personality could be bottled and marketed, I'd patent and distribute it).  You look for answers.  And are tired enough to accept the bad ones.

So one Reagan, two Bushes, a Clinton, an Obama and a really bad Trump later, it's Joe Biden's time.  

Will it be better?  

Will Biden do what the others wouldn't or couldn't?  

Can he revitalize the middle and lance the fascist boil?

I'm betting on him.  

For two reasons.

One is psychological, the other political.

In the inter-war years of the 20th century, one politician stood out as different from all others.  That politician was Franklin Roosevelt.  In the 1920s, he was different for reasons that had nothing to do with politics. He was different because he was paralyzed, the victim of polio in 1921 at the age of 39. 

In the years that followed, he couldn't walk and could barely work.  The glide path to political power that his name and aristocratic upbringing had greased was suddenly closed.  But he willed himself -- catacombed in steel braces -- to stand up and then carry on, and in doing so, the dispossessed realized -- in the words of that famous worker crying years later as his funeral train passed by -- that he knew them even if they didn't know him.

That's Joe Biden's gift today.  

And accounts for his current purchase on the American soul.  

His father for a time was unemployed.  The family had to live with in laws and in crowded apartments. In the pre-financial aid era, he could only go to schools he could afford. His first wife and one year old daughter were killed in a car accident.  His oldest son died from cancer at 46.  Another is a recovering addict.  For thirty-six years, he commuted to work.  In 1988 he almost died from a brain aneurysm. Every time he is knocked down, he tries to get up.  And if you're down, he doesn't walk by, he picks you up.   

Not since Ronald Reagan has an American president so perfectly mirrored the current American psyche. The two Bushes were keepers of Reagan's flame, even as it sputtered and then burned out.  Clinton felt pain in an America where too many still did not.  Obama was a gift, proof that Jefferson's claims were not just empty rhetoric, and Trump was a tragedy, proof that hopelessness and fear can be turned into organized hate.

More than the others in their time, Biden is one of us in this time.  

He gets it because he's been there.

There literally is not one trial visited today upon America's struggling middle -- whether they are located on the middle of the economic ladder or in the middle of the country -- that he has not personally experienced one way or the other.

Unemployment, insecurity, illness, addiction, death and despair.

He’s seen it all.

So far, he has been pitch-perfect.  

His American Rescue Plan (ARP) has put money in pockets and Covid vaccines in arms. State and local governments will receive needed assistance to regain the revenue lost to the pandemic and schools will have the money to retrofit and re-open.  Obamacare will be enhanced and preserved. By all accounts, child poverty will be cut in half.  

70% of Americans support this.  

All of it.

In a world where, as he said yesterday, "politics is the art of the possible," infrastructure is the next agenda item to be then followed by voting rights.  The infrastructure bill -- which will have a "green" hue as the administration attempts to combat climate change -- is priced at $3 trillion and will have to be paid for in part with some high end and corporate tax increases, and voting rights will inevitably fail unless a Senate filibuster can be avoided (unlikely) or repealed (possible).  Without it, however, the GOP's voter suppression campaign will continue and succeed.  

At the border, humanity has been restored even as challenges remain, and abroad, China and Russia loom large.  The latter is an annoyance, a lifeless, commodified economy whose government consists of a corrupt oligarchy that poisons its opponents.  The former is a growing obstacle.  Both require allied efforts in a world where America cannot go it alone.  

China is a particular problem.  

Its version of capitalism is mercantile and whatever market freedom prevails within its borders will always be subservient to party loyalty.  This means that China will respect neither human rights nor intellectual property rights unless it has to.  This also means that, short of war, a unified western approach will be the only way to change Chinese behavior.  Trump's tariffs got China's attention and his trade czar, Robert Lighthizer, was delivering a consistent message.  But Trump's opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty and his go-it-alone approach with Europe made it impossible for him to apply long-term, non-tariff leverage or even close a short-term deal.  Biden will not be able to change this until our erstwhile allies are back on board. 

And that will take time.

If Biden succeeds domestically, he may get that time, avoiding the fate of lost mid-terms that plagued his predecessors.  If he doesn't, China will still be a problem. 

But not our biggest one.

FDR became president in 1932.  With his New Deal -- a pragmatic amalgam that regulated corrupt stock dealers, offered the aged some semblance of security, and created jobs -- America avoided both fascism and communism.  

In 2021, the challenges are different but as daunting.  

A brewing fascism exists within.  It was seeded by Trump and is now being institutionalized by GOP voter suppression. In the hinterlands, its supporters in the GOP base have grown weary of government that does not work for them.  ARP, however, does. So will a big infrastructure bill.  Together, they can represent real progress delivered to real people by the realist of guys.

That’s why I'm . . .

Bettin' on Biden.