Ground Game vs Air Attack

When I was a kid,  football was my favorite game. I was too little to play running back or fullback, but was fast enough to play receiver.


There were the coaches, adults, authorities, at my schools who would say, "When you throw the ball, three things can happen and two of them are bad."
I knew I would never play for them. All they would do was run the ball, usually up the middle.
Of course, when coaches arrived who knew how to use the passing game, those dinosaurs who did not believe in passing were quickly forgotten.  They simply were mired in old thinking and in sports, you have a final score. You win or you lose, so you can judge the truth of certain propositions.


Politics is like that now.  There are those in the know who claim the ground game will serve to propel Hillary Clinton to the Presidency.

I hope they are right, but I suspect they are like those old time coaches who just didn't have enough imagination, even nerve, enough willingness to risk.


I have been doing "ground game" for Hillary, canvassing, and I'm here to tell you: It looks pretty ineffective to me.

On a good day, we go to 40 doors and only 5 or 6 will even answer the knock or the ring. Most people at home on a weekend are annoyed, not inspired by a visit from a canvasser. Those who do answer saw our Hillary pins and answered because they are voting for her and it's like a group hug. About half, which is to say 3 or 4, are not going to vote for Hillary and try to end the conversation as quickly as possible.


We do not persuade anybody to vote for Hillary who would have voted for Trump.
Even if we did and even if you multiply the number of people we persuade by the total number of canvassers, we have changed only, at best, 100 minds, and God only knows how many of those will actually act on their new found embrace of Hillary and vote. How many later talk to their husbands who say, "What? Don't you know Hillary is a Crook?!" and so the visit changed nothing in the end vote.


There is a second reason to canvass: to be sure people actually go vote. Again, I can't see any data which shows a visit from a person they did not know, even if that person is a neighbor, really gets that voter to the polls.  I'd love to see a study showing comparisons of comparable neighborhoods where one was canvassed and one not and the outcome of how many voted from each. Of course, what you really want to know is how many voted the way you wanted them to vote.


I'd love to believe Politico and all the conventional academics who think people power can overcome the loud voice on the TV and the air game of a Donald Trump.


Having labored in the trenches, however, I don't believe the ground game makes a difference.

Hillary Haters: Invasion of the Brain Snatchers

They seem quite normal. Talk to them about the weather, the price of gas, how Winnacunnet High School's football season is going, about the drought and how it has killed all the lawns in town, and they seem quite normal.
But mention Hillary's name, and it happens.
It's like pressing on the abdomen of someone with appendicitis and they hit the chandelier.
It's like one of those horror movies where that lovely housewife next door who brings you a fruitcake suddenly opens her mouth to reveal dagger shaped incisors dripping with blood and her eyes turn red and she emits a roar like a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

The monster within explodes out.

"She should not even be allowed to run. She belongs in jail. She is the most corrupt person to ever run for office."

And, stepping back a step or two, if you don't fly from the room, you ask, "Well, but how do you know all this?

If they can site a source--like the wikileaks conversations between Podesta and Mook or whatnot--they have no real idea of where those came from or what they actually mean . They mean what the monster thinks they should mean.  They mean what Rush and Sean say they mean.
And they are just so certain. As Bertrand Russell observed: The trouble with life is the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent full of doubts.
Their opinions are more than baked in. Their opinions are etched in stone.

Oh, she is just so corrupt. Very, very corrupt. (Mr. Trump has such good words.)
And they get pretty upset if you pursue, patiently, well how do you know. Oh, you heard it from him? Oh, you read it there. And how does he know? And how did it get there? That really sets them off. You are questioning their deeply held belief. If they cannot be sure of what they are most sure of, what can they be sure of?

It's not Hillary, the most examined person in public life, whose unleashed this horror.
It's the invasion of the brain snatchers. They are all around us.

Intimations of Impending Doom

Diary of a mad morning:


1. On the treadmill, "New Day" reviewing early voting trends in North Carolina: Early voting is up 50% among whites compared to last year, up only 15% among Blacks. Inference: Blacks are not coming out to vote for Hillary as they did to vote for Obama. You need a big Black vote to win North Carolina.
2. Driving in: NPR report on two reporters, one in England one in Pennsylvania. Town in coal country where everyone is voting Trump because "Hillary wants to kill coal. Washington has forgotten about us."  Brexit voters say the same thing about London. The elites in London are doing well and we are drowning in immigrants.
Inference: Trump is the American Brexit. He's the disrupter.
3. NPR report on a woman canvassing in Manchester, New Hampshire. She asks to speak to the wife, who she has listed on her computer spread sheet as a potential Democratic vote. Man answers the door says, "Nobody in this house is voting for Hillary. We're Trump. She should be in jail, for what she did. Shouldn't even be allowed to run. She belongs in jail."
By the time the canvasser has finished knocking on 39 doors, she has spoken with only one voter who wouldn't say how she was voting and the man who knows Hillary belongs in jail. And this is using what the Democratic party's computer says is a list of Democratic voters.


So much for the value of a "ground game." 

Why should I care?  Will my life, personally, change with President Trump? If the Ku Klux Klan marches down Lafayette Street, how will it affect my life? 
If the scoundrels and racists and Muslim, foreigner haters take control of the government, the Music Hall will still have concerts. I can still take the C&J bus to New York City and see my kids.

My father returned from a trip to Spain, years ago, when the dictator, Franco, was still in power. He was dismayed at how happy the Spaniards looked. "They're living under a dictatorship and they look happy!"

El Duce, not Franco--Mussolini

I imagine, if you lived in Austria, for most of the 1930's and even into the 1940's your life continued to be pretty pleasant, as long as you were not a Jew or a Gypsy.
Symphonies still played, operas still got sung. People went out to beer gardens and for hikes in the mountains.

You will say the odor wafting into town from the concentration camps must have unsettled the happy little blonde lives, but Americans keep their nastiness at a distance--in Gitmo, in the great empty spaces of the far West.
It's just an election. Just a government. And what Mr. Trump's supporters are reminding us is we don't need no freaking government.

November 9, 2016

President Donald John Trump, 45th President of these United States takes office on January, 2017.

Is he the worst human being to ever hold that office?  He has some stiff competition.
Andrew Johnson, Warren Harding, Richard Nixon--there have been some potential winners for that competition. Racists, paranoid near schizophrenics, simpletons, but it is hard to confect a more perfect combination of all the above, to which we add a twist of Mussolini/Berlusconi narcissism.

There might be a certain delicious quality of dreadful anxiety, anticipating his arrival at  the portico of the Capitol Building, to deliver what I am sure will be a memorable Inaugural Address to the American people, on a bright January day, when the clean, crisp air attempts  to wash clean a foul election campaign and we can sense a new beginning.

What an excruciating ride from the White House for President Obama, who will accompany his replacement, riding in the long black limousine, and who, I hope, will lean over and whisper in his ear, "You know, Donald. I can tell you now. You were right: I really was born in Kenya." Just one last effort to mess with the President elect's head.

In the interval between his election on the night of November 8, and his inauguration in January there have been cross burnings on the lawns of Blacks and Jews, but Muslim Americans have come in for special attention, as several men suspected of being Muslims have been dragged out of bars, grocery stores, Walmarts and beaten to death in parking lots, on sidewalks and alleys. One was dragged behind a car in Texas.


A crowd of men with AK 15 assault rifles roamed the streets of a Michigan town near Dearborn and fired on passers-by, killing a Shik man who was thought to be a Muslim. Store windows were broken and homes set afire.

In Nashville, Tennessee and Portsmouth, NH synagogues were defaced with swastikas and in Charleston, Richmond and  Birmingham synagogues and mosques were burned to the ground.


Mr. Trump vowed his promise to jail Mrs. Clinton would be fulfilled and he would appoint an attorney general whose first priority would be accomplishing that.
The inaugural balls scheduled for the evening after the address have been organized by the Miss Universe organization and every woman invited must be a 10, except for Maria Bartiromo, is invited even though she has gained weight, eating like a pig, but as long as she wears that red dress she wore at the Al Smith dinner, which caught Mr. Trump's eye, she can attend.

Such are the celebrations of Mr. Trump's election.
Listening to his oration, we can forget all that and simply enjoy the show.


Democracy reigns.

The Hatch Act: I Stand Corrected

Okay, so I got a little carried away and failed to inquire into the penalties for violation of the Hatch Act. Apparently, after further googling, Mr. Comey cannot be led away in hand cuffs--a pity--the only penalty is removal from office.

Listening to the talking heads on The PBS News Hour, Chris Hayes etc., opinion broke two ways--there are the forgiving Obama types who have known the man and think well of him, but thought he simply made a mistake and then there are others, who simply shrugged and said, "Of course he violated the Hatch Act. There have been few examples of a more flagrant violation."

There is a board which hears these cases and their verdict can be appealed in court. 

If Trump wins,  I doubt we'll see that process unfold. 

Deep Cleansing Breath

Oliver described the FBI’s announcement as the equivalent of a mystery box.
“And like the box from the end of ‘Seven,’ it could contain anything from nothing to Gwyneth Paltrow’s head,” he said. “Although it almost definitely contains Anthony Weiner’s penis.” --RE: JOHN OLIVER SHOW


OY, what a story! The October Surprise. Trump gloating, triumphant. I told you so!

Told us what?

Fact is, nothing.  Nothing's changed.

In "The West Wing" the Republican candidate is undone by an October surprise when a nuclear power plant in his home state nearly melts down. He had advocated for more nuclear power in a debate with his opponent and now this comes back to bite him just before the voting.  He never recovers and loses the election.
But that was different. That was a policy thing.


If Hillary Clinton is elected, the Republicans in Congress will be investigating her from day one through her last day in office, spending millions of taxpayer dollars in their single minded obsession to prove they were right all along.
They'll continue to infect the government with gridlock.
Survivalists in Idaho and the Dakotas will continue to stockpile arms in anticipation of the apocalyptic attack of the black helicopters. Rush Limbaugh and Trump radio will continue to accuse Hillary of dark, undiscovered crimes against humanity and the Republic.
South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Utah, the Dakotas, Idaho and Wyoming and likely Texas will continue to be home to people who believe Barack Obama was born in Kenya or on Mars, and Hillary and the Democrats are plotting to take away your guns, and the federal government should not be allowed to own land, and there are space aliens in Area 51.  Oh, yes, and there is a vast, world wide conspiracy nobody in the liberal media will tell you about to do bad things nobody is quite sure of, but it's bad.
Worst of all, we'll have Donald Trump on TV every day, and he'll lead every news program every night. He'll be so ubiquitous he'll make Big Brother look like a recluse.

I have a button which says, "Shut the Trump Up."
But, of course, we can never do that. Wouldn't really want to. After all, there is a reason freedom of speech is in the FIRST amendment. It's the most important freedom of all. 
If Trump wins, having to listen to stories about him, but actually, I was forgetting--there is an even worse than worst part:  We'll have to deal with stories about those he inspires, enables and emboldens.
That is the real horror show.

But, in a better world, if Hillary Clinton does win, and if she wins by a wide margin, then it might reassure a broad swath of the nation that Americans are not fools, that we can listen to Trump and all those who travel with him without being convinced.

If Hillary wins a squeaker, that would be less therapeutic, especially if she has to face a Republican Senate.

If she loses, likely the news about Obamacare premiums rising will be more important than the schemes of James Comey, the screams of Rush Limbaugh.


Now, just a week until we know.

Where is the Warrant for the Arrest of James Comey?

Harry Reid tells Director of the FBI, James Comey, he "may" have violated the Hatch Act.  The New York Times says if the election goes to Mr. Trump, then Mr. Comey "might" be guilty of violating the law which forbids federal employees from using their offices to influence political activity, elections.

All this implies there is some doubt about whether Mr. Comey violated the law. 
The Times, and others, point out Mr. Comey's intent must be assessed to convict him of violating the law.

Yes, that's what trials are about, weighing alternative interpretations of actions.
But this is also what arrests are about, and what timing is about. And what law is about. 
Judges have a process by which they can issue an interim decision when timing is critical to outcomes. 
Unless I'm mistaken, the only remedy for the current situation is to publicly arrest Mr. Comey, and make him do a perp walk in handcuffs, to say to those impressionable voters out there who are wondering if the FBI investigation of emails associated with Mrs. Clinton implies she has done something wrong or even illegal, to say to these folks, no, actually it's the Director of the FBI who has done something wrong. 

He has taken action which can only be seen on face value as one which was motivated by trying to influence an election.  He can be tried on this charge. We can take all the time he needs to prepare his defense, but for now, he belongs in jail.