Speed Dating Democrats in Manchester, New Hampshire

From 9 to 5, yesterday, Mad Dog joined a crowd which did not fill the arena in Manchester, NH, to hear each of the 19 remaining candidates for the Democratic Presidential nomination.

The morning after, this is what Mad Dog can recall from the blur:

The WTF group:
1. Admiral Joe Sestak:  who somehow seemed to think his daughter's brain tumor, treated by Navy medicine, was an argument for his becoming President.
2. Tom Steyer: who seemed to think that having been born poor and becoming a billionaire was an argument for his becoming President. 

The Likeable Group, for whom being a decent person and having the right values was an argument:
1. Julian Castro: who is smart, and who delivered the best final sentence of any candidate, wherein he described his fantasy about having won the election and walking Trump to the helicopter on the White House lawn and calling out to him: Adios!

2. Senator Michael Bennet: who was introduced by an 80 something Gary Hart, which got all the people around Mad Dog trying to remember what "Monkey Business" was all about and when that election was. Bennet is good man who made the very good point that Medicare for All should not mean people should be forced to give up their own union Cadillac health insurance plans.

3. Governor Steve Bullock (Montana): who thought that because he had won as a Democrat in a deeply red state won by Trump by 20 points meant that he could beat Trump anywhere in the US.  A good man, who should be in the cabinet, if the Democat wins.

4. John Delaney: another up from the bootstraps billionaire who seems like a nice guy nobody could remember ten minutes after he left the stage.

5. Amy Klobuchar: So far the most memorable thing about her is she declared her candidacy in a snowstorm. She is not Ann Richards, although she is working on those one liners. She has not come up with a classic, like "If Trump's  IQ got any lower, we'd have to water him twice a day." But she's working on it. 

6. Andrew Yang: Who is the most likeable of the likeables.  Could not find anything to disagree with as he spoke. But the question is: Why is he up there speaking? Donald Trump took decades to build his brand. Everyone knew Trump, even if they hated him. Yang is so obscure, he could walk down 5th Avenue and not be stopped for so much as a handshake. Trump could shoot somebody on 5th Avenue and not lose a vote. Yang could shoot somebody on 5th Avenue and nobody would notice him. He'd have to jump up and down and scream, "Hey! It was me! I shot him!"

The What Are They Thinking Group:
1. Bill DeBlasio who has no apparent group who likes him, but is very tall and articulate, with smoothly honed completely unmemorable phrases.

2. Tulsi Gabbard: Who seems anatomically and constitutionally incapable of smiling or making others smile, who has a finely tuned sense of outrage, likely tempered by her experiences in war,  whose best argument seemed to be she will never be mistaken for Donald Trump.

3. Marianne Williamson:  who viewed 20 feet from the stage, where Mad Dog was sitting, looked as if she were performing "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" but all that facial expression and body language was not adequately conveyed on the Megatron screens on either side of the stage. What Mad Dog remembers is her observation real change does not come from entrenched elected officials but from the people, which seemed to be her argument for making her an elected official.
Mad Dog could not help but think about Abraham Lincoln, who was elected and who achieved significant change.

The Also Rans: The folks who just don't have the speed, but if we still chose Presidents at Conventions in smoked filled rooms, each just might be a compromise candidate
1. Kamala Harris: who oozed emotion and a sense of knowing where she came from, with stories about her intimidating mother who told her not to see herself as others saw her. What Mad Dog saw was someone who internalized a sense of moral superiority.

2. Cory Booker: Who once again reminded everyone he was an all American tight end college football play and who somehow confused the convention with a revival meeting in which "Rise Up" is not a song from "Hamilton" but his very own theme song.

3. Pete Buttigieg: Who, if Mad Dog closed his eyes, sounded exactly like Obama. A white, gay Obama. He makes you forget he is only 37 and his highest achievement has been mayor of South Bend, Indiana.  If Mad Dog were really "voting my heart" he just might vote for him. Or, if Mad Dog decided to vote strategically, he might   on the assumption Pete might win the Rust Belt, but then Mad Dog thinks, if you are trying to predict how Rust Belters think, you might expect they would recoil from the sight of Mayor Pete kissing his husband on stage. 

The Aged Triad:
1. Joe Biden skipped briskly on stage, as the first speaker, which Mad Dog suspected was a good thing because they might not have been able to wake him up if he had to hang around backstage for more than an hour. Joe probably belongs in the "likeable" group, but he's better known than any of those guys. He's the Eisenhower candidate, but Ike was on a farm in Gettysburg by the time he was 78, and clearly Biden would do less harm on that farm.

2. Bernie Sanders:  Ever the same. Energetic, bombastic, fighting the fight for all of us. Sly, funny, exciting. But his shtick grows a bit old and he's a one trick pony. Every problem can be solved by a big government program to stick it to the avaricious corporations who own this country. He may be right, but he is not getting any younger. His crowd looked to Mad Dog like a throng of recycled 60's hippies, Yippies and Make Love Not War folks who voted for Magovern and shrugged off the results as just another reason to think there's nothing you can do about America anyway, so we'll just go smoke pot.

3. Elizabeth Warren: Who has finally got her message simplified to the point voters can actually understand it. The problem is CORRUPTION. Corruption so thoroughgoing we don't even see it as corruption any more, where the super rich pay next to nothing for all the stuff we do for them and everything, from despoiling the environment, climate change, health care, gun violence can be tied to the big money boys who will not allow the people what they need and desire. 

She has finally learned she needs a very amplified mike because her voice is as soft as a high school librarian's.  

On the other hand, in that setting at least, the fervor for her outstripped an Alabama tent revival. 

Did anything in that arena matter?
We had a primary election in the New Hampshire 1st, Sept 11, 2018. There were scores of house parties, debates, rallies. Issues were discussed passionately. People stayed late into the night to pummel candidates with questions.

In the end, the guy who had no presence, no energy won: Chris Pappas with 20,000 votes. A close second was a woman who moved to New Hampshire the month before, backed by dark money, Maura Sullivan. She had melted down in debate, provided platitudes which bored even her young campaign workers but she got 19,000 votes. 
The rest of the pack struggled to get to 4 figures. 

Those Sullivan votes were "bought" votes. But how did they "buy" votes? Was this simply a reflection of the effectiveness of TV ads. Most people Mad Dog knows go to the bathroom or the kitchen during campaign ads. Are people really absorbing these things, subliminally?

Pappas had been around New Hampshire for a decade, serving on the Executive Council, a government panel fewer than 1 in 10 Granite Staters could identify, much less than explain, but he, at least, was a sort of old pol. He had cultivated friends in high places.  But that cannot explain how Sullivan, a vapid, content challenged Stepford wife, made  it a close contest. 

Mad Dog's  assessment of Sullivan may be unfair, he knows. Maybe Mad Dog just could not respond to her charms for obscure psychological reasons. 

But it does make you wonder what does matter in politics. 

For another take on what matters, I've discovered Noam Chomsky, a man I will learn more about, but he makes more sense to me than most:

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/04/01/noam_chomsky_trump-russia_collusion_claims_a_joke.html

From Whence We Came: George Washington and Our Sordid Past

Nathaniel Philbrick, in his excellent history of the final campaign of the American Revolution which ended at Yorktown tells some grisly tales about what the British troops under Cornwallis did in the Virginia countryside.

Cornwallis

A pregnant American woman, an American patriot, her abdomen sliced open, her breasts sliced open, her baby butchered and decapitated heads lined up along her pottery shelves where pottery had been, with "Breed No Rebels" painted in her blood on the wall. 

These British soldiers were not the benign Redcoats depicted in our American history books, who were simply trying to protect the king's tea from being dumped in Boston harbor.

The level of butchery wrought upon the natives rivaled what we later saw in movies like "Platoon" about American soldiers in Vietnam.

But what was just as appalling was the story of the treatment of Black slaves, who the British commander, Cornwallis, had taken from surrounding Virginia plantations, promising them freedom if they would help build fortifications at his redoubt at Yorktown: When Washington and Lafayette finally surrounded him and their usefulness was spent, Cornwallis ejected the slaves into the no man's land between his fort and the American lines, where, once the slaves walked across, they were once again enslaved.  George Washington appointed a slave procurer to take custody of these unfortunates and to return them to "their rightful owners."

Slaver

After the British commander surrendered, Washington hosted a surreal dinner for the French officers who had fought alongside the Americans and for British officers.
Having read through 200 pages of the fierce and ruthless fighting, of the bombardment and saber slashing, it strikes one as almost incomprehensible that these soldiers could sit down to a catered dinner together. 

But what is really interesting, is that the British and French officers got on wonderfully well. Neither liked the Americans much.  The French had fought long and hard side by side with the Americans, but the French officers were from the upper classes and considered the Americans ill mannered and not of their station. The British officers were, of course, gentlemen and it was the class bond which mattered.

Lafayette

Of course, there were exceptions: Lafayette was well loved by Washington and Hamilton and returned their affection, but on the whole, the gentlemen of the upper classes found affinity.

As Philbrick notes,  among the best American soldiers who lined the road out of Yorktown as the beaten British troops marched by, were the Black soldiers from Rhode Island, who had been steadfast and reliable and effective but now they watched as lines of hundreds of slaves marched by them, on their way back to "their rightful owners." What they were thinking, Philbrick notes, one can only imagine.

This is not the story portrayed in high school history books in Texas, or in any of America, one can imagine. Those grisly, grimy, ghoulish parts get scrubbed clean.

But it's where we come from, and that may explain some of where we are today.

The Creed of the Democrat

As a score of Democrats vie for advantage Mad Dog has stumbled across Thomas Paine, the 18th century thinker whose ideas now find a new life in the 21st century moment of Trump.

These words flitted across my Twitter screen and Mr. Paine spoke to me from the 1770's as if a fresh voice reached across time to find me, from the big bang of American thinking:

"When it shall be said in any country in the world my poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want; the taxes are not oppressive; the rational world is my friend, because I am a friend of its happiness: When these things can be said, there may that country boast its Constitution and its Government."

Mad Dog can think of no more concise enunciation of what the Democratic Party of 2019 should stand for, and what separates us from the snarling dogs of the Republican Party and Fox News.

1. Neither ignorance nor distress:  Are you listening Betsy DeVos, and all those who sail with you, intent on traveling back to the time before public education?

2. Jails are empty of prisoners:  When America incarcerates more citizens than any other nation, and for crimes of drug possession and use, which result in one of four Black males spending time in jail.

3. My streets of beggars: And we have homeless from LA to Seattle and in every city, and we have no clear thinking about the causes of this blight or any real idea about how to ameliorate it?

4. The aged are not in want: Thank Democrats for Society Security and Medicare, which the Republicans, though they claim to only want to improve these systems, take every action to kill.

5. The rational world is my friend: When we have our President saying he's the best thing to every happen to the community of color, while he decries brown immigrants as criminals and rapists but yearns for more immigrants from Norway?

We do not need another Democrat in the ring: We need some Democrat who can think and write and speak with the clarity of Mr. Paine.

If It's a Lie Then We Fight on That Lie

Every once in a while, Twitter shows me something.

Someone managed to add a GIF showing that wonderful 32 seconds from "The Wire" where Slim Charles explains to Avon Barksdale, the king, the essential truth about war, for any nation, whether it's a subculture in Baltimore or for the United States of America. 

It's a truth which explains every American war, with the exception of WWII, going back to the Spanish American War of the 1890's.

Of course, it has much wider application in today's Trumpery era. 

And here it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOQCuRdWt-A

Okay, Finally, Someone Who Can Beat Him

Yesterday, Mad Dog heard Cory Booker at a backyard New Hampshire event.
He told an affecting story about washing the blood of a gunshot victim off his chest with water hot enough to cause enough pain to his skin to deflect the pain he felt inside. Women sobbed. You could hear a pin drop.

Mad Dog was unmoved:
1. It was simply too much, too much drama, too theatrical.
2. It was all about appealing to white suburban women who are all about empathy, compassion and who are moved by "heart rending."
(Some men are, too, but this is a pitch which is focus grouped.)

Not that he was insincere. He was just not what Mad Dog was looking for.
Mad Dog loves Elizabeth Warren, but she shares that fatal earnestness of the Democrat: bleeding heart liberal, oozing concern for the wretched refuse stuff Booker is trying to sell.

Don't get Mad Dog wrong: He loves Emma Lazarus and the yearning to breathe free stuff, but he is looking for someone who can withstand the acid rain of the Trump crowd, who say all that's for losers.

Today, it was different.

At a house party in an elegant Brentwood manse, Amy Kobuchar arrived and ridiculed Trump from start to finish. She did the one thing Trump cannot stand: She made a fool of him, much to the delight of the crowd. 

The one thing that makes Trump melt is withering ridicule, laugh out loud, ridicule. 

She mentioned that when Trump pulled us out of the climate accord, only Nicaragua and Syria had not signed on. Today both of these countries have signed on--only the US has not. She went through a few stories about floods and fires and asked: Do you really think we don't have climate change? She mentioned a march of scientists who marched with banners that said, "Science matters. But first, peer review."

She said Trump has been riding on the Obama recovery for two years and he has been doing his level best to torpedo the recovery Obama gave us. 

Everyone was  laughing together. It was cathartic.

From climate change, to healthcare to student debt she said just enough, not too much wonky detail, just broad strokes.

Mad Dog could have listened to her all night.

This is just 4 days after Trump regaled his 10,000 storm troopers in Manchester.

After she finished her stump routine, she took questions, written on slips of paper she pulled from a box.
She pulled  out one slip and read it: "How to you defeat a candidate of charisma with policy?"

She laughed. "Well, I think I have plenty of charisma."

She had already proven that.

Weepy Democrats

Something's changed, it's not that I fear but
Maybe it's that I took care of you too many times
And you grew weaker for a kindness
And sometimes kindness from a friend can break a man
--Rickie Lee Jones

Don't feed stray dogs: They'll follow you home.
--Southern proverb

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
--Emma Lazarus

This is racism. Real racism. 

Riding in to work this morning Mad Dog is listening to 3 stories on NPR:
1. An ER doctor talking about treating drug addicts in Boston who sometimes return to his ER 3 times in a single day with overdoses.
2. An activist talking about Trump's new policy to deny entry to immigrant family members if their US citizen relatives who are sponsoring them have been on food stamps or Medicaid--as a way of preventing people entering who will become burdens to the state.
3. A Democratic politician who says Donald Trump is a racist because he says immigrant caravans are filled with MS-13 gang members.

Now Mad Dog is a radical leftist Democrat, he knows this about himself. But something about these stories dived subcutaneously, got into his blood stream and started his blood boiling. 
Mad Dog would like to address the drug problem, the problems of addiction, would like immigration to be fair and orderly and he agrees that there is something suspicious about a man who sees a dark man coming across a border as a rapist gang thug but who smiles and opens arms wide when he sees a blond Norwegian at the gate.

Furthermore, Mad Dog thinks we are doing something wrong in the United States that we have so many mass shootings and so many home shootings compared to other nations, especially English speaking nations.

On the other hand, nothing gets Mad Dog more irritated than hearing the typical Democratic response to all these problems because it sounds so effete, formulaic and wrong headed and the posture is always one of lachrymose --"I'm so sorry for your loss"--and never tough, pragmatic.

The Trump fan will say:
1. That drug addict is a leech on society. He is making his problem our problem. He keeps presenting himself to the ER for care then goes right out and repeats his transgression.
2. That immigrant family is on food stamps and gets free insulin from Mass Health when my insulin costs me $600 and why does the government take better care of these illegals than it does for me, a hard working guy who puts roofs on houses in the hot sun all day?
3. Trump is not racist. Look at his rallies--always a few Black faces in the stands behind him. He says he is doing more for Blacks than Obama by opening up factories and getting them jobs. Would Hitler or George Wallace have shaken hands with Negroes on stage at their rallies? Trump never said he didn't want Black immigrants or brown immigrants. What he doesn't want is criminals and people who will go straight on welfare. Has nothing to do with race. He doesn't like "shithole" countries. His antipathy is not toward Blackness but backwardness. He loves rich Black people.

What Democrat is this loved?

Anti Trumps keep pointing to the Statue of Liberty and the idea of the maternal gathering up of the suffering as the ideal of the United States.
Trump is saying, "NO! Our ship is full!"

Compassion is out, hard edge is in. We take care of our own, not the whole world. Africa, South and Central America, Asia, South Asia are huge buckets and we cannot contain all their misery in our cup.

Do we turn her away?

The fact is, Mad Dog believes, most of his fellow citizens are somewhere in between these two extremes.
1. There should be care for drug addicts, but the addict and his family are not primarily our burden. These folks have to get themselves right. We can help in a limited way but the responsibility of getting you clean is not ours.

2. We want to provide limited welfare--the welfare system was changed during the Clinton years to accommodate people briefly, for a matter of months, but we cannot support every needy family indefinitely. We can tide you over, but not accept the full burden of your family indefinitely. You must learn some skill and work. When Trump says he's open to immigrants with PhD's this is what he's tapping into. Send us your well trained, your high tech stars, but keep your failures.

3. It was for years a liberal trope that 90% of our prison population is Black, which proved, ipso facto, that the justice system is unjust and biased. 
But then someone asked, "What if 90% of the crime is committed by Blacks? 
Suppose the justice system simply incarcerates, color blind?"

The average citizen, reading his newspaper sees the description of the perpetrator and sees "a Black male, in his twenties" often enough it makes an impression. 

4. As for immigration: Yes, we want immigrants, but since the early 20th century our doors have been closed, often to whole classes of people, particularly Asians and Africans but even to southern Europeans. That was done on a straightforward master race/Nordic race racist basis emanating not from the slack jawed, illiterate Southern simpleton, but from the Harvard, Princeton, Yale set of privileged entitled white males.
Trump is simply atavistic; he's nothing new. The whole Emma Lazarus thing was but a flicker.

Desperation

We can work out immigration but we need to decide basic things like are we out to "reunite families" or to import talent or to be sure new immigrants will not be unemployable or diseased? We used to exclude people for TB and trachoma. In recent years we admitted people with HIV and severe heart disease which were sure to cost the public coffers dearly. What do we want to do about allowing the disabled or unemployable to immigrate? 

Is this racist?

What we need is thought, not slogans.
But the left gives us bumper stickers.
Trump gives us rallies.

Studying Trump; Learning from Trump

People who loathe Trump cannot penetrate his armor.
Intelligent, scholarly, otherwise learned and effective people melt before his visage.

Why? They simply lose their cool. They stop examining the disease under the microscope or in the lab and they erupt in a bilious outrage and all hope of effectively striking back at him is lost.

This happens in various (usually contact) sports: If you can just get your opponent to blow his top, he'll self destruct and be unable to hurt you.

So Mad Dog submits this proposition for your, kind reader's, consideration: Let's find what is attractive about Mr. Trump. Why people love him, and then see where that takes us.

First of all, you will note, his rallies are not conventions of snarling dogs.
People you see behind him are grinning ear to ear. 
The people you cannot see in the audience are laughing uproariously.

Take just a random, recent clip of Trump speaking to a crowd in Texas, where he complains about the criticism coming from the liberal/fake news media: 
"They complain about my saying we are seeing an INVASION coming across the border! Ten thousand coming across! What else do you call it?"

He laughs. 
The crowd laughs with him.

"Well, of COURSE it's an invasion what else would you call it?"

Now he is all reason and incredulity that the obvious truth of this assertion could be questioned.

"And what can we do about it?" he goes on, grinning.

"Shoot 'em!" someone cries out from the audience.

"Well, that's only in the panhandle you can get away with that stuff. Only in the panhandle!" Trump roars.

The crowd roars. 

Now, what has he done here, exactly?
1. He has shown the crowd he knows there is a panhandle.
2. He has suggested he shares an inside joke about the panhandle with them. (Although what exactly that joke is eludes Mad Dog, who is not even sure he wants to know.)
3. He has used a big number to substantiate his claim, 10,000. Where that comes from doesn't matter. He just says it. 
4. He shows the good folks of Texas he is with them on shooting folks first and asking questions later--a good ol' Texas tradition.

Despite his red tie and designer suits, his New York origins, he has shown he is one of them, can laugh with them, can reduce those self righteous, sanctimonious snots who are the Eastern liberal media to sputtering effete puddles of jelly.

And what is the response?  Joe Scarborough explains, tediously, that this is bad. This is racist. This is the President being unpresidential.

Trump knows if you can get the crowd laughing with you, he wins.

What Democrat--other than Bernie, on occassion--can do that?