Diatribes of Jay: Stacey Abrams

[For the principal post on this page, click here. For a brief note on vote suppression in Georgia as a reason to support Stacey Abrams, click here. For other good candidates and causes and how to contribute easily, click here. For links to the most recent posts together with the inverse chronological links to recent posts, click here.]

John McCain: A Man of Honor
He was a fighter. Annapolis nearly kicked him out for fighting. He was hardly a scholar: he graduated fifth from the bottom of his class of 899 cadets. But John McCain had two things rare and precious among those who call themselves public servants: a keen sense of right and wrong and a fierce defense of the right.

Shot down on a bombing mission over North Vietnam, McCain spent years suffering torture as a prisoner of war. His captors offered to release him in a propaganda ploy, after discovering that his father was a highly-placed admiral. But McCain refused to be let go before his comrades in arms.

As a senator and public servant, McCain fought to keep us from the sorry state in which we find ourselves today. His name still marks our first and most important statute limiting money in politics. It was our Supreme Court, against McCain’s and others’ efforts, that foolishly opened the floodgates to money and corruption.

McCain worked hand in hand with John Kerry, President Clinton and others to repair a tiny part of the immense damage we had done to Southeast Asia in our most misguided war ever, in Vietnam. He secured repatriation of the remains of his fallen comrades. He helped normalize relations with Vietnam. And then he helped legalize and promote the massive trade that has pulled so many there out of poverty.

Once it became clear that oil is running out and that fossil fuels are heating our planet, McCain extended his hand across the aisle to arrange a bipartisan compromise on energy policy. That effort failed through no fault of his own. Now our own country, like Australia, is in the thrall of Big Fossil, destined to extract all the short-term profit it can as oil and gas run out, leaving us with a blasted planet and a legacy of useless, stranded assets.

McCain made a big mistake letting consultants and “operatives” take over his 2008 presidential campaign against Barack Obama. He picked an unqualified and inexperienced person as his running mate. Then he let the “operatives” drive his campaign into a sewer of negativity and racism. Yet after he lost, McCain was man enough to admit his error, apologize, and, unlike the vast majority of the GOP, wish the new president well.

Conflict was inevitable between this honorable man and our current White House without Honor. McCain was among the first of his party to recognize as treasonous President Trump’s self-focused inaction in the face of Russian “active measures” against us. His last major act of honor was his unexpected vote to save “Obamacare” from extinction—and with it reliable and affordable health insurance for tens of millions of Americans. He never played along with the casual, lying bigotry that has come to define today’s GOP.

John McCain’s long and purposeful life was rich with struggle, success, defeat and tragedy. But he always fought for what he saw as right, regardless of the consequences to himself and his career.

We will never “make American great again” without more like John McCain. May they rise from origins yet unknown. Or may today’s pols grow a spine and recall what honor means. Honor, after all, requires seeing and telling the truth—things that John McCain rarely failed to do.

In a recent essay, I promised to lay out my Geezers’ strategy for supporting a “blue wave” in November. On reflection, I think it mostly boils down to one candidate and one state: Stacey Abrams of Georgia.

Americans’ longest-standing challenge remains today what it has always been: the divide between South and North. That divide spans whole continents of difference.

The cultural chasm once spanned slavery and freedom. It spanned the monotony of farm labor versus the imagination of science and industry. It spanned the great slave boss’ mansion on the hill and the small wooden homes huddled together against the New England cold. Today it spans the remnants of a decaying democracy, the still-dangerous embers of a dying but defiant racism, and the resurgence of a uniquely American bossism that could produce a thousand-year Yankee-style oligarchy.

The greatest novelist could hardly have imagined cultures more wildly different than the two our Founders tried to knit together into a single nation. From the get-go, their knitting was defective. We’ve been more like Frankenstein’s monster than a seamless chimera. The stitching still shows, with blood oozing between the stitches.

Today the North and West have the industrial might, the imagination. Silicon Valley sits in California, about as far from the South at you can get. But the South still owns the political power, as it has from our very first mal-apportioned Senate. Even now, the wily Mitch McConnell is trying to stack the Supreme Court to keep it that way. Even now, a South that (outside of Texas and Florida) trails the nation in every economic measure consistently supports Wall Street’s domination over its own citizens because that’s where the money and power are.

Our Congress is twisted to favor the South. Today the so-called “Tea Party” makes a rabble out of the House of Representatives. But who or what is the “Tea Party”? As of 2013, when the so-called “movement” began, about two thirds of its members came from the Deep South and Border States: 2013 House Tea-Party Roster by Region

Region	Number	Percentage	States
Old South	17	53%	AL, FL, GA, LA, NC, SC, TX
Border States	4	12.5%	KY, MO, TN
Midwest	6	18.8%	IA, IN, KS, MI, MN, OH
North	1	3%	NJ
Northwest	1	3%	ID
Southwest	2	6%	AZ
West	1	3%	CA

Almost twenty percent of its members (one out of five) came from a single Southern state: Texas.

As for the Senate, our Founders designed it for minority rule from the very beginning. Today, Wyoming has two senators to represent its 573,720 people, while California also has two senators to represent its 39,776,830. Thus each citizen of Wyoming enjoys more than 69 times the voting power in the Senate of every Californian. And procedural rules in both the House and the Senate entrench minority rule even further.

In just twenty years, half the country’s population will reside in a mere eight states, with sixteen senators. The other states will have eighty-four senators and will govern the majority with an iron fist. Meanwhile, our Electoral College has given us five minority-elected presidents, two in our new century alone.

A future in which Southern bossism continues to govern the vast majority of Americans, including the huge progressive states of California, Illinois, New York and Washington, is untenable. The South today comprises but one-third of Americans. Even with the powerhouse of Texas, it generates only one-third of our national GDP. It ought to be perpetually in the minority, able to make or block law only if and when it can attract a larger political coalition. But don’t tell that to Mitch McConnell or the Tea Party; you might frighten them.

Something has to give. Testosterone-fueled pride makes Southern pols revel in political anachronisms like the Electoral College, which stole presidential elections from Al Gore and Hillary Clinton. They gloat about stealing Supreme-Court seats with sheer political obstinacy. But the longer this travesty of democracy continues, the more all Americans peer into the abyss.

We got a good glimpse of the abyss a year ago in Charlottesville. Our president reveled in the catastrophe because his angry minority is all he’s got, and he knows it. But the rest of us awkwardly gazed away toward a better future. That’s why this year’s proposed “re-enactment” of Charlottesville, in our nation’s capital, came out so differently. Counter-protestors vastly outnumbered the white supremacists, and a strong central government kept order.

As much as the violence-prone might yearn for it, a second Civil War is not the answer, let alone in the Nuclear Age. Nor is secession, although the reasons for it are mounting daily. The solution cannot be based on testosterone, on masculine guile, obstinacy and risk-taking.

Instead, our two cultures must meld. We Americans must adopt common values. Whether through migration, education or simple exhausted compromise, we must become a single nation, with a single culture, in which North or South makes no difference. If we stay divided, the best we can hope for is a national decline so precipitous as to duplicate ancient Rome’s four-century slide in as many decades. With the most divisive, erratic and incompetent president in our history—and with Russia’s persistent and skilled egging on—we have already started down that road.

Since Trump became president, political analysts have focused on our upper Midwest and Pennsylvania. There a mere 80,000 votes in a few key states made liars out of pundits and chaos out of order. But the action isn’t really there. It never has been. The action is in the South, and in the cultural chasm between the South and the rest, where it always has been.

California, now the world’s fifth largest economy, is already a majority-minority state. But key Southern states are close behind. If you add African-Americans and Hispanics together, they amount to about 40% of the total population in each of Georgia and Florida, and 30% in North Carolina. If just one-fifth of whites vote progressive (one third in North Carolina), and if minorities understand who’s on their side, common values can command an absolute majority of the population in all three states. When that happens, the Dems will have a permanent lock on the Electoral College, with a reliable 273 votes in every presidential election. Then the Midwest’s (and Pennsylvania’s!) indecision will become irrelevant.

Sound unlikely? Not so much. In 2008, Barack Obama won both Florida and North Carolina, but not Georgia. In 2012, he still won Florida but lost North Carolina and Georgia.

The elusive prize is Georgia. Why? Well, there’s still a lot of regional resentment there. That’s where General Sherman marched to the sea, in the only sustained military occupation by Americans of their own. Stone Mountain, near Atlanta, is where the KKK held many of its most fearsome rallies and set out on its rounds of white terrorism. Ghosts of the strong feelings that made our Civil War the single bloodiest in our entire history still inhabit Georgia’s stones.

But the time is ripe for change there, and Stacey Abrams is the one to bring it. She’s smart, experienced and capable. As a woman, she lacks the testosterone that still fills the halls of Congress with rancor and once made Southern ground slippery with blood.

Abrams is nice looking. But she lacks the kind of strong attraction that can inspire lust in men and envy in women. She has no accent, whether “black” or regional; she speaks American English. Most of all, she lacks the slightest trace of the bitterness and resentment that have poisoned the South for a century and a half. She’s a healing mother figure who loves all her “kids” equally; she hardly ever refers to her constituents except as “all Georgians.” She threatens no one.

Abrams is the kind of candidate who could be elected governor of Georgia without most voters caring that she is “black.” But when she wins, you can be sure that gerrymandering, vote suppression and the other political shenanigans that have characterized the South since slavery will come to a screeching halt. The state and its national influence will belong to all its people for the first time since our original Constitution counted slaves as three-fifths human.

If ever our nation needed such a healing figure, it is now. If ever there were a state that deserved one, it is Georgia. Atlanta’s thriving business and entrepreneurial culture has made it known as the “Silicon Valley” of the South. It’s as capitalist as a stock market; but Abrams can make it fair and just for those—black, brown and white—whom the stock markets have left behind. Isn’t that what President Trump has promised so often but has yet to begin accomplishing?

The day after Obama first won the presidency in 2008, I speculated whether his success could extend to a list of less stellar minority leaders. Abrams is high on that list—a worthy successor to Obama. She’s also high on Obama’s own endorsement list. Her winning the governorship of Georgia will send a message of a New South and a New America, which can lead a whole new world.

Both male and female voters know in their souls that empathy and concern for every human being is the only way out of the hate, conflict, and neglect that Trump’s and other world leaders’ male egotism has wrought. Female voters know instinctively that nuclear weapons and global warming have driven us far too close to species self-extinction to let testosterone continue to rule us.

Like African-Americans of both genders, Stacey Abrams has had her soul tempered by four centuries of oppression and hate. Yet she bears no scars. Whether minorities or not, all Georgians will reap the harvest of her wisdom born of hardship.

So dig deep, my fellow Geezers. Support her with your money and your time.

If we can propel Abrams to victory, a whole lot of things will change for the better. We will have forged a durable new coalition of white progressives and minorities that could last as long as FDR’s New Deal. We will have taken a decisive step toward a society in which female caring for the whole human family replaces male-ego-driven abstract ideology that never quite gets it right. We will have leaders who care about the people they represent, rather than proving a point. We will finally have laid our American Civil War to rest, without further violence.

Above all else, that’s what we need most as we push farther into the twenty-first century and its multiple life-and-death trials of our species. When you come down to it, it’s a pretty easy choice: support the one who has felt the sting of racism and has risen above it; support the gender that Nature has endowed with the responsibility for giving and nurturing life. The hour is late, but not too late; the choice is urgent but clear.

Endnote: If you’re skeptical that “vote suppression and the other political shenanigans that have characterized the South since slavery” are still going on in Georgia, read a recent catalogue of Georgia’s vote-supression efforts as reported by the New York Times. The attempts include: (1) a purge of registrations of voters who don’t vote for three consecutive years, (2) a delayed purge of registrations with information that doesn’t match, down to the letter, data in state drivers’-license databases and Social Security databases, (3) a “sweeping investigation” of so-called “voter fraud” in Brooks County, which produced a dozen indictments and no convictions, (4) a 2.5 year investigation of voter-registration drives by Asian-American groups, which found no violations, and (5) a recent investigation of the New Georgia Project, a voter-registration drive founded by Abrams herself, which discovered 53 fraudulent applications but provoked a lawsuit claiming that state and local officials had failed to process 40,000 registrations.

Who’s responsible for most, if not all, of these efforts to cut the vote? Georgia’s current Secretary of State, Brian Kemp, a Republican and fervent Trump supporter. The same guy is now Abrams’ opponent in the general election for governor of Georgia.

One thing that has changed over the years is that minority-vote suppressors have become much more cagey and sophisticated in hiding their partisan and racist motives. Kemp, for example, was recorded only once, in 2014, complaining of efforts to register “all these minority voters that are out there and others that are sitting on the sidelines.”

But you don’t need careless confessions to know what is going on. Watch what they do, not what they say! In a nation whose average turnout in non-presidential elections rarely beats one-third, officials who really care about democracy and giving everyone a say ought to be doing everything in their power to register more voters and get them to the polls. When they do precisely the opposite—seeking to cut the vote, especially in minority districts—you don’t have to be a genius in tracing cause and effect, or an historian, to know what’s going on. That’s especially so in the Deep South, where it’s been going on for one and a half centuries and counting.

If Abrams were to do nothing more than put a stop to this nonsense, she would merit a vote from everyone who values democracy. The facts that she wants to do so much more, plus be the only small-d democrat running for the job, qualify her to win. Just ignore skin color and think which of the candidates every true small-d democrat since ancient Greece would support.

Other Good Candidates and Causes
By emphasizing Stacey Abrams as a worthy candidate, I don’t mean to ignore any other worthy figure or cause.

Here are the other individuals to which I’m making recurring donations:

1. Andrew Gillum, to become governor of Florida. My reasons are much the same as those for supporting Stacey Abrams. Florida is also one of the three states (FL, GA & NC) which, on turning blue, could give Democrats a permanent lock on the electoral college. Having a Democratic governor could put the kibosh on right-wing gerrymandering, vote suppression, and other misdeeds. I put Abrams first only because: (1) I think Florida is closer to turning blue now than Georgia and (2) Abrams is a woman. We need more women in statehouses and Congress—a lot more!

2. Claire McCaskill, to keep her seat as senator from Missouri. Claire is more moderate than I am. But she’s a key Democratic senator for three reasons: (1) she’s experienced and savvy; (2) she represents a key “border” state, and the loss of her seat would be devastating to the Dems; and (3) she is in a good position to help stem the tide of skullduggery by which the hard right seeks to keep the South an anachronism and delay the natural effect of the demographic tides.

3. U.S. Representative Jacky Rosen, to become senator from Nevada. She could turn her purple swing state blue and thereby help reduce the hard right’s Senate majority, or even swing the majority to the Dems. She’s got a tough fight but has among the best chances to win of any non-incumbent Dem running.

4. Beto O’Rourke, running for U.S. senator from Texas, to unseat the vile, much-hated right-wing demagogue Ted Cruz. Beto is a true progressive and one of the youngest people ever to make a serious run for the United States Senate. He accepts no PAC money but relies only on small donations. He’s also running the right way: criss-crossing the huge state of Texas in his pickup truck, holding town-hall meetings in every one of Texas’ many counties. There he listens to the people, rather than telling them what to think based on some simplistic “little red book” of ideology. If our Founders could be resurrected today and could watch Beto run, they would see what he’s doing as how they’d hoped American democracy would look two centuries in their future.

5. Xochitl Torres-Small, running for Congress from my home state of New Mexico. She’s a progressive Dem with a good chance of winning, in part because she’s seized on two important issues both locally and nationally: education and stopping the right wing from de-nationalizing public lands and selling them off to the highest and most environmentally rapacious bidders.

There are also other worthy candidates. Some I don’t give to because I expect them to win anyway, without my help. (A cynical view, maybe, but practical.). Some I just don’t know. I’m a political junkie, not a tied-in political operative. So I also make recurring donations to the following expert organizations, which help pick the best progressive candidates to support and also help get out the vote:

Democracy for America, a new organization for progressive Democrats that is truly color blind; and

Daily Kos, the online progressive newsletter, which has a strong get-out-the-vote-program for the upcoming midterms.

Tip for donors: The website ActBlue makes it easy to donate to any Democratic candidate and many Democratic organizations. It also makes it easy to review your donations, and to make and modify recurring donations.

If you check the box to make a political donation recurring, you might be signed up for twelve months, i.e., a whole year. You may not want to do that, especially now, with just over three months left until the midterms.

Enter ActBlue’s own website. Not only does it keep track of your legal limitations on donating for each election cycle and let you review all your contributions made through its website or its referrals from candidates’ websites. (My own list on its site goes back to 2012.) It also lets you view recurring contributions and modify the recurring parameters as desired. In just a few minutes, I was able to review all my recurring contributions and set them to expire in November, after the midterm elections. (I don’t want to build up candidates’ war chests unnecessarily; other candidates may be needier or more worthy by 2020.)

[For how Twitter weakens our people’s impulse control, how primitive so-called “AI” now is, and their effect on Elon Musk, click here. For a prediction of America’s eventual awakening to Russia’s many small acts of war, click here. For reasons to vote for the blue wave of female candidates, click here. For how Geezers can fight the oligarchs and win, click here. For the threat to our way of life posed by dark cryptocurrency transfers and untraceable and undetectable assault weapons, click here. For reasons why an economic or political crash is coming or imminent, click here. For a brief note on a rare “conservative” who can think, click here. For things corporate CEOs can do to help keep the United States from suffering a decline and fall like ancient Rome’s, click here. For a comparison of quality in pols and reasons to recall our recent past, click here. For reasons why Trump’s trade war is headed toward a disastrous defeat, click here. For a brief note on how corporate rule is encroaching on American cities, click here. For our desperate need for voters to focus on good character, click here. For an analysis of facts and Kim’s myth about North Korea, click here. For a second post on training new voters, click here. A list of links to popular recent posts follows:]
Links to Popular Recent Posts

Diatribes of Jay

20 August 2018

Stacey Abrams

John McCain: A Man of Honor

2013 House Tea-Party Roster by Region

Other Good Candidates and Causes

Links to Popular Recent Posts

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