Diatribes of Jay: Who Can Beat Trump?

[For brief comment on Trump’s State of the Union Speech and Stacey Abrams’ response for the Dems, click here. For reasons why the Huawei affair requires diplomacy, not criminal prosecution, click here. For how Speaker Pelosi has become a new sheriff in town, click here. For how Trump’s misrule could kill your kids, click here. For comment on MLK Day 2019 and the structural legacies of slavery, click here. For reasons why the partial government shutdown helps Dems the longer it lasts, click here. For a discussion of how our national openness hurts us and what we really need from China, click here. For a brief explanation of how badly both Trump and his opposition are failing at “the art of the deal,” click here. For a deep dive into how Apple tries to thwart Google’s capture of the web-browser market, click here. For a review of Speaker Pelosi’s superb qualifications to lead the Democratic Party, click here. For reasons why natural-gas and electric cars are essential to national security, click here. For additional reasons, click here. For the source of Facebook’s discontents and how to save democracy from it, click here. For Democrats’ core values, click here. The Last Adult is Leaving the White House. Who will Shut Off the Lights? For how our two parties lost their souls, click here. For the dire portent of Putin’s high-fiving the Saudi Crown Prince, click here. For updated advice on how to drive on the Sun’s power alone, or without fossil fuels, click here. For a 2018 Thanksgiving Message, click here. For a list of links to recent posts in reverse chronological order, click here.]

Trump’s SOTU Speech and the Response
If you listened to the words and not the music, Trump’s State of the Union speech might have seemed all about opportunity. He invited Democrats to join him in exploring the opportunity to build a unified, better, bipartisan America. There were just two problems with his means. First, with respect to immigration—on which Trump spent far more time than on any other issue—the invitation was to do things his way, again. As Sarah Palin might ask, “How’d that work out for ya with the government shutdown?” The second wrong thing is that Trump already had blown his best opportunity to do right by all the skilled workers who voted him into the White House. He blew three-quarters of the $ 2 trillion that we need to invest in rebuilding our infrastructure on a tax cut for his rich cronies and for corporations. Then the corporations turned around and blew their share on their rich shareholders through stock buybacks. So the money for infrastructure is basically spent, at least in the views of most Republicans and so-called “moderates” who profess to worry about big government debt. Nevertheless, we ought to spend a few words on just how good a real infrastructure plan would have been for all the skilled workers who rolled the dice on Trump. Infrastructure building differs from almost all other jobs available to people who work with their hands. You can’t outsource to China the work of building or repairing a bridge over the Hudson River or the Mississippi. But you can building a computer, iPad, iPhone, TV or dishwasher. Outsourcing is, in essence, what has driven large segments of our skilled workers to opioids. And infrastructure alone is immune from outsourcing. Anyway, most of the manual jobs in our “knowledge” economy can’t match infrastructure building in pay or in pride. A worker who helps build an airport, a runway, a bridge, or an aqueduct—even a sewage treatment plant—can point it out to spouse or kids and say, “I built that.” What can a worker in an Amazon warehouse say? So in spending our infrastructure money on his friends and social class, Trump had already foreclosed the opportunity for any substantial redemption of skilled workers from the vast and ongoing sale of their jobs to China, Mexico and Bangladesh. He left them to their opioids. There are two types of intelligence: emotional and analytical. Trump has emotional intelligence: he’s a brilliant demagogue who rose from zero political experience to become president of the United States. But in analytical intelligence he’s dumb as a rock. He couldn’t see that making infrastructure his first priority would have made him one of our better presidents, would have dispelled his party’s political death wish, and would have cemented and broadened the “base” that elected him. He couldn’t see that few share his trumped-up fear (pun intended) of illegal immigrants, or that his base will turn on him when they still don’t have the good jobs he promised and they see no MS-13 killers in their neighborhoods, let alone their bedrooms. The worst leaders in human history have had high emotional and low analytical intelligence. They include people like Hitler, Stalin, Mugabe and Mao in his later years. I modestly call this “Dratler’s Law.” Trump not only fits the model. Worse yet, he’s a fighter. He doesn’t know any other mode of working than ginning up an enemy and fighting him. The “enemy” can be workers on his buildings, banks that won’t make him loans, his own lawyers or business partners, his students, or his fellow elected officials. Imagining illegal immigrants as a brown horde out to rape and kill America is just the way he’s lived his whole life. He might have been a good solider if he hadn’t used his bone spurs to get out of the only war he might have had to fight. Trump is also unquestionably another thing: an old white guy. His speech played mostly to people like him, recalling heroism from as far back as D-Day and our trips to the Moon. While the right side of the chamber applauded enthusiastically, you could almost see the younger House members—mostly women dressed in suffragette white—thinking “when are we going stop patting ourselves on the back for D-Day and start working on the real problems of this century”? So don’t expect Trump’s lame invitation to be accepted. He wouldn’t know what to do if it was. He’ll just keep doing what he’s been doing for two years, playing to the workers whom he left high and dry and to old white men who revel in the past. One thing is certain: his “base” isn’t going to get any younger, any more numerous, or any better employed, at least not due to anything Trump has planned or can do. As for Stacey Abrams, who delivered the Dems’ response, her position reminded me of a truism. We Americans tend to give the toughest jobs to African-Americans and then ding them when they don’t work miracles. So it was with Barack Obama, who came into office four months after the Crash of 2008, and after his GOP predecessors had already spent two-thirds of a trillion dollars on bailouts. And so it was with Abrams, who had to answer an hour-and-a-half speech, with many human props, in seven minutes, with only fifteen minutes to prepare. Anyone faced with that kind of task has two choices. You can prepare your speech in advance, or you can trust your career to someone else who (or a whole team that) writes it for you during the SOTU speech. Abrams obviously did the former. She was clear, articulate and at times passionate about the differences between Trump’s values and vision of America and the ones that most of the rest of us share. She stressed the values of community that all of Trump’s human props exemplified. And she rightly complained of the vote suppression that Trump and his GOP have made a routine strategy, and the irony of Mitch calling making voting easier for working people a “power play.” As the PBS pundits agreed, neither speech would live in memory. But all in all, Abrams did herself and her party a service. She introduced herself to the American public, so that people will know who she is if appointed to a cabinet position in a Harris or Warren administration. Abrams also did her party a service by avoiding an unseemly row (or an even more unseemly advantage) among the many Dem candidates for president in 2020. In so doing, she put another well-deserved nail in the coffin of the sick idea that members of minorities can’t be national leaders. In seven minutes, that was about all anyone could expect.

What Dem can beat Trump best next year? There’s a lot of talk and speculation. But sometimes the answer to a question sits right in front of you, staring you in the face.

We start with six unassailable facts. First, Hillary Clinton actually did beat Trump, in the national popular vote, by a whopping margin of more than 2.5 million votes. But her votes were badly distributed among the states, so she lost in our antiquated Electoral College.

Second, Hillary Clinton was a weak and widely disliked candidate. She had a tin ear and poor judgment about everything from Dubya’s unnecessary war in Iraq, through using a personal server for official State Department e-mails, to failing to fire staff that had embarrassed her and made scandals. Yet still she won the national popular vote decisively.

Third, women first exercised the right to vote in November 1920. So next year’s presidential election will mark precisely the 100th anniversary of their suffrage, with nary a female president. You think these facts might have meaning for women?

Fourth, women are a majority of voters, a (slightly) larger majority of registered voters, and a majority of our population. They are no minority group. They are a majority.

Fifth, Trump “won” the Republican nomination by clearing the field of fifteen males and one token female. He used every frat-boy male hazing trick in the book. He gave his rivals demeaning nicknames. He insulted and vilified them. He used his physical size to advantage, talking and acting like a bully, even on the debate stage.

Trump could hardly have played the role of an alpha-male-ape better if he had jumped up and down on the debate stage, scratched his armpits, bared his teeth and screeched. His atavistic tactics worked like a sudden dagger thrust between the ribs, and for the same reason: no one expected them. No one expected a politician at the highest level of the most powerful democracy on Earth to act like an alpha ape or an oversized teenage bully. His tactics bypassed a hundred thousand years of social evolution and touched some of us deep in our atavistic souls. Our species did evolve in small clans of apes run by alpha males selected by physical combat; that’s why Trump won the non-college-educated vote so decisively.

Surprised and dumfounded, Trump’s male rivals succumbed to this ape nonsense, as did the only woman rival (Carly Fiorina), who had no more political experience than Trump himself. But women and female voters play by different rules. They prefer social evolution, from which they have gained immensely. They don’t have alpha-male ape-hazing antics written into their evolutionary DNA. They don’t like violence, express or implied. They prefer empathy, inclusion, and nurturing. And they are a majority.

Sixth, Trump won the presidency despite—perhaps because of —his constantly belittling and demeaning women. Doing that fit right in with alpha-male rule by combat, under which might not only made right, but the King. By his own admission, Trump groped and assaulted women, and he bragged about it. Obviously all this went down well with some males.

But males are a minority of voters. What will happen when and if females recognize their majority and their power? You think all this might have left civilized female voters with a burning anger that won’t go away? Might the #MeToo movement reflect that anger?

By now, the answer to this essay’s principal question should be obvious. A woman can beat Trump soundly next year. Even Hillary nearly did in 2016. All the Dems have to do is select the best one and focus on the right states.

My head tells me it’s Elizabeth Warren. She’s the smartest and by far the most expert in finance. And finance is the means by which the 0.1% have stolen the substance of this nation, subverted our democracy, and (with misguided but huge campaign contributions), made it possible for a troglodyte like Trump to win.

Yet Warren has three weaknesses. First, she seldom ventures outside the comfort zone of her deep financial expertise and the mostly-financial shafting of this nation’s middle class. Second, she has no expertise in military or foreign policy, and she has let most of her first Senate term slide by without acquiring any. Third, she seems almost oblivious to the rapid awakening and rise of minorities in America, in large part in rebellion against the catastrophe of Trump’s presidency. That sudden rise of minorities is largely responsible for re-energizing the Democratic Party.

So my heart tells me the best woman just might be Kamala Harris. True, she shares with Warren the same deficit of experience and expertise in foreign and military affairs. But as an experienced prosecutor, Harris seems less afraid to venture outside the comfort zone of her own narrow expertise. And though coming from an educationally privileged background, Harris is absolutely part of the jubilant rise of minorities that’s now energizing the Democrats.

Like Barack Obama, Harris is bi-racial. Her father is Jamaican-American, and her mother is (East) Indian-American, specifically Tamil-American.

Harris and her mother emphasized her African heritage for reasons of geographic and social affinity. Although her parents had been educated at Berkeley and Stanford, Harris chose Howard University, the once-all-black college in Washington, D.C. with an illustrious history. She did so in part to follow the example of Thurgood Marshall, the great civil-rights lawyer and first black Supreme Court Justice, who had studied there. Harris then took her legal education at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco.

Also like Barack Obama, Harris has two parents with Ph.D.s. This matters a lot for practical problem solving. Universities grant Ph.D.s only for original research that solves an original problem that no one has ever solved before.

No one could get a Ph.D. for the kind of magical-thinking, halfway measures that Prime Minister May is trying to pass off on the British people as a “solution” to the vexing problem of Brexit. No one could get a Ph.D. for anything like the puerile, simplistic “solution” to our immigration problems posed by Trump’s border wall. To get a Ph.D. you actually have to have wrestled a real problem to ground, and a committee of five expert scholars has to agree that you’ve done so. Having been raised by two Ph.D.s should give Harris the strength and perseverance to avoid the kind of magical thinking that lies behind almost every ideologically pure “solution” that is pushing this nation toward banana-republic status.

Despite her unusual background, Harris calls herself an “American.” She has no doubt who she is. That means she understands fully—both by walking the walk and by talking the talk—what our American enterprise is all about. Just like Obama, she has lived and embodies Jefferson’s credo, “All men are created equal.”

These aspects of Harris’ background could give her a decisive electoral advantage in the South. As I noted in an earlier essay, the Dems now can win the presidency without winning any of the states in the Upper Midwest that Trump won in 2016. All they have to do is take take Florida, Georgia and North Carolina. What makes that task doable is the high percentage of minority voters in those three states, as follows:

Flipping Key Southern States
State	Florida	Georgia	North Carolina
Hillary’s Margin of Loss (2016)	2%	5%	4%
Black population	15.6%	30.7%	21.4%
Hispanic population	24.1 %	9.3%	9.0%
Total of Two Minorites	39.7%	40.0%	30.4%
Possible Total 2020 Dem Vote*	54.1%	54.2%	50.9%

* Erratum: An earlier version of this post omitted the male non-minority vote and calculated these figures incorrectly. This version has correct calculations and makes more realistic assumptions about Harris’ or another Democratic candidate’s share of the female non-minority, male non-minority and total minority votes.

The last line in the table shows the vote that Harris might get if she could win 60% of non-minority female voters, a mere 20% of non-minority male voters, and 75% of minority voters regardless of gender. The arithmetic goes as follows: Possible Total Vote = [0.60 x 0.51 + 0.20 x 0.49 = .306 + .098 = .404] x (1-Total of Two Minorities) + 0.75 x (Total of Two Minorities). If Harris can win these three states plus the usual Democratic strongholds, she can win the presidency with 273 electoral votes, without winning a single Midwestern state but Illinois, which is a Democratic stronghold. (The GOP in these three states apparently agrees with this analysis: it’s trying as hard as it can to restrict minorities’ voting rights there.)

Harris’ prospects don’t depend on background, numbers or minority affinity alone. She’s also tough. She’s tough enough to have attracted the attention of David Brooks, the conservative pundit on PBS and the New York Times, who seems to yearn for anyone to beat Trump. In a recent column, he reasoned that Harris is tough enough to do it.

Long before there was a President Obama, and long before our Congressional Black Caucus numbered 55, an African-American named Willie Brown became Speaker of the California Assembly and later Mayor of San Francisco.

The late, great San Francisco Columnist Herb Caen never used Brown’s name without the adjective “powerful” in front, as a sign of respect. For Brown was a supremely skilled pol and a progressive one, too—a prominent force in California’s development as a progressive bastion. Brown was Harris’ mentor and, during a period of estrangement from his wife, her lover. He described the relationship in this way:

“I have also helped the careers of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Gov. Gavin Newsom, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and a host of other politicians. The difference is that Harris is the only one who, after I helped her, sent word that I would be indicted if I ‘so much as jaywalked’ while she was D.A.”

That’s tough. That’s also honest—a value that Dems miss mightily since Obama left the White House.

California is tough and honest, too, no matter how conservative demagogues try to paint it as a socialist, libtard dystopia. It’s now the world’s fifth largest economy, all by itself, having beaten the entire UK. It’s the largest state by population and by Electoral College votes. Unlike many so-called “conservative” states, it has a huge budget surplus, which it maintains without skimping on social services for its people. And among the large industrial states, California leads the nation in non-hydropower renewable energy (mostly wind and solar), without reducing its economic clout.

If Americans outside of California really want to make our nation great again, they could do far worse than follow California’s example. Harris might convince them that California’s way is the wave of the future. Then we could have a thoroughly progressive national government for the first time since another Californian—a gravelly voiced con-man from show business named Ronald Reagan—got Americans to see their own federal government as a bumbler and their enemy.

Of course, it’s still early days. There’s a lot of time and space for Warren or Harris to stumble or to show their stuff, and enough for the other women who’ve announced to distinguish themselves. But it would be political malpractice for the Dems, after witnessing Trump’s rout of the nearly-all-male GOP field in 2016, and Speaker Pelosi’s recent rout of Trump himself, to ignore the obvious facts that women are on a political roll, and that Trump simply can’t handle women who are both powerful and tough. (Hillary was neither, although she tried.)

Something deep in Trump’s twisted psyche seems to snap whenever he confronts a woman whom he can’t dismiss as a bimbo or sexual conquest. Harris the prosecutor might get him to melt down on national TV, and then we could be rid of him. Even if not, either Harris or Warren would make a far better president. And either would put a nice seal on the promise of women’s suffrage, which by then will have languished, without making a woman president, for an entire century.

Endnote: For a delightfully insightful analysis of just how nonsensical and self-contradictory PM May’s proposed Brexit plan is, see this opinion piece. Links to Popular Recent Posts

Diatribes of Jay

04 February 2019

Who Can Beat Trump?

Trump’s SOTU Speech and the Response

Flipping Key Southern States

Links to Popular Recent Posts

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