Visions of a Landslide Heave into View

Never in my 79 years have I seen such a seismic shift in party prospects so late in a presidential campaign. Never have I seen a party so rapidly leave despair behind, find hope and begin to feel exultation.

It’s hard to believe that only five days have passed since President Biden stepped down from the upcoming contest. Yet every one of those days not only validates his decision; it gives us ever-greater reason to thank him for his wisdom and patriotism.

Experience matters. That was the primary reason for Biden’s reluctance to go, and it had a lot of merit. But once he left the field, and once Kamala Harris claimed the Democratic nomination, the balance of experience became again perhaps the most lopsided in my 79 years, save for the 2020 campaign itself.

On the Democratic side, Harris has had seven years as San Francisco’s District Attorney, six years as California’s Attorney General, four years as California’s junior Senator, and now 3.5 years as Vice-President. All those are elective offices. That’s a total of 20.5 years experience in electoral politics, a whole generation.

In contrast, former president Trump’s sole experience was four years as president, the only political office he’s ever both run for and held. And GOP Vice-Presidential candidate JP Vance has had a grand total of less than seventeen months in public office, as Ohio’s junior senator.

That vast difference in political experience is beginning to show.

One of the things that pols learn from experience is not to offend whole classes of voters gratuitously. Remember Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables”? That single remark may have cost her the presidency. When coupled with her “tin ear” about most people having two email accounts, and her refusal to discuss her closed-door speeches to Wall Street, it almost certainly did.

Well, not yet two weeks into the most consequential campaign in US history, JD Vance did something arguably worse. Not only had he gratuitously insulted Democratic leaders in 2021 as “a bunch of childless cat ladies with miserable lives.” This week he doubled down. With all the certainty of a sophomore proclaiming a self-discovered universal truth, Vance declared that parents of children should have “a bigger say in how our democracy actually functions” than other voters. (I know, it’s hard to believe any sentient pol would actually make that claim; but here it is: link. (Set the timer at 21:44 and prepare to be amazed.)

This is what you get when you appoint a hillbilly who went to Yale to run for the second highest office in the land after putting less than eighteen months of political experience under his belt. You get sophomoric and voter-disdaining hubris.

What will happen next is anyone’s guess. Will Trump see the gaffe and try to rein Vance in? Good luck with that! Vance undoubtedly sees Trump as little more than a deranged stepping stone to the presidency without having to earn his spurs. So the Trump-Vance campaign may crash and burn while not yet a month old.

Even if it doesn’t yet, there’s always Trump himself. He appears never to read his briefing papers. As president, he reversed himself frequently, often appearing to hear only the last person to whisper in his ear. He lied incessantly. He had trouble reaching simple logical conclusions. This is undoubtedly what caused Rex Tillerson, the former CEO of Exxon-Mobil who became Trump’s Secretary of State and whom Trump later fired, to call Trump “a f*cking moron.”

Experienced pols do none of these things. They read their briefing papers. They discuss important decisions with all their advisers, at length and in detail. And they try to make sure they won’t have to go back on them, or even qualify them, at least not right away. Millions of voters—at least those who are not already members the Cult of Trump—are beginning to understand these fundamental truths.

At the same time, millions of occasional, reluctant, female, minority and young voters, tired of two old men who can’t seem to express themselves coherently (in Trump’s case) or forcefully (in Biden’s) are beginning to see the light. They are coming to understand that a Black and South Asian woman, who looks like many of them and knows how prejudice feels, has the experience and the heft to win and to represent them as no one else (except perhaps Obama) ever has before. And so Harris polled 46% higher than Biden among Hispanic “double-haters” (those who dislike both Biden and Trump), even before Biden stepped down.

If you don’t think all this has the makings of a Democratic landslide in about one hundred days, then I question your imagination. So let’s work like hell for every one of those days, but with hope at our backs and wind in our sails.

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¡Look at this creep!

Take a look at this clip of the Demagogue, Kamala Harris’ opponent. Bear through the PBS promos and run the timer from 4:44 to 5:04. Then stop the clip and think a bit.

Is this whom we want as our supreme leader? In a mere twenty seconds, he gives us a torrent of name-calling, name mispronouncing (apparently deliberate), lies and exaggerations.

There he was, characterizing his new opponent with the very same epithet—“lying”—that he had used against Joe Biden before Joe stepped down. Does the Demagogue even lack imagination, in addition to all the other finer human virtues?

Funny thing, that. According to the Washington Post, the Demagogue told 30,573 lies and near lies during the four years of his presidency. If there were an Olympic contest for lying, he would surely get the gold. Can we all say “projection”?

So our Republican candidate is not just extreme and lawless. He’s not just visibly suffering senile dementia and derangement. He appears to be impersonating a six-year-old or eight-year-old bully on a grammar-school playground.

That’s why I used the Spanish-style double exclamation marks in my title above. There’s nothing in English strong enough to express my amazement and astonishment that this creep is even running seriously for president, let alone has a credible chance of winning. If he wins, he’ll be our Nero, Caligula and Commodus, all rolled into one.

Why don’t our media show this? Isn’t that the sixty-four million dollar question? When you put clips like this together with his frequent word salads, things like this must occur several times a week, if not once a day, especially at rallies. Every single one should be on our national news, virtually every night. Our people need to see precisely what level of derangement and degeneration they might be putting into the White House.

Our media are self-evidently not doing this job. So alternative media must. At 79, I’m too old to do it. And anyway, it’s not a one-man job.

We need a Website to report the Demagogue’s puerile lies, taunts, word salads and worse in real time, in short but accurate video clips. Persuadable voters must see precisely whom they are considering giving our nuclear codes, in his own words and voice. Democratic ad-makers need a readily available, non-restricted source of clips.

The site’s name should be something simple and accurate, like “Trumpisms” or “Trump served Raw.” (“Trumpistry”, with its reference to sophistry, would only aggrandize his puerile, deranged speech.)

If our mainstream media can’t step up, is it too much to ask an ad-hoc group to step up, just for the next hundred days, to keep us all apprised of how quickly the Demagogue is degenerating? Every puerile rant, every gaffe, every word salad, every sudden and unexplained reversal of so-called “policy” at whim, and every gross misstatement or exaggeration deserves video-clip recordation on a single, easily searchable online site, without copyright protection.

We need to put it all out there so the worst derangements can “go viral.” Our voters desperately need to see and know them all before it gets too late.



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The Kamala Harris Advantage

How and why can Kamala Harris win when Hillary Clinton did not? I’ve been thinking a lot about that question since Harris became VP. The answer depends a lot on her experience. She was San Francisco’s District Attorney for six years, from 2011 to 2017. Then she was California’s Attorney General for four years, from 2017 to 2021.

That’s a total of eleven years of leadership in law enforcement, including lots of criminal trial work. In short, as Harris has already noted to put the fear of God into our criminal Demagogue, she spent a large part of her career putting criminals like him away.

That work is not just a throw-away campaign line. It reflects a deeply engrained set of experience, skills, and values.

Successful prosecutors acquire an essential skill for politics: speaking to ordinary people. In a criminal court, they’re called “juries.” If you speak down to juries, if you make arguments too complex for their full comprehension, or if you fail to address basic human values, you will lose more cases than you win. Harris’ career speaks for itself: she rose rapidly and stayed in place for eleven years, becoming a master of these basic political skills.

There’s also something about prosecutors that many non-lawyers don’t know. Because they wield the State’s awesome power against individuals—the power to punish—they are subject to a host of strong ethical rules that apply especially to them.

The most important is the “Brady rule,” named for the Brady v. Maryland case in which the Supreme Court established it. It requires prosecutors to disclose to criminal defendants and their attorneys any material exculpatory evidence that they come across. If they don’t, a conviction can be dismissed, for that reason alone, on the defendant’s motion.

Under these and other rules and customs, prosecutors learn to deal with ordinary people straightforwardly, truthfully, fairly and without condescension. In my view, Hillary Clinton failed to do that in her presidential campaign, and that’s why she lost.

I don’t want to re-open old wounds, and of course I did vote for Hillary Clinton myself. But it’s important to understand why she lost, and why Harris has a big, innate advantage, in part by virtue of her career experience.

The biggest error that, in my view, led to Clinton’s defeat (with the help of the outrageous Comey disclosure), was “E-mail Gate.” I don’t believe for a moment that her using her personal e-mail account for official business as Secretary of State created a serious security risk. But it represented a grievous political “tin ear.”

Everyone who works for someone else had and has two e-mail accounts: one for personal messages, and the other for work. In mixing up the two, primarily if not solely for her own personal convenience, Hillary implied that she was better than everyone else and didn’t have to work by the same rules. Then she compounded the error by insisting she had a right to use her personal e-mail account for official business. A seasoned prosecutor like Harris would never have made those mistakes.

Add to that Clinton’s refusal to divulge the contents of her closed-door speeches to Wall Street—in the aftermath of the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression—and you have clear evidence of an aristocratic attitude that has no place in American democracy. Many ordinary voters simply didn’t trust Hillary Clinton, and that’s why she lost. A seasoned prosecutor like Harris had to earn ordinary people’s trust every time she stepped before a jury.

In the old days, serving as a prosecutor was a tried and true staircase to political office, especially in times of corruption and scandal like the present. It’s a shame that so few candidates for public office take that path today.

But Harris represents the best of that tried-and-true tradition. We all yearn for a return to the plain-speaking, honest and fair traditions of our past. We yearn for it especially now, when corruption, profit seeking and self-seeking seem to be eroding the foundations of our Republic, especially among Republicans.

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The Kamala Harris "Miracle"

When President Biden first bowed out, my reaction was immense relief. Now, just two days later, I’m filled with awe.

In just over 48 hours, a fractious party known for its circular firing squads has united behind Kamala Harris. If not complete, the new sense of unity has been decisive and impressive.

Harris now reportedly has enough pledged delegates to claim the nomination legitimately, even in an “open” convention. She motivated over $100 million in donations in a single 24-hour period—an all-time record. Not a single Democratic rival has risen to challenge her for the top job. And an ever-expanding single-day Zoom meeting of Black female supporters grew to 44,000 participants before it was done.

All of this happened in about two days. It was as if some sort of dam had broken.

I’m not sure what was responsible. Part of it was surely the immense relief (which I also felt) at the thought that our democracy’s destruction by a vengeful and demented Demagogue no longer appears inevitable. But I think there was more, a lot more.

My aging memory tells me that Harris is a strong debater. I remember that she scored points off of President Biden himself in the 2020 primary debates. I think that was part of why he picked her as his VP. After all, any VP is widely expected to serve as an “attack dog.”

Yet Harris hasn’t performed that role in her 3.5 years as VP. Instead, except for her strong support for female reproductive rights, she has kept as low a profile as any VP in my memory.

Could all that have been by design, whether by her, President Biden or both?

I’m beginning to think so.

Today, Kamala Harris seems the Demagogue’s antithesis in every way. She has a lovely smile and and easy grace, while he’s a bragging, lying, growling, testosterone-fueled bully. Her views on many issues are poorly known or speculative, while his are expressed loudly and repeatedly in lies, insults and slander. Not only does this give her room to maneuver; it also lets voters suspect, quite reasonably, that she might be persuadable. Where she seems full of love and optimism, he is full of fire and brimstone, vengeance, fear and hate. Where she projects hope, he touts doom and an apocalypse.

Funny thing, that. Two of the most successful politicians of my lifetime—Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama—both used optimism and hope to win elections. Reagan called it “morning in America.” Obama used what Sarah Palin derided as “that hopey changey thing,” but it worked. Could it be that American voters are tired of gloom and doom?

There is virtue in keeping a positive message with little detailed policy prescription. You invite voters to project their needs onto you. You appear open-minded and non-didactic. And if you keep that mien while actually in office, you invite the respectful, open and conciliatory negotiation that is the essence of democracy, or at least that was before the advent of Newt Gingrich, Mitch McConnell, the Demagogue and the co-called “Freedom Caucus.”

Ambiguity suits a real leader. Why? A true leader knows that the best anyone can do in a democracy, even the President, is to push the lever a little in the desired direction before the final decision is made. That’s what distinguishes democracy from despotism.

Hope springs eternal, and Harris is quite clever in using it as her vision for the future and a point of leverage for her campaign. Maybe, just maybe, we fight fire best not with fire, but with cooling water. Maybe, just maybe, Democratic, Independent and a few Republican voters are beginning to appreciate these points. Maybe, just maybe, President Biden and Vice-President Harris planned it this way all along. If so, then maybe, just maybe, the vote in November will be far less a cliffhanger than a landslide like that for FDR in 1932.

If so, there is nothing that the Demagogue or his party can do or say to affect the result. He would need a personality and a brain transplant. He is utterly incapable of keeping his many flaws to himself.

Next to him, Kamala Harris seems like an angel. Best for an angel to stay not entirely transparent and a bit out of reach.



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Thank You, Joe!

Dear Mr. President,

When I heard the news that you are stepping down, like millions of Americans, I felt a huge surge of relief. It was strong enough to bring tears.

My relief had little to do with you. You’ve already saved our democracy once. You did it by over seven million votes nationwide. But our Founders bequeathed us a bit of pernicious nonsense called the Electoral College. So you really won in 2020 by less than 150,000 votes in seven so-called “Battleground” states.

I’m 79, two years behind you in age. I know from monthly, if not weekly, personal experience how quickly, unexpectedly and erratically decline comes. And I have a deep conviction that your chances for pulling the rabbit out of the hat again, four years later, are far too low for comfort.

The Demagogue is now better prepared, with a plan for despotism behind him called “Project 2025,” only slightly ameliorated in the Republican Party’s official platform. The entire GOP is also united behind him, a phenomenon uncannily reminiscent of Adolf Hitler’s rise in 1930s Germany. And a phalanx of talented people, in it just for power, fame or money, are lining up on his side.

So the stakes now are higher than in 2020. Democracy itself is on the line. And you are four years older, weaker and less sharp, facing an emboldened Demagogue with thousands of lesser leaders—all of whom should know better—and some seventy million cult followers behind him. Yet you are sixteen years beyond the standard American retirement age — nearly two decades for the French.

If you had stayed on, you would have faced the greatest threat in the history of American democracy, and the greatest globally since Julius Caesar, at an age when the vast majority of people in human history have retired or have died.

So thank you, Joe Biden. Thank you acknowledging the inevitable. Thank you for having saved our democracy once already. Thank you for making clear the threat we face. Thank you for understanding that it’s time to pass the torch to those who will bear the cost and the consequences of the coming election for the rest of their lives.

I have no idea who will take your place. Like millions of Americans, I have an indelible memory of Vice President Kamala Harris, during the 2020 debates, looking wistfully, and smiling, at the fly on Mike Pence’s forehead. I remember vividly her cogent and aggressive debating. And I hope that, if the Demagogue feels the sharp point of those debating skills again, coming from a female who is both part Black and part Asian, he might melt down on national TV, destroying his candidacy right there and then. He is hardly known for his firm reason or self-control.

Whether or not that pleasant fantasy comes to pass, I’m quite sure that the process of picking a new standard bearer, and and new VP, will energize the Democratic Party more than anything that has happened in the past year. Four months may not be much time, but they can pack in a lot of hope, energy and excitement.

I also hope that the Dems will devote one full day, at their national convention, to showcasing your leadership, the advances you have made, the legislation you pushed for and signed, your Executive Orders, and all the other benefits of your presidency. This “thank you” fest would serve two purposes: (1) acknowledging our nation’s immense debt to your leadership; and (2) letting a national audience know —in depth and in detail—how much you and the Dems have already done for all of us.

As a geezer myself, I offer you special thanks, for having the courage and wisdom to recognize that your time has passed. As Lincoln once said, under very different circumstances, you have given the nation the “last full measure of devotion.” And we are all grateful. Now, under your guidance, if not direct command, we can get on with the business of preserving your living legacy: the survival of American democracy and the Enlightenment.

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J.D. Vance’s Fairy Tale

“How many Texans must freeze and broil, ‘fore they know that science is real?” — my respectfully submitted addition to Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan’s questions “blowin’ in the wind.”

Last night I witnessed an extraordinary spectacle. It was a longish fairy tale. Usually, adults tell fairy tales to children. But this time, the younger told it to the old.

J.D. Vance, age 39, told it to a estimated crowd of some 50,000 Republicans. As far as I could tell from what I could see on my TV screen, his audience’s median age was about 55. A proud father of three young children, Vance told his tale mostly to people who could be his kids’ grandparents.

It was a fine and comforting fairy tale. If only we elect Donald J. Trump as president again, with Vance as VP, we can all go back to living in nineteenth-century small-town America. We can all know, love and respect each other. We can live our lives in peaceful certitude. We need stand and fight only when foreign hordes surge over the very hills behind our homes.

When we die, we can be buried in the old town cemetery on the hill, along with seven generations of our forebears. And while we live, we can “Drill, Baby, Drill!” We can stay energy independent, strong and wealthy by supplying ourselves and the world with the fossil fuels that, even now, are making our planet uninhabitable.

Vance himself didn’t start that chant. His audience did. But he egged his audience on with not-so-subtle references to energy independence and trusted sources of power. His elders picked up the cue. Like children recalling an oft-told tale heard many times before, they began the chant in unison, “Drill, baby, drill!”

As a whole, Vance’s fairly tale went right to our biological evolutionary roots. We self-described Homo sapiens evolved in small clans of some thirty individuals. We all knew each other and, to some extent, loved each other. We tolerated the clan bully and the clan idiot because we had known them from birth.

This model of life is in our DNA. So it has an attraction—a psychic “pull”—that’s hard to resist. Vance exploited this evolutionary reality brilliantly. With his handsome if bearded face, his simple language, his slow pacing, and his joyous response to his audience’s spontaneous chants, he resembled nothing so much as a loving camp counselor speaking by an outdoor fire at a children’s summer camp.

Some darker aspecs of Vance’s speech recalled the Nazis’ call to “blood and soil,” But as Vance told the tale, it was not a call to social dominance, far less ethnic purity. Vance himself touted equal treatment of all. No matter that his audience was almost entirely white and old. He said the right words, and the cameras found the few Black, brown and Asian faces in the audience.

But we don’t live in small towns of thirty anymore. We live in great nations of hundreds of millions or billions of people. As desirable as it may be, it’s physically and practically impossible for us to get to know, let alone love, each other. So we need rules, customs, norms and, yes, traditions. We need abstractions that we all honor and respect. Some call this “law.”

Yet Vance told us, early on, that “we don’t fight for abstractions.” Instead, he wants us to vote for a man whose abstract thinking is totally focused on how to help himself.

In 1992, Bill Clinton toppled a competent sitting president, who had been Vice President, Director of the CIA, and Ambassador the UN. In comparison, Clinton had had only two terms as governor of Arkansas—hardly our most populous, richest, or most productive state. When later asked how this unexpected loss had come about, the Senior Bush cited “that vision thing.”

His son, George W. Bush, avoided the same mistake. With the Supreme Court’s help, he beat Al Gore, a much more experienced and smarter pol, with a grand vision for America. As I pointed out in an essay published later, Dubya’ vision was never realized, and anyway he didn’t have much of a plan to make it real. The conclusion I reached is that, in presidential elections, vision matters more than reality, even more than competence.

Is Vance’s fairy tale that kind of vision? Is the slogan on all those annoying red hats, “Make America Great Again”? Does Joe Biden—for all his competence, empathy for the underdog and solid accomplishments during his presidency and his long political career, have a competing vision? If not, can Biden win?

The answers, my friend, are blowin’ in the wind, precisely as Dylan sung.



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Presidential Immunity and Judge Luttig

Ten days ago, I published a post on the Roberts Court’s decision in Trump v. U.S., the presidential immunity case. In it, I reasoned (among other things) that the Court had gone rogue, completely overstepped its judicial function, and had flagrantly violated Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution. It had acted like an unelected legislature and had made up a complex test for presidential immunity out of whole cloth, without ever looking at the facts of the case on appeal.

I’m just a blogger and retired law professor, and my main field of study and research was intellectual property law. So it’s nice to have my views not only confirmed, but immeasurably strengthened, by an expert in constitutional law.

As you may recall from the House January 6 Hearings, Judge J. Michael Luttig is a Republican constitutional law scholar of national repute. He served as an Assistant Attorney General under Republican President G.H.W. Bush, and for fifteen years as a judge on the United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

In an extended online interview, he laid out his evaluation of the Roberts Court’s decision in Trump v. U.S. with no holds barred. The interview runs some 35 minutes, so I’ll save readers time by summarizing the highlights, in roughly chronological order:

1. Judge Luttig saw the decision as not drawn from law at all. Instead, he considered it self-evidently “reverse engineered” from a predetermined result: giving Donald J. Trump practical immunity from the charges against him, especially those relating to the January 6 Insurrection and other attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

2. Judge Luttig compared the decision to the Supreme Court’s worst-ever products, including Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) (citing history for the proposition that Black people were “so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit”) and Plessey v. Ferguson (1896) (the infamous “separate but equal” case overruled in Brown v. Board of Education (1954)).

3. Like me, Judge Luttig saw the official-unofficial acts test as having been created by the Roberts majority “out of whole cloth.”

4. Judge Luttig characterized the reasoning in Trump v. U.S. as “sophomoric” and “childish” and the result as “astounding” and “stunning.”

5. He reasoned that the Roberts Court’s test for immunity could be applied to immunize a president who sells pardons, or who orders a drone strike on a political rival.

6. Judge Luttig stated that nothing in our Constitution or in nearly 250 years of law following it justified the Roberts majority’s reasoning or result.

7. He saw the decision as a “cruel irony,” coming just days before the Fourth of July, because it destroys our Founders’ checks and balances for both sitting and former presidents and essentially makes our President a King, contravening our Founders’ deepest desires and their belief that “no man is above the law.”

The title of my own post was “The Court Lays the Groundwork for Despotism.” That title had given me some writer’s qualms: Was I too bold? Did I overstate?

Those readers who saw all or part of Judge Luttig’s testimony in the House January 6 Hearings know how careful and often understated he is. That he would use this sort of stark language suggests not just a five-alarm fire, but an air-raid siren warning us to dive into fallout shelters.

At very least, it should mellow those pols and voters who think that packing the Supreme Court, or depriving it of jurisdiction and setting up an alternative court (as Article III, Section 2, Clause 2, permits Congress to do) is too strong an antidote for this rogue and lawless Court. We all know what either such remedy would require: a Democratic president and Democratic majorities in both Houses of Congress. Let’s get to work.



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How Biden Can Win

THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT POST I’VE EVER WRITTEN ON THIS BLOG, AND ONE OF THE SHORTEST. PLEASE READ IT.

OK. I get it now, at last. Joe Biden is our candidate. Period.

Four months is too short a time to introduce anyone new to the 81 million voters who voted for Biden in 2020. And anyway Wes Moore, while immensely promising, is too green and doesn’t even want to run. My bad for having touted him at this inopportune time. Mea culpa.

But Moore has something that Biden can have but doesn’t yet: a vision. So did all three of our living Democratic ex-presidents: Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama.

All three were almost complete unknowns nationally when they ran for the top job. Jimmy Carter was an unknown peanut farmer who had become governor of Georgia. He ran, and won, on a vision of healing the wounds of Watergate, easing the sting of the Nixon pardon, and bridging the deep divisions of the Vietnam War.

Bill Clinton ran on a vision of compromise and accommodation. He accommodated welfare critics by reforming welfare, and he let Wall Street and the good times rip with the bill that eventually produced the Crash of 2008. I think it was a bad vision, disastrous for our nation and our Party. But it got him elected, twice, from a standing start as a two-time Governor of Arkansas, hardly the brightest star in our fifty-state firmament.

Barack Obama is the strongest example. He had been a state senator in Illinois and was in his very first term as a United States Senator. Four years before his 2008 run, he had burst into public recognition with his world-beating keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Like Clinton, he had promoted national unity and harmony, but with a call for a “United States of America,” not a “red America and a blue America.”

Unlike Clinton, Obama did not compromise progressive principles to win. And unlike Bernie Sanders, he was smart enough never to use death-spell words like “socialism” to describe them. He just described them in functional, practical terms, cause and effect.

And so, despite the most godawful, mean, openly racist Republican opposition of my 79 years, Obama was able to make the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) law. Now over 40 million people have health insurance under his vision. For many of us, his being our first Black president was an unspoken part of his vision: a nation in which things like that no longer matter.

It may hurt to acknowledge it. But in some ways Trump is just like Carter, Bill Clinton, and Obama. He was a newcomer with a vision. His vision is right there on all those annoying red caps: “Make America Great Again.”

It doesn’t matter that it’s totally non-specific. It doesn’t matter that it implies we’ve lost a bit of our luster. What matters is that it’s a vision: a simple, easily digestible call to something better. It’s a look to the future, not the past, and it sticks in your mind. And if you can put aside your loathing for the man, you have to admit that it’s a positive goal.

Trump has other visions, too. They are not all so positive, but they strike chords far beyond his conservative (some would say “reactionary”), often rural base. They include: bringing good jobs back onshore, pushing China back, strengthening Christian religious belief, providing government support for religion, supporting traditional marriage and traditional sexual roles, stopping illegal immigration, a bit of coddling (if not supremacy) for disgruntled whites, and supporting traditional values generally.

All of these visions have a distinct flavor of nostalgia about them. So they are immensely attractive to a largely aging population. And older voters vote more reliably than others.

The contrast with Biden is stark. Biden has accomplishments. You can assemble a whole list of statutes and executive and agency rules and orders for which he’s responsible. Each of them has made life better for millions of people. Together they add up to trillions of dollars of investment by government in our people and our future.

But all together—and even with all those dollars—they don’t make a vision. They are by definition parts of the past, not the future.

Biden also has character, empathy, experience, and good judgment. These shine through, despite his lifelong difficulty speaking clearly and his recent difficulties with an aging memory (something all my age know too well). And on his worst day, Biden’s character is infinitely more desirable than Trump’s.

But character, too, is not a vision. It’s a personal attribute, not a compact source of inspiration or a map for the road ahead.

As we approach the most consequential election in our nation’s history, you could say that the odds are against us. In 1992, Bill Clinton came out of nowhere, to beat George Herbert Walker Bush, who was a competent, experienced, effective sitting president, and who had also been a Vice President, CIA Director, and UN Ambassador. In 2008, Barack Obama came out of nowhere to beat a distinguished long-time US Senator and universally acknowledged war hero, John McCain. In both cases, a key winning ingredient was vision.

In my view, Joe Biden has none right now. His “vision” is his good character, the long list of statutes, orders and regulations that he has pushed for and signed, and the column of numbers of dollars that they represent. None of that is a vision. To many voters, it’s all as dry as dust. The details are quickly forgotten, and the tone is as inspiring as reading a dictionary.

Joe needs a vision, and he needs it fast. Fortunately, a vision is much easier to conjure up than a national reputation for someone with none.

Maybe our Democratic Party needs a Frank Luntz, but one who works for the angels, not the Devil. Maybe our three living ex-presidents, together or separately, can help Joe create a vision in time to avoid the destruction of our democracy and our Republic. They, Joe, and we all have less than four months.


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Vision and Values

“That vision thing.”— President George Herbert Walker Bush, explaining why he lost to Bill Clinton

The two “v” words in my title will fix the fate of our nation. It happened twice before, when the stakes were not nearly as high.

In 1992, the virtually unknown Governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, beat incumbent President George Herbert Walker Bush. That Bush had been a congressman, Ambassador to the United Nations, Director of Central Intelligence, and Vice President (under Reagan), before becoming president himself. Yet he lost to a virtual national unknown.

When asked to describe why, he famously said, “That vision thing.” Clinton had had a vision for where he wanted to take the county. The Elder Bush just had his competence and experience, even including the top job. The rest is history.

Apparently the Bush family learned from this experience. In 2004, John Kerry lost his challenge to incumbent President George W. Bush. The younger Bush had already started the War in Iraq, on the false pretense that Saddam had nukes. It was our second most misguided war in our history, after Vietnam.

His much-derided “Bushisms” made clear he was far from a master of the English language, let alone a great orator. John Kerry had been a distinguished Senator from Massachusetts. Long before, he had fought and been wounded in Vietnam, and on returning, had protested against it, then gone into politics. He was a rather austere and modest man of great intelligence and wisdom. Yet he lost.

In an essay I wrote in 2012, here’s how I described why:

“What mattered was that Dubya had the vision. It didn’t matter that his vision of an Iraq and a Middle East reconfigured by war was contrary to all of history and common sense. It didn’t matter that his home “ownership society” was already under erosion by rogue banks and lax regulation. It didn’t matter that his attempt to privatize Social Security was retrograde to history and contrary to every poll of what ordinary people wanted. It didn’t matter that he has absolutely no diplomatic skill and could only preach to his choir.”

“What mattered, in the end, was that Dubya had a vision for the future that sounded attractive and plausible, and Kerry had none. Vision trumped [pardon the pun, today] a more-than-plausible claim of greater competence. It will (and probably should), every time.”

Could the same thing happen this November? I think it’s likely, if nothing changes. For all his faults—and they are legion—Trump has a simple vision for his voters and his Cult. Expressed in my own words, it goes like this:

“You’ve been had. The Democrats and the elite sold your factories and jobs to China. You’ve been left to find demeaning work outside your homes because your factories have closed. Your children have moved away. Your religion and your rural and small-town values have been ignored and disparaged. No one cares about you, but I do. I am your retribution.”

The last sentence, of course, is actually Trump’s.

It’s a dark vision, to be sure. It isn’t easy to realize, but neither were the Younger Bush’s war in Iraq easy to win, his “ownership society” easy to implement, or Social Security easy to privatize. Apparently, voters don’t second-guess a vision if they like it. And that’s a large part of the point.

But wait! Trump has an even shorter, punchier vision. It’s on all those ubiquitous red hats: “Make America Great Again.” It may be corny; it’s definitely not specific; and it does imply that we’ve lost some of our luster. But the millions of people who wear those hats proudly show how powerful a vision it is. Trump may be a malignant narcissist and, as Rex Tillerson said, “a f-ing moron,” but he knows how to inspire and incite.

So what vision does Joe Biden have today? It’s hard to tell. He certainly wants to bring labor unions back, and that’s a good thing. But workers who live in “right to work” states (mostly red today) may have forgotten what unions are like. Or they may have succumbed to the propaganda that union dues and union rules are infringements on workers’ “freedom.”

Beyond that, Joe has a laundry list of dry-as-dust legislation: the Infrastructure Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act, Covid relief, etc. All together, they amount to trillions of dollars to improve ordinary people’s lives in America. But even all together, they don’t begin to make a vision.

What makes a vision is values. The younger Bush’s vision had them: (1) a Middle East, or at least an Iraq, democratic and free from the tyrant Saddam; (2) fighting the terrorists there, not here; (3) an “ownership society” where everyone who wants one owns a home, (4) and a richer, better, privatized Social Security, where everyone has a piece of the soaring Dow. Stripped to their essence, these values are: (1) peace and democracy in the Middle East; (2) peace at home; (3) equality in homeownership; and (4) equality in wealth. Who in their right mind wouldn’t want all that?

This last week I’ve been touting Maryland Governor Wes Moore as an alternative to Biden. Having been beaten around the head and shoulders by comments from more practical folk, I now acknowledge that Moore is still light in governing experience. And anyway four months is far too little time to introduce a man virtually unknown outside of Maryland to the 81-plus million voters who backed Biden in 2020.

But if you want to see what “vision” and “values” look like, set the timer in Moore’s victory speech to 16:08 and watch for just nine minutes. In that short a time, Moore creates a grand vision with the following values: (1) restoring women’s bodily autonomy in reproduction; (2) producing smarter kids by following science and giving them early-childhood education; (3) reviving Enlightenment values by making everybody better off, and leaving no one behind, which Moore defines as part of “patriotism;” and (4) creating “a healthier and wealthier Maryland.”

Can Biden win without that kind of vision? Maybe. But “maybe” is not good enough when the alternative is a loss of our democracy and likely a turn toward full-blown fascism.

And while four months may be far too short a time to introduce a national unknown like Moore to 81-plus million voters, it’s ample time for Biden to announce a vision to match his accomplishments and guide his next administration.

The thing about a vision is that it’s goals and values. It doesn’t have to include means. If nothing else, George W. Bush taught us that. It doesn’t matter if the vision is hard to achieve, or even impossible: Bush taught us that, too. As MAGA proves, the more general and aspirational, the better.

Here are some values that Biden and his team could mould into a vision:

(1) restoring women’s bodily autonomy in reproduction; (2) producing superior children through early-childhood education; (3) making college or university affordable to any kid who can get in; (3) bringing leading-edge manufacturing back onshore; (4) restoring and promoting leadership in science and technology, not just software; (5) housing all Americans, including the now homeless; (6) fighting planetary heating by reaching national net-zero carbon emissions by 2045; (7) retraining oil and gas workers to work on renewable energy; (8) restricting immigration to those who can help us excel; and (9) achieving justice and equality in policing.

There are, no doubt, other values just as important, or more so. I’m not a politician. But we do have three living past presidents: Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. Not coincidentally, each of them rose from relative obscurity to the top job by having some sort of vision. Jimmy Carter had a vision of a kinder, gentler America and universal human rights. Obama’s vision, if I recall correctly, was as simple as “one America, not a red and blue America,” at least initially.

Maybe the three exes should huddle with Joe Biden and come up with something short, sweet and winning. The last thing we need is a large committee to debate and bureaucratize the message to death.

Four months, I now admit, is too short a time to change horses. But it’s plenty of time to create and tout a vision to match “Make American Great Again,” with perhaps more values, more specificity, and more substance. The means to realize the vision can wait for Biden’s second term. The three exes (perhaps Jimmy virtually) can mold and polish the vision with all their accumulated wisdom and once-winning political skill.



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More on Wes Moore

My post on “Wes Moore for President” didn’t go over well on DailyKos. Most commenters treated me like an idiot apostate. They taught me how hard it is to change the direction of a train rushing down the tracks, let alone one carrying anxious and terrified Democrats.

Some of it was my own fault. I didn’t make clear that I’m not looking for a strongman, just a candidate who can defeat a strongman. More precisely, I want a candidate who can exploit, if not overpower, our species’ evolutionary longing for a strongman in tough times.

I suppose I also didn’t dispel some natural suspicions about me. I’m 79. So am I just an old white geezer looking for a Black Messiah, the second coming of Barack Obama? That’s a legitimate question to ask, and I asked it of myself, too.

After due consideration, I think the answer is “no.” And the best explanation I can give is something I neglected to say in my first essay. Les Moore is not just smart; he sees the holes in basic values that threaten to gut our democracy.

Not only that. He laid them out, in simple, easy-to-understand terms, in his victory speech on the night he won the governorship of Maryland. (Click here for the speech, and set the timer 16:08, after the obligatory thanks to others.)

Here they are, in the order in which he introduced them:

1. Women’s bodily autonomy in reproduction;

2. The overweening importance of our children and their education, especially early-childhood education;

3. The importance of following science, especially in number (2) (Actually Moore laid this out, as a basis for pre-K, in another, later speech.); and

4. The Enlightenment value of the greatest good for the greatest number, which Moore described, in different words, in defining “patriotism.”

By inference, I would add a point 5, as follows:

5. Long-term planning for societal safety, improvement and perfection. (This follows from points 2 and 3, because early-childhood education won’t show big results for a generation.)

Tribal issues and hopes aside, I honestly believe that, if we could follow these five basic values religiously in our politics and government—especially in the near future—we could fix most or all of what ails us, plus take a big bite out of planetary heating. Yet never before, in my 79 years, had I heard a politician lay them out in a single speech, let alone in the heady atmosphere on the very night of his or her electoral win. (Most pols focus on the pandering and tricks that helped them win.)

This speech is what brought Moore to my attention like a supernova. I can’t help but think that he planned this part of his speech well in advance, and that his Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford had something to do with it.

JFK excelled in rhetoric. Nearly everyone my age, and many a lot younger, recall his “Ask not . . .” line in his inaugural and its call to national service. RFK, MLK and Obama excelled in rhetoric, too. But the first two were cut down in the primes, just like JFK, and Obama was stymied in his prime by Mitch McConnell (may his name be damned) and a racist backlash. Yet here, right before our eyes, is a possible successor who may not be quite as soaring in his rhetoric, but who knows the substance of what ails us and can lead us to fix it.

Many Democrats are smart. Some of them—Buttigieg, Harris, Raimondo, Newsom and Whitmer—have more political experience than Moore. Buttigieg even beats Moore in length of military service, which I see as essential for our next president to face the threat of (and clandestine planning for) a second insurrection. But none of them, and no pol I’ve seen in my long life, has so succinctly laid out the key lapses in our basic values, let alone in an inaugural speech.

Without those values, and a citizenry that holds them dear, our Constitution and laws are just pieces of paper. With the aid of the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, Evangelical fundamentalists, our ideologically skewed Supreme Court, Project 2025, and the theory of the “Unitary Executive,” that’s precisely what Trump and his Cult are hell bent on showing us.

We desperately need an effective antidote, and Moore may be one.


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Wes Moore for President

My most recent post here was not my finest. I asked President Biden to step down. But as one commentator noted, I didn’t suggest an alternative. And I implied (but never said!) that we Dems need a strongman to overcome the lure of Trump. What I should have said is that we need a candidate with the strength, vitality and youth to beat the appeal of a strongman like Trump. In this post, I’ll try to fix all that.

Ever since he won the governorship of Maryland, I’ve been watching Wes Moore. Right now, today, if we had a ranked-choice-voting primary to replace President Biden, he would be my first choice. Here’s why, in rough order of importance:

1. Calmth. Yes, I’m coining a new word here. But we need a new word to describe a special quality that Moore has. He has a calm, measured and yet decisive manner of speaking. It works like flame retardant on a bonfire.

Watch a few of his speeches and you’ll see what I mean. After mere minutes of listening, your adrenal glands subside and your brain kicks in. Moore’s combination of mildness, empathy, reason, and intelligence are just the balm we need in an era when accusations, blame, lies, fear and sometimes rage are all that most pols serve up.

2. Military Experience. Right now, all of us Dems are scared to death of losing, and for good reason. But what if we win? Trump has hinted that violence will follow, maybe even civil war. And the paradigm of his January 6 Insurrection gives him a platform on which to build new attacks.

Our misguided debacle in Vietnam caused us to create an “all-volunteer” military. As a result, very few of our leaders have served in our armed forces. Among my short list of alternatives to Biden, only Pete Buttigieg also has served. Raimondo, Whitmer, and Newsom never served. Moore served two years in combat in Afghanistan and attained the rank of captain.

If Trump loses, I think some kind of violent disturbance is likely, if not inevitable. When/if it comes, I want our Commander-in-Chief to have had military experience. I want to see quick and decisive action, overwhelming force, and thoughtful tactics and strategy—all of which will save lives and reduce casualties and the risk of violence spreading. And I want a leader who will use all the powers of his/her office, including martial law and the new immunity from criminal prosecution that John Roberts has given presidents, to jail the troublemakers pending trial and put a quick kibosh on any mimicry.

Combat experience will also serve Moore well in the field of foreign policy. The world is becoming increasingly violent and unruly, so much so that calls for American troops may soon arise, if only for clandestine capture or rescue missions. Both citizens and troops will have more confidence in the orders of a Commander-in-Chief who has actually seen combat.

3. Trust in Science and Expertise. Moore first came to my attention as I watched his victory speech on winning the governorship of Maryland. After promising to keep abortion a decision for a woman and her doctor [timer at 16:08] he said that giving every child in Maryland a year of pre-pre-K education was one of his top priorities [timer at 16:38]. With the Democratic “trifecta” in Maryland, he got the pre-pre-K done during his first year.

What impressed me most was the reason that Moore later gave for this important educational initiative. He relied on the science of human brain development, which says that the most important gains occur in the first few years of life.

How many times have you heard a politician say that spending money is a top priority because scientists say it will make things better? Moore will bring scientists and other experts back to their proper places in society, and science back to its proper place among Enlightenment values.

And as for the Enlightenment, set the timer for his victory speech at 23:16 and listen to Moore define the term “patriotism.” It sounds to me a lot like the Western Enlightenment, in different words.

4. The Bridge Collapse. To see what Moore is made of, watch his speeches about the tragic collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore Harbor. No blame. No finger pointing. He simply explains: this is what happened, and this is how we’re going to fix it.

Competent engineers were consulted. Expertise was applied. Two and a half months after the bridge collapsed, its dangerous remnants had been removed, the ship that had caused the damage sailed out of the harbor under its own steam, and the harbor re-opened. No fuss. No muss. Just quiet competence. That used to be how we Americans worked all the time.

5. Jack of All Trades. Wes Moore has been all of the following: (1) a military-school kid, after his father had died and his mother gave him “tough love” to fix some discipline issues; (2) a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University; (3) a Captain of airborne troops in Afghanistan; (4) an investment banker; (5) a founder of non-profit community organizations; and (6) a best-selling author (with a book about a kid with the same name whose life took a very different trajectory).

With all this experience, Moore understands deeply what it takes to lead on a heating planet with a population over 8 billion people: you have to pick the best experts and follow their advice. That’s what Moore did in educating Maryland’s children and clearing Baltimore Harbor after its disastrous bridge collapse. When Moore gets though explaining precisely how and why Trump botched Covid, our economy, Trump’s own tariffs, and our relations with Iran and North Korea—by shooting from the hip with his own half-baked ideas—voters will begin to recall what true leadership is.

6. Racial politics. Can a second Black candidate win the presidency after a backlash to the first one helped elect the worst president in our history? I think so. That backlash is at its height right now; it can’t go anywhere but down. And virtually all the backlash voters are already MAGA supporters; they voted for Trump in 2020, and Biden won. I doubt any non-Black progressive or moderate voter will turn away from a candidate as solid as Moore simply because he’s Black.

On the other hand, Moore will bring Black voters who are now considering voting for Trump, or for a third-party candidate, back into the Democratic fold. He may even do that with straying Hispanics. He will attract youth much better than an 81-year old man with speaking and memory problems.

Since straying Black voters are the Dems’ greatest potential liability in the upcoming election—and one that the Trump campaign seeks relentlessly to exploit—Moore’s identity will probably be a net electoral plus, especially in battleground states like Michigan and Pennsylvania. Once people see how calm, smart and measured he is, how empathetic, and how good a leader, he will win.

7. No Skeletons. Moore seems to have no skeletons in his closet. He got arrested for graffiti in his youth, and a public nonprofit he started failed. He’s married, with two kids, and his private life is private. Unless I’m missing something, there’s no dirt in his history to dig up.

I have only two reservations about Moore. First, he will have had only two years as governor of Maryland before becoming president. But if you add his two years of military leadership in combat, that’s four years: two thirds of the time George W. Bush had as governor of Texas before becoming president. (Bush served in the Texas Air National Guard but never saw combat.)

Moore beats George W. Bush all hollow in intelligence, public speaking, judgment and leadership. And of course Trump had zero political experience before he became president.

My second reservation is campaigning. Will Moore, who excels in his calmth, mature judgment, empathy, and intelligence, be able to best Trump in the electronic media that are Trump’s only plausible field of expertise? Will Moore be able to dig out from under an avalanche of lies and boasts?

I can’t answer that question definitively now. But Moore is young, vital, and adaptable, and his combat experience will have been worse than anything that Bone Spurs can throw at him. Moore may have to undergo some crash campaign training, but it won’t be the first time in his life when a lot hung on learning fast.

As I look at the field of possible Democratic candidates, including President Biden, I see Moore as standing head and shoulders above the rest. His military leadership and contacts, his instinctive and experienced resort to science and experts, and his calm, measured approach to problems all are vital ingredients, in my view, of a return to normal.

His governorship of Maryland, although short, has been an unqualified success. I think voters will quickly see the vast gulf between leadership based on true intelligence, good judgment and reliance on experts, on the one hand, and a carnival barker’s boasts on the other. And Moore has the youth, vitality, stamina, and intelligence to best an increasingly deranged malignant narcissist in campaigning and public debates.

Oh, and I guess there’s another small problem: if Moore becomes president, Marylanders will be sorry to lose him.



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President Biden, Please Step Down (An Open Letter)

Dear Mr. President,

I am not now, never have been, and never will be a Biden Basher. After literally years of thought, I believe you are the best president of my lifetime, save only JFK, who spared our species from nuclear self-extinction.

In my mind, you edge out your brilliant colleague and close friend, Barack Obama. He was more inspiring and transformational, but you got more done. You easily surpass LBJ, who let his own Great Society die in his personal obsession with Vietnam, which produced our nation’s most misguided and tragic military loss ever.

For a month, I’ve been working on an essay tentatively entitled “100 Reasons to Vote for Joe Biden.” I’m up to 25 already, and more are appearing every day. My first response to the debate debacle was to urge you to soldier on.

So no, I don’t for a moment devalue you, your honesty, integrity, experience and talent, nor a bit of what you’ve done for our nation and the world. If I knew that you and VP Harris could be appointed to a second term, I would cheer my lungs out for that result.

But that’s not the way our country works. You have to get elected, and you have to do so even as our ship of our democracy is sinking like the Titanic.

A single iceberg sank the Titanic. Our ship of state has hit five.

The biggest and most destructive is a Demagogue to rival Julius Caesar, who is an absolute master of modern media and little else. The second is tens of millions of Americans who have bought his lies and joined his cult. They seem quite willing to follow him into Hell, if only to preserve the dominance or privilege of their respective tribes (white people, Christians, so-called “conservatives,” business tycoons, market manipulators, oligarchs, billionaires, etc.).

The third iceberg is even more insidious, for it reveals rot in the very halls of government. A major political party has forsaken both truth and justice for power, abandoning multiple verbal repudiations of lies, violence, insurrection and lawlessness for the sake of political expediency. It exaggerates nothing to say that the erstwhile “Party of Lincoln” has gone rogue.

The fourth iceberg is our media, which mostly work for profit, and which are now devoting far more time and energy to increasing their audiences than reporting truth, or calling out evil. Our final iceberg is a Supreme Court that has gone lawless and rogue. I’ve just written an essay explaining how.

The recent immunity case of Trump v. US is an example. The five male justices who subscribed to all of Chief Justice Roberts’ majority opinion ignored a basic principle of separation of powers: that courts are not legislatures. They prescribed a detailed, abstract, multipart test for a president’s immunity from criminal prosecution, without even looking at the facts of the case before them. (In fact, they sent the case back down to the district court to find facts.) They admitted, repeatedly, that they didn’t have enough of a record of the facts to apply the abstract law that they had created out of whole cloth.

I’m sorry to say it. But that wrongheaded, lawless, totally abstract and power-grabbing opinion changed my mind about you. More accurately, it changed my mind about your chances of winning the upcoming election.

I do not see Chief Justice Roberts as an evil man. Nor do I believe he’s stupid. I’m aghast that he ignored the separation of powers, so explicitly applied to our judiciary in Article III, Section 2 of our Constitution. I understand that he earned highest distinction as an undergraduate in history at Harvard University, in a mere three years. And he served on the Harvard Law Review, just as I did nearly half a century ago.

So if CJ Roberts is neither evil nor stupid, what caused him to “go rogue”? Had he so desired, I think he could have led his four male colleagues in a different direction, with his power as Chief, his intellect, and his persuasive personality. Why didn’t he?

His majority opinion reveals why. It’s not much about law at all. Several times, it admits that precedent is scare—a fact that should have motivated judicial restraint, not power-grabbing. The opinion is really all about history, the field of Roberts’ own greatest educational triumph.

It’s long and repetitious. But if you have the patience to read it to the end, a single, overwhelming theme engulfs you. The Supreme Court’s majority opinion in Trump v. US is a paean to the strongman.

Roberts quotes numerous sources to the effect that our laws should not hog-tie a president who is “energetic,” “vigorous,” “decisive” and “independent.” Some of them are legal precedent; others come from the Federalist Papers and other historical documents. Some come from the writings of Alexander Hamilton who, we all should remember, was so “energetic” and “decisive” that he died of a stomach wound from a duel with Aaron Burr.

Whatever the details, it’s impossible to come away from an honest reading of CJ Roberts’ opinion without perceiving his belief that only a strongman can solve our many problems. That deep-seated belief explains why a man who had spent his whole adult life studying and practicing law appears to have abandoned it. And if the Chief Justice of our Supreme Court has had that sort of dark epiphany, what can we say of as-yet-undecided voters, let alone the tens of millions in the Demagogue’s Cult and in his Party, which the Demagogue now controls absolutely?

This same sort of thing is happening all over the world. In Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Hezbollah, Hamas and even Israel, people are looking for strongmen to lead them. This is not just a sudden and coincidental failure of human education or culture. It’s a product of our evolutionary biology.

Our species evolved from apes on the African savannah, in clans of around thirty or fewer individuals. The alpha male ruled each clan absolutely, enforcing “discipline” by growling, grimacing, gestures, roundhouse swipes, chases and (in extreme cases) ape-to-ape combat. (Apes still rule their clans this way.) This model of “government” is in our DNA.

So it’s not surprising that, when things get confusing and tough, we revert to this evolutionary model. The ancient Romans, who had the first region-spanning democracy, invented the word “dictator” (which originated in Latin) to recognize this point. They appointed a “dictator” to rule absolutely, without second-guessing by the Roman Senate, for limited times during crises. Most often, the crises involved a war or civil uprising and the “dictator” was an experienced military general.

This is why the alpha leader (almost, but not entirely, always a male) is a constant figure throughout human history. This is why real democracy has been limited to a very few times and places: ancient Greece (Athens, not so much Sparta), ancient Rome, England and the British Empire, and the modern democracies that sprang from them by colonization or imitation. An honest look at human history shows that democracy is an anomaly.

So what does all this have to do with your stepping down, Mr. President? Everything.

You are a good, kind, empathetic and admirable man. You care about people. You want to heal the sick, help the poor, vindicate the oppressed, strengthen the economy, and elevate the downtrodden. But you are not a strongman.

You never were. Your skills are those of a bygone era: listening, negotiating honestly, compromising, making friends, thwarting enemies through alliances and deterrence, and improving things by careful and incremental change. You are a product and a master of the postwar “international order” that is even now coming to a violent and chaotic end.

Many of us still value all that you are. If you are the Democratic candidate for president, I will vote for you as long as I have a pulse. But I fear and believe that many will not. The strongman model is too deeply entrenched in our history and our evolution. And our times seem so chaotic, disorganized and incomprehensible that many voters feel only a strongman will do. If our highly-educated Chief Justice of the Supreme Court can succumb to the lure of the strongman so completely as to forsake basic constitutional law, what chance does an undecided voter have?

For all that you are, you are not a strongman. You don’t look like one. You don’t act like one. You don’t speak like one. You don’t have the youth, energy, vitality or gall to simulate one. I believe that, deep down, the last thing you desire is to be one. And as you get older, in the weeks ahead in the campaign, I believe that any attempt to simulate one will be viewed as disingenuous, even pathetic.

Yet that’s precisely what CJ Roberts, the Republican Party, and all the followers of the Cult of Trump seem to want. That’s what all but a few Republican stalwarts have devoted their party to. That’s what many now-unaligned voters will seek as they go to the polls. And if you look outside our beleaguered democracy, much of the world (except doughty Britain) seems to be chanting in unison, “Caesar! Caesar! Caesar!”

Under these circumstances, I think you have no more than a 30% chance of winning—even less if your physical or mental condition deteriorates in the four months remaining until the election. Do you want all that you have worked for and built your whole life to be at the risk of one person’s good health?

So the question I pose to you is simple. Do you want to roll the dice, when the odds are against you, and at stake are not just all you have done in your career, but a quarter millennium of American democracy and four centuries of the Western Enlightenment?

If you run and lose, all those things will end forthwith. Our Demagogue may be scatterbrained and increasingly demented, if not deranged. But there are people behind him who know exactly what they are doing. They have complete control of the Republican Party. They have the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation. And they have plans: Project 2025 and the “Unitary Executive”—a plan for “gentle” despotism under a strongman. History and logic—and those careful plans—suggest that their takeover our government and subversion of our democracy will be just as quick and decisive as was Hitler’s takeover of the Weimar Republic.

So I ask you point blank, Mr. President. Do you prefer to go down in history as the leader who saved American democracy and the Western Enlightenment from the Demagogue once, and then went on to help pick a successor who did it again? Or do you want to roll the dice against even a 30% chance that your second try will end in failure, with all that portends? And what would you prefer if the odds against you this time are 70%, as I believe?

The choice is yours, Mr. President. It is one of the most consequential choices in human history, with grave implications for our species’ trio of growing existential threats: (1) nuclear proliferation; (2) runaway planetary heating; and (3) the possible evolution of a pandemic much more contagious and deadly than Covid. If you are truly a Man of the Enlightenment, then you should make your choice without ego, pride, nostalgia or regret, in cold, rational contemplation of the odds and likely consequences.

With great appreciation, admiration and gratitude for all you have done so far,

Jay Dratler, Jr.

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The Court Lays the Groundwork for Despotism

If you ever wondered whether our so-called “conservative” Supreme Court would preserve the values and ideals of our Founders and the Western Enlightenment, you now have an answer. It has demolished them systematically, one by one, in a breathtaking and sustained display of arrogance, illegal power-grabbing and failure to see cause and effect. Today’s decision on presidential immunity in Trump v. United States is the latest in its demolition derby.

Let’s review the sequence. In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), the Court declared political contributions “speech” and thus struck down most limits on political contributions, leading to massive, legalized corruption in our politics and runaway spending on media ads, including those in social media. In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), the Court struck down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act as no longer necessary, only to have 29 states adopt 94 voting restrictions in the next decade. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), the Court reversed a half-century precedent and took back women’s abortion rights, throwing reproductive rights and the health industries that support them into turmoil nationwide. In Trump v. Anderson (2024), the Court eviscerated the Disqualification Clause (Section 3) of the Fourteenth Amendment, requiring Congress to enforce it in each instance, although over three-quarters of each House of Congress had already approved the Fourteenth Amendment in adopting it.

You would think the Court would be satisfied with having done so much damage to the nation, its institutions and its people in less than fifteen short years. (And I haven’t even mentioned guns!) But you would be wrong. Today, in Trump v. United States (2024), the Court took it upon itself to hand down a detailed test for when (and whether!) US Presidents have to obey the laws of the nation they serve.

Let me repeat that. Our Supreme Court—or rather the five male justices who subscribed to all of the majority opinion—created a complex, multi-part test for when (if ever) former presidents can be prosecuted for violating our criminal laws. The male justices did this although not a single one of them, nor the four women on the Court, had been elected to make law.

As every middle-school civics student knows, making law is the job of Congress, including adopting amendments to our Constitution for ratification by the States.

Our Constitution itself prohibits judicial lawmaking. Article III, Section 2, limits “the judicial Power of the United States” to “Cases” and “Controversies.” What this means is that our courts make decisions in cases and controversies that come before them, one by one; they don’t make law, let alone in the abstract. That simple rule is what distinguishes our legislatures, including Congress, from our courts.

Yet in Trump v. United States the Roberts Court did precisely the forbidden thing. It created, mostly out of whole cloth, a complex, multipart abstract test for deciding whether or not a former president is categorically immune from prosecution, trial and sentencing for alleged violations of our criminal law as it applies to everyone else.

The Court did this abstract lawmaking despite the fact that it admitted, repeatedly, that it did not know enough about the facts of the actual case before it to decide that case. In fact, the Court’s only administrative action, and its only proper one, was to send the case back down to the district (trial) court for that court to gather more facts and make an initial decision.

What the Roberts majority did in the meantime was to create a complex test for presidential immunity, as if it were Congress or our Founders, for the district court to apply the facts to. No one, least of all our Founders, ever intended our unelected Supreme Court to have that kind of power or to perform that sort of role.

Apart from being utterly illegal as most first-year constitutional law students understand our Constitution, Roberts’ majority opinion is a beguiling read. It evokes the words that David Brooks applied to the writings of Dubya’s White House Counsel, Harriet Miers, whom Dubya unsuccessfully nominated to the Supreme Court. Roberts majority opinion reads like “a relentless march of vapid abstractions.”

All of the vapid abstractions focus obsessively on a single idea: the need for a decisive, unfettered leader as president. There are quotes from the Founders—all relevant but none focused on the specific issue of immunity. Roberts never mentioned it, but as I read his opinion I became convinced he had become enthralled by the Federalist Society’s theory of the “Unitary Executive.”

How could we possibly survive as a nation without a strong, decisive male at the helm, unfettered by such irrelevancies as criminal law? Wouldn’t we need such a creature to tell us when and whether to take vaccines, how to fight planetary heating, when, whether and how to intervene in the catastrophe that is today’s Gaza, and whether, if push comes to shove, to hit the Kremlin with a small nuke and hope the Russians don’t respond with a species-extinguishing general nuclear attack? Wouldn’t an unfettered, strong male make these tough calls better than any so-called “experts”?

Roberts’ quote-rich majority opinion was nothing like what I had learned in law school and later taught to my own law students for some three decades. The essence of legal reasoning is analogy and distinction: accepting or rejecting former decisions based on their similarities to or differences from your case on their facts. That’s how American courts are supposed to make decisions without violating their constitutional mandate not to make law in the abstract.

Roberts did none of that, nothing even close. Although fluent and beguiling in its repetition, his opinion is a travesty of legal reasoning. It was, indeed, a relentless march of vapid abstractions, all revolving around obsessive longing for an unfettered strongman to make things right.

Justices Sotomayor and Jackson eviscerated his analysis completely. In great detail, Justice Sotomayor showed how Roberts had misapplied virtually all the decisions he had cited by failing to pay attention to their facts. In particular, he had failed to distinguish a key precedent that had decided immunity from civil suits, not criminal prosecution.

Justice Jackson, in similar detail, showed how Roberts had brutalized the key understanding of the Western Enlightenment: that no man is above the law. She showed how Roberts’ approach would abandon the Enlightenment’s core notion of personal accountability for top leaders and bury it under a mountain of complexity, indecision and delay. (In the process, of course, it would also bury our Founders’ fondest desire: never again to serve as subjects under a King.)

As for cause and effect, the consequences of the Court’s decision in Trump v. United States are obvious. First, the delay inherent in applying the Court’s multipart abstract test for immunity—in the district court, then at the intermediate appellate level and again (finally!) at the Supreme Court—will postpone any final decision until long after the upcoming election. (Maybe that was Roberts’ goal all along.) Second, and as a result, if Trump wins he will immediately claim immunity and later try to pardon himself, creating yet another year or two of confusion, controversy and delay, as Trump consolidates his power (including within our military), fires all but his lackeys, and seeks “retribution” on his political opponents.

Roberts graduated with highest distinction, in history, from Harvard University. He attended Harvard Law School, served on the Harvard Law Review, and had a successful career as an appellate attorney. It’s possible, although hardly likely, that he did all this without absorbing the most basic principles of what American courts do and don’t do and how they make decisions differently from legislatures.

But one thing is crystal clear. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes observed, we are all presumed to intend the natural consequences of our acts. Under that standard, if the United States descends into fascism and despotism in the coming years, and the Western Enlightenment ends ignominiously here at home, Roberts will bear the blame for failing to do what he could have done, in light of what he should have known. He will go down in history as an unreluctant handmaiden to despotism.


For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

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