Diatribes of Jay: Could it Be Beto or Pete?

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The Mueller Report: A Beginning, not an End
The breathlessness with which our media have greeted the Mueller Report’s mere delivery proves one thing. Few in the media, and ever fewer among the public, understand what the report is.

You don’t have to have graduated from law school to understand, but it helps. The Mueller Report is the beginning of a process, not the end.

Robert S. Mueller III is a Special Prosecutor. He’s not a judge. He’s not a jury. His job was and is not to decide anything, except whether to prosecute people other than the president. His job was to interview witnesses, gather facts, and organize the facts so as to assist readers in connecting the dots.

The Report will contain no recommendation to indict President Trump because it’s Justice Department policy not to indict a sitting president. Almost certainly, the Report will neither contain a recommendation not to indict him nor reveal whether Mueller would have recommended indictment if the policy were otherwise.

The reason is simple. As a superbly disciplined lawyer and prosecutor, Mueller is conscious of the separation of powers. A prosecutor decides nothing; judges and juries do that. In this case, the judges are the members of Congress, and the jury is the American people.

Mueller knows how politicized the subject of the Report has been. He knows that, as Trump himself has said, no one cares about the judgment of an appointed servant as to whether the president is fit to serve. But that’s, in essence, what the facts revealed in the Report are all about.

That’s why the Attorney General must release the entire Report, or as much as can be released without violating the law or revealing sources and methods of counterintelligence. That’s also why every person who comments on it, including every American citizen, should read every word that’s released.

This is a case where Tweets or Cliff Notes will not do. Every reader must make his or her own judgment whether the President had the necessary corrupt intent to obstruct justice in resisting the investigation so famously. Every reader must assess whether the President’s judgment on Russia was compromised by his commercial interests there.

So the first question a reporter should ask anyone interviewed about the Report is “Did you read it? the whole thing?” If the answer is not forthcoming, the next question should be, “Why not”? And if neither answer is revealing, the interview should be very short.

Legacy of Shame. In the runup to our forever war in Iraq, only six out of one hundred senators read the National Intelligence Estimate. (Hillary Clinton was not one of them.) Our intelligence experts had made that document available for senators to read in secret. It ran only 90 pages and contained vehement dissents against the asserted rationale for war. Our senators’ failure to read it may have been one of the greatest collective derelictions of duty in Senate history. Let’s hope that today’s senators don’t revive that legacy of shame.

As we look at the long list of Dems vying for the presidency, something seems to be missing. There are many über-competent wonks and experienced doers. But no one stands out as a leader.

There are specialists galore. Elizabeth Warren is an expert in law, especially finance, banking and antitrust law: she knows how to stop big corporations from gobbling up our economy, livelihoods, privacy and freedom. Bernie Sanders is an expert in how the über-rich have stacked and rigged the economy in their favor. Cory Booker is an expert in urban renewal. He’s now becoming expert in the social and economic impacts of legalizing marijuana. Kamala Harris is an experienced prosecutor familiar with both violent and white-collar crime. Joe Biden deserves credit for the switch from an anti-insurgency to an anti-terrorism strategy in our forever wars. If we include Dems not running, Eric Holder is an experienced and highly successful fighter for justice and defender of voting rights.

But even if all these experts could serve together in the same “Dream Cabinet,” as I fantasized in a recent essay, who would lead them? Who could command their attention and respect? Who could get them to work together, in harmony, toward common goals? Who could select those goals and set priorities that all of the highly skilled Cabinet members, and the voters as well, would respect?

At this time, just about everything needs doing at once. The best way to put our skilled middle class back to work is rebuilding our infrastructure, but no one has even begun to get that done. Scientists now think that climate change will ruin our grandchildren’s or even children’s lives if we don’t act swiftly and decisively. Yet Trump is unwinding the modest progress that Obama made, leaving our industrial and business leaders to pick up the slack. Some industrialists have presided over notable failures, as recently when GM abandoned the marvelous engineering in its Chevy Volt to churn out gas-guzzling pickups and SUVs.

The list of unsolved problems marches on. We need to wind down our “forever” wars, bring at least some of our troops home, and close some of our numerous military bases abroad, if only to save money and augment our domestic stash of trained competence. We need to figure out whether we are going to cede the role of global hegemon to China, or work toward a rule-based world with no hegemon at all. We need to square the third-millennium future of corporate rule with the traditional Enlightenment values of equality, equal opportunity, freedom and privacy. We must halt and reverse the trend toward self-righteousness and even hatred in politics, which is turning neighbor against neighbor and converting our political parties into possible nuclei of armed camps. We must include all of our diverse population in voting rights and other civil rights.

We must, at last, give our people some semblance of universal health insurance, preferably without breaking the bank and without riling up millions of citizens who are perfectly happy with the insurance they have. We have to reduce the threat of white-supremacist terror, as well as Islamic extremism, both on the Internet and in our streets. We must solve the riddle of immigration so as to maintain the stream of newcomers that ever renews our strength, without frightening the natives. Last but not least, we need to confront and overcome the menace of fake news, disinformation, and targeted propaganda, coming both from home and abroad.

That’s a lot to do, isn’t it?

Not surprisingly, there’s widespread agreement that we are a nation in decline. Progressives see decline in Trump’s erratic and inconsistent decision making, his rejection of expert advice, and his many lies and frequent 180-degree turnabouts, not to mention his cruelty, apparent casual criminality, corruption, nepotism, and reversal of progress under President Obama.

But Trump followers feel the decline, too. What does the slogan “Make America Great Again” suggest, if not that America already has slipped from greatness? Of course the two sides differ greatly on the cause, but both agree that America is getting smaller, weaker, meaner and farther from its ideals and potential.

The Dems have lots of experts chafing at the bit to pursue particular problems on which each has focused. They enjoy a surfeit of problems to solve, including the problem of general decline. But who’s going to pick what problems to tackle first, organize the effort and inspire the troops? Doesn’t that require the elusive quality of “leadership,” rather than experience or analytical skill in any particular field?

Insofar as concerns picking a president, the Dems often wallow in fuzzy thinking. The ability to attract huge campaign contributions—whether from plutocrats or from millions of small donors—says a lot about salesmanship, but little or nothing about leadership. It reflects an ability to tell certain people what they want to hear. It shows little ability to invent solutions and push them through. Is says little about skill in getting enthusiasts and donors to make necessary compromises with realism after they’ve sunk their “investments.”

Ditto success in the Iowa caucuses and early primaries. Early popularity says nothing about getting rivals and followers to stick with tricky solutions as the going gets tough.

The quality of leadership is strained even more by the chance that any one or more of our many problems could surface as the “most urgent” from time to time. Global warming will undoubtedly raise its ugly head anew after every bomb cyclone, tornado swarm, devastating hurricane, heat wave, and forest fire. The depredations of social media will come to the fore after every media-inspired terrorist attack and every intelligence-agency warning of foreign disinformation. The publication of every new economic assessment will bring our Second Gilded Age’s extremes of inequality to the public’s attention. And so on, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

This is just one reason why the leader we desperately seek shouldn’t identify solely or primarily with any one problem or solution. He or she must keep all the balls in the air, shifting both tactics and strategy as current events batter both proposed solutions and the pols promoting them. Leading America in this time of troubles demands extraordinary native aptitude and skill.

Above all, the leadership we seek demands flexibility and adaptability. It will thrive as much on listening as on speaking, in a delicate balance between following and leading.

Assessed against these criteria, not many of the current candidates measure up. As columnist Richard Cohen has credibly argued, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders—the current front-runners—are probably too old to maintain the appearance of this sort of flexibility, let alone the reality.

Each would be within two years of eighty upon inauguration. So both are probably too old to take strategic advantage of modern means of communication and propaganda, as Trump has done so brilliantly with Twitter. In addition, Biden’s opposition to busing in Maryland in the 1970s could make him appear a johnny-come-lately to the cause of genuine racial equality, while Sanders’ singular focus on a “rigged economy” in 2016 could make him seem a johnny-one-note.

There’s a similar rap against Elizabeth Warren. She’s a brilliant analyst. She seems to understand the risks of banking, the dangers of corporate bigness, and the nuances of antitrust law better than any other candidate, and she’s masterful at explaining them simply. But what about global warming? What about infrastructure? What about the menace of white-supremacist terrorism metastasizing like a cancer around the globe? Where is she on these issues, any one of which could grab prominence at any time?

Both Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris have stumbled badly. Each apparently failed to foresee see the political repercussions of a version of “Medicare for All” that wipes out private insurance, which about two-thirds of all health insureds possessed in 2017. [See Page 2, Figure 1] With so many problems to solve, picking a specific solution to one (universal health insurance) that is bound to arouse ferocious resistance is hardly the best approach.

Becoming deeply invested in any particular solution, especially so early in the campaign, also seems a lame approach to building support, except from true believers in this or that. A better approach might be articulating desirable goals and going on “listening tours” to see how strongly the people support each goal and what solutions they prefer. Test the waters first, then commit, not vice versa.

So far, there appear to be only two candidates who’ve invested much in this “softer,” step-by-step approach. They are Beto O’Rourke of Texas and Pete Buttigieg of Indiana.

Both appear to have done far more listening than pontificating. Both seem to address political issues at the appropriate level of generality—i.e., the level at which common ground is firmest. To see how each does that, read this campaign message of Beto and this interview with Pete.

Does their political experience measure up? The following table compares the experience of some now-leading Dem candidates with that of important postwar presidents:

Elected-Office Experience of Selected Presidents and Candidates:
Total Years in Elected Office Prior to Presidency

President or Candidate	State or Local Office, Other than Governor	Governorship	U.S. House	U.S. Senate and/or Executive	Age at Inauguration (if elected president)
Abraham Lincoln	8	0	2	0	51
John F. Kennedy	0	0	6	8	43
Jimmy Carter	4	6	0	0	52
Ronald Reagan	0	8	0	0	70
George W. Bush	0	6	0	0	54
Barack Obama	8	0	0	4	47
Donald J. Trump	0	0	0	0	70
Beto O’Rourke	6	0	6	0	48
Pete Buttigieg	8	0	0	0	39
Joe Biden	0	0	0	44	78
Bernie Sanders	9	0	16	13	79
Cory Booker	11	0	0	6	51
Kamala Harris	13	0	0	2	56
Elizabeth Warren	0	0	0	6	71

Besides now-leading contenders Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, no Dem with anything like Lyndon Johnson’s experience is running for president. The one who comes closest is Nancy Pelosi, but she’s not running. Anyway, she, like Biden and Sanders, is probably too old for the rigors of the presidency. It’s enough that JFK and the last three presidents had about the same or fewer years in pre-presidential elective public office than Beto or Pete, albeit in higher positions.

Perhaps the most important quality in a president, apart from elusive “leadership,” is the even more elusive quality of judgment. Obama had good judgment from the beginning of his campaign. That’s why he won the presidency by indisputable popular majorities twice, despite the now-obvious handicap of his dual race. That’s why, in my view, he was our best president since JFK, perhaps since FDR.

Do Beto and/or Pete have similar quality of judgment? Only time will tell. But their common decision to delay strong commitments to particular solutions of major problems, while discussing the importance of solving them and preserving the national values that should undergird solutions, reflects caution, mature judgment, and healthy risk aversion. In contrast, an early commitment to particular solutions can arouse opposition and give it time to fester and grow—as will no doubt happen to any version of “Medicare for All” that wipes out private insurance.

The focus on underlying national needs and values is analogous to focusing on interests, rather than positions, in dealmaking. That approach is what a leading book on negotiation recommends, and it seems especially appropriate in this time of discord. Logically, people must understand the need to do something and the reasons (values) underlying that need, before they can begin to agree on a solution.

It’s still early days, for everyone. Beto and Pete could easily flame out in the white-hot crucible of a presidential campaign. But right now, they appear to be the only players who’ve made no unforced errors. They also appear to have the deepest understanding of how to run a national campaign in a time of unprecedented division and discord.

Neither man has overwhelming experience, either in years or importance of office. But each has a respectable amount of experience, which measures up generally to that of recent presidents, not to mention Trump’s total lack of experience.

More important, Beto and Pete both have had the good judgment to keep their campaigns at the level of generality needed to attract more support and perhaps less opposition as time goes on. Each also has the youth and vigor needed to survive, let alone succeed at, the world’s most difficult job in this extraordinarily fraught and disputatious time.

It remains to be seen how each will interact with his rivals. That interaction is vital in our precarious time, in which nothing less than a solid team of rivals, with massive collective experience, can begin to meet our multiple national challenges.

Yet at the moment, at this early stage, these two young men seem like the Dems to watch, a bit like Obama in 2007. It’s not that they are more “moderate” than their rivals. It’s that they appear to have taken a softer, less risky, more deliberate and more strategic approach to their campaigns.

Yes, both men are light in national experience. Pete has none, and Beto has only six years in the US House. Neither has national name recognition to speak of.

But politics is politics. As a powerful Speaker of the House (Tip O’Neill) once said, “All politics is local.” Time will tell how well each man has learned the game. But at this early day, each has shown some talent for doing what none of the other candidates has yet done well: healing the vast divisions and delusions that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin have so skilfully inflamed.

Footnote: I have taken the liberty of copying below, verbatim, the e-mail message from Beto’s team announcing his candidacy for the presidency, which I received after supporting his unsuccessful campaign to retire Ted Cruz from the Senate. After a reasonably diligent search, I was unable to find the same material on the Web, either on Beto’s apparently nascent presidential-campaign Website, or on his open Facebook page, which seems to contain more photos than text.

As you read this short message, note the undertone of humility, the acknowledgement of the extraordinary challenges that face us as a nation, the emphasis on cooperation and listening (which I hope will extend to his more experienced Cabinet if he wins), and the insistence on a positive tone amidst great acrimony. Note also the brief nod to wounded warriors coming home from wars we never should have fought.

I presume that Beto’s team will soon beef up his presidential-campaign website, and I recommend that they include this impressive opening message in it:

“Jay,

“I write to ask you to join me in a campaign to serve this country as the next President of the United States.

“At this moment of truth — at this moment where we could make or break our democracy, where we will decide the fate of generations to come on this planet — we must all ask what each of us can give to this country and to the people who will inherit the consequences of our choices.

“Amy and I have decided that running to serve America as president is the best way for us to do our part, understanding that we have an historic opportunity to join with millions of our fellow Americans at a time like no other.

“The challenges we face are the greatest in living memory. The connected crises in our economy, our democracy and our climate will either consume us or they will afford us the opportunity to demonstrate our resolve, our creativity and our courage.

“In other words, this moment of peril produces what is perhaps our greatest moment of promise. We can have a government that serves people instead of corporations. We can invest in the dignity of those working and those seeking work, no matter their gender, race or background. We can guarantee high quality health care to every single American. We can remind ourselves that if immigration is a problem, it’s a great one to have, and ensure that we create lawful paths to enter the country to work, to join family, to flee persecution. We can achieve real justice reform and confront the hard truths of slavery, segregation and suppression. We can listen to and lift up rural communities. We can restore American leadership, find peaceful solutions to global challenges, and end decades-long wars while delivering for every woman and man who has served in them. And we can unleash the ingenuity and political will of millions of Americans to meet the existential threat of climate change before it’s too late.

“No one candidate or president, no matter how tough or talented or experienced, can meet these challenges on their own. Only this country can do that, and only if we build a movement that includes all of us – not just to vote and volunteer, but to understand that for democracy to flourish and meet these challenges, it is an everyday responsibility, one that doesn’t end when the ballots are counted.

“We saw the truth of that in Texas over the last two years - people from all walks of life, every part of the state, coming together in record numbers, creating something greater and more powerful than the sum of the people involved. I saw firsthand how the purpose and function that we all crave can be found in serving others and serving this country.

“This campaign will be positive. We will define ourselves by what we want to achieve and accomplish for America. It will be animated by an ambition for the country that recognizes that the challenges we face will only be overcome by lifting each other up; that the opportunities before us will only be realized by overcoming the differences between us — of party, of geography, of race, of gender, of faith — before they define us forever.

“We seek the Democratic nomination by listening to and learning from the people we wish to serve. We are running a campaign for everyone. That’s why, wherever you are in the United States — from Alaska to Puerto Rico — I want you to be part of this. I want this to be your campaign. A campaign by all of us for all of us.

“In the coming days I will travel to introduce myself to my fellow Americans and to listen to the people I meet. In those conversations I want to discuss how we can bring the power and ingenuity of the American people to bear on the challenges we face.

“On March 30th we will officially kick off this campaign in my hometown of El Paso. I want you to be there with me then if you can. I’m also asking you to help organize others in your community to make sure that we build the greatest grassroots campaign this country has ever seen. No PACs, just people.

“There’s more to come, but I want to leave you with this:

“The only way to live up to the promise of this country at this moment of maximum peril and maximum potential is to give it our all and to give it for all of us. We are now, more than ever, the last best hope of Earth. Let’s show ourselves and those who succeed us in this great country what we are made of and what we can do.

“If you are ready to be part of this effort, please make a donation to help us kick off our campaign the right way.

“Beto”

Links to Popular Recent Posts
For reasons why the twin 737 Max 8 disasters should inspire skepticism and caution with regard to potentially lethal uses of software and AI, click here.
For my message to Southwest Airlines on grounding the 737 Maxes, click here.
For an example of even the New York Times spewing propaganda, click here.
For means by which high-school teachers could help save American democracy, click here.
For a modern team of rivals that might comprise a dream Cabinet in 2021, click here.
For an analysis of the global decline of rules-based civilization, click here.
For a brief note on avoiding health lobbying Armageddon, click here.
For analysis of how to save real news and America’s ability to see straight, click here.
For an update on how Zuckerberg scams advertisers, click here.
For analysis of how Facebook scams voters and society, click here.
For the consequences of Trump’s manufactured border emergency, click here.
For a brief note on Colin Kaepernick’s good work and settlement with the NFL, click here.
For an outline of universal health insurance without coercion, disruption of satisfactory private insurance, or a trace of “socialism,” click here.
For analysis of the Virginia blackface debacle, click here.
For an update on how Twitter subverts politics, click here.
For analysis of women’s chances to take the presidency in 2020, click here.
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.

Links to Posts since January 23, 2017

Diatribes of Jay

21 March 2019

Could it Be Beto or Pete?

The Mueller Report: A Beginning, not an End

Links to Popular Recent Posts

Links to Posts since January 23, 2017

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