Diatribes of Jay

This blog has essays on public policy. It shuns ideology and applies facts, logic and math to social problems. It has a subject-matter index, a list of recent posts, and permalinks at the ends of posts. Comments are moderated and may take time to appear.

31 July 2019

The Dems Come Back Hard!


For a morning-after view of the first Dem Detroit Debate, click here. For a brief review of the second Detroit debate, click here.

For a discussion of how the US can arrest its decline by rebuilding its labor unions online, click here. For suggestions how to fix, not trash, America by adjusting corporate law, click here. For what we can learn from the strong third-party candidacy of Ross Perot, who died recently, click here. For brief analysis of the House’s censure of the President, click here. For reasons not to watch Trump’s empty shows, click here. For an analysis of reparations for the descendants of slaves, click here. 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.

Bravi! Forget about the doldrums of June. The auditions are over. The real presidential campaign has begun.

Not only did last night’s debate avoid (so far) all four of the pitfalls I had predicted for it. All ten candidates—even the ingenues—delivered strong performances.

Those who highlighted their differences did so politely, making distinctions in policy or approach without rancor or name calling. Even author (and political ingenue) Marianne Williamson gave a stirring plug for reparations for slavery, rightly calling them an ever-growing debt that must be paid.

The moderators, too, did a good job. They kept their questions short and general and avoided sensationalism. They focused on vital issues, not “gotchas.” They cut interruptions short and enforced time limits, as moderators should.

As a result, the debate seemed worthy of its actual status: an “infomercial” for the world’s greatest democracy and the only party that might rescue it from cancerous corruption and precipitous decline. The only real deficiencies were in CNN’s technical and business performance, which we’ll get to later.

Every one on the stage threw punches at Donald Trump, and some landed hard. (In the absence of a full feed or transcript from CNN, I can’t quote them, but I’ll try later if CNN ever gets its act together.) Every candidate was articulate and spoke in complete sentences that made sense. Some had punch. Best of all, every one presented a vision, or aspects of a vision, of a country that works for everyone—especially the people who do the nation’s work—without division, hatred and rancor.

The news week before the debate had focused on our president’s outrageously racist and divisive remarks, then on his insistence that he get another term to make his ill-considered trade war with China work. After all that, the Dem debate was balm for the soul.

Every candidate, it seemed, understood the debate as a golden opportunity to sell the Dems’ damaged brand, and all did. Every one’s contrast with Trump was palpable and emphasized, without bitterness. To my recollection, no one used the word “socialist” except in predicting what Trump might say. It was a superb group performance.

The New York Times had provided (but apparently has deleted) a helpful graph of the time actually allowed each candidate to speak. According to that graph, Warren and Sanders, as leading candidates, each had about eighteen minutes. Buttigieg came next with fourteen. All the rest had between ten and eleven minutes, except for Hickenlooper and Williamson, who each had less than nine.

Think about that. At least six major themes came up: (1) the economy, (2) jobs, (3) health insurance, (4) race and racism, (5) climate change, and (6)foreign and military policy. Subtract one minute each for the opening and closing statements, and that leaves about 2:40 minutes per theme for each of two leaders, and fewer than two per theme for everyone else. Consider the need to use some of that time to address specifics raised by the moderators and rivals, and that leaves about two or fewer minutes each to address the substance of each major issue facing our nation and our species.

Not without reason have I used the word “informercial” and the language of advertising in this post. That’s all that anyone can do in the time allotted: advertise. Present a vision. Put the “brand’s” best foot forward. Name, but do not describe, your or your plan’s advantages. Distinguish competing brands. Do anything more, and you run out of time, looking stupid for failing to finish your thought.

During the first two disastrous debates in June, the candidates seemed oblivious to these arduous limits of time and medium. This time, they all “got it,” probably through diligent practice.

There is no room or tolerance for details or wonkishness in this or any other similar debate. Lamentable as this state of affairs may be, it’s our American culture today. We live in a world shaped by Twitter and less-than-single-minute commercials. So pols have to learn to “sell” a plan, an approach or a whole political philosophy in the time often used to sell a car, appliance or dish soap.

This is not an easy skill to learn. Nor is it one that produces fine government. But it’s required in campaigning using modern media, and all last night’s Dems seem to have mastered it at last. Bravi!

Endnote: CNN and the ongoing privatization of American democracy. One aspect of last night’s debate was not so bright. It held an unspoken and largely unnoticed irony. Almost every candidate bewailed the increasing privatization of our government and the corruption that inevitably follows from it. But none commented on the consequences of giving CNN, a private news medium with no broadcast presence, exclusive rights to the Debate.

Rather than complain in the abstract, I will simply describe my own experience. Keep in mind that I have a Ph.D. in physics and have worked with electronics, computers and software (including occasional programming) as early vocations and later avocations for about 60 of my 74 years. I seldom spend less than thirty hours per week on line.

An hour before the debate, my fiancée and I sat down to prepare for it. Assuming that PBS would carry it, we tuned in to a free PBS broadcast, only to find PBS would not carry the debate. So we watched the PBS News Hour while waiting for the Debate to begin.

As Debate time approached, I discovered (by tuning through all my local broadcast stations) that CNN has no broadcast presence in my area, and maybe at all. So I went on line, using Google to search for “CNN Democratic Debates.” The first hits had no relevant links or buttons, so I tried CNN.com. There I found lots of promotional links to various stories about the debates, but no live feed.

After a few minutes of searching and reloading, I eventually found one. A half-screen with a start button appeared. I hit the button and nothing happened. On my 2012 Mac Mini running Chrome, the circular “loading” arrow ran on and on, eventually yielding to a notice saying the server was running too slowly. After trying this several times, I gave up and switched to my 2018 Pixelbook, which came with a native Chrome browser. This time, the live feed moved, but with halts every few seconds, far more than we ever see in watching the news by streaming after broadcast or in watching Netflix or Amazon entertainment by streaming online.

Having run out of options for viewing the debates, we waited as the frequent streaming halts got fewer with time. After we had missed the first ten or fifteen minutes, the number and frequency of the halts got tolerable, and we watched the rest of the Debate with only infrequent halts. I can only assume that CNN added more server capacity after starting with far too little, or that other users (of the 400) on my private, nonprofit, local Internet Service Provider eventually signed off in frustration, leaving more capacity for me.

It’s now 12:42 am Eastern time Wednesday. The debates ended more than three hours ago. After a ten-minute search, I could find no full feed or transcript of the debates on line on CNN.com or CNNgo.com. All I could find was excerpts and analysis by CNN.

In other words, having been given exclusive rights to the Debate, CNN apparently has arrogated to itself the right to determine what portions of it are (or ought to be) of interest to viewers. The feed and any transcript, in their entirety, apparently belong to CNN, to be buried in its archives and unavailable to the general public.

This is precisely the same situation that I complained about with respect to ABC’s exclusive dominion over coverage of the first New Hampshire Democratic debate in January 2012. plus ça change. . . I can only assume that CNN outlawyered the Democratic Party, or that some lazy Dem lawyer pulled a contract out of the file without even thinking about giving a private corporation an exclusive lock on history after its first live streaming.

Maybe the harm to Dem interests is not as great as it now seems. The vast majority of Trumpets watch Fox and so must have cable. So they probably had access to the Debate live. But for those who didn’t, and those many people who think cable is obsolete (or who refuse to subscribe to cable out of reluctance to fund Fox), CNN, a private firm much a part of our oligarchy, now has a lock on current history. And the public has no recourse because our First Amendment applies only to government, not private corporations like CNN’s. Welcome to American news and history, Soviet style.

A Morning-After View

 It’s now nearly 1 pm, Eastern time, on the day after the first Democratic debate in Detroit. After a diligent search, I still could find no full streaming feed or transcript of last night’s debate on CNN’s Websites.

My conclusion of last night therefore remains. CNN has buried the raw news and presumes to interpret what happened in the first Detroit debate with its own “analysis” and “spin,” just like the old Soviet journal Pravda, which was the official organ of the Soviet Communist Party from 1918 to 1991.

That a private corporation—a part of our corporate media oligarchy—could presume to perform such a function in America shows how far the US has sunk into effective corporate rule. It also shows a breathtaking lapse of sagacity, savvy and basic lawyering on the part of the Democratic Party officials who let this happen.

Is the Party going to have to pay CNN, presumably by the minute, for Debate clips to use in political advertising? The Dem leadership, apparently, was asleep at the switch. If it were up to me, the person(s) responsible for this debacle would be fired. This is precisely what good contract lawyers are hired to avoid.

In contrast to Party leadership and lawyers, the actual candidates did a fine job. Yet without a full feed or transcript to help me, it’s too hard for this lone blogger to wade through CNN’s clips and corporate spin to find and verify the quotations I think I remember. So I’ll limit my morning-after remarks to a single general impression.

Not only did the Dems do well in reviving their “brand” and distinguishing it from Trump’s erratic and vile simulacrum of “policy.” They also divided neatly into two camps. This division will no doubt persist through the second Detroit debate and into the foreseeable future.

You can characterize the two camps in many ways. They include: (1) proponents of fundamental structural change versus incremental change; (2) more “progressive” pols versus more cautious ones; and (3) those in favor of wiping out private health insurance and those opposed. Since any such abstraction is necessarily inaccurate in some respect, I prefer to characterize the division concretely. The two camps comprise: (1) Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and (2) everybody else.

Sanders calls for a “political revolution.” Warren calls for “fundamental structural change.” Everyone else calls for something softer, more careful, more incremental, and more gradual.

In fact, virtually everyone but those two seems to be campaigning on the ground of “electability.” They argue, and they assume, that the nation’s electorate generally—and the Trumpets in particular—are allergic to more drastic change and will accept only moderate and gradual progress. Any Democratic candidate who proposes significant change will, they argue, lose to Trump.

On its face, this view creates some cognitive dissonance. Didn’t Donald J. Trump, with zero years in political office and a raucous, rambunctious, maximally divisive 2016 campaign, himself represent drastic change? Didn’t many people who voted for him do so “on a wing and a prayer,” hoping that a presumed successful businessman might somehow jar a Washington dead in the water with gridlock out of its lethargy?

If so, and if Trump now sits in the White House because his name spelled “change” to many voters who didn’t really know much about him, is it possible that a better, more experienced, more credible and less nasty change agent could beat him?

These are the questions that voters must answer in their own minds in the general election next year. At present, they are the questions that Democrats (and voters considering registering or re-registering as Democrats) must answer for themselves in the Democratic primary. If they are not the only questions that matter, they are certainly among the ones that matter most.

Another way to look at it is to consider personalities, rather than bare abstractions. Do the upper-Midwestern voters who elected Trump now long for an anodyne nerve-soother like Jeb Bush or John Kasich on the “conservative” side, or like Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden on the progressive side? Or do they repent their choice of Trump as a change agent yet still want to change the system that Bernie showed is rigged against them?

In answering this question, it’s good to recall that Trump was never an anodyne or “safe” choice. Are voters so traumatized by Trump’s vileness and ineptitude that they want to retreat to any safe shore, or do they still harbor a deep hunger for real change? Answer that question, and you can predict which Dem has the best chance of winning.

Wonkish ones will obsess over details, as is their wont. Last night, John Delaney hit a wonkish nail on the head when he declared any health-care plan that wipes out 170 million private insurance policies to be “dead on arrival” in Congress. That point is self-evidently true, and both Sanders and Warren are smart enough to see it. So the only possible reason I can ken why both are vying for the “wipe out private insurance” crown is that it represents easily perceptible drastic change. It’s a badge of courage as a change agent, on an key issue (health insurance) that helped the Dems win in 2018.

If either wins the nomination, she or he will have to “pivot” in the general-election campaign and propose a health-insurance plan that can pass Congress and not outrage 170 million satisfied insureds. In so doing, the winner will lose credibility and some of the gloss that comes from genuinely supporting systematically disadvantaged workers. But apparently both Warren and Sanders, and/or their political advisors, have decided that being anointed this presidential cycle’s true change agent is worth the trouble.

Me? I’m skeptical that proposing something so unlikely to become law within any two-term presidency will work politically. But stranger things have already happened, including the election of Trump.

I do believe in my heart that this country must have fundamental change in order to preserve, let alone restore, its democracy and its egalitarian advantage. We are too far along toward an entrenched corporate oligarchy for anything less to work. So for me the primary boils down to Warren (whom I prefer as smarter, more thoughtful, a better planner and less prone to fall into demagogues’ verbal traps) or Sanders, and the also-rans.

Don’t get me wrong. I will vote for any Dem against Trump. I will even max out my $2,800 contribution, if corporate contributions likely to flow to a gradualist don’t make that unnecessary. But for me the essential truth is that this nation needs serious political change. The Dems’ task in this presidential cycle is to show at least some Trumpets, and many skeptical Dems and independent voters, that they can deliver that change where Trump can’t, won’t and hasn’t.

The Anticlimactic Second Democratic Debate in Detroit

 The second Democratic debate among ten (count ‘em, ten) candidates in two nights would probably have been an anticlimax in any event. On both nights, the vast majority onstage were hardly household names. Viewers—especially nonaligned and possibly hostile voters—likely had difficulty identifying them, let alone getting to know them. By the time you count to twenty people, most of whom you know only by name and office, a sense of overload sets in.

The second-night candidates only added to that overload in the way they handled themselves. Several repeatedly attacked the front-runner in most polling, Joe Biden. Then Joe responded in kind.

As a general matter, attacking the front runner is fair game. That’s a traditional practice in primary-election debates. The problem last night was the way Joe’s rivals, especially Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, attacked him, and the way he responded in kind.

The attacks were mostly based on Joe’s past acts and omissions, some decades old. Because they were far from recent, the attackers had to explain the acts and omissions, along with their political and social significance. The time allotted for attack and response—thirty seconds each—simply wasn’t long enough for the explanations.

So for most viewers, the result seemed an argument over “inside baseball.” Even for me, at 74, it was like watching a ping-pong match with a big screen hiding the ball.

Was Biden, as Booker implied, a racist or insufficiently progressive, when he opposed busing of African-American schoolchildren into white schools back in the seventies? Strong white opposition to busing was widespread then. I’m old enough to remember a rumor that the Boston City Council had stopped busing into Boston’s Italian district after the Mafia threatened to blow up the Logan Tunnel. Anyway, what does Biden’s stance over four decades ago say about his views today?

Responding to Booker’s attacks, Biden cited Booker’s tolerance, as Mayor of Newark, of “stop and frisk” tactics by police. But cities used “stop and frisk” tactics widely to cut crime, especially a couple of decades ago, when city crime reached its dismal peak. Was Booker right to use them, or was he he too hard on minorities in his zeal (like most mayors then) to cut crime? What viewer could tell, without facts detailed enough to exhaust ten thirty-second intervals?

All this poorly explained back-and-forth laid a pall of pettiness over the second debate. Whereas the first Detroit debate was mostly about goals and aspirations, the second debate looked backward too much. Perhaps Booker could have used Biden’s opposition to busing as an illustration of Biden’s innate caution and refusal to stand in the vanguard of social policy. But in trying to prove too much, Booker failed to make that legitimate point.

This deficiency of the second debate may have followed from its format. When you have ten people on stage, it’s hard to make attacks count, and gang attacks begin to look like shark feeding frenzies, evoking sympathy for the target. Also, when several candidates make attacks but the rest do not, the ones who attack risk losing the gloss of team players.

Apart from the attacks and the “inside baseball” they involved, the second debate did have some good points. There was good teamwork in bashing Donald Trump for his racism, his broken promises, his failed economic policies and his alienation of allies. There was universal disgust for Trump’s policy of mistreating asylum seekers and separating children from parents. There were good explanations, especially by Julián Castro, of the rationale for and effect of handling illegal immigration cases in civil, rather than criminal, courts. The moderators again performed well, serving short, general and important questions and keeping candidates to their allotted times. And several candidates mentioned the importance of having labor unions and environmental groups “at the table” in future negotiations over trade agreements, including Trump’s “NAFTA 0.2” and any attempt to revive the TPP.

But overall the second debate in Detroit raised a basic question: what, if anything, did the Dems gain by having twenty candidates appear on stage in two successive series of debates?

Several factors favor the practice. Debates featuring candidates from various places and harboring different philosophies emphasize the Party’s “big tent” and openness to differing views and diverse people. They give candidates unused to the “big spotlight” a chance to hone their debating techniques in a less challenging environment. They also give less favored candidates experience in running for higher office and a chance to plump for Cabinet positions in full public view.

Finally, multi-candidate debates allow candidates with little chance to win to introduce new ideas that may enhance governing or future campaigns. Marianne Williamson did that in the first Detroit debate with her eloquent and full-throated plug for reparations for slavery. Andrew Yang did the same in the second Detroit debate with his idea of a guaranteed, universal $1,000 per month income. And both candidates introduced these new ideas without splitting the Democratic vote with a futile third-party run, as Ross Perot had done the Republican vote decades before.

On the other hand, multi-candidate debates have disadvantages. They rob the leading candidates of much-needed time to introduce themselves and their ideas. They dilute even strong messages. They keep the leading candidates from securing early and impactful name recognition and public identification. They can allow minor candidates to identify the Party with minority or unpopular positions. And they can confuse or bore—and therefore turn away—voters who simply want to “take a look” at the Party.

At the moment, it is by no means clear whether having two series of debates with twenty candidates each helped or hurt the Dems’ chances to beat Trump in 2020. If the answer becomes clear at all, it likely will only do so in retrospect.

But one thing is clear right now. The Party is best advised to narrow the field rapidly, to no more than six candidates. In my view the survivors should be, in alphabetical order: Biden, Booker, Buttigieg, Harris, Sanders, and Warren.

One other point is worth repeating: the Democratic Party should be sure that its contracts with media companies require them to make both full (unedited) audiovisual feeds and complete transcripts available online within hours of the debate, and to keep them posted until the general election. The Party also should receive high-quality digital copies of both and have a perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, non-exclusive, sublicensable, worldwide license to use, modify, edit, publish and transmit them, and to authorize the Party’s candidates to do so, for any Party purposes.

Links to Popular Recent Posts

For a discussion of the importance of labor unions and how to rebuild them online, click here.
For a recipe for fixing America by adjustment, without revolution or extremism, click here.
For what we can learn from the strong third-party candidacy of Ross Perot, who died recently, click here.
For brief analysis of the House’s resolution censuring the President, click here.
For good reasons not to watch Trump’s empty shows, click here.
For a discussion about reparations for the descendants of slaves and how to make the reparations work, click here.
For three things the Dems must do to win the White House, click here.
For an assessment of how the second debate propels the Dems toward losing, click here.
For suggestions on how to improve multi-candidate debates, click here.
For a more general discussion of how to improve debates, click here.
For a review of the first Democratic Debate, click here.
For a third, simpler look at why Trump won in 2016, click here.
For seven reasons not to make war on Iran, click here.
For discussion of Warren’s ability to defend science, and why it matters, click here.
For comment on the quality of Elizabeth Warren’s mind and its relevance to our current circumstances, click here.
For analysis of the disastrous effect of our leaders’ failure to take personal responsibility, click here.
For brief comment on China’s Tiananmen Square Massacre and its significance for our species, click here.
For reasons why the Democratic House should pass a big infrastructure bill ASAP, click here.
For an analysis why Nancy Pelosi is right on impeachment, click here.
For an explanation how demagoguing the issue of abortion has ruined our national politics and brought us our two worst presidents, and how we could recover, click here.
For analysis of the Huawei Tech Block and its necessity for maintaining our innovative infrastructure, click here.
For ten reasons, besides global warming, to dump oil as a fuel for ground transportation, click here.
For discussion why we must cooperate with China and how we can compete successfully with China, click here.
For reasons why Trump’s haphazard trade war will not win the competition with China, click here.
For a deeper discussion of how badly we Americans have failed to plan our future, click here.
For an essay on Elizabeth Warren’s qualifications for the presidency, click here.
For comment on how not doing our jobs has brought us Americans low, click here.
To see how modern politics has come to resemble the Game of Thrones, click here.
For a discussion of the waste of energy and fossil fuels caused by unneeded long-range batteries in electric cars, click here.
For a discussion why Democrats should embrace the long campaign season and make no premature moves, click here.
For a discussion how Trump and Brexit have put the tree world into free fall, click here.
For a review of how our own American acts help create our president’s claimed “invasion” of Central American migrants, click here.
For a review of basic facts that must inform any type of universal health insurance, click here.
For a discussion of how the West’s fall and China’s rise affect the chances of our species’ survival, click here.
For a discussion of what the Mueller Report is and how its release could affect American politics, click here.
For a note on the Mueller Report as the beginning of a process, click here.
For comment on the special candidacies of Beto O’Rourke and Pete Buttigieg, click here.
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

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posted by Jay Dratler, Jr., Ph.D., J.D. @ 7/31/2019 01:46:00 AM  

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