Posted on by rjonakait

Twelve Ways to Win

In the last post, “77 Million,” I wrote that the real story of the last presidential election was not the switch to Trump, which was not large, but the “lost votes,” the many who had voted for Biden but did not vote at all this year. A story in a Pennsylvania news source neatly illustrates the point. A Philadelphia district that is overwhelmingly Black had shifted to Trump, but in that district Trump had gotten only three more votes than he had in 2020. Harris, however, had received 81 fewer ballots than Biden had four years earlier.

After the previous post, a friend said that he agreed with my analysis but wondered what my explanation was for the lost votes. I thought more about that and realized that I did not have a single overarching explanation but only a collection of partial possibilities. Here are some of them.

One. Donald Trump is a remarkable politician. His dominant qualities—liar, ignoramus, bully, fearmonger, bad economist, embarrassing dancer—should make him a laughingstock, but despite these characteristics, or perhaps because of them, he connects deeply with a broad swath of Americans. They are devoted to him like teenage girls to a K-pop boy band. There’s a major difference, however: American devotion to him has not been a passing fancy; we don’t seem to grow out of it. Other presidents—Reagan, Clinton, Obama—had devoted admirers, but not like Trump. To me the attraction is inexplicable, but I recognize his draw.

Two. Americans have short memories, and Trump benefited. In 2020, almost all voters held strong and accurate images of the Trump presidency. Despite the pandemic, the economy was about the same as it was under Obama, with some indicators stronger and some weaker than in the previous four years. (E.g., inflation was low under Trump, but it was even lower under Obama.) However, all was not well in the country. Crime had started to increase under Trump which was disturbing. Life expectancy had started to fall even apart from the pandemic. The border was a problem, and Trump had failed to fix it. Even Obama had deported more people than Trump had. Trump’s wall seemed a joke. His attempts to erase the Affordable Care Act were disturbing. Deficits skyrocketed. He played footsy with dictators, which was disturbing. His many grift-like actions were disturbing. A lot of things were disturbing, but that was all forgotten four years later. Moreover, of all the bad things that were predicted to happen because of his four years did not happen. For example, Biden continued the China tariffs that liberals had decried ruinous. Biden continued Trump border policies that were labeled ineffectual and heartless. More and more politicians supported the border wall. Trump was still the same Trump, but to many he did not look as bad as he had in 2020.

Three. Americans are not only forgetful; they are ignorant. Americans want simple answers, and Trump benefited. The border problem has many causes. We need a reform of our immigration laws. We need more border agents. We need more immigration judges. The problem is fueled by criminal gangs and political unrest in various countries. The problem is exacerbated by poor economies in various countries. It is intensified by the wider spread of media coverage that tells more and more people that they can find a better life if they can get to the U.S. And so on. Americans don’t want to confront such complexities. They don’t want to concede that the problem has been years in the making. They want a simple answer. And to many, the border problem is simply the fault of the Biden-Harris administration. (When conservatives refer to 2017 to 2021, they never say the Trump-Pence administration.)

More simplistic thinking follows: If the border were tightened, for example, we could tackle our fentanyl problem. (We have already forgotten that Trump promised to solve the fentanyl crisis when he ran in 2016.) Inflation. Well, inflation was the consequence of many complex events, but Americans didn’t want to understand that. Neither did we want to know that many developed countries had a worse inflation problem than we had, and that perhaps our inflation, bad as it was, was not so bad. Americans did not want to hear that gas and oil trade in an international market, that supply chains are international, and that the U.S. government does not control these markets. Instead, we want a simple answer, and that answer was that inflation was the fault of the Biden-Harris administration.

Four. Fear sells, and Trump benefited. Many campaigns have tried to make the electorate fearful about the consequences of the other side’s actions. In the first election I paid attention to, JFK stressed a “missile gap” at a time when nuclear concerns were high. (That gap seemed to disappear once he took office.) This year Trump and his acolytes did a much better job of spreading fear than the other side—fear of crime generally, fear of immigrant crime more specifically, fear of immigration, fear of fentanyl, fear of transgender people. That last fear should not be underestimated. For most of the election season, I was in Pennsylvania, a swing state for the presidential election with a closely contested Senate seat and several close House races. It seemed as if every third political ad — and the ads ran nonstop — by those on the right brought up Democratic support for trans people. They damned Harris for supporting government payment for gender-transforming operations. They hinted that Democratic candidates were going to allow trans people to play girls’ sports and use girls’ bathrooms. This country may have become more accepting of gays, but many, many Americans see trans people as unsettling and dangerous. Trump and his supporters benefited.

Five. The media has had a fixation on Trump, and Trump benefited. News sources, including, or perhaps especially, liberal ones reported at length whatever Trump was doing or saying. This was not totally surprising. In the run-up to the election, Trump was on the receiving end of multiple lawsuits including his conviction of 34 felony counts in New York. Nevertheless, this coverage overwhelmed coverage of Biden’s accomplishments (how many of us can summarize what is in the Inflation Reduction Act?) and explanations for problems like rising prices or the border. Since memory-impaired Americans seemed less concerned about the bizarre and dangerous behavior of Trump in 2024 than they were in 2020, the media did Trump a favor by focusing on him and not other things.

Six. We don’t know how to handle misinformation, and that benefited Trump, too. A higher percentage of misinformation came from the right than the left, and listeners ate it up.

Seven. Liberals and Democrats are poor at messaging. Who named it the Inflation Reduction Act? I know. I know. It was meant to reduce inflation, and it certainly did help. But it was hard not to hear it as a laugh line when the cost of milk and eggs and gas and mortgages was unusually high. Why didn’t they change the name and start focusing on all the good the Act accomplished?

Eight. But perhaps the chief cause of Trump’s (narrow) victory came throughout Biden’s term. While Americans were concerned about the border and inflation, Biden seemed indifferent to those problems. He might have been able to do little or nothing about them, but he should have appeared more concerned about them. He did not. And Trump won.

Similarly, every third ad against Harris I saw featured her being asked what she would have done differently from Biden. The response was the blank look of a doe in the headlights with the answer of “nothing.” It was powerful each time, and I saw it many, many times. Such a question had to be anticipated. How could she not have had a better immediate response? (Later on — too later on — she did.) There was also the never-ending clip of her crowing about the success of “Bidenomics.” Democrats should have been ready to explain what they were hoping to accomplish and what they had accomplished. They did not. And Trump won.

Nine. In the eyes of many Americans the Democratic Party does not stand for anything, and Trump benefited. Worse: Democrats were seen as the party that stood for trans rights, defunding the police, DEI, and critical race theory. But what else? For many, Democrats didn’t stand for anything that benefited “ordinary” people. Biden’s support for the United Auto Workers made no dint in this perception.

Ten. Covid hurt Trump in 2020. It helped him this year. His inconsistent and bizarre reactions to the pandemic were fresh four years ago. Now many have selective memories of that time. Unless personally affected, few seem to remember that one million American died. Instead, today Covid is remembered by many as a time of unnecessary school closings that harmed kids and strained parents; of unnecessary face masks; of governmental overreach on vaccines and social distancing. These are all reasons to distrust the government, and Trumps surrogates did a great job of reminding us of this distrust. At the same time, some see the Democrats as the ones who believe in big government of the sort that made Covid more hellish. Trump benefited.

Eleven. Many are not ready for a woman to be the Commander-in-Chief. We cannot discount that this country continues to have a strong strain of misogyny. Trump benefited big time from it.

Twelve. What do you think contributed? I’d love to hear them.

Posted on by rjonakait

The World Series of the Electoral College

A recent post on a local social media site drew on an analogy to the World Series to defend the Electoral College. The poster referred to a decades-old article recently reprinted in Discover magazine that discusses the theories of Alan Natapoff, a physicist, who favored voting by districts instead of in one mass. Natapoff, thus, seemed to be defending the Electoral College over a nationwide popular vote, as the poster clearly did.

The baseball analogy refers to the 1960 World Series where the New York Yankees won three blowouts but lost four close games to the Pittsburgh Pirates. The Yankees scored more runs, but the Pirates won the series. The poster and the article (https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/from-the-archive-math-against-tyranny) both noted, “Runs must be grouped in a way that wins games, just as popular votes must be grouped in a way that wins states.” That was fair, they maintain. “A champion should be able to win at least some of the tough, close contests by every means available–bunting, stealing, brilliant pitching, dazzling plays in the field–and not just smack home runs against second-best pitchers. A presidential candidate worthy of office, by the same logic, should have broad appeal across the whole nation, and not just play strongly on a single issue to isolated blocs of voters.” Natapoff decided that “nine-year-olds could explain to a Martian why the Yankees lost in 1960, and why it was right. And both have the same underlying abstract principle.”

There is much wrong with this reasoning. If the 60s Yankees had won the fourth game in another blowout (they scored nine runs in the final game), they would have been recognized as champs without having won a close game. Moreover, winning single games or their equivalents is not always the rule in sports. Cricket, e.g., has multi-day contests. The winner is not decided by who “won” each day, but by the total score. Had it been set up this way, baseball could be a contest decided inning by inning, or football quarter by quarter, but those are not the rules of the game. The rules are not inherent in the way the game is played and certainly not divinely inspired. They are man-made and can be changed. At one time the team that had the most wins after 154 games was in the World Series. The end. That is no longer true. The season is now longer and there are multiple playoff rounds that allow, many believe, for the possibility that a lesser team can become champions.

The poster quoting Natapoff asserts that the “popular votes must be grouped in a way that wins states.” That is not a requirement in all our elections. E.g., we use the total vote to pick our governors and don’t require the victor to have won a majority of counties or parishes. It is only because of the Electoral College that winning a state is required in our presidential elections. (I have no idea what is meant when the poster says, “A presidential candidate worthy of office should have broad appeal across the whole nation, and not just play strongly on a single issue to isolated blocs of voters.” I don’t know of a successful candidate who runs on only one issue, and when I look at the maps that will be produced of red and blue states because of our Electoral College, I see something like isolated blocs of voters. We would not have that with a nationwide vote.)

I seldom respond to any posts except occasionally to point out easily checkable misinformation. (For example, I might respond: Fact-checking sites have made it clear that FEMA workers are not eating the cats and dogs of isolated North Carolina hill folk.) I did, however, reply to this post by saying, “It would be interesting to see the reaction if a conservative won the popular vote but lost the electoral college. We are unlikely to find out. A conservative winning the popular vote???” Almost immediately someone who had already declared the post “great” said, “I couldn’t give a damn what the popular vote says as long as Trump is elected.”

This comment, of course, typifies why discussions of the way we select our president are fruitless. Alan Natapoff may have been sincerely exploring the best way to hold our elections, but most of the rest of us only want reasons for a system that will select our preferred candidate. Electoral College discussions these days are partisan ones with conservatives, like the poster, defending the Electoral College. They want the status quo because they believe it favors Republicans while reformers believe Democrats would benefit from a national popular vote. Recent history fuels these positions. Twice in the last generation we have inaugurated presidents who did not get the largest popular vote, and both were Republicans.

We did not always have this particular partisan divide. In the summer of 1968, polls indicated that 66 percent of Republicans and 64 percent of Democrats believed that the Electoral College should be replaced with a national popular vote. After the election where the popular vote was close, but the Electoral College was not, 80 percent of Americans supported changing the electoral system. In 1969, the House passed by a wide majority (339 to 70) a constitutional amendment to select the president by popular vote. The proposal, however, opposed strongly by Senators from small states, could not get the necessary two-thirds vote in the upper house.

If such an amendment could not make it through the Senate when the populace overwhelmingly favored it, a similar amendment has no chance today. Instead, those who wish to retain or change the Electoral College search for plausible reasons for their positions. The standpatters often refer to the goals of the founding generations, which, I am positive, did not use Mickey Mantle sports analogies. Many defenders contend that the point to the Electoral College was to preserve the powers of the small states in the presidential selection. Reading such comments, I pulled out The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, edited by Max Farrand, and The Federalist Papers to see what these sources said about the discussion over the methods of choosing the president.

The issue was debated again and again in the Constitutional Convention of 1787. The delegates would agree to a method, but potential flaws in that method would circulate. A different scheme would be proposed and problems with the new proposal would be pointed out. This merry-go-round continued until near the end of the convention when the delegates finally settled on the Electoral College as it appears in the original Constitution.

The convention first voted to have Congress choose the President, but criticisms soon emerged. In James Madison’s words: “If the Legislature elect, it will be the work of intrigue, of cabal, and of faction: it will be like the election of a pope by a conclave of cardinals; real merit will rarely be the title to the appointment.” Madison and others maintained that an Electoral College, however selected, would obviate some of the concerns of a congressional selection. The electors would be chosen for only one purpose and would gather just once. In the adopted version they would not meet together in one place but in the separate states so that there would be little opportunity for cabals, intrigues, and foreign influence. The congressional selection of the president, they said, would also upset a basic goal of the Constitution — the separation of powers — since the President would be beholden to Congress for his selection.

Many other methods of choosing the president were proposed and rejected: The state governors should select the President; electors selected by Congress should make the choice; electors drawn by lot from Congress should choose the President. Madison did state that the “fittest” way to select the President was to have a direct election, but he then noted two problems: “The first arose from the disposition of the people to prefer a Citizen of their own State, and the disadvantage this would throw on the smaller States.” Madison did not find this problem insurmountable and said “that some expedient might be hit upon that would obviate it.” The next speaker, however, differed with Madison’s optimism by saying, “The objection drawn from the different size of the States, is unanswerable. The Citizens of the largest states would invariably prefer the Candidate within the State; and the largest States would invariably have the man.” The delegates thought that a direct election would prejudice the smaller states, but what concerned them was that candidates from small states could not get elected. (Reminder. In 2016, Trump was a lifelong resident of a large state, but New York overwhelmingly voted against the hometown boy. Perhaps the Founders were not familiar with the adage, “Familiarity breeds contempt.”)

Madison also maintained that a direct vote would undermine the South. Many northern states had eased the traditional requirement that only white male citizens who owned real property could vote by allowing white males who paid taxes to also have the franchise. Thus, a higher proportion of people in the North could vote than in the South, and the South’s power would be diluted by a direct election. The Electoral College would prevent this calamitous possibility. It was not suggested that extension of the franchise might benefit the South as well.

Today many assert that the founders were protecting the small states by giving them a slightly greater number of electors than was justified by their populations. However, the founders addressed the small-state problem in a different way. The concern was that a candidate from a small state, even if worthy, would inevitably lose because the large-state electors would vote for one of their own. The solution: each elector would vote for two people, one of whom must not be from the elector’s state. The delegates thought that while one vote may go to the home state favorite, the second vote would be for the person seen as the best in the rest of the country. If that person was from a small state, he could be elected with a collection of second-choice votes.

The Founders added another “accommodation to the anxiety of the smaller States,” as Madison wrote in a letter in 1823. If no person got a majority of the appointed electors, then the House of Representatives would choose the President from the five highest on the electoral list with each state having one vote. The largest and smallest states would be equal in this process, which, according to Alexander Hamilton in The Federalist Papers, would be “a case which it cannot be doubted will sometimes, if not frequently, happen.”

The constitutional convention delegates knew that the large states would dominate the Electoral College, and they did. Luther Martin writing to the Maryland Legislature after the draft Constitution was promulgated but before it was adopted said that the “large states have a very undue influence in the appointment of the President.” Gouverneur Morris, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, writing in 1803, noted that it was recognized that the large states would dominate the Electoral College. Only if the matter went to the House of Representatives did the small states have a substantial voice in the presidential selection.

The major effect of the original Electoral College was not to give power to the small states but to the slaveholding states. Madison had said that a direct presidential election was “fittest,” but it would harm the South, citing the more “diffusive” franchise in the North, but the Virginian slaveholder continued with the curious comment that with a direct election the South would “have no influence on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty….” The “difficulty” was avoided by basing the number of electors on representation in the House of Representatives. The apportionment of the House, of course, incorporated the three-fifths clause where that percentage of slaves was used in the allocation of House seats.

The three-fifths clause was, therefore, incorporated into the Electoral College giving extra power to the large slaveholding states. The first census in 1790 found that New York had a free white population of 313,000 and North Carolina had a free white population of 289,000. Each state had the same electors, however—twelve—after that first census. While New York had 21,324 slaves, North Carolina had 100,572.  However, when 60% of the slaves were included to determine representation in the House, North Carolina’s “population” was larger than New York’s. South Carolina had a free white population of 139,000, but New Jersey had thirty thousand more. Even so, South Carolina had twelve electors and New Jersey eleven. South Carolina had 107,094 slaves and New Jersey 11,423. (New Jersey is the starkest example of why Madison feared for the effect on the South were there to be a direct election of the President. As Madison had to know, New Jersey alone among the states then allowed white women to vote, and its total vote might have been twice that of South Carolina’s. With the Electoral College as adopted, even though South Carolina had the smaller white population, it had more power in the presidential selection than did New Jersey.)

Virginia had a free white population of 441,000; Pennsylvania had 422,000, about a four percent difference. Virginia had 292,627 slaves and Pennsylvania had 3,731. Even though the enslaved people could not vote, because of them Virginia had forty percent more electors than Pennsylvania—twenty-one to fifteen.

A direct vote for President would have lessened the power of the South; instead, the Electoral College as adopted magnified it. Founders recognized and said that large states would dominate the vote in the Electoral College, but Southern states would have special influence in picking a President because of the peculiar way in which slaves were counted.

The Founders did not protect small states via the Electoral College, and their sop of requiring electors to vote for two people with one not from the state of the elector proved to be laughable. The Framers in adopting the Electoral College did not foresee the rise of political parties even though parties were in place only a few years after the Constitution was adopted. Partisanship was evident in the first contested presidential election, after Washington retired in 1796.* By then, two men ran as a team with one running for President and the other as Vice-President. The country made it through 1796 without a major problem, but the Electoral College caused a crisis in 1800.

Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr ran as a Republican team in the presidential election. The widespread understanding was that Jefferson was running for President and Burr for Vice President. John Adams, the Federalist incumbent, ran with his vice-presidential running mate Thomas Pinckney against Jefferson and Burr. Jefferson got seventy-three electoral votes to Adams sixty-five, making Jefferson the apparent victor, but of course, because each elector had two votes, Burr received the same number of electoral votes as Jefferson. With two candidates yoked together by party affiliation, it was not a surprise that they would get the same number of electoral votes. A tie, which was not foreseen by the Framers, was close to inevitable with the rise of political parties.

The selection of the President in 1800 went to the lame-duck Federalist-dominated House, even though the Federalists had lost the election. That losing party had to decide which Republican, Jefferson or Burr, was the lesser evil. Thirty-six ballots later, Jefferson became the third President. And we got the Twelfth Amendment to fix this major flaw. That Amendment required electors to cast separate votes for President and Vice-President.**

At least when it came to the method of selecting the president, the Framers’ wisdom was faulty. Perhaps there are good reasons today to have the Electoral College but not because the founding generation created a perfect system. It did not protect the integrity or sovereignty of the small states. Our first six presidents all came from large states. Four of them were Virginians. This was not a surprise for the original Constitution through the Electoral College gave the major slaveholding states the dominant power in picking the President.

——————

*The Framers also did not foresee that electoral votes would be allocated by a winner-takes-all approach where the candidate with the most votes in each state would get all of that state’s electoral votes. That development, however, did not come quite as quickly as the rise of political parties. In 1796, even though Jefferson won the most votes in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina, one elector in each of those states voted for John Adams instead, and those three votes made Adams president. He received 71 electoral votes to Jefferson’s 68. Jefferson received the second most votes. Adams’s running mate, Thomas Pinckney, garnered 59 electoral votes. Thus, under the electoral system then in place, Jefferson became Vice-President under his political enemy, Adams, an uncomfortable result.

**Elections might be more fun if we still had the original electoral scheme as indicated by Alexander Hamilton’s devious actions in 1796. Although Adams and Hamilton were both Federalists, Hamilton did not want Adams to become President. Supposedly Hamilton approached electors in states Jefferson had won and urged those electors, after voting for Jefferson, to give their second vote to Thomas Pinckney. Hamilton was hoping that Jefferson-Pinckney votes plus Adams-Pinckney votes would give Pinckney the most electoral votes and the Presidency. Hamilton’s machinations seem to have borne some fruit, most notably in South Carolina where both Jefferson and Pinckney received eight electoral votes. The scheme failed because in several states that Adams won, the electors divided their second votes between Pinckney and other candidates or did not give any second votes to Pinckney. For example, Adams received nine votes in Connecticut, but Pinckney got only four, with five votes going to John Jay. New Hampshire gave six votes to Adams, but none to Pinckney. Pinckney received twelve fewer electoral votes than Adams. But think of the gamesmanship we might have if this original electoral edifice still existed.

Posted on by rjonakait

In the Realm of the Aged

I am a ‘tweener. I am older than Trump and younger than Biden. Knowing how age has affected me, I am concerned about the ages of both presidential candidates.

I, like almost everyone in my age bracket, suffers from the oft embarrassing tip-of-the-tongue syndrome. For example, an actor was in an ad. I tried to name him. I could say he was great in that movie with Jodie Foster, Silence of the Lambs. His name was on the tip of my tongue, but it did not immediately emerge. Of course, something like this happened when I was younger but not as often.

I have a related problem to the answer that won’t quite emerge. Sometimes I hear myself utter X and immediately know that X is not right. In a moment I may know I meant Y, and then I must quickly decide whether correcting myself is worth it.

This disturbs me, perhaps more than most others because I took pride in my trivia abilities. And, while I occasionally used to participate in trivia contests, I have vowed to eschew all future ones since they just make me feel old. Many of the questions have pop culture references that are too recent for me. That makes me feel old. I know I once knew the answer to some questions that I no longer know. That makes me feel old. And other questions produce that tip-of-the-tongue thing where only sometimes the answer emerges quickly enough to be useful. And that makes me feel old. The answers I can contribute to my trivia team do not make up for the inadequate, aged feelings, and I have retired from trivia.

Should these cognitive hiccups, which are normal in the aging process, disqualify me from being president? They should be put into context. I feel many of my cognitive powers are as strong — or at least nearly as strong — as ever, and perhaps some of the time even better now than before. I reason and think as well as any time in my adulthood. Whatever you might think of the quality of this blog, it would not have been better in 1980 or 2000. I no longer practice law, but I believe that I could write a brief of as good quality as I did in the past. I don’t believe that my mind has deteriorated in thinking about all sorts of problems and may even be better now because I bring more experiences and knowledge to bear.

The qualifying cognitive abilities to be president should not be determined by trivia gotcha questions, such as, Who is the leader of Kazakhstan? (Kazakhstan by land mass is one of the world’s ten largest nations. Can you name the other nine?) We should realize considering the magnitude of the job, that no person can know on their own everything they need to know to be an effective president. Instead, in judging a president or candidate, we need to know what kind of advisors he or she is likely to have. Will they be knowledgeable about Kazakhstan or whatever is the immediate matter of concern? Will they be able to present to a president in a comprehensible way what a president should know about the topic? Will they present all the information or only what they think the president will want to hear? If asked for opinions and recommendations, will they give unfiltered ones? Then our attention should turn to the president or presidential candidates. How well can these people absorb new information and analyze it? In other words, how well can the person learn and think?

However, we should remember that the learning and thinking required of a president is different from other successful folk. Generally, those who think and learn well do so only in a narrow path, and it is often embarrassing when they opine outside their lane. We have often seen the truth of what a wise person said: “Every person who has become famous for something ought to pray not to be interviewed on other things.” On the other hand, the president is a generalist. He or she must make decisions that span the globe and span multitudinous areas of expertise. A president must be able to learn and think about not just one subject but a whole world of subjects.

The public seldom gets direct knowledge about the crucial learning and thinking abilities of presidents or would-be presidents. We can only infer from other signals. How much a person does know about a range of topics is an indicator of how well that person has learned and, presumably, can learn. Whether a person indicates curiosity about a range of topics indicates a desire to learn.

There is another factor in this cognitive journey. I was once a trial attorney, and I believe that I could cross-examine and sum up as well as I did in days of yore. But a trial takes a lot of energy. Attention needs to be paid every moment during often long court days. After court ends, the attorney must retreat back to the office for hours of preparation for the next day. It can be exhausting. I know that I do not have the energy I once had, and it is possible, perhaps probable, that days of trial would sap my mental acuity. The energy to be a good president must be exponentially higher. Even if a person is able to think and reason well about a broad range of topics, energy, especially as the person ages, may wane in ways that affect mental acuity.

I am old. I believe that I still have a good mind. Even so, I am concerned about how the age of our candidates affects their mental abilities. However, the mental acuity of our leaders should always concern us. Gaffes in speech are not by themselves important. What truly matters is how well the person can learn, analyze, and make decisions and who the advisors will be.

Now. Examine for yourself the two gentlemen under consideration.

Posted on by rjonakait

Trump’s Uncanny Inheritance

Whenever I listen to a minute or two of one of his rallies (which is as long as I can tolerate), I admire Donald Trump’s speaking ability. This is not the speechifying of many public figures. It is not like the famous speeches we may remember. It is different from JFK’s pronouncing that the U.S. was going to the moon; different from MLK’s I Have a Dream speech; or Ronald Reagan’s, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” The oratory of those other figures was carefully scripted, and we knew that this was a performance for a massed audience. On occasion, Trump tries something similar, but we can always tell that he is reading words written by someone else.

Instead what I admire in Trump’s rallies is his “conversational” style. He does not seem to be talking to the massed audience all at once, but to an individual. (I say “conversational” because, of course, we don’t really think he would ever have a real conversation with anyone at his rallies or perhaps anywhere.) He has the ability to make it seem as if he is talking only to you, not just to a faceless crowd.

This makes me think about something I read decades ago about the development of popular music. Before microphones, singers sometimes used a megaphone to reach their audiences, but mostly they just projected their voice so that it could be widely heard. They were singing for a massed audience without any individuals being singled out. Think opera today. I may feel thrilled to hear the soprano, but I don’t feel that she is singing just to me. I am just one of many who is hearing her at the same time.

When amplification started, the popular culture historian I read said that at first singing styles did not change. The music was still for a massed audience. Then, according to that writer, Bing Crosby changed everything. He used the microphone in a new way that felt not that he was singing to a group, but was singing to every individual in that group. Close your eyes and listen to Crosby singing about that white Christmas. He is singing to you. It is a personal experience, not a mass one.

Trump’s strength in his rallies is that he does not talk to a crowd. He makes it seem as if he is talking to everyone personally, and that has turned out to be a powerful ability to attract and keep followers.

Trump has benefited from speaking to large public assemblages in this way. He reads the room seeking laughter and outrage from his listeners, and this serves to acknowledge them. It gives them an identity when they feel overlooked and some sort of hope that he can make their lives better.

In these rallies he is an heir to a much older America where people got education and entertainment by hearing speakers and lecturers. America’s golden age of oratory was from roughly 1870 to 1925, a time before the mass media of radio and television had permeated the nation. What there was instead was an extensive railroad network. Able to appear in towns of all sizes, speakers utilized this network to entertain and inform. People like Frederick Douglass, Emma Goldman, William Jennings Bryan, and Clarence Darrow may have had other careers, but they all were on the lecture circuit. For example, Frederick Douglass edited a newspaper and wrote much, but he was perhaps most widely known for his oratory, which not only spread his views but earned him sizeable sums.

These speaking tours must have been exhausting because the speakers were almost constantly on the move. Emma Goldman, for example, made 321 speeches in a year. In breaks from the Scopes trial in 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee, Darrow road the rails to Chattanooga and elsewhere to speak, and Bryan also appeared at auditoriums whenever the trial was in recess. Wherever such speakers appeared, they gave audiences their money’s worth, speaking for more than an hour, eliciting laughter and outrage as they tried to get the audiences to adopt their views. Trump may not know who these people were (When president Trump said, “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.”), and he certainly does not espouse the racial views of Douglass or the pro-labor, anti-capitalist views of Goldman, the true populism or religious faith of Bryan, nor the populism or agnosticism of Darrow. Even so, at his rallies he in essence shares a legacy with these and similar people. I can’t imagine he knows who they are, but if he did, he would not see them as kindred spirits; He would only despise them.

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

I once thought I understood proper tipping, but now I am confused. More and more the machines where I pay ask if I want to leave a tip at places where I seldom tipped before, such as a bagel shop or a coffee bean retailer. But I was very surprised when I went through a toll booth and I was asked if I wanted to tip.

The handwritten sign in the bar’s window said:

          Here’s to Strong Women

                    May we know them

                    May we be them

                    May we raise them

When inside, I said to a favorite server that the sign was offensive. She asked if that was because there was no reference to men, and I replied, “No. Because there should be another line: ‘May we love them.’ ” She gave me a thumbs up and a fist bump. When a bit later I saw the at-least-once-burned owner and said the same thing, she snapped back, “No one believes in love anymore.”

Until recently I was not aware that Stellantis was a major American car maker. Of course, until recently I did not even know that Stellantis existed.

I was only trying to spread hope, but the mother seemed upset when I peered into the stroller and said, “Some two-year-olds get better looking as they grow older.”

All those TV sports shows ought to interview college athletes about their favorite professors and then produce clips of those teachers both in the classroom and interacting with the athletes outside of classes.

A wise person said: “The fact that you cannot serve God and mammon does not seem to have hurt business any.”

The sidewalk sign for a neighborhood establishment said among other things that I could buy “esoteric products” on the second floor. Can you tell me what I could expect to find?

If a son is a “Junior,” is it psychologically harmful to him if his father is not “Senior?” Does this help explain Donald Trump, Jr.?

Trump Sr. boasts that gasoline prices were much lower when he was president than now. He is correct, but even when he is correct, he is wrong. He says that the prices back in his presidential days were much lower than now. They were, but he quotes prices that were much lower than they actually were when he was President and then quotes much higher prices than is true for today. Is there a name for this syndrome where a person tells falsehoods even when the truth favors him?

When Trump took office, the cost of gasoline (“Obama’s gas prices”) were lower than the averages during the next four years. I have never heard Trump mention this.

“The trouble with facts is that there are so many of them” Samuel McChord Crothers.

“The best liar is he who makes the smallest of lying go the longest way.” Samuel Butler.

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

Distinguished lawyers state that no attorney would allow Donald Trump to testify in his criminal trials. That is misleading. A criminal defendant has the constitutional right to testify at his trial, and the law is clear that the attorney does not control this decision. The accused decides. The attorney may advise against such testimony, and the defendant usually follows that advice, but the defendant has the ultimate authority over whether he testifies or not. Would you be surprised, however, if Trump did not listen to his lawyers?

Does Trump fully know what he is charged with in the last indictment? That charging document is forty-five pages long. It is about him, so there is a chance he read it, but not a good one.

“A President’s hardest task is not to do what is right, but to know what is right.” Lyndon B. Johnson.

“The American Presidency, it occurs to us, is merely a way station en route to the blessed condition of being an ex-President.” John Updike.

Several women are running for president. With our concern over inflation and deficits, we should elect a female. We could pay 70% of what we pay a man for  being president.

“I’d like to get to the point where I can be just as mediocre as a man.” Juanita Kreps.

“He told me that he was a self-made man. Later I discovered that he would have been wise to get some help.” Joan Rivers.

When a woman refuses to respond to a man’s advances, he is not disconcerted; he is merely astonished that she could be so blind to her own feelings. With a nod to Helen Rowland.

“In passing, also, I would like to say that the first time Adam had a chance he laid the blame on a woman.” Nancy Astor.

“Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, that is not difficult.” Charlotte Witten.

“It’s sexy to be competent.” Letty Cottin Pogrebin.

“I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.” Gloria Steinem.

“My life is not up for criticism, just my work.” Cher.

A wise person said, “Women who think they are the equal of men lack ambition.”

Behind every successful man stands an amazed woman.

Posted on by rjonakait

The WOAT or the WE

As long as he played baseball, I was obsessed with Henry Aaron, and I am saddened by his death. It doesn’t surprise me, then, that recent events apparently unrelated to the batter’s box have jarred loose some thoughts about him. That happened recently when I heard an MSNBC host label Donald Trump the worst president ever.

Of course, slotting Trump into a ranking of presidents is part of the expected exercise whenever a president leaves office. What’s the outgoing president’s place among all the presidents? We have many such rankings. Sometimes they come from professional historians or political commentators; sometimes from polls of “regular” citizens. Even though we have lived through a president’s term, we want someone to tell us where the departing executive stands in the hierarchy of presidents. Is he near the top like Lincoln and Washington and FDR; in the middle like, like—well, if they’re in the middle who can remember them?; or at the bottom like Buchanan or George W. Bush. (And who among us can speak with authority about Buchanan?)

The proclamations about Trump’s standing had me thinking about a sports acronym. Recently it has become commonplace to debate whether some athlete is the greatest of all time – the GOAT. Is it Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Tom Brady? So I thought the television commentators should be using an equivalent shorthand to talk about Trump: Is he the WOAT (worst of all time) or perhaps the WE (worst ever)?

So what does this have to do with Henry Aaron? The attempts to rank Trump reminded me of things that were said when Aaron broke Ruth’s career home run record. Some people, supposedly putting the accomplishment into perspective but really trying to denigrate it, pointed out that it took Aaron many more at bats than Ruth had to get to 714 home runs. Aaron responded, “But Ruth never had to face Juan Marichal.”  (My memory is that Aaron actually said this. I have not fact-checked it. You can do that if you want. Whether Aaron  said it or not, the insight remains.)

Ruth, of course, never did come up against Marichal, an undisputed all-time great pitcher. Ruth’s last major league appearance was before Marichal was born. (I did look that up.) The real point, however, is that Ruth did not bat against his day’s equivalent of Juan Marichal. Because major league baseball was segregated in Ruth’s time, he did not swing against the best pitchers, only the best white pitchers. For example, Ruth did not face Satchel Paige, even though Paige’s prime came when Ruth was playing. Paige was clearly an outstanding pitcher—some think the best of all time. (The GOAT?) In the frequent barnstorming and exhibition games of his era, he faced major league stars and pitched excellently against them. But Paige was Black and could not play in the major leagues in the 1920s and 1930s. (I do not know what to make of the fact that Paige first played in the United States on an integrated team in 1933 in Bismarck, North Dakota. Or at least that is what I read in his biography.)

How many home runs would Ruth have hit if some of the weaker pitchers he faced had been replaced by Paige and other outstanding Black players then barred from the major leagues? We can’t know.

Aaron, however, did face Marichal, as well as Bob Gibson and other outstanding Black pitchers. Baseball had by then become integrated. Perhaps because he had to face all the best pitchers, Aaron’s record is more impressive than Ruth’s. On the other hand, the nature of American professional athletics was changing during Aaron’s career. When Ruth played, baseball was the dominant sport, and the best American athletes concentrated on baseball. That may have been also true at the beginning of Aaron’s career, but by the 1970s, professional football and basketball had become more attractive to the athletically gifted, and probably not all the best American athletes homed in on baseball.

If we were comparing Ruth and Aaron to today’s players, we would have to factor in the internationalization of baseball. While there were Latin American players in Aaron’s day (but almost none in Ruth’s)—after all, Marichal was a Dominican—the influx of Spanish-speaking players has mushroomed since then, and the major leagues are also seeing a steady flow of players from Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and even Australia and the Netherlands. Ruth today would have to face the best talent from around the world.

In assessing players from different eras we should not only consider the differing player pools but also that the game has changed in other ways: The pitching mound has been at different heights; gloves differ tremendously from those of yesteryear; night games were not always played or scheduled less frequently; travel was different; the number of double headers has changed; the use of relief pitchers has changed; spitballs, once allowed, are now banned; a ball that bounces over the outfield wall is no longer a home run; the strike zone has varied; and so on.

This all leads me to the wisdom of Bill Russell (again, I have not verified that Russell said this, but the point remains even if he did not) who stated that you cannot compare players from different eras. At best, players can only be compared to other players of the same era. You can conclude that Ruth was the greatest slugger of his day. You can debate whether Mays or Mantle were as good as Aaron, but you can’t meaningfully maintain that Tris Speaker was better than all of them.

And that conclusion should also apply to presidents. To rank Presidents ignores the different conditions during their time in office. You might think Washington did a good job as the first one, but the world he faced and how the government functioned was different from the environment other Presidents faced. Perhaps Teddy Roosevelt’s temperament and abilities suited well the conditions when he was President, but TR would probably have been a disaster as President in 1861. The issues that one President confronts are not faced by another, and the nature of Presidential powers, federalism, and congressional authority have changed over time. As a result, the presidential playing field keeps changing, and it is well nigh impossible to make meaningful comparisons among performers operating in different games.

Rankings of presidents from different eras, while giving occupation to some historians, pundits, and pollsters shouldn’t be taken too seriously. The conclusion that George W. Bush was a better or worse President than James Buchanan or that Barack Obama ranks higher or lower than Grover Cleveland is merely a parlor game (at a time when there are few parlors). As with athletes, at most we can compare presidents within an era, not across the whole history of the presidential game.

Having said that, Obama did seem to have a better basketball game than all the other Presidents, but it is open for debate whether Trump’s golf game, which got a lot of practice while he was president, was better than Eisenhower’s. And certainly Trump must have told more lies about his golf than Ike did.

Posted on by rjonakait

Let’s Go Bowling

It is college football bowl season. There are many reasons to find college football despicable, ridiculous, and ludicrous, and bowl games are one of them. The games are played when the football players either should be with family or studying for finals. Most of the games are unexciting, meaningless affairs between teams that have been mediocre in the already too long regular college football season. Of course, this year the games are being played in mostly empty stadiums, but that is often true in other years, too. The games generate so little enthusiasm that the stadiums were mostly empty in past seasons. Only a handful of the many bowls produce excitement and get crowds.

The games, however, generate money. They are televised and they also draw a sponsor whose name makes it into the title of the bowl making for some strange sounding contests. I was reminded of this early this bowl season when I was flicking through ESPN and saw that the RoofClaim.com Boca Raton Bowl was on. (I have no idea who the teams were or what the outcome was, and I am willing to bet none of you do either.) I had never heard of RoofClaim.com before, and I still don’t know what it is, but I assume, but do not know, that it has some connection with Boca Raton, Florida.

My impression is that there are fewer bowl games this season compared to years past, but we still have some intriguing bowl names that raise questions. For example, this year there will be a Cheez-It Bowl and a Duke’s Mayo Bowl. I assume there will be normal football games at these events, but the title makes it seem as if there will be something like mud wrestling where the football will be played in fields covered in a yellow snack or in one of carefully prepared pimiento cheese and other mayonnaise-based delicacies. They might be fun to watch.

We will have a PlayStation Fiesta Bowl, and I can’t help wonder if this will be a real head knocking game or a virtual event. The Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl seems to be working against itself. Should I eat a chicken sandwich or the fruit? Or is the chain marketing a new culinary creation? And what should I make of this year’s R + L Carrier New Orleans Bowl, the SERVPRO First Responders Bowl, the TransPerfect Music City Bowl, the Vrbo Citrus Bowl, and the TaxSlayer Gator Bowl.

These names may have some appeal, but to me they don’t match the titles from olden days, which in this case means a few years ago—real classics like the Bad Boy Mowers Gasparilla Bowl and the San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl. And of course, that all-time favorite, the Poulan Weed-Eater Independence Bowl.

In today’s world, however, we need not just create new names for bowl games, we need to rethink them to make them more interesting. I have a few suggestions.

The Paul Manafort Ukraine Bowl. Instead of a fake-tasting sports drink, delicious borscht is poured over the head of the winning coach as  commentators read a lobbyist-written script, generating a huge bill, that Ukraine, not Russia, was the creator of the beet soup. At halftime, instead of marching bands, ostriches are paraded as well-connected people bid to have the best-looking birds made into jackets. The proceeds go to a “charity,” but no one knows what that means.

The Roger Stone WikiLeaks Bowl where it is mandatory to steal your opponent’s playbook. The game officials wear faux Saville Row clothes, and their every third pronouncement is a lie. The referee said it was a first down, but was it? Or was that a dirty trick?

The Rudy Giuliani Get-Even-Crazier Bowl. The teams get to make up their own rules for every play, but each is still doomed to failure. The field is delineated with hair dye, and the game is played in a warm climate. As the temperature begins to rise, the lines run and form Rorschach tests.

The Smartmatic Hugo Chavez Venezuela Bowl. Even though there is no such game, OAN, Newsmax, and Fox are heavily bidding on it with Fox planning on Maria Bartiromo doing the play by play, which would be her first real journalism in years.

The Dominion Voting Systems Bowl where 47.3% of the spectators believe that every time their team scores the scoreboard adds even more points to the opponent’s total.

The Donald Suck-Up Swamp Bowl. Played in a foul-smelling bog that many spectators pretend not to see or care about, each player drawing a penalty can beseech a man with orange hair sitting behind a tiny table by saying “Pardon me” in hopes of having the offense forgiven.