Johnson, Voting Rights

GOP Channels Southern Democrats in the 1960’s…

On a Monday night 56 years ago next month, Lyndon Johnson ambled his way on to the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives to play the role, as one of his biographers has written, of “one shrewd heartland politician finishing what another had started.” 

“The galleries were jammed with whites and blacks, some in street clothes fresh from demonstrations and others in business attire,” historian Randall Woods wrote of the scene. The president’s wife and a daughter were in the crowd, so was FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. But the entire Mississippi delegation was boycotting the speech. Those unreconstructed segregationists Democrats, still embracing the grievance of a lost cause, knew what was coming. 

Lyndon Johnson speaks to Congress, March 15, 1965

“At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom,” Johnson said in his low, familiar Texas drawl. “So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.”

The week before – forever etched in American memory as “Bloody Sunday”- voting rights advocates had been routed and brutalized in Selma, Alabama. The next day’s coverage on the front page of the New York Times ran under the headline: “Alabama police use gas and clubs to rout Negros.” A four-column photo showed Alabama state troopers beating a young marcher – future Georgia congressman John Lewis – leaving his skull fractured and blood on his white shirt and tan raincoat. 

The ugly, un-American state terrorism at the Edmund Pettus Bridge – the bridge still carries the name of a Confederate general and Alabama leader of the Klan – was a hinge moment in political history, and LBJ seized the moment. He would push a Voting Rights Act (VRA) to finally make real the promise of that earlier heartland politician, Abraham Lincoln, martyred in his pledge to guarantee equal rights for all Americans.

Alabama state troopers assault John Lewis during a voting rights march in 1965

“The real hero of this struggle is the American Negro,” Johnson told the country and the Congress in 1965. “His actions and protests, his courage to risk safety and even to risk his life, have awakened the conscience of this Nation. His demonstrations have been designed to call attention to injustice, designed to provoke change, designed to stir reform.

“He has called upon us to make good the promise of America. And who among us can say that we would have made the same progress were it not for his persistent bravery, and his faith in American democracy.” 

Writing recently in The Atlantic, journalist Vann R. Newkirk II correctly asserted that passage of the VRA “finally delivered on the stated ideals of the country,” but now in state after state across the country that ideal “hangs by a thread.” 

From Georgia to Arizona, Montana to Idaho, Republican dominated state legislatures are attempting to do what southern segregationist Democrats did in earlier days: make it more difficult, if not impossible for some Americans to vote. It is no accident that this wave of new era vote suppression and denial comes on the heels of a record vote in a presidential election where a Democrat won the White House over a man who over and over perpetuated a big lie about elections being stolen, dead people voting and ballots being manufactured. 

By repeating time and again that some Americans are “skeptical about the integrity of our elections” Republicans, including the former president, have manufactured a malicious assault on American democracy. It quite simply amounts to the biggest lie ever told about American politics. 

Minnesota’s secretary of state Steve Simon described recently what is happening: “Some folks bring these proposals forward and say, ‘Well, we just need to address confidence in our election systems,’ when it’s some of those very same people, or at least their allies and enablers, [who] have denigrated our election system by either telling lies or at least leveraging or relying on other people’s lies to justify some of these policies.” 

This tactic is the voting rights equivalent of the fellow who murdered his parents and then insisting on leniency because he’s an orphan. 

The Republican floor leader of the Idaho House of Representatives, a guy so cynical that he blasted federal efforts to provide financial assistance to businesses whacked by the impacts of the pandemic and then ended up taking the aid himself, is a champion of the “many people are saying” logic of voter suppression. 

“There are a lot of people in this country looking at what happened in other states — some of those states had ballot harvesting — that feel like they were victimized by the outcome of this last national election,” Mike Moyle said recently as he pushed a bill to restrict your ability to pick up and drop off your elderly grandparent’s absentee ballot.

In the face of precisely no evidence of abuse, Moyle said the quiet part out loud while pushing an earlier even more restrictive bill. “You know what? Voting shouldn’t be easy,” Moyle said. Other legislators are seeking to ruin the ability of voters to take action using the time-test initiative method. 

The gentleman from Idaho won’t appreciate the reference, or likely understand it, but he’s a latter-day version of Mississippi segregationist James Eastland who resisted the Voting Rights Act by claiming his state had a right to disqualify certain voters and, after all, some communists must certainly be mixed up in this push to get more people to vote. 

Mississippi segregationist James O. Eastland

In the 56 years since Johnson framed the basic right to vote as a “battle for equality” rooted in “a deep-seated belief in the democratic process,” the two political parties have traded places on voting rights. Democrats, believing that making it easier to vote and easier for more people to vote, have embraced policies like motor voter registration, mail voting and same day registration. Republicans, looking fearfully at what high turnout portends for their long-term electoral success, now broadly reject inclusive policies and endorse conspiracy theories about stolen elections. In 2013, a conservative majority on the Supreme Court gutted a key enforcement provision of the landmark 1965 law, and the GOP resists efforts to address stronger enforcement. 

In politics the truth is often hiding in plain sight. Georgia voters, including record turnout among African Americans, elected two Democratic senators in January, one, the state’s first black U.S. senator, the other, the first Jewish senator in the state’s history. More people voting is good for democracy. Attempting to keep more people from voting is good for Republicans. 

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Additional Reading:

Some items you may find of interest…

Rush Limbaugh Was Trapped in the ’80s: It’s his fault that our politics were, too.

Conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh takes a break and smokes a cigar during his radio show. (Photo by mark peterson/Corbis via Getty Images)

Michael J. Socolow has an insightful piece on the recently departed talk radio personality and his impact on American politics.  

“Limbaugh’s influence on U.S. politics from the Reagan era to the Trump presidency was enormous. To discuss him primarily as a media figure (many credit him with saving the AM radio band when FM radio listening became dominant) is to overlook his more general impact on American political culture. He did not innovate radio programming, nor did he leave an easily replicable formula for a successful show. Like Arthur Godfrey and Walter Winchell before him, there was only one Rush Limbaugh. And like those two earlier giants in U.S. radio, Limbaugh’s style and massive audiences will no doubt disappear along with him. For better or for worse, there won’t be another one like him.” 

Read the entire article:


The Filibuster That Saved the Electoral College

A central character in my new book on four 1980 U.S. Senate races is Indiana Senator Birch Bayh. He was an enormously important political figure and it’s almost lost to history that he came remarkably close in 1968 to doing away with the Electoral College.

“Mr. Bayh had been pushing for a popular vote since 1966, shortly after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts had ended the Jim Crow era and pulled America closer than it had ever been to a truly representative democracy. Electing the president directly was the next logical step in that progression.”

Read how a Senate filibuster killed the effort. Bayh called it the biggest disappointment of his political life.


One night in Cancun: Ted Cruz’s disastrous decision to go on vacation during Texas storm crisis

Cruz fled disastrous winter weather and ran into another kind of storm

In this delightfully snarky take down of the oleaginous Texas senator the Washington Post’s Ashely Parker strikes a blow for freedom.

“Usually, it takes at least one full day in Cancún to do something embarrassing you’ll never live down.

“But for Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), it took just 10 hours — from when his United plane touched down at Cancún International Airport at 7:52 p.m. Wednesday to when he booked a return flight back to Houston around 6 a.m. Thursday — for the state’s junior senator to apparently realize he had made a horrible mistake.”

The most hated man in the Senate expands his reach.

Read about it here:


Thanks for following along.

And please check out my author website for regular updates about events and talks related to my new book Tuesday Night Massacre: Four Senate Elections and the Radicalization of the Republican Party.

Impeachment, Trump, U.S. Senate

What Are They Afraid Of…

The irascible, irreverent Perry Swisher – once an editor at the Lewiston, Idaho paper that publishes my regular column – was a 20th Century Renaissance Man: legislator (he served as both a Republican and Democrat), an independent candidate for governor, a writer, activist, deflater of egos and caustic truth teller, particularly about frauds, phonies and attorneys. 

One Idaho governor threatened the judicial council with a Swisher appointment to the Supreme Court – Perry wasn’t a lawyer – if the council didn’t start recommending better candidates for the court. Another governor put Swisher on the Public Utilities Commission and he proceeded for several years to scare the crap out of Idaho Power Company. 

Swisher once quipped that the Founders had made one fundamental mistake: they turned over an entire branch of government to lawyers. One can only imagine what the old curmudgeon would have made of the “trial” of America’s first insurrectionist president; where at least 18 of the Senate Republicans jurors who voted to acquit Donald Trump – including the two timid sheep from Idaho – are card carrying members of the bar. 

Senators being sworn in for the second Trump impeachment trial

Of course, none of these Perry Mason’s actually attempted to defend Trump’s behavior leading up to and including January 6, 2021 when a crazed mob of the then-president’s followers stormed the U.S. Capitol, killed a police officer, precipitated the deaths of two others and injured dozens more. 

This brainwashed gang of cranks, misfits, losers, white supremacists and MAGA true believers were, as Wyoming Republican Liz Cheney succinctly put it, summoned by Trump, assembled by the president who then “lit the flame” of the attack. There has never been such a blatant frontal assault on our democracy.

Everything that followed, Cheney said, “was his doing. None of this would have happened without the President. The President could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not.” 

That’s it. That was sum of the indictment that 43 Senate Republicans would not, could not defend, but were craven enough to dismiss on specious process grounds. 

The “trial was unconstitutional,” Harvard Law grad Mike Crapo said. “The House’s impeachment proceeding blatantly violated established guarantees of due process.” 

Jim Risch soiled the reputation of the University of Idaho’s law school where he surely learned more than he is now able to admit. “The United States Senate has no jurisdiction over a private citizen,” the former law and order prosecutor intoned incorrectly, “and thus impeachment was and is impossible.” 

Both men conveniently ignored that the Senate has, in fact, conducted trials of impeached officials who are out office and that the Senate in which they sit actually voted on the constitutionality question and a majority of senators deemed the proceedings proper. They weren’t defending the Constitution, they were engaging in jury nullification

The Trump “base” of the GOP, and those like the coward caucus in the Senate who refuse to confront it, are, in the words of media analyst Margaret Sullivan, “so disconnected from reality that when reality manages to intrude – in the form of undeniable facts, timelines, videos and presidential tweets – there’s nothing to do but deny it as outrageous and either look for an escape hatch or go on the attack.” 

Attorneys for former President Donald Trump William J. Brennan, left, and Michael van der Veen fist bump each other on the Senate subway after former President Doanld Trump was acquitted during the impeachment trial in the Senate on Saturday, Feb. 13, 2021. (Photo By Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)

And it’s not as though these senatorial profiles in gutlessness don’t know any better. Arkansas’s Tom Cotton, Texan Ted Cruz and the insurrectionist from Missouri Josh Hawley are, like Crapo, Harvard men, recipients of the best, most exclusive legal education America can offer. Cruz clerked for a chief justice of the Supreme Court. Utah’s Mike Lee was an assistant U.S. attorney and clerked for federal judges before jumping through the escape hatch rather than act to uphold an oath of office. 

Constitutional law scholar John E. Finn of Wesleyan University is just one of dozens of experts who utterly reject the rationalization of unconstitutionality that allowed Trump to skate. Instead Finn calls what Crapo, Risch and 41 other Senate Republicans did “constitutional rot,” a condition “in which we appear to be formally governed by constitutional rules and the rule of law, but the reality is quite different. When rot sets in, public officials and the public routinely ignore or subvert those rules while sanctimoniously professing fidelity to them.” 

The historian T.J. Stiles, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for biography, knows his American scoundrels. He says of our current one: “Donald Trump is precisely the sort of person for whom the Framers wrote the impeachment provision into the Constitution.” Unfortunately, while Madison and Hamilton and the rest did envision the need to disqualify a despot their imagination failed them when it comes to someone as ethically vacuous as a Cruz or a Crapo. 

This is the point at which history reminds his constituents that Crapo – Juris Doctorate cum laud, Harvard Law School in 1977 – has the rare distinction of voting to both impeach and then convict Bill Clinton for lying about consensual sex. Yet rather than confront the guy who summoned the mob, incited it, lit the flame and then watched the fire burn, Crapo employed the solemn sanctimony of the partisan escape hatch to acquit a man he must know in his heart of hearts is guilty as sin. 

The debasement of basic decency, truth and accountability are now widely accepted as a fundamental condition for good standing in a political party that once plausibly, but no longer, claimed Lincoln as its founding father. 

“The Republicans who voted to acquit Trump acted with selfishness, cynicism and even malice,” says the conservative scholar Tom Nichols. “They have smeared their betrayal of the Constitution all over their careers the same way the January insurrectionists smeared excrement on the walls of the Congress itself. At least human waste can be washed away. What the Republicans did on Feb. 13, 2021, will never be expunged from the history of the United States.”

History will remember, however, the few Republicans – Washington’s Jamie Herrera Beutler is one – who stood against the lies, rejected fears of mob censure and refused to quake at the prospect of facing the dreaded primary challenge. 

“I’m not afraid of losing my job,” Herrera Beutler said after voting to impeach Trump, “but I am afraid that my country will fail. I’m afraid that patriots of this country have died in vain. I’m afraid that my children won’t grow up in a free country. I’m afraid injustice will prevail.” 

What are Crapo and Risch and the Senate’s 41 other cowards afraid of? They should be frightened of the verdict rendered by the French philosopher Voltaire: “Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.”

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Additional Reading:

Some other items worth your time…

Pure, liquid hope:  What the vaccine means to me as a GP

Gavin Francis is a general practice physician in inner city Edinburgh, Scotland and he writes about the challenges for The Guardian.

“Before the pandemic, about a third of my consultations were about mental health; now it’s between half and two thirds, and the list of patients I check in with weekly or fortnightly about their mood is lengthening. People are unable, for now, to share those aspects of our humanity that help us, and come most naturally – touch, speech, sharing space. I hope the vaccine programme will prove an effective antidote to the sense of hopelessness that, for the past few months, has been spreading and deepening among many of my patients.”

The big costs of a pandemic. Read the whole thing


Embedded within a mass delusion: The challenge of reporting on QAnon

Angela Fu writes for the Poynter Institute about the challenges for journalist trying to cover the center of the conspiracy theory universe – QAnon.   

The Q symbol outside the Capitol on January 6

“The conspiracy theory originated in 2017 when someone calling themselves Q posted a Trump quote about the ‘calm before the storm’ on 4chan, a notorious online message board. Since then, QAnon has rapidly evolved as new followers join and more niche theories develop. Followers have taken their beliefs into the real world, sometimes in violent ways. Most recently, some QAnon believers took part in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

“A growing number of journalists are tracking QAnon, reporting on everything from the way social media algorithms help spread conspiracy theories to the people who lose loved ones to the movement. With each story, they debate whether their reporting will contribute helpful information or simply amplify the movement. Their goal is to make readers — lawmakers, tech companies, the general public — understand the gravity of the problems QAnon poses.”

Full story here


“I Don’t Trust the People Above Me”: Riot Squad Cops Open Up About Disastrous Response to Capitol Insurrection

A stunning piece of journalism from ProPublica on the insurrection on January 6, 2021 and the cops who fought off the mob: 

“One officer in the middle of the scrum, a combat veteran, thought the rioters were so vicious, so relentless, that they seemed fueled by methamphetamine. To his left, he watched a chunk of steel strike a fellow officer above the eye, setting off a geyser of blood. A pepper ball tore through the air over his shoulder and exploded against the jaw of a man in front of him. The round, filled with chemical irritant, ripped the rioter’s face open. His teeth were now visible through a hole in his cheek. Blood poured out, puddling on the pavement surrounding the building. But the man kept coming.

“The combat veteran was hit with bear spray eight times. His experience overseas ‘was nothing like this,’ he said. ‘Nothing at all.’”

A true first draft of history.


Thanks for reading…

Andrus, Salmon, Simpson

Run of the River…

Thirty years ago last month then-Idaho Governor Cecil D. Andrus stood at the front of a crowded hotel ballroom in Boise to warn the Northwest’s industrial and energy interests that the Endangered Species Act (ESA) was coming for them, and that the demise of the region’s salmon populations would eventually force them to change. 

“We have to tell the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) and the Corps of Engineers that they’ve had a microchip in their head on how to run the river,” Andrus said at his “Salmon Summit” in 1991. “That should be removed and replaced with a new chip, in which you say, ‘You will maintain this river for the fish, as well as power generation.”’ 

Until his death in 2017, Idaho long-time governor and former secretary of the Interior Cecil D. Andrus, was the region’s foremost political champion of salmon

Later that year, the first endangered species salmon listing was handed down setting off three decades of litigation and involving massive – and largely ineffective – spending on fish and wildlife. And yet the iconic fish struggled on. 

Andrus, rarely a pessimist, eventually came to believe the region’s only salmon strategy was simply to stall until the last of the fish were gone leaving nothing left to fight over. 

Nevertheless, the region’s Native American tribes and fish advocates fought for salmon, often winning repeat victories in court and slowly bending public opinion against the traditions and influence of BPA, the often-clueless Corps, the inattention of administrations of both parties and deeply invested special interests ranging from irrigators to port commissioners.

Now, in what must be one of the great political ironies of our age, this long, litigious battle over fish, power and river operations finds a most unlikely champion, a former dentist from eastern Idaho, a conservative Republican politician more at home on a golf course than in a drift boat. 

This week, Mike Simpson, the one-time Trump loathing congressman from Blackfoot who discovered Trumpian religion just in time to avoid any challenge to his 22-years in the House, rolled out a plan for the region’s grandest social engineering project since Franklin Roosevelt envisioned a Grand Coulee Dam in the 1930’s that would turn the Northwest’s “darkness to dawn.”

And like the very transactional Roosevelt – Montana Senator Burton K. Wheeler said FDR rewarded the region’s senators with a dam in exchange for political support – Simpson’s audacious, $33.5 billion plan is all about the lubricating influence of a billion here and billion there. There is money and projects in his plan to compensate every affected interest when, as Simpson envisions, the four fish killing dams on the lower Snake River in eastern Washington are breeched in the next decade. 

Mike Simpson, a conservative eastern Idaho Republican, is championing a big plan to save northwest salmon

Economic development cash and energy research. Waterfront restoration for port towns. More rail options. Money for water quality enhancements. Big checks for irrigators and tourism. And a truly massive enhancement for tribal interests in management of fishery resources. 

Pat Ford, who has fought the good fight for Northwest salmon for as long as there has been a fight, told me this week what Simpson “is a true believer in restoring the fish.” And then marveling at the reality, Ford stated the obvious: “The most committed politician in the region to restoring salmon stocks is a conservative Idaho Republican.”

While Simpson richly deserves the accolades he’s received from many quarters – particularly tribes and conservation interests – for reshuffling the cards around fish and power, it’s impossible to escape the sense that the region’s deeply embedded special interests – and their often rabid grassroots supporters – are willingly going to do anything other than what they have been doing since Andrus’s speech, which is nothing to help the fish. 

The harsh political reality for salmon and for the Idaho congressman is that this fight, like all our political fights, is less about solving seemingly intractable problems than prevailing over “the other side.” Truth be told those four lower Snake River dams, condemned almost from their inception as expensive dinosaurs that would eventually destroy the fishery, are more important for what they represent than what they offer. 

Lower Granite Dam on the Snake River in eastern Washington would be one of four dams breached under Simpson’s plan

In reality the dams are political symbols, concrete proxies in the continuing western mythology that real men exist to remake rivers, tame Mother Nature and vanquish environmentalists. After spending years insisting dammed rivers can co-exist with migrating fish why admit it was always a lie? 

Even as Simpson’s plan offers the promise of billions in goodies and the end of endless litigation, the grassroots forces who have defended the dams with religious vigor, while hating those who advocate for the fish, will find a “come, let us reason together” argument no more attractive than brackish slack water.  

Eastern Washington congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rogers is the epitome of how this mythology works. She immediately blasted fellow Republican Simpson’s plan with a line that had the precision of a fearful focus group. “These dams are the beating heart of Eastern Washington,” McMorris Rogers said, knowing just how to connect the culture of concrete with the grievance of 21st Century conservative politics.

Will southeastern Washington Republican Jamie Herrera Beutler, one of the few House members to buck her party on impeachment and under fire for it, really pick another fight with her conservative base by getting on board with Simpson? What prevents the calculating, do nothing Jim Risch, who has done it before, from kneecap Simpson’s plans by quietly stoking the ready opposition? 

Simpson’s calculation is that he has, at best, a two-year window of opportunity to sell his idea. 

With Joe Biden in the White House wanting a historic infrastructure bill, and with Oregon Senator Ron Wyden sitting atop the Finance Committee, Simpson might – might – have an opening. Don’t count on it. When Wyden outlined his own priorities recently salmon wasn’t on the list.

If American politics were more like 1980 when Henry Jackson and Frank Church and Mark Hatfield attempted the region’s last grand design to head off the end of salmon – the Northwest Power Act – Simpson’s billions of dollars in carrots without a stick might have a chance, and the fish might have a future. But today there is no Scoop Jackson, and no Mark Hatfield and region’s once proud bipartisan altruism is long out of fashion. 

The Idaho congressman has taken this intriguing kickoff to his own 20-yard line. He’ll need the kind of regional offense not seen in decades to cover the next 80 yards to the end zone. The clock is running, and it benefits the same old group that wants to do nothing. 

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Additional Reading:

A few suggestions for additional reading this weekend…

The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election

Time magazine journalist Molly Ball with a sobering look at just how close the United States came to failing at democracy. 

“This is the inside story of the conspiracy to save the 2020 election, based on access to the group’s inner workings, never-before-seen documents and interviews with dozens of those involved from across the political spectrum. It is the story of an unprecedented, creative and determined campaign whose success also reveals how close the nation came to disaster. ‘Every attempt to interfere with the proper outcome of the election was defeated,’ says Ian Bassin, co-founder of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan rule-of-law advocacy group. ‘But it’s massively important for the country to understand that it didn’t happen accidentally. The system didn’t work magically. Democracy is not self-executing.’”

Sobering. Hope you’re paying attention. Link to the full article.


I Talked to the Cassandra of the Internet Age

A fascinating New York Times piece by Charlie Warzel about the scientist who predicted what the Internet would do to society and to each of us.

Big surprise: the Internet has changed us

“The big tech platform debates about online censorship and content moderation? Those are ultimately debates about amplification and attention. Same with the crisis of disinformation. It’s impossible to understand the rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA wing of the far right or, really, modern American politics without understanding attention hijacking and how it is used to wield power. Even the recent GameStop stock rally and the Reddit social media fallout share this theme, illustrating a universal truth about the attention economy: Those who can collectively commandeer enough attention can accumulate a staggering amount of power quickly. And it’s never been easier to do than it is right now.”

Fascinating. And frightening. Read the whole thing


The Lousy Tippers of the Trump Administration

The writer, a restaurant worker in D.C., dishes on the habits of the former administration. 

“The restaurant adapted to the Trump era. We introduced a $45 three-course early bird special, which I recall was still too pricey for Wilbur Ross, though the unusual influx of right-wing tourists who visited appreciated it. Betsy DeVos became a regular, and unlike the others she was a paragon of superficial graciousness, even if she didn’t tip quite enough to compensate for two or three tables that would ask to move if she was seated near them.”

Moe Tkacik writes of the Trumpers, “they were exhausting, impossible, stingy, and cruel, just like at their day jobs.”

Here’s the link.


Bathroom Reading

And this delightful essay from Rose Henrie about, well, “talking to a man about a horse.”

“It is remarkable to think that each of us spends roughly three years of our life going to the toilet. And that’s not to mention the reading, watching, and maybe for some — though it’s still an etiquette grey area — talking on the phone. Potty training is a child’s first step to becoming a functioning member of society. Along with learning to communicate, this is phase one of proto-personhood: say please and thank you, and try not to wee on the floor. For those of us who are fortunate, this is the start of a lifelong lack of thinking about using the loo. It is something we take for granted. An accessible, clean space is often available, whether it’s in the home or out and about. When nature calls, we know exactly how to answer and can do so, for the most part, comfortably.” 

You can read it while doing “your business.” 


Thanks for reading. Be careful out there.

Biden, Montana, Politics

Memo to Joe: Go West…

When Joe Biden says he will govern as a president who represents all Americans, even those who did not vote for him, I take him at his word. But I also know millions of fellow Americans don’t. 

Biden’s words about wanting to be a uniter, a president who seeks and finds common ground, are surely welcome after some many months of purposeful division. But without genuine action – and by that, I mean more than policies, executive orders or even legislation – Biden’s words will ring hollow for many Americans. Many don’t believe he’s sincere because, well, we live in a deeply cynical and polarized age

Joe Biden’s message of unity would benefit from some one-on-one engagement with people who don’t believe he really means it

So, as a Democrat in the rural west, I offer some tough love to the new president and to his staff, a group like the staff at every White House who will all too soon become victims of inside the beltway thinking that will almost certainly short circuit the new president’s efforts at unity. Three suggestions.

Get out of the bubble. A still raging pandemic makes it difficult to travel and engage with real Americans, but Biden and the White House must find a way. Despite the pandemic, political pros like senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Jon Tester of Montana have been holding virtual town hall meetings in their states. Until he can travel, Biden should be pushing hard against a presidency that is defined exclusively on inside the beltway terms. 

If I could command the White House communication shop, I’d have Biden and vice president Kamala Harris doing weekly sessions with real people, Republicans, Democrats, independents, young and old in every region of the country. The desire to control such presidential interactions causes careful staffers to fret over a real person posing an uncomfortable question that might induce a gaffe. The hell with such thinking. Biden is at his best in small group, one-on-one situations. He’s an experienced retail politician. Empathy is his long suit. Take the shackles off and let the president mix it up with real folks, particularly including those who didn’t vote for him. 

Listen and learn. The desire to avoid risk is a huge limitation on political action and political persuasion. Every politician is expected to have a crisp, detailed and often meaningless answer to every conceivable question. But real life is more than a 12-point plan and begins, as Woody Allen famously said, with showing up, and beginning to connect. 

In pre-COVID days, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden held a all-comers town hall in every county every year. Now he’s doing them virtually

Biden and his handlers can make a virtue out of merely showing up and listening. They don’t have to have a detailed position paper on every issue. Oregon’s Wyden is particularly good at this kind of listening. He starts his town halls with a sentence or two about some big issue in the news and then listens to questions and concerns from his constituents. Often, he has a good answer, but nearly as often he will turn to a staffer and say, “we need to do some more work on this and get back to this guy.” 

The key is to listen, and of course to get back. 

Imagine if the president of this apparently hopelessly divided country would show up in a small town in the rural south or central Iowa or Bonner County, Idaho and told local county commissioners, school board members, business owners, farmers and retirees: “I want to hear what’s on your mind. I want to hear your solutions to our biggest challenges.” I think jaded Washington hands would be stunned by the power of a disarming sentence like: “I really want to know what you are worried about.”

Would Biden get some seriously awkward questions? You bet. Would it make for great television? Absolutely. Forget the big, boasting, fact-free rallies that have passed for presidential leadership for the last four years. Let’s have real Americans talk directly to the new president. There is a fair chance the country would get smarter. And Biden would begin to prove that he listens and cares, even cares about and listens to those who didn’t vote for him. 

Come West. It’s become a tired cliché, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true that broad swaths of the nation are “flyover country,” precincts seldom visited by a national politician. It’s also a truism that Democrats have suffered a deep and persistent decline in most of flyover country in large part because too many on the political left don’t care – or act like they don’t care – about the West. 

You can date much of this to the widespread and not inaccurate view that Bill Clinton (and then Barack Obama) didn’t know the West and didn’t try to learn about what they didn’t know. Donald Trump appealed to many in the West despite the fact that he hadn’t a clue about why forest fires continue to rage or that public lands are where westerners hunt, fish and recreate. Showing up and listening to the very real practical concerns in flyover country would be the beginning of understanding and the foundation on which trust might be built. 

Tester, the last significant Democrat standing in Montana, also still operates a family farm on the Hi Line, and he put a fine point on all this in his recent book Grounded.

Montana Senator Jon Tester has advice for fellow Democrats

Rural westerners, Tester writes, have “given up on whatever ‘normal’ is in politics, because that normal has failed them. The status quo ain’t working, and we ought to be listening – truly listening – to what rural America has to say about it.” 

So, twice a month Biden and his staff should pick a spot in rural America and go and listen. A good place to start would be an old railroad town 30 miles from Tester’s farm. The last president to visit Havre, Montana, the county seat of Hill County, was Harry Truman in 1952. Trump won the county with 54% of the vote last year. Tester won the same county with 58% in 2018.  

Imagine a town hall in Havre. No speeches and no malarky, as Biden might say, just real folks and real issues and real listening. The power of showing up and listening just might be the first concrete step to disarmament in our uncivil war. 

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Additional Reading:

My weekly curation of worthy reads from here and there…

Henry Aaron

The great Aaron has always been my favorite player of the great game. He was the quintessential “all tool” player. He could hit for power and average. Run the bases. He could play defense and had a great arm. His recent death hit all baseball fans hard.

Hall of Fame in every respect

And Henry Aaron was a genuinely decent man who played brilliantly and quietly through a lot of adversity and made a tremendous contribution on and off the field.

“Aaron’s consistency is unparalleled in baseball history, and perhaps in all of North American team sports. He qualified for the batting title in each of his first 19 seasons, hit at least 24 home runs 19 seasons in a row, and scored at least 100 runs 13 times in a row. He hit .300 in 14 seasons, and he posted at least 6.0 bWAR every year from 1955 to 1969, a 15-year streak that nobody had matched before or has since.”

Great piece by Michael Baumann.


Forcing out the Fringe

Republicans struggled this week with two extremely difficult issues: what to do with a conspiracy theory believing freshman House member and what to do with a GOP leader who voted to impeach Donald Trump.

Historian Matthew Dallek provides some context for the first issue by reviewing how the GOP once distanced itself from the John Birch Society, a conspiracy theory embracing group of ultra-right loons that came to prominence in the 1950’s…and now is, sort of, back.

“By stigmatizing, punishing and outvoting the forces that wanted to burn it all down in the 1950s and 1960s, Americans ostracized them; the United States put a lid on the toxic stew of bigotry, conspiratorial thinking and White Christian identity politics, and defended democratic values like truth, equality and racial justice. It was a whole-of-society strategy, more effective than anything unfolding today. Clearly, it didn’t keep those forces at bay forever. But in the right circumstances, it could work again.”

Worth your time.


The Second Shot Proves the Vaccine is Working

Katherine Wu in The Atlantic.

“Dose No. 2 is more likely to pack a punch—in large part because the effects of the second shot build iteratively on the first. My husband, who’s a neurologist at Yale New Haven Hospital, is one of many who had a worse experience with his second shot than his first.”

Get ready…and get the vaccine when you can.


All the best…and thanks for reading.