Sunday, May 12, 2019

WHY HASN’T PUBLIC OUTRAGE JUMPED ON TRUMP?

Where is our  Joe Welch speaking out over  indecent behavior?
By Dominique Paul Noth

Rudy Giuliani’s announced and then canceled trip to Ukraine to encourage that government to find dirt on Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s only surviving son, proved too obviously low for even Trump’s senior advisers – but only after pronounced criticism from both parties.
  
Trump immediately struck again in his now routine departure from normal behavior by injecting self-praising politics into a famous annual Fourth of July celebration, hoping to insert an “ain’t I great” speech into a nonpartisan patriotic moment.

Such antics brought to mind Joseph Welch, distinguished special counsel for the Army in 1954, who finally halted Sen. Joe McCarthy’s overwrought appeal to fear and innuendo by simply asking, “At long last, sir, have you no sense of decency?”

That is the only proper response to the machinations of Donald Trump, who so fears people think  a foreign power helped get him elected that the first thing he wants  to do against Biden  in the 2020 campaign is get a foreign government to embarrass a family member and interfere in our election.

The Ukraine affair and the Fourth of July threat are tips of an iceberg that includes bizarre Tweet attacks on former employees, revocation of press credentials, contradicting his own staff  and other uproars so typical of Trump’s modus operandi – to trot out something outrageous and see how much attention he gets from the media whether he does it or not.

These “no sense of decency” moments ought to catapult the American electorate into seeing how far from basic morality Trump is willing to stray.  That the nation accepts this would confound the mild-mannered Welch – whose putdown of McCarthy drew national magazine covers -- and shows how far we have drifted from the traditional America Trump keeps talking about, though he clearly doesn’t know what it was. Welch was a touchstone, the sort we need again.

You don’t have to want Biden as president to realize Trump is counting on the media to magnify by repetition any weird action or political dirtiness he attempts, with Rudy as handmaiden. 

It has already happened regarding Biden.  The only reason most of the country now knows Trump’s nasty nickname for Biden – sleepy creepy Joe – is because news outlets, even MSNBC, repeated it hourly – sometimes in laughter but they repeated it nevertheless.

Trump is the president, the media argues, so every utterance has to be covered. But ratings concerns have clearly infected the networks.  Obama’s controlled face never got half the airtime of the plastic-putty puss.  There is no journalistic justification for how often his repetitious rally ramblings and predictable nastiness get airtime.  

The media is mystified – stupefied – on how to handle someone so willing to be unconventional and even immoral out in the open, untouched by the normal control brake of shame. Since the Mueller report did not criminally nail him for his footsies with foreign powers, he figures footsie can continue. Anything not directly forbidden will rear up again.

McCarthy (left) consulting with Roy Cohn
during 1954 hearings.
The reference to Joe McCarthy actually has historical connections to Trump – beyond how their use of fear and degradation is much the same.  Recall in videos of those Army hearings that McCarthy’s lawyer was the same Roy Cohn, now departed, who was Trump’s mentor in business shenanigans.  Trump himself has wished aloud the attorney general would serve as his personal lawyer like Cohn – and clearly William Barr is a sort of clone. 

In we can read facial language into videos from 65 years ago, Cohn was not happy with McCarthy’s ploy because he saw early – like the Ukraine fiasco – it could backfire into elevating McCarthy’s enemies.  McCarthy’s overreach was much like Trump’s – he tried  to embarrass Fred Fisher, a Welch assistant for a short time and a member of a Boston law firm  who at Harvard joined the lawyers guild, which had been cleared by DOJ but labeled a ‘‘Communist front'' by the now notorious House Committee on Un-American Activities.

McCarthy’s violent stretch of the facts – trying to discredit Welch and the Army by reaching for any red paint he could find -- is parallel to the Ukraine trip and similar Trump outrages, sometimes against the advice of his modern day Cohns.

Biden’s older son, Beau, a rising political force, was stricken by brain cancer. The grief over his death is the main reason Joe Biden did not run in 2016, while many are certain he would have done better than Hillary Clinton in the states that turned out to be vital – Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Trump seems to suspect that also and he is turning up the pressure that Biden himself forecast – “he’ll go after my family.”

Hunter, the younger son, has had a slightly troubled life, the kind the tabloids Trump loves might exploit -- a divorce, allegations of drug use, Page Six breathlessness when he dated Beau’s widow and now in Ukraine as board member of an oil company cleared of charges in the new, less Soviet friendly government.

What this has to do with Joe is minimal.  Guiliani’s second advertised reason for talking up Ukraine, to get dope on Mueller and how the probe of Trump started, is equally delusional.  But note how Trump reaches for foreign help when facing opponents like Hillary and Joe who have a valuable foreign reputation, the sort of reputation he doesn’t.

The liberal school of thought doesn’t believe – or want to believe -- Trump made it to the presidency in 2016 on his own hook and crook.  It evokes in them a frightening view of anti-intellectual Americans.  I have to remind myself that in Wisconsin, 1,405,284 people voted for him. (For number nerds, Hillary gathered 1,382,536 and would surely have won drawing a fair share of the third party candidates, as the spilled milk people will tell you.)  My question today is simpler: Are those voters still there? Can the Trump voters stand by him now? It’s not just me asking.  TV news crews are busy interviewing voters about shifts in opinion.

Yet something about his methods apparently appeals to a section of Americans, which suggests a segment of the public so upset by the establishment that they wanted a maverick, even if the maverick has now proven a con artist and destroyed our foreign reputation while clinging to a rich man’s view of an economy that hardly addresses the pocketbook issues. 

I don’t know if Biden will be the voters’ final choice, though I have written about why he seems so appealing to voters and so scary to Trump.

I suspect that Trump gimmicks like the Ukraine – trying to destroy him by destroying his children -- will only increase Biden’s support. The election is about more than revealing Trump as a charlatan, but that’s a good start for angry voters.  They are suffering under Trump’s foreign stumbles, refusal to act on climate change, undoing deals that were good in the first place – and simply pretending that just being in the office gives him a license to misbehave.

No, the election should be about the best ideas for government and what the public regards as the best ideas.  The Biden appeal is predicated on a known quantity who can be moved to the left and is going to benefit from all the cheap shots Trump throws at him.  He is too old-fashioned for some of the voters who wanted him in 2016 when he was 72 – and given two terms would have been a president at 80.  But suddenly 76 feels too old out of the starting gate, though strangely you don’t hear the same sniping  about 77 year old Bernie Sanders.  

The progressives see strong younger presidential candidates out of the 20 or so running. One or two may still catch fire.  The issue is whether the electorate feels the same necessity for speed and youthful vigor.   It is too simplistic – as Kirsten Gillibrand proclaimed to the media -- that only Biden’s name recognition has him so far ahead. The non-hyphenated Democrats who make up the bulk of the vote are responding to more than name value.

Remember, in 2007, a year out from the contest, few voters even knew who Barack Obama was, but they measured him against the rest of the field.

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his DomsDomain dual culture and politics outlets.  He also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.



Sunday, May 5, 2019

THE OLD GUARD, SCARING TRUMP AND CONFUSING DEMOCRATS

By Dominique Paul Noth

Nancy Pelosi has been displaying her limp handshake diplomacy against
 Donald Trump  for years.
Leaving aside the younger Bernie Sanders fans, most progressive Democrats are activating for a new generation to take charge of the party in 2020.  In the last weeks, however, they have been forced to concede that the vim, savvy and experience most confounding Donald Trump stem from two septuagenarians. 

The main one, Nancy Pelosi, has emerged as the party’s strategic leader. The Republicans hoped to paint her as the evil shrew leading the impeachment stampede. They have been outwitted. She has convinced her colleagues that sharp investigation of Trump’s behavior will create the grounds for impeachment that even Republican senators can’t ignore.  It is a strategy that appeals after two years of doom and gloom rhetoric. “Own the center left,” she preaches, and bury Trump with a big victory.

The Speaker of the House at age 79 is not just pounding away on Trump’s behavior -- and the criminal means used to protect him – she is also backing a flood of progressive bills moving from the House to the Senate.  The cliché of   “walking and chewing gum at the same time” now only applies to one party – the Democrats.  Her open embrace of that cliché confounds Republicans.

She just produces wave after wave of responsible bills on election reform, background checks on firearms, paycheck fairness, net neutrality, health care and the environment, while showing the White House her willingness to work on infrastructure.  The delicious irony for Pelosi was that Republicans, led by McConnell, are opposing the infrastructure initiative.

That makes Mitch McConnell looks like the Grim Reaper (his own term that she has cunningly played offense with) blocking all these sensible advances. It hasn’t taken voters long to notice that the Senate, under Republican control, is where good ideas go to die.

The traditional voter preference for split government – denying one party both the Congress and the White House -- is fast disappearing thanks to this obstinacy of Mitch and Donald. Their new breed of Republicans has no philosophical rationale and looks weaker on ideas than the Democrats. Half the talking heads on TV agreeing with the Democrats are Republicans who have fallen away from Trump! Can the voters be far behind?

The fighting spirit of Joe Biden almost leaps past
primary niceties to tackle Trump.
The other vigorous septuagenarian is Joe Biden, younger by three years.  His mere presence at the top of the Democrat field of over 20 presidential hopefuls drives Trump zany on Twitter. Biden is leaping directly into the general election, bypassing the primary to go after Trump full bore and letting the chips of his 40 year record fall where they may. 

In simply not having to prove who he is, he is ahead of most of the field who have to introduce themselves to the public. The attacks from right and left on who he is are preaching to the choir – the voters know him. His plans for the future will unfold slowly while other Democratic candidates are pressed to explain who they are. He’s openly appealing to fallen away Republicans.

The presidential field is generally quite impressive and thankfully diverse. Many are making a strong impact.  But Joe just being Joe, and the reaction from the White House, demonstrate how much Trump hates dealing with known quantities like Joe and Nancy. They simply laugh off his sneering attacks. 

Biden’s age is assuredly a negative factor for new generation enthusiasts. Many eagerly want a younger generation to take hold of the future (and even Biden supporters regard him as  a place holder in the White House).

But age may not be as big a factor with traditional Democratic voters.  Many say medical advances are making 80 the new 60! Trump who is also in his seventies tries to pass himself off as young and healthy compared to Biden.  But the public sees who has to waddle onto the greens and needs a golf cart to carry him through foreign meetings.

Those over 50 are still more reliable as voters than those under 40, and even black women in recent polls show a preference for Biden, which could be another aspect of the Obama factor that is driving Trump nuts.

For two years, the Donald has tried to destroy Obama’s legacy – the health care plan, the Iran nuclear deal, the environmental regulations, pretending he didn’t inherit a good economy.  Maddening for Trump, longing for Obama grows and Biden represents that wished-for competence.   

So his only success has been elevating Biden, to many Americans a key part of an era where progress was made, in increments of inches perhaps but progress nevertheless. It was also a time when the world looked to America for moral and intelligent leadership, something that has vanished. Trump has done more than any other president to elevate Russia, China, Iran and even North Korea and Venezuela. What a horrible legacy!

America’s decline in reputation over two years lends credence to the progressive left’s call for robust correction, no half measures.  Trump has cost us a great deal of lost time at a crucial moment in history.

The US was once regarded as the essential fair broker in international disputes – no longer.   The window on dealing with climate change is almost closed.   The economy cannot long survive the growth of the top 1% against the middle class. 

Thus there is understandable pressure for “Medicare for All,” as some term it, or automatic voter registration, or the Green New Deal as a direction for the future, and many other pleas for immediate action on the left that Trump falsely decries as socialism. The US democracy has actually embraced socialism to deal with the common good – and the "common good" seems to have fewer tools at its disposal under Trump.

The majority of voters may internally agree with the left that something important must be done in 2020. But they may prove in their voting more cautious and hence more susceptible to GOP claims that the Democrats are throwing money around.  

The voters who have the final say have some historic pressures on being cautious.  In America, our traditional icons of heroic patriotism are white males -- mainly icons from the movies and from politics. While many female organizations are now demanding deeper appreciation of female power, even recognition of how the “weaker sex” is often the stronger sex in intellectual maneuvering, there is a tide of history that has diminished women and continues to do so in presidential polling. Is there a new tide in history strong enough to overcome that?

Many expect the electorate to jump in horror away from Trump, but not as far as some on the left hope. It recalls to mind the Aaron Sorkin inspired observation on the “West Wing” Season 7 when Matt Santos was campaigning to replace Josiah Bartlett as president. 

Santos was proudly a liberal but his campaign in Sorkin’s language was dealing with “a nation of centrists” while liberal Democrats were trying to push him even further to the left and conservatives were hawking on the right. That description of a fictional American electorate rings dangerously true to reality 13 years later.  

Biden may represent that solidarity from the Obama past to many voters. I’ve long been one who thinks he missed his natural time, but I also admit that his tenure as VP for eight years has demonstrated a capability that I did not see in 2007.  Election choices are often about the personal story a candidate brings to the office, and Biden has a good one.

His gains, however, have produced a disquieting level of infighting among the Democrats, some of it understandable, some of it petty. 

If the past is any measure, and that is questionable these days, the emerging Democratic candidate has to be a mixture of personality and ideas.  There’s plenty of time to decide -- and maybe to ponder why two septuagenarians, Pelosi and Biden, have made the deepest inroads against Trump.

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his DomsDomain dual culture and politics outlets.  He also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.