Wednesday, February 19, 2020

CAN SANDERS AND BLOOMBERG SHARE THE SAME PARTY?

By Dominique Paul Noth

Mike Bloomberg was greeted to the debate stage in Las Vegas
with ferocity from all the other candidates, with Elizabeth
Warren particularly animated in her attacks.
“Anyone but Bernie -- he’s an anarchist,” thumped the big Democratic donor from Las Vegas on national TV.  “Anyone but Bloomberg – why replace one egotistical New Yorker for another?” said a Sanders supporter during a similar national interview.

Both presidential candidates are leading in national polls, so the February 19 debate also brought the ultimate test of the “big tent” theory of the Democratic Party. Could that bulging tent contain both the perfect foil for Bernie Sanders’ attack on the billionaire class and Michael Bloomberg’s perfect riposte for such an attack on the wealthy? 

The combat was not mano a mano. Everyone took advantage of Bloomberg’s first time on the stage to thump him like a refugee from the Walking Dead, so he and Bernie only got into it around the edges.  But oh what edges!

It’s almost as if the Democrats had created Frankenstein opposites to destroy themselves, each controlling a third of the voters against Trump.  Sanders will run as a Democrat but insists on the Democratic Socialist brand.  Bloomberg the mayor ran as Republican, then Independent and finally Democrat while changing the rules in New York City to allow himself a third (Trump-like?) term.

In effect the two have given Trump the best week of his lamentable presidency, a glimmer that the unity of opposition that should destroy him in November will split itself apart.  Yet both candidates insist their primary purpose is to destroy Trump.

Can a diehard Sanders voter ever support Bloomberg should he win?  Or vice versa? Despite protestations from their camps? Trump, always looking for a weakness if he can’t manufacture one in his enemies, has been handed a real one to needle his opponents. 

This is no trivial surface split. If some third candidate doesn’t leap to the forefront in the next few weeks, the big tent could cleave apart.

Sanders’ successful rally screed is blaming oligarch ravenous acquisition (Bloomberg by his definition) for the financial imbalance that has destroyed America.  He wants a flat revolution in how we address health care (Medicare for All), higher education (free), taxation (wealth tax) and how the government puts people first.  
         
The 12th richest man in the world has the resources to buy the election and a background that makes him palatable to many who still associate capitalism with the freedom to rise to the heavens.  Bloomberg approaching 40,  to oversimplify,  spent two decades building a fortune and then two decades using the money for public service and social causes he and many Democrats believe in – gun control, climate change, more equitable income.  His ads are terrific and his promise to use his wealth for whoever wins appeals to many.  (Unanswered – would Sanders take his money to beat Trump?)

What gives Bloomberg the bigger edge on entrance is how deeply US voters value wealth and the willingness to spend it for what you believe.  That elevation of money flies in the face of Sanders’ values as he wondered aloud to Bloomberg where his thousands of workers fit into that equation.

Facts, even impeachment, have been unable to discard Trump.  False views of the economy have helped him continue a stronger popularity --- never 50% but a heck of a lot stronger than his behavior should allow. It’s tempting to think that only someone with a bigger bankbook can dislodge him.  Though in reality it’s the number of votes – and the key question is which Democrat can reach those numbers.

While Bloomberg was selective partners with Obama, he was also a fierce critic of Obamacare and Dodd-Frank. While many still disagree with him on charter schools, redlining, stop and frisk, and his style of speech – and while Elizabeth Warren’s blistering attack on his treatment of women gouged deeply --   there is much to admire in how Bloomberg has parlayed enormous financial influence into unstintingly giving to the world.

But it is clearly his political and philanthropic causes.  Sanders conversely seems a gut believer  in the common man and how government should exist because of the essential public service it can provide, such as universal health care and fair pay for hard work.  Whether he can handle the complicated wheels of US government, the essential compromise needed to pass legislation, is less clear.

But it is easier to understand in Milwaukee with its German Serbian heritage of good government from “sewer socialists” – a century of mayors who pushed government to regulate sewer, water, public transit and other universal services while letting free markets decide the rest of the world.  Few found these attitudes couldn’t co-exist, though there were endless debates about the parameters.  

Bloomberg does not have the same philosophy – there is almost a patrician air to his decisions about what help the public needs when. It is clear that his conscience will decide. His influences dovetail with most of America right now but they are his influences, while Sanders’ unwillingness to change is a big appeal since it stems from a rigid morality.  The rigidity worries many but appeals to others. You can see it clearly when Warren decided to modify her “Medicare for All” to provide an actual time period to legislatively implement it – and that seemed to help Sanders and weaken her though many others found it an intelligent recognition of the realities.

It is the absolutism of Sanders (which is actually not reflected in how often he has voted with Democrats on bills when he couldn’t change them) that has created in social media the Bernie Bros, the absolutists who denigrate any opposition, which has hurt Sanders with the larger Democratic and independent pool of voters.  Conversely, Bloomberg the ultimate self-made capitalist can be equally testy and arrogant when challenged and has a descriptive style about his philosophy that carries its own level of injury and snippiness into any debate. He may not be the racist Sanders supporters paint, but he has not led on minority issues.

There is also clearly a generational divide at work, which explains much of Sanders appeal to the young and Bloomberg’s appeal to the more established.

It is not just some mystical past “ism” before “terrorism” that worries those who came of age in the 1950s to 1970s when they hear the term “socialism,” If roughly you are under 40, it is another ism -- flagrant runaway capitalism -- that has been destroying your livelihood, so the kind of socialism that has always worked side by side with American democracy creates appeal, not fear.  Some older voters are not willing to take the trouble to understand the daily terror associated with our free market system, no more than the younger are willing to understand the lingering bogeymen of isms that generations before them had to fight off.

The strangest irony would be if the Democrats’ own internal eating of their young allowed Trump to escape the consequences of how much he has destroyed the America that is and how much more he could destroy now that the GOP has set him loose.

Bloomberg entered the race to beat Trump – could he have opened the door to Trump’s survival? My highway or the highway has been Trump’s battle cry, after all, and some are not ready to replace it with Bloomberg’s healthier highway.

Another irony comes from comparing economic plans. Bloomberg clearly entered the race because of Sanders’ wealth taxIt was the most ferocious attack on people like Bloomberg even as other more neutral sources took issue with its efficiency.  Sanders was not as worried about details as about the new direction he believes America must change to.

Bloomberg’s own economic proposals use other terms but don’t let the rich get away with traditional escape hatches – adding an estimated $5 trillion in taxes over 10 years.  But Bloomberg still believes Sanders wants to destroy capitalism and Sanders didn’t supply contrasting information in this debate.

Polls are only a snapshot in time, and times change, but right now it is not so much that Sanders has gained in numbers (maybe a few)  but that others have fallen as Bloomberg rises.  The other Democrats actually regard themselves as progressives – ask Amy, Joe, Pete, Elizabeth. They were all on the attack, Warren most effectively, Mayor Pete more snidely toward Amy and Amy more like facing up to a high school bully in Pete.

Joe Biden was more laid back, largely pointing out that he had been there and done that (whatever the issue). I began wondering if he is hoping that the viewers will be moved by his calmness in a storm. His essence is steeped in the Democratic variation of the old Reagan edict – don’t speak ill of a fellow Democrat. Except when he looks at Sanders and Bloomberg as something other than a Democrat, which he finally did with Bloomberg in one of his most effective exchanges.

Collectively all these candidates are treated by the media as the more moderate wing, but they are still larger than the Sanders wing, especially if you add Bloomberg  It’s just that none of them are yet willing to give over to another.  The way the procedure to win delegates has been arranged, they may be forced to.


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. 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.  A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.


Thursday, February 13, 2020

PUBLIC BADLY MISLED ON WHAT’S IMPORTANT IN ELECTION

By Dominique Paul Noth

In Maine, Sara Gideon is fortunate.  Every time GOP Sen.  Susan Collins
opens her mouth about how she expects Trump to behave, and he
 doesn't, that raises campaign money for Gideon against her.
The American public and the cable news stations are totally misguided on where they are putting their focus.

Dogfights and who’s up and who’s down may seem important for ratings but they are nonsense so early in the primary game against Donald Trump.  In a few weeks we may not be talking about Klobuchar, Mayor Pete and Elizabeth Warren or maybe we will. Or we may be marveling anew at how Joe Biden survives or how Bernie Sanders and Michael Bloomberg are on a collision course of the “wealth is horrible” vs. “wealth is essential” debate – if Bloomberg can survive the audiotape from 2015 when he says “the way you get the guns out of the kids’ hands is to throw them up against the wall and frisk them.”

Time will tell but real politics suggest we should now be focusing on the most vital election games in our national town and how the communication in these days of the Internet makes us all players in the essential contests in every state that will shape the future without Donald Trump, since the polls also indicate that any number of Democrats can beat him.  

What kind of Republic will we then inherit to get things done? If anyone thinks Trump’s destruction of our institutions is the only way they can be destroyed – given the behavior of some people in the institutions themselves – they are not paying attention.

We are only stuck with Trump because of the fear and venality of the Republicans in the Senate during the impeachment trial and now beyond, when they knew what he did was wrong and decided the country could survive another 11 months with him. “What could he do with us all watching?”  they seemed to say. Turns out plenty and he is now trying to shred the remaining fabric of criminal justice and they won’t stop him. They are helping him do it.

I was beaten up by some as too negative for a column Jan. 27 when I predicted the Republicans in the upcoming impeachment trial would not allow a single witness though they knew he was guilty, but that is exactly what occurred.

They have already demonstrated they cannot look facts in the face, that they are weaklings in a crisis, that their own lack of values for even the institution they occupy are the biggest internal threat to our democracy. While the voters are consumed with destroying Trump they are neglecting the sycophants who will readily creep to another.

So the electorate’s path is clear.  Sure we can beat Trump, but we have to get this GOP out of control of the Senate while keeping Democratic control of the House.  Everyone thinks getting rid of Trump will cure things, but that’s nonsense. Going to the polls beats him in November and I don’t see a single opponent I wouldn’t vote for to do it. I trust the majority of the voters feel the same. But I can never trust Republican control of the Senate again, not this Republican Party.

This means there are 10 Republican incumbents we can throw out in 2020  and three Democrats who need some special help to save them – and if we fail to do that, we will wonder why getting rid of Trump alone didn’t solve things.  Sure these Democrats won’t by themselves bring everything any of the presidential candidates want – they vary from moderate to progressive -- but they will be moving the country in a better direction that the current Senate has stymied. 

So this is where the public’s money must focus, and my personal preference is not through groups like the DNC but individual gifts to candidates I support even ahead of clarity about who they may face. Internet and emails make that easy to do – a dollar here, a dollar there.

Some states seem difficult because a number of Democrats have announced in certain Senate primaries and I have my own feelings about that as every observer will, but each state’s voters get to decide -- all we can do from outside is send money and support. The national public nevertheless has to do some work on its own – and this is the election where none can be sheep.  This is when democracy is hard work.

In several contests, the final candidates have not emerged. In fact, one element of Trump’s control over these senators is that through May at least there are primaries in which he could field his own choices unless they behave (hint hint).  The Democrats in some states are similarly waiting. 

Mark Kelly has to seek money outside Arizona to assure
flipping a GOP senate seat.
In some states the Republicans may strike you as too entrenched to be beaten, but don’t be so sure. The obvious GOP senators in trouble are Cory Gardner of Colorado,   Susan Collins of Maine, facing a strong opponent in Sara Gideon, and Martha McSally in Arizona, already polling behind former astronaut Mark Kelly (who is the spouse of Gabby Giffords and a co-leader in the campaign for better gun regulation).  But she is getting money from Trump while his coffers are badly stretched already.


But if I were Thom Tillis in North Carolina or John Cornyn in Texas (even having escaped Beto O’Rourke as opponent) I wouldn’t be too comfortable. And I sure would be uncomfortable if I were Joni Ernst in Iowa, given the robust threats from a number of Democrats contending for  the June 2 primary.   This is shaping up as a year of change – and the behavior of these Republicans already warrants throwing them out.  Three or four losses in GOP numbers looks doable.

Two more fascinating races are surprisingly on the bubble.  One is the senate majority leader himself, Mitch McConnell heavily underwater in Kentucky polls. But never count out someone who finagles so much financial largesse for rural communities in his state.  Everyone is watching to see what tricks he will pull against popular political newcomer, Amy McGrath, a former Marine pilot with a Kentucky sensible platform who survived some missteps in her launch to lead the charge against him. 


Jaime Harrison is neck and neck on flipping a
South Carolina Senate seat.
And over in South Carolina, the former head of the state Democratic Party, popular and eloquent Jaime Harrison, is making a strong fight against another familiar senatorial name, Lindsay Graham, whose mental fitness has been flailing in the wind as he defends Trump on every front, even contradicting stances he once took.

I once said that any remnants of Graham’s soul apparently died when John McCain did, and it is an observation that has grown in truth. The head of the senate judiciary committee has even said he won’t investigate the AG’s meddling in the Roger Stone case, which delays until the end of March any congressional inquiry into what Faustian pact with Trump Bill Barr has made.

And Georgia is much on Democrats’ minds, since circumstances bring both of its Republican senate seats up for election in 2020 in the state where Stacy Abrams, who declined to run, is leading a national “fair election” campaign. Many feel she was robbed of the governorship in 2018 but her statewide appeal and apparatus can now apply to two senate races, both against well-heeled avid Trumpers – one-time corporate raider David Perdue (bearing a familiar last  name in Georgia politics) and newly appointed GOP moneybags Kelly Loeffler, who has already started sneering at Democratic bills. 

An interesting field of opponents is emerging against them in Georgia, including popular pastor Raphael Warnock, leader of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church where the Rev. Martin Luther King preached. Explaining his decision to run for the Senate, Warnock said, "I've always thought that my impact doesn't stop at the church door. That's actually where it starts."

Democratic Sen. Doug Jones will need a lot of
outside money to survive in Alabama.
Unquestionably, the Democrat who needs the most help and the most long-distance fund-raising is Sen. Doug Jones of Alabama, praised for his fearlessness in voting for impeachment but distinguished as a moderate Democrat who has stood up at key moments representing a state that has been notoriously right-wing in the past.

It is still unclear if he is going to face the same deviant and former state justice he did last time, Roy Moore, or the wimpy Trump attorney general Jeff Sessions who wants the Senate seat he regards as his own back.  But whomever he faces will have tons of money and conviction that this is Trump country even if Trump is soundly beaten.

Another Democrat who could face big money is Michigan’s Gary Peters, little known, a moderate who has tried to work across the aisles and made some steps I question. But overall he has proven a keeper for the Democrats and he will be extremely targeted. So  will Tina Smith in Minnesota, appointed to fill out Al Franken’s term.  Her main problem is she is little known and has been caught up in a year when it is difficult for any new senator to make a mark.

It’s usually not a winning strategy for a writer to ask readers to take out their notebooks and checkbooks -- and start prowling the state contests for senate on their own.  But if you want your vote against Trump to truly survive Trump, get busy. There are only eight months left.

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. 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.  A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.