DEATH AND VIRUS – MADDOW FORCES US TO KEEP SEVERAL BALLS IN THE AIR

By Dominique Paul Noth

Nationally, our neck has long had a huge weight pressing down on it.  This feeling that “I can’t breathe” started months before George Floyd’s video death footage knocked the pandemic out of the top headline spot.  For days cities everywhere have exploded in unrest, with some violence-minded outside agitators on both the left and right stealing the public protests once the sun went down.

The news in this time frame should have been dominated by a potentially monumental and essential shift in presidents and not (since the nation has been slow to pay attention for 400 years)   the knee on the throat that the black community has been familiar with. 

Covid-19 – 100,000 deaths in the US in three months but probably much more  --   should still dominate international  attention and soon will again since too many states without flattening the virus curve are dealing with fumbled advice from the White House to reopen. 

The virus is the reason we all feel a death grip on our collective chest, particularly those in older years, those with underlying medical conditions and those crowded together in prisons or workplaces – and now we see how many young adults are also succumbing and how even some children under 5 have related symptoms despite the hope that the young recover better. 

Typically our imaginations try to humanize this invisible enemy, imagining it’s a him cackling like a demented Claude Rains in “The Invisible Man” as he flits among us, or hovering over our beds in a Nosferatu cloud waiting to swoop in and attack the droplets in our saliva.

A contrast in styles -- Madison protest to reopen state from coronavirus
 stay-home orders in April and (below) a Milwaukeee daytime march
downtown in the George Floyd case.

There is a horrible contrast here – polls indicate most Americans (84%) are still following social distancing, hand washing and even face masks despite Trump’s thrust to reopen whatever the cost.  Yet simultaneously the videos of people crowding into bars and pools make us think these thousands exist on an even more massive scale in a nation of 328 million people. Every TV moment of crowds packed in for protests or drinking confirms the fear.

We expect any day now to see the death tolls rise and the much expected second wave of the winter actually continue as a constantly rebooted first wave all the way into September.  It is a belief furthered by our realization of the imbeciles we’ve elected to high office – if we could do that to ourselves once, maybe we’re doing so again.

The summer death toll will continue but not, I anticipate, at the rate our worst dreams imagine, because the majority is struggling to follow the medical directives. Certainly some people are wearing face-coverings during Floyd protests to protect their identities, but look how universal remain the masks.  Anger may reduce the social distancing but clearly the virus is not far from the minds of protesters.  That won’t make the Floyd case the tipping point many pray for but it does suggest Americans can keep differing ideas in their heads at the same time.

So I am hopeful. Most governors will be forced to respond to spikes though Trump seems to have abandoned responsibility. 

Part of my brain remains uncertain, however, because the network and cable news largely have missed the boat, wasting hours in expected revelations from the corona virus task force assembled by the president but forced by his vagaries and ego to produce a mixed message of important medical advice suffocated in misleading rambling data about testing, spread, false drugs, the place of the economy in his thinking, where the tons of advertised help are actually going.   Of late, in his self-inflation flailing, he has suspended the task force press conferences and turned again to misdirection about thugs, Twitter rules and threats rather than realities.

As former president Obama pointed out, responding to a pandemic would challenge the abilities of the best of presidents.  We have the worst, yet our democratic niceties demand that we can only have one president at a time.  So while real words of comfort may be coming from Biden, he cannot insist on a contrary system to what the White House has wrapped itself in.  The pandemic has produced a presidential contest unlike any other, where we normally want explicit contrary visions of the future to dominate air time. The pandemic means we still have to hope the guy with the executive power to do things will grow up. All we can do is pray against realities that Trump may fumble through.

Rachel Maddow keeps our attention local
as well as national.

So how do we gain any sense of clarity in these circumstances?  So far I have only seen one famous anchor attempting that.  Until the Floyd explosion in dozens of cities, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow was trying to split the nation’s attention in her nightly news show between the global pandemic and the steady but diverse deterioration state by state, nursing home by nursing home, prison by prison, meat packing plant by plant, doctor by doctor.  In many ways, this is the real human story of the president’s failure and where our nation must be paying attention to recover. It was a vivid reminder that the real purpose of the masks is to protect others. But it’s clearly not a ratings winner.

Spitting moments of anger and passion, Maddow was deliberately digging for what she saw week after week as the real story, not the ratings story.  She knows how to get ratings.  Her January interviews with Les Parnas – remember him? One of Giuliani’s Ukraine stooges that people hoped in vain would testify during the impeachment trial in the Senate, and does anyone remember that? – stole FOX and CNN’s thunder.  Her outlet’s coverage of that impeachment trial was also memorable for sticking with what happened, or should have happened.

Indeed take a moment to look back.  Trump’s ineptitude with the pandemic was hardly a surprise.  Viewers knew he was guilty and should be impeached by the Senate.  We also sensed the GOP senators knew it but refused to embrace the remedy.  The House’s eloquent lead prosecutor, Adam Schiff, bluntly warned Trump would do it again and by golly he has.  Recall what Schiff told us and the Senate, once they had absorbed his “overriding guilt.”

“History will not be kind to Donald Trump,” Schiff said in part. “If you find the House has proved its case and still vote to acquit, your name will be tied to his with a cord of steel and for all of history. Is there one among you who will say enough?” 

There wasn’t.

“Right matters here,” said Schiff. “So does decency. . .  He has betrayed our national security. And he will do so again. He has compromised out elections and he will do so again. You will not change him. You cannot constrain him. He is who he is. Truth matters little to him. . . . I do not ask you to convict him because truth or right or decency  matters to him but  because  we have proven our case and truth matters to you ... You are decent, he is not and he is not who you are.”

Maybe not.  Maybe yes. We knew then and know now this was the only chance to be rid of him, little realizing in the earliest days of February that covid-19 had already broken through the doors and Trump’s feeble efforts were arriving far too late. Now we are forced to live through our failure and thousands of lives do hang in the balance. 

It’s one reason I responded to Maddow’s aggressive coverage.  (With one caveat.  Her insistence we pay attention to what local newspapers and media were showing us would have had even more value if local newspapers and media had remained strong and probative over the years, but time and again we see more clearly the stories they have missed.) 

Yet that is also a value of Maddow’s coverage.  The meat companies and prisons that won’t share numbers or respond to local Freedom of Information requests.  The confusion of local media and papers to echo the graphs and visuals that were already burying us at the national level.  They needed humanizing and she supplied.

By tracking regional and state coverage to the degree she did, she must have known that national ratings numbers would go to the “White House first” teams of other outlets. Yet she saw where the real story was, the humanity of local medical personnel, the suffering of relatives, the true weight on our chests of this pandemic.

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. 

DEMOCRATS SURVIVING IN THE REDDEST STATES

By Dominique Paul Noth

I didn’t write that headline.

It was provided me partly in jest by a high school mate in Oklahoma  I have not seen for 61 years, who went on to become a distinguished Oklahoma City lawyer and school board member and is now in the last month of his life because of cancer.

[Editor's Note: The subject  succumbed in June to cancer but his life story remains important. Ironically Trump has announced his first rally in a long time for Tulsa, Oklahoma,  June 20 even as covid deaths are on the rise.]

Horning circa 2015 on Oklahoma City school board

His name is Phil Horning and this is his story through my memory and some of his words.  He was the star  of my high school basketball team nobly labeled in sports pages of the time as “The Cubs of University High” though we were in fact the smallest high school in Norman, Oklahoma,  operating out of old barracks and a naval airport hanger built by the Seabees for  a World War II base, kept alive in case the need arose in the Korean War.

(It brings to mind an old George Gobel joke on the “Tonight Show” when the audience laughed because Gobel was a naval military flight instructor stationed in Oklahoma during WWII.  “You may laugh,” he told the audience, “but remember not a single Japanese plane made it past Tulsa.”)

We were actually the University of Oklahoma Laboratory School, which had great teachers and promising student teachers back in the days when this was uncommon.  As was our small class sizes. I recall a graduating class of  about 30, but I did get to take university level math and literature courses, no small feat back then.  Our school was a smattering of  kids associated with the university and from the town of Norman and the surrounding farms and ranches, so deliberately not designed as an elite academic program. There was a gigantic Norman High School for most of the town, but thanks mainly to Horning we were also a state basketball star – he had a wicked turn-around jump shot, and with a tall center and some good passers that was enough.

I was the manager of the team (meaning glorified ball boy) and we traveled by bus from town to town, sometimes to gyms so cramped that there was a mattress hung on the wall to cushion players doing layups.  Sometimes the rowdy opposing crowd for night games  gathered around our bus a bit threateningly, but we were undeterred.  It was a happy school environment despite the antiquated facilities – with marshes where we could conduct science experiments, real carpentry shops  and frogs we could catch for dissection.  We stood out in basketball and chess but lacked the numbers to do much else.  Phil’s exploits were such that his son, Clay, now a sportswriter, wrote them up in March 2020 in a column for the Norman Transcript, a paper I think I delivered as a kid in the 1950s. 

Horning circa 1958 in Norman Transcript
news story

In a warm email catching up on our past, Phil recalled how I would leap on a teacher’s table to enact a scene from Cyrano.  His memory is flattering.  I was the school nerd, I guess, popular because I performed as a folk singer and wrote for the school dittoed newsletter.  I loved to claim that if I hadn’t stopped growing at 5 feet 6 (I did shoot up to 5 feet 11 in senior year) I could have been a jock, but of course that’s nonsense. Phil was the BMOC, a great student and athlete who I recall deserving every bit of popularity he got. 

I never knew his politics then, and while I enjoyed my school, I was a transplanted liberal New Yorker deeply troubled by the political tones I heard around me.  Oklahoma was then and now a red state.   I remember the high school once held a debate for juniors and seniors on segregation vs. integration and I cheerfully took what to me as was the obvious winning side of integration. The school’s classes voted for segregation and it took me decades to get over that.

Phil is also a giant fan of my son-in-law, comedian Jim Gaffigan whose wife, my daughter, is his co-writer and they’re parents of five of our grandchildren.  I tried to arrange tickets for the Hornings years ago when Jim came through Oklahoma City, but the date didn’t work.  That was our only email contact until a mutual friend from long ago told me last month of his battle with stage four cancer.  In my email of reconnection, he was most flattering: “I remember so many details of our interactions in our youth," he wrote, "particularly I remember what a good brother you were to Jean.” Jean’s prime care giver today is our sister Malou.

I can write about this because Phil said I could and he is deeply humorous and philosophical about it all.  Look at this paragraph: “Given the fact that my expiration date is rolling closer, that I retired 17 years ago, I'm not really devastated about dying earlier than I planned (hoped.) If it comes to pass as predicted (three months), I will be very sad to leave my family when the world is in such a mess and the worst president of my lifetime is in office.”

Let’s think about that for a moment. First, you hear the disappointment with Trump everywhere and it has  become harder than ever to stick behind him, even in Oklahoma. Phil is theoretically surrounded by deep waves of red Trump supporters, but his viewpoints are no longer unique. 

He is placing a letter to the editor with a local newspaper – and since they have not yet replied I am cheerfully offering this space.  The main reason is not the attack on Trump.  It is to remind readers that a lot of the noble examples of the 20th century American man are being underappreciated by our 21st century sensibilities.  Sometimes the quiet, steady positive life of the Phil Hornings of our world should not pass unappreciated:

Letter to the editor:

First, a personal note:   I am a patriot. I have lived in central Oklahoma all my life and have lived under 14 presidents. If you have lived under more, you are at least 88.  Three times I have drawn checks from the federal government.  When I was a soldier, when I got my law degree on the G.I. Bill, and when I began to draw Social Security.  I have twice taken an oath to defend the Constitution, and I believe in the rule of law. I tell you these things hoping you will think about my thesis before piling on.

My thesis:  We are victims of the most incompetent president of my lifetime.  He is profoundly ignorant.   As conservative columnist George Will wrote, “What is most alarming is not that Trump has entered his eighth decade unscathed by even elementary knowledge about the nation’s history… Rather, the dangerous thing is that he does not know what it is to know something.”

This flaw and others have led to the bungling and botching that is the federal response to the pandemic.   He turned down testing kits from the World Health Organization.  He spewed false statements.  On 1/22/20: “We have it totally under control.”  On 2/28/20 referring to Democrats, “This is their new hoax.”  Valuable time was lost.

Now, our health professionals are short on testing, masks, ventilators, and protective gear.
  
Our governors are trying to save lives while Trump is trying to save face.

--Phil Horning

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. 

TRUMP’S ONLY CHANCE FOR SALVATION IS STOPPING THE VOTE

By Dominique Paul Noth

For the last weeks, every day, America has suffered through the most maddening yet strangely essential White House briefings where some important facts and warnings about COVID-19 are dispensed directly from eminent health scientist but also prattled endlessly about in somnolence inducement by Vice President Mike Pence and anchored in constant misdirection by the portly ringmaster of this flea circus, who contradicts or calls into question the advice from his own gathered experts.

Trunp tries to stifle reporters at White House briefing.

Donald Trump, perhaps jealous about how personal, emotional and fascinating have been New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo briefings, determined not to let voters forget for a moment that whatever they think of Cuomo or the other governors he is the one in charge of the vital levers of government,  and confident in his ability to spin his own version of events,  has wandered this  White House meeting stage like a prowling gorilla ready to pounce, saving some important summaries for his own lips and using a parade of military men, CEO stooges and once capable bureaucrats, plus Jared Kushner, to fill in the gaps or in reality  take the blame for the mounting sense of failure and loss he doesn’t want to be associated with.

He also plays doctor, urging Americans to take an unproven chemical he has “good feelings about,” and contradicting the ventilator concerns of the nation’s governors, inadvertently revealing that, while most Americans know ventilators are the almost inevitable tool to keep them from death, Trump envisions going on ventilators as a sign you are beyond saving – so why encourage their use?

The next few days, he insists, will bring the peak of the infection wave and America can start getting back to normal while scientists see rolling peaks going on for months.  Sunday he actually called such a White House conference, though there was no news to speak of, simply to keep his rally-less presence going on TV, and jumping in to prevent Dr. Fauci from telling us what he really thinks about Trump’s drug of choice – hydroxychloroquine, which works for malaria and lupus but is unproven for COVID-19 and has as much chance to harm as to help.

By Monday and election Tuesday in Wisconsin, Trump’s hostility and arrogance at those briefings went beyond all reason, attacking any member of the press who questioned his statistics or past statements, defending his miracle cure even though it is unclear if it helps or hurts, sideswiping  any questioning of his experts on medical supply chains or desperate physicians. He then tried to turn the blame to Congress for not giving him more money without supervising strings.

This has dumfounded the so-called Trump supporters, who live in the regions or occupy the age levels most endangered by Trump’s behavior.

Even a sober research fellow at Marquette University couldn't help noticing that Trump's slight bump in poll ratings came nowhere  near the rise in popularity of other “wartime” presidents, though Trump uses that bump to further justify his behavior.

But what it all does demonstrate is his slow change in re-election strategy.  His “trump card,” of a stable economy will be long gone by November, so he is shifting to the “irreplaceable dictator” philosophy, that only he has enough control and authority of the system so the US has to keep him in office for another four years.  Every noise he makes these days is trying to bully the public into that viewpoint, including – have you noticed? – his attacks on voting by mail.

Of all the states, it is our Wisconsin that may be quietly showing him the way forward as long as conservative courts are in charge. Wisconsin’s Democratic Gov. Tony Evers was too slow to pull the obvious trigger – delay the spring election -- perhaps because Trump was still holding out hope of an all clear by Easter. But when he did try to pull the election until June, the GOP legislature took him to conservative state high court, which insisted the election proceed.

Almost simultaneously, the US Supreme Court shot down an effort by a federal judge to allow ballots to count until April 13. SCOTUS ignored rampant evidence that the absentee ballot system was overloaded. As Justice Ginsburg said in a stern dissent: “Tens of thousands of absentee voters, unlikely to receive their ballots in time to cast them, will be left quite literally without a vote. This Court’s intervention is thus ill advised, especially so at this late hour.”

It seems to me the change in political reality runs far deeper this time than previous outrages from Trump’s lips.  This time everybody has family and friends in the danger zone for COVID while every day brings fresh stories of people outside the danger zone (except medical personnel regardless of age who are constantly in danger on the front lines) who are also dying – by the hundreds and thousands.  In Wisconsin, each day brings a story of a progressive voter who risked death to cast a ballot.

It is no accident that the country that prides itself on democracy is leading the death parade.

For him to view any of this as a personal victory, or to suggest that despite the evidence before our eyes none of this is his doing – well, everyone knows neither will fly. We can’t blame Trump for COVID-19 – any leader would have been challenged -- but we know clearly at this point that his prevarication, his destruction of previous pandemic response mechanisms, his inability to provide meaningful statistics despite the experts around him, his general incompetence all  suggest there are plenty of thing to blame him for at the polls. So his chances of winning an open election have disappeared despite the twitter harping of his diminishing fan base. They may still find him amusing but not to vote for.

His only hopes of survival are now not in the hands of voters – it depends on whether he can stop voting by mail or somehow get rid of the November election.  Wisconsin has just proved he can lean on the courts to do the undemocratic.  That’s the only way he can win.

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. 

AS AMERICA TURNED TO BIDEN, TRUMP TOOK COVER INSIDE A VIRUS

By Dominique Paul Noth

Just as America seemed to be turning to Joe Biden,
Trump tries to sound like COVID-19 expert.

Up until Trump, it had never been thought a weakness of our US Constitution that we can only have one president at a time.

The wish that this were not so crept into America’s majority thinking March 12 when the Democratic presidential race clarified and the final two contenders in separate events,  Joe Biden in prepared remarks on the coronavirus crisis and Bernie Sanders in typical off the cuff elbow-waving punctuation, delivered more presidential clarity than Trump had ever managed.

Up to then he had pretty much lied saying he had kept COVID-19 away by blocking travelers from China in February and assured everyone to just let the virus run its course and we would be back to good times in a matter of weeks.

That was followed on Sunday March 15 in a formal debate between the last two contenders where the winning choice for voters unveiled more of his softer, reasonable elder tone and Sanders provided a louder “me too” echo.  Since Bernie was still trying to knock Joe off, his hand gestures were in full force (delightfully illustrated in a newspaper story) and the debate verged into boring references to who had done what to whom 20 years ago.  Yet both still sounded more presidential as the virus clouds gathered -- and certainly clearer on the government’s relationship to its people in times of crisis. 

You could almost feel the mood of the watching public changing.

There was a pronounced desire to STOP LISTENING to that overweight comb-over on the corner TV endlessly pontificating on how great he is and assembling dutiful minions to echo his self-praise -- and turn instead to hear more ideas from the person likely to replace him and see how his lower-key approach and empathy about problem-solving rather than self-aggrandizement would work. Maybe he’s older than many would like, maybe a younger generation should be prepared to take over, but Biden is so obviously better and crisper that the nation was clearly moving to see him as the replacement.

Indeed the Biden camp itself is right now debating how to provide its own truth squad to combat Trump’s tendency to exaggerate what he has done and muddy where the US actually is. But be careful. Just as America in my estimation was prepared to make that mental shift to the president in waiting rather than the president in freefall, we were painfully reminded of the constitutional mandate. Our forced time with Trump is far from over and the real power of the president exists in the controls he still commands and the obedience that is his for the asking, right or wrong.

The social isolation demands of the coronavirus situation led Trump to abandon the frequent rallies that gave outlet for outrageous statements the media felt compelled to report. Gone as well are the impromptu diatribes against his enemies while boarding helicopters (where is he going to go now anyway?).

Yet just as the public was longing to see Trump get the comeuppance denied by the GOP in the impeachment trial – Bam! came down the invisible virus enemy and a crisis that demanded standing by the federal government and the only president we are allowed to have.

The crisis is so extreme that it pushed politics to the backburner.  Trump’s own wishy-washiness on COVID-19 helped him by extending our confusion. Now we need him to unleash the real power of the presidency – not to make  false claims of hoax, not the presidential declarations that had the weight of thimbles, not  the slow steady erosion of presidential planning and authority he had been demonstrating for three painful years and that Biden was primed to take on.  

Now we need the money his signature can help provide. Now we need a real president and have to settle for what is there in a genuine crisis.  And he was determined to keep himself in our minds over his rivals, assembling the real health scientists and his own obeisant cabinet to dominate the news cycle nightly, with press conferences where they crowded around him like nobles to the master – violating every edict of social distancing they talked of --  with actual edicts that had to be reported and the press again clamoring to hear him ramble.  

He  loomed  like a giant Pillsbury doughboy over even the intelligent warnings from health experts, hoping the public would transfer his bovine presence to a semblance of a steady hand --   and then imposing his own two-bit advice on the best drugs, shutting down any media who questioned Dr. Trump by immediately branding them as nasty and unfeeling for the American public.

Dr. Fauci trying to maintain decorum as Trump rambles

He is also forcing his minions to introduce every piece of news with “our beloved and great leader” intros.  To this point the scientists have tried to resist, dropping some gems of disagreement (Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Brix in particular) which tell the listening public more about what to do and what to fear.

It’s  become a  laughable exercise as VP Pence praises him and dispenses infomercial pitchman advice, as speaker after speaker crowd forward to clarify what the confusing policies meant, as Trump takes his bows and leaves the stage … and the TV cameras typically also depart until the next cycle. It has all led frankly to calls by multiple media reporters for the press to abandon covering these daily White House briefings because they are falsely elevating Trump.

Yet according to polls it was a clever intrusion, since the public has not yet separated how much Trump actually helps and how much he hinders.  It is  transparent to any student of history that his initial worry was his own re-election not the danger to the world and he thought he had an  ace up his sleeve to protect first – the economy.  It is now suffering a COVID-19 swoon into Great Depression territory.

All we’re going through cannot be blamed solely on Trump. His actual slowness to organize and act  may be only 25%  of our troubles --  but he  had disbanded many of the planning protections and field exercises Obama had put in pace and he’s played fast and loose with the truth since.  His behavior is far different than his proclamations yet  there is no one else given TV space to fabricate as he does.

I understand the wish to move to a new president well before a November election – I suspect most of the country feels the same but knows it is stuck with the jackass.  His self-description as a “wartime president” is another ploy to prevent  the US from swapping war horses in midstream.  But it does seem the voters have too quickly forgotten  we  had a chance in the impeachment trial to be rid of this president.  We and the Senate GOP didn’t and we are paying for that now, left with only the hope that he is not so far gone to prevent us from pulling  through.

I sympathize with those who want it to be different – who long for a nightly truth squad to follow the president around and provide common sense.  A good friend in California, a retired artist, is one of many on social media who bluntly and eloquently suggest that Biden should form a shadow government, one that daily contradicts and clarifies Trump’s ramblings  and supports the grains of sensibility in other orders.  “Please, don’t tell me it doesn’t have the force of law,” wrote the friend. “Of course it doesn’t. It has the force of morality and exigency.”

This friend and others have given the “shadow government” idea a lot of thought, working down to a vice presidential choice I agree with, a cabinet of proven public servants and many other truth tellers and experienced hands to restore the US to some sort of sanity in  internal politics and global repute. Meanwhile, the real Joe Biden is itching to speak out but is being advised by his insiders to temper his past blasts at Trump.  Like him or hate him, the nation needs Trump  to succeed for the sake of millions of US lives – plus he is all too eager to paint any opposition as “un-American.”

How do you attack a bad president in such circumstances?  You have to pick your shots and hope the voters understand, particularly with a president who will take constant bows dispensing nearly a trillion dollars in rescue money.

We are stuck with him for 10 more months  that are looking uglier and more dangerous every day.   But  the Constitution allows no shadow government to correct our course – any such effort could be disruptive.  So we have to watch and abide, hoping the current crop of voters are sensible enough to look past the mountebank, realize how we can’t much longer endure his deficits and remain eager to  look for some sanity in our future.

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. 

BLOOMBERG JUST BLEW UP AMERICA’S HOUSE OF CARDS

By Dominique Paul Noth

Barry Blitt's impish New Yorker cover as Mike
Bloomberg's millions exploded
in his face

Given their profit priorities, no wonder television networks and cable channels missed the big lesson of Mike Bloomberg’s flabbergasting expenditures and loss in his flirtation with the presidency.

If they stop and think about it, the Bloomberg debacle cast a deep shadow on their basic beliefs in marketing, advertising and the virtues of data collection that underlie our consumer society.  The entire structure of the communications industry -- from advertising paying for programming, streaming fees based on past practices and promotions built around expected behavior – has been called into question. 

Bloomberg may be one of the smartest capitalists on earth, but he himself seems duped even more than the public about the value of “data driven” methods that landed him his billions.  His sophisticated team of strategists mined the data and saw a path to victory – until a few well placed blows knocked him off his perch and sent them sheepishly to tell the boss they were dead wrong. (Though he is spared the decision of whether to rename Bloomberg News to something like Not the Bloomberg News at All, to avoid cries that he is using the presidency for profit, a Trump-like issue he could have faced.) 

Thousands of expensive Bloomberg terminals that financial offices rely on were built around his ideas of complexity, accountability and instant analysis.  They anchored his fortune.

Add to that the lucrative fees his data-snappy news delivery and pulsating highs and lows have brought in, and add his promise to use new data-driven information systems and complicated algorithms to defeat Trump. All these ought to be thrown into sharp questioning.

 If Bloomberg could be so misguided as to invest $500 million in himself – even given that noble aim of beating Trump – why should anyone stand in awe of his wealth? He emerges as the biggest patsy of his own beliefs.  Could it also be that we have been handed a bill of goods on our consumer driven models of success?  Bloomberg in many ways is the tip of the financial spear that drives the engine of market research.

Even the important corrective he announced in March – to help Democratic candidates up and down the ballot as well as helping Joe Biden toward the presidency – is not sufficiently reassuring.  He no longer will make himself the main vehicle, but he still will decide who to help and how.  It is his money and he has that right -- though we should all have doubts about following him down the rabbit hole.

The good news is the cold water Bloomberg inadvertently threw on people’s attitude about big money.  Maybe even Bernie’s.  I don’t know whether Sanders is right about 60 billionaires giving to the Joe Biden campaign, since Biden won spending very little money.  But being torn among 60 billionaire’s desires seems healthier to me than being beholden to one.

For a long time, people have been fearful about the single-minded purpose of Republican big money and power.  We are learning anew how powerless all that is when the public is motivated in different directions.

Trump’s direct $23 million in TV and digital ads over the last year is married to PACs that command some $150 million more and all that sounds enormously scary, but all that pales next to the $60 billion Bloomberg can command.

And that $60 billion pales in comparison to what can happen when the public panics or resists the smart guys and their smart predictions.

Anxiety – in the US form of doubting how well the Trump administration can deal with the coronavirus – has pushed a global economy into panic. Even though COVID-19 may not engender the degree of illness and death worried about by pessimists, the slowness to test for it and explain the community nature of its progress has infected our universal attitude.  It can’t be explained away as something not to worry about – or something those durned aliens brought to the country. 

Why has this Trump lack of candor taken hold of public angst in a way that impeachment and general White House ineptness didn’t? One thing for sure – a pandemic has made the current leadership seem painfully less reliable, underscoring the limitations of Trump’s ability to control his own fate. 

And inevitably all this raises questions about the financial systems our economy is built on.

The passion to get rid of Trump is a big factor in the public turning to tried and tested means – like Joe Biden -- rather than leaps into unknown voids of policy. Maybe you’d like to believe Bernie that we need a revolution, though in his years in the Senate he has always insisted on his own way and then buckled or amended to others.  But this time it’s a difficult sell to predict his behavior.  

Millions of voters so far have rebelled against being branded establishment Democrats by Bernie. They are the bulk of black voters and middle class workers, yet they are rebelling by leaning away from his concept of revolution in favor of smart reversals of Trump policies and believable advances on climate change, health care, immigration and so forth. 

You can argue whether the public should see that more in Biden than Sanders, but that is the argument for today – more than how either candidate voted decades ago –that people want to hear.  And clearly folks are reacting to what they can see and feel rather than what others think inevitable around the corner.

The Bloomberg debacle may actually take hold on Madison Avenue and Wall Street and throw into new doubts not just the power of money but the reliance on polls and digital track records to evaluate consumers. Maybe we all have been led down a garden path of financial stupidity.

It’s more than you can’t sell the wrong product with big money, as Bloomberg tried.  Many still assume he has so much money that he can re-evaluate and choose a new path for $445 million so far in TV, radio, billboards and digital ads.

But this is far more than Ford’s 1950s disaster with Edsel, which in calculator conversion math cost the car company more than $2 billion in today’s dollars (and $250 million then) or Coca Cola’s  1980s debacle with New Coke.  Those were simply products aimed at a market that wasn’t there.  But remember how much consumer research drove the bad results.

All manner of data analytics are being called into question.  Review any of Harvard Business School’s so-called Bibles of consumer analysis and you’ll see how many are based on expectations that consumers will continue past practices, that sales people must be rewarded with very specific incentive motivations, that people in general are responsive to established norms of behavior and Pavlov responses and that marketers must learn from what the customer looks at or says they’d like to look at. 

Only a tad of these manuals  explore what may be happening in modern society with the advances of social media (Facebook and Twitter) and the consumers' growing awareness of their own identity and how they are being manipulated by digital presumptions.  The public recognizes they are a floating Petri dish if isolated on a carnival cruise, but they are becoming more aware and more resistant to being treated as a Petri dish on shore.

All America is becoming much like the comic “Magic Town,” a Capraesque movie from 1947 actually directed by William Wellman but larded with many regulars from the Frank Capra movie machine. The good idea in a bad movie was an opinion pollster (Jimmy Stewart) sees a fortune having identified a city whose opinions reliably reflect the whole nation – until the community becomes aware of how mirror fashionable its ideas are and start changing its opinions to fit the circumstances, becoming useless as a weather vane.

The Bloomberg debacle suggests that US consumers have reached that territory.  In certain instances they don’t jump as once predicted to advertising come-ons.  Maybe they still will with individual products or local political campaigns.  But maybe not. They may have become self-aware enough to balk at being expected to respond like sheep in the face of awesome big money or saturation advertising.

If advertisers become aware of the change, they will react to how much money the communications industry expects them to spend.  If they doubt that Madison Avenue or Facebook can shape the results, they may leap to other methods.

The consumers may, horror of horrors, be more willing this election year to think for themselves.

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.

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 tax. It 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.

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.