FLIPPING THE SENATE NOW BRIMS WITH POSSIBILITIES

An article chock full of helpful links

By Dominique Paul Noth

Easily overlooked in flipping the senate is the strong
North Carolina campaign of Cal Cunningham.

The cry has gone up throughout the land:  Who needs my money to win the election in November?

That fever is mounting. It’s clogging email and snail mail boxes, infecting cable TV and social media.  Every time the common man turns around, it seems that money is the decider, but partly because – however inept and corruptible the GOP is at the top – the party seems to be swimming in money as well as gerrymandering advantages. The Democrats may have better grassroots funding in many state races but sound desperate even when the polls put them ahead. 

Such is the fear that Trump will manipulate another win by attacking the mail service, by deepening his pandemic “it is what it is” disinterest or by plowing through the protesters on the public streets. It’s not a logical fear, but nothing about Trump is logical.

Yet another signal has gone out across the land – this one among the GOP in desperation to keep control of the Senate: If you need to separate yourself from Trump, they tell their own candidates, so be it. And some cautiously are, running on quite different issues in a tacit admission that they can’t openly criticize their beloved leader but can walk away from some of his outrages.

They will do anything to prevent the flood that the polls say is heading their way, while Democrats know they not only have to elect Biden but flip the Senate and keep the House.  That has made potential donors in every state a target for Senate and House candidates in every other state – a flood of Internet requests that leave the physically  distant recipients sometimes mystified about where to put their money.  The dilemma is producing articles like this one.

Sara Gideon leading in Maine

The field of Democratic opportunity has expanded in both the House and now the Senate  beyond the three or four flips most talked about by TV’s talking heads on cable news.

These likely Senate flips start with Sara Gideon leading Susan Collins in Maine.  Collins has tried to slide along the road of tsk-tsking Donald while voting with him, which has angered much of her state as well as equal rights groups that once were duped into regarding her as slightly independent – this is Maine, after all.  But when it comes to put up, she shuts up.

 Meanwhile Gideon – well known as speaker of the state house – has put together a platform that speaks to rural voters as well as progressive values, and she’s leading or tied in polls.

Mark Kelly on campaign trail

In Arizona, a former astronaut known as the devoted husband of Gabby Giffords and a TV commentator on space issues as well as gun safety, is leading in what once was thought a red state.  Mark Kelly is ahead in the polls versus the governor-appointed senator, Martha McSally, who has clung to Trump and attacked every convincing social argument from Kelly. 

McSally’s stubbornness in clinging to Trump (after being beaten in 2018  by a quixotic Democrat, Kyrsten Sinema) is one of  her many missteps in this campaign. She didn’t get the GOP message or know how to safely disassociate herself from Trump.

When Colorado governor, John Hickenlooper couldn't
wait to drink a beer with Obama.

In Colorado, the Republican senator, Cory Gardner, stays in Trump’s shadow while ignoring Trump’s main issues on the campaign trail, mainly selling his own outdoor recreation credentials, always popular in that state. His even more popular opponent, the conservative Democrat who ran for president, has a  “drink a beer with me” personality: John Hickenlooper.  Despite some fits and starts in his campaign switch to run for the senate, his brand of fiscal conservatism incorporating Democratic principles made him successful for eight years as governor.  He remains ahead in the polls.

So is, though less noticed, the popular progressive Cal Cunningham, who is better than neck and neck with  a largely unknown North Carolina GOP senator -- Toady Thom Tillis.  Cunningham’s image as a “get things done” leader is clearly key to his attraction. 

Theresa Greenfield

Among the surprise new prospects as the Democratic map expands is Theresa Greenfield, running hard against Republican Joni Ernst in Iowa. Partly because Iowa was early in presidential primary importance, it’s become a politically tuned state and Ernst looks more and more like a feeble  Trump echo in a region eager to move with the times, which Greenfield has come to represent. Local papers flirted with sexism describing this as no race for sissies.

It is no small issue in many such states that if Biden takes over the White House, they want a senator on the Democratic side.

That is one of the spurs underlying Steve Bullock’s campaign in less populated and usually red  Montana.  A former Democratic presidential candidate and a popular governor,  Bullock is neck and neck in the polls against Steve Daines, the former Procter and Gamble exec who enjoyed one term already in the US Senate and is wrapping himself in Trump anti-gay anti-protest and anti-Obama flag-waving. 

Steve Bullock

How will that fly in Montana?  What does fly is Bullock’s  ability to speak intelligently  on issues, which impressed many when he ran for president.

Another surprise is there are now two Senate seats available for Democratic takeover in the red clay of Georgia.  In a campaign strongly supported by the late John Lewis, youthful Jon Ossoff (he’s 33) has inched ahead in respected polls against former Dollar General exec and wealth accumulator David Perdue, who is becoming known for political gaffes. 

Jon Ossoff

Perdue and the other GOP senator for the state, Kelly Loeffler, are best known for their GOP funding chops (she was appointed by the governor to an unfinished term; he has a chicken friendly last name) and both are under investigation of insider trading charges linked to their  public hearings.  One of these  senate seats is technically a special election runoff Nov. 3, with  Loeffler hoping to edge another rabid Trump backer, Rep. Doug  Collins, and praying the Democrat doesn’t get 50% of the vote.  The top two finishers face off in January 2021.

But either will be facing a strong Georgia name unknown when they entered. Their  opponent is backed by Stacey Abrams (often touted in the early speculation to run with Joe Biden and believed by many to have been cheated out of winning the 2018 governor’s race)  and many in  the nation know this candidate well though have not yet linked his oratorical prominence to his candidacy.

The Reverend Raphael Warnock

He’s the Rev. Raphael Warnock, who presided over the eulogies for Lewis at the Atlanta Ebenezer Baptist Church most associated with the late Martin Luther King Jr.  But senior pastor Warnock is  also  notable for his social justice stances – which puts him in stark contrast to either of his GOP opponents. Republicans are furious because the three-way Nov. 3 special comes at the same time as turnout for Biden and Ossoff.

Defeating Mitch McConnell in Kentucky is the secret wish of every Democrat (more on that contest later) but  it’s not the biggest event on the red state map or the place where a Democratic candidate needs the most outside bolstering.  That was clarified in the August 4 primary in Kansas, where the popularity of the Democratic candidate seems tied to the extremeness of her opponent. She didn't get the most extreme but she wound up with an important contrast.

Barbara Bollier has strongly emerged to face the well-heeled but lesser known GOP candidate Roger Marshall, also a retired doctor but the one who wants to kill Obamacare while she works to expand it.

Barbara Bollier

Bollier, a state senator who switched to the Democratic Party to be part of a coalition that put Kansas on a better economic footing, has led a quiet campaign of basic service that contrasts with the image of the current GOP. 

It was Republicans  who worked hard Aug. 4 with big money to defeat their biggest hard-core conservative nightmare, Kris Kobach, who tried to become Trump’s border czar.

They succeeded, hoping that Marshall isn’t as harsh a name since he has shown some moderate malleability to help him against Bollier.  His slight money advantage and the long GOP history of Kansas are the background noise in this contest, but Bollier seems the ideal mix of pandemic and political common sense.

Jaime Harrison

Let’s not forget that the most politically troublesome Carolina is the state below North.  But the Democrat there, Jaime Harrison, has strong support among South Carolina’s  22% black Americans – in fact he is leading the state in some polls and nipping at Lindsey Graham in others.  

That, plus embarrassing ads put together by the GOP Lincoln Project showing how violently Graham contradicted himself on both Trump and Biden,  have become a big part of what makes Graham a genuinely threatened Republican senator.  I have long joked  that when John McCain died he seemed to have taken Graham’s soul with him.

Harrison, former leader of the state Democratic Party, is both politically savvy and a believable common man orator with deep roots in the Carolina soil. He’s given a genuine chance at drawing national support for what could be a major upset despite Graham’s years in the spotlight.  Were Lindsey not feared for his $15 million war chest and his history of pulling surprises out of a worn hat, he would be considered a fading if not totally gone goose given how much ground he’s lost  three months before the finale. But this is South Carolina where all sorts of strange things happen.

Intensely disliked in his state’s polls is Kentuckian Mitch McConnell, the turtle avatar constantly onscreen in TV news as the senate majority leader who has blocked some 400 bills from the Democratic House.  He  has spent 30 years getting re-elected in Kentucky – at times in spite of a  lack of personal popularity.  The rumor is he has dropped so many federal dollars in key voting corners over time and even has a wife, the secretary of transportation, Elaine Chao, making sweetheart deals for the state that he will be hard to dislodge in a state so wildly red.

Amy McGrath

His opponent lacks political experience in handling an old shrewdie like McConnell – but if  Kentucky longs for a breath of fresh non-D.C. air and more clout once Biden takes over,  Amy McGrath could run away with the race. 

A moderate Democrat, she also brings a  remarkable military record (the Marine’s first female combat fighter who retired with the rank of  lieutenant colonel), plus a social media campaign that has given her the money to nearly match Mitch.  Her views on the economy and health care seem to fit  the emerging nuanced political profile of what has long been a red state. The key may come down to whether Kentucky voters, who have seen McConnell join the Trump mishandling of a pandemic and of health care, will grasp for change or merely suffer the status quo.

Urged by a supporter at a campaign event, MJ Hegar 
displays her military tattoo.

Over in Texas, long thought GOP property, another inspirational retired female fighter pilot, MJ Hegar, is struggling for name recognition and funding as Texas trends more progressive.  She is eight points behind John Cronyn, seeking his fourth term, but despite his years in office his popularity rating is 35%, suggesting she has room to maneuver.  Especially during a pandemic hitting Texas hard while Cronyn is on record last March blaming China for even the 2009 swine flu.  This is a contest to decide how out of touch Texas wants to be in the 21st century.

Don’t forget Mississippi, always considered safe GOP country – but maybe not anymore.   The Democrat, Mike Espy, was the Clinton agriculture secretary and the first African American from the Deep South given that job. Now he has soared back into attention to oppose the governor appointed senator,  Cindy Hyde-Smith, who has earned the title of  most racist senator.  But Ole Miss is changing under her feet. 

It has abandoned putting the Confederate flag in its state flag and even its most famous university has abandoned many of their Civil War trappings while Hyde-Smith tries to live down posing with Confederate artifacts.  Moreover, Mississippi has been spiking in the covid numbers, for a while topping 20% in positive tests and belatedly imposing a mask mandate while Republican leaders try to fudge on Trump’s K-12 order to automatically reopen brick and mortar  schools.

Mike Espy

Let’s not pretend Espy isn’t  a long shot but Hyde-Smith has lost more than half of  the 17% lead Trump gave her in 2016.   GOP PACs are pumping money into states they once thought shoo-ins, and this seems one of many, including Texas, Kansas and Georgia.

So while Kelly in Arizona, Gideon in Maine, Greenfield in Iowa, Hickenlooper in Colorado and Cunningham in North Carolina are the best shots to see your donations succeed, I have not in my giving overlooked Bollier in Kansas, Ossoff and Warnock in Georgia, Harrison against Graham in South Carolina, McGrath against McConnell, Hegar in Texas and – following my heart the strongest – Espy in Mississippi.  

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. 

 

EVERYTHING HOARY ABOUT TRUMP BECOMES NEW AGAIN

By Dominique Paul Noth

Partly his own foot-in-mouth, but also much to our national shame, there has been a flourishing publishing industry built around Donald Trump’s endless prattle and tabloid sordidness.

Mary Trump 

Now some old and shopworn gossip has gotten new enthusiasm in the public sphere because it comes from the inside, the tales from her childhood into her 50s by his only niece, Mary Trump, who is cannily introduced as a “trained clinical psychologist” to apparently give some depth to what are largely retreaded digs into the family dirt in “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.”

Never forget this book, while leading national sales, is largely a rehash to veteran New Yorkers.  Three and a half years into his presidency, they remain amazed at how Trump ever fooled a sizable portion of the nation with the same behavior they had long grown tired of. How Trump talks about blacks and other minorities, how he treats workers and business partners, how he preens with self-aggrandizement – all that is old stuff on his home turf. 

That’s been much overlooked in the media coverage -- that the details in Mary Trump's book are already familiar fodder.  Virtually everyone in NY knew what a racist and PR tool Trump was and real thinkers had grown sick of it over decades.  The nation’s foolishness, encouraged by NBC’s pursuit toward the top of ratings by wallowing in the bottom of reality TV, turned Trump and his “Celebrity Apprentice” clown show into an elevation for much of the nation, while folks in Manhattan have known his blather inside out for generations.

Trump’s penchant for tabloid fame and plated fool’s gold had so long been a laughingstock in New York society that you can find published examples going back 40 years. He was only tolerated for his family’s money and the savagery with which he attacked those who attacked him. Savagery always delights the Manhattan press and public. He was long the media’s poster child for how arrogant belligerency can lead to tabloid reputation if you flash enough money on your way to bankruptcies and TV ratings.

While NYC residents thought they had his number, there was a whole misshapen mass of voters in the United States who could still fool themselves into seeing freshness in his tired tropes.

Waterston in 1975's "The Killing Fields"

While researching a story on actor Sam Waterston – long the famous prosecutor on the “Law and Order” series but with a longer reputation for stellar stage and film work, I stumbled on essays by a famous Pulitzer winning journalist, now deceased, the feisty stubborn Sydney Schanberg, central figure in the movie “The Killing Fields” (Waterston won an Oscar nomination for portraying him) and long known for speaking truth to power.  In fact, he cut his own close ties to the New York Times because his editors didn’t like it when he criticized their own coverage.

But before then, in 1983!, he had written a sarcastic piece for the New York Times about a Trump proposal to move the homeless into one of his buildings scheduled for demolition.

And then, on September 14th, 1987, now writing for Newsday, Schanberg provided an editorial anticipating by 30 plus years (!) the likelihood that the Trump brand, so scoffed in New York, might work for a while in national politics.  

Sydney Schanberg in 1980s

Entitled "Donald Trump -- Public-relations master" his prominent editorial  called Trump a "public-relations virtuoso," described an ongoing feud with then NY Mayor Ed Koch who Trump called a "moron" and "a jerk" (sound familiar?), provided numerous instances of Trump's claims of superior intellect ("It would take an hour and a half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles. I think I know most of it anyway."), and Schanberg then bluntly  warned,  "He can deny all he wants any designs on the White House, but Trump has the kind of instincts that are perfect for the age we live in -- the age of stage smoke and magic mirrors and imagery. In short, he sees the kind of men we admire and elect these days and he naturally asks: Why not me?"

 Schanberg ended the piece with, "In an age where smoke is everything, Donald Trump can blow it with the best of them."

I always thought “Celebrity Apprentice” was a ridiculous concept designed for morons and fully believed back in 2011 that most of America was laughing along with Barack Obama at the presidential press dinner where he poked fun at Donald deciding between Meatloaf and Gary Busey about who to better run a company.

Yet behold, the obnoxious high ratings crap that TV brought home to America seemed to make just enough people believe in an egotistical moron to elect him!

Today it is clear the public mood is finally done with Trump --  and yet … and yet. There still seem enough jerks around during the pandemic who think wearing a mask while shopping is some sort of attack on their constitutional rights, not some effort at saving the people around them.  Finally, now that children as well as adults are being put in harm’s way because of Trump’s egotistical behavior, the dawn is coming to people who once envisioned him as a salvation and are finally joining New  York City’s upper echelons in rejecting him. 

Yet the fear remains.  Maybe there are not enough people around still fascinated by his branding games but fear is powering voters this year who are ready to defy the virus if that’s what it takes to vote him out.  They are seriously worried about the damage Trump wants to do to mail-in voting and his attacks on the US Postal Service.

They are scared that he may send federal officers in camouflage to every city that doesn’t obey him (and most are hardly in a mood to obey) and believe he won’t follow normal democratic procedures once he loses. His mere existence at the top has done so much damage to our normal sense of human behavior and decency that the entire country is out of balance in how ferociously to put him down.  It’s turning us all  into mini-Trumps in how viciously we want him gone.

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.  

A COLD SLAP OF REALITY ABOUT COVID AND TRUMP'S ACCOUNTABILITY IN DEATH TOLL

By Dominique Paul Noth

I understand and even agree with not blaming Trump for everything.  Yes he is the symptom not the disease.  No, he’s not entirely to blame for the national gridlock. Yes, ousting him is only the first November step in the nation’s recovery.  It must be accompanied by wresting control from those deaf dumb and blind Republicans of the US Senate and retaining  Democratic control of the House (passing most of those 400 plus bills McConnell has blocked)  if we really expect President Biden to correct the damage.

Amusingly Biden has already said that on Day One he will make permanent DACA(Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) and also on day one rejoin the World Health Organization that Trump in a moment of pandemic pique pulled the US out of.

But Biden is going to have one hell of a busy Day One given the clamor to fix health care, remove kids from border cages, put the economy back to work, help Congress fix immigration, rejoin the world on climate change, reclaim Obama’s environmental efforts, restore the rule of law, try to renew the Iran deal, return our global standing to normal and on and on in a numbing litany of damage to US reputation that Trump still has six full months to wreck even further.

But I do blame Trump first and foremost for the deaths he has caused in mishandling coronavirus – not something that he is just a symptom of.  He is the root cause. Unlike his claim that he could shoot a follower on Fifth Avenue and not be prosecuted (actually he would be), there are so many levers involved in his covid decisions that here he is getting away with murder.

His belligerent inaction has killed hundreds of people I know and tens upon tens of thousands I don’t personally know. There is no escaping that reality.

With the best of presidents we still would have lost thousands of our citizens – pandemics are not easy to deal with and knowledge of how covid-19 is acquired over time is proving essential to addressing it.  Failing to put knowledge first has proved quite horrifying.  Trump’s refusal to face up to the task is worse than any games of secrecy China played.  The fact that the US is painfully last in the world (next to a Brazilian Trump-like fool) is a direct consequence of his stopping and going, flunking basic messaging, in not trusting science over his own stupidity, in blocking sustained testing and research – yes, all that I blame him for.

His attitude that it is now up to the governors, not the federal government, is absurd if not criminal.  His delays and denials were not for the purpose of gaining knowledge – nor was the whip he used to run the taskforce -- or for admitting that we didn’t yet know enough, which is why scientists early on were uncertain about masks because they didn’t have evidence that the asymptomatic spread the disease.

Their uncertainties developing knowledge are explainable. His refusal to help develop that knowledge and then resist organized testing has now made the nation once regarded as the world’s strongest look the most confused and untrustworthy. More than likely now, another nation will develop the vaccine and let’s hope they are friendlier once Trump is gone.

Refrigerator trucks serving as temporary 
hospital morgue in New York City

We are now months if not years away from getting out of this.  In wasting six months we have jeopardized current and future generations.  We were so short of protective supplies that we demanded people not hoard them from first responders.  We limited testing and treatment to those that showed symptoms. Even today, despite the numbers Trump keeps touting, citizens cannot go out and get a test.  Nor are all of them exposed to the best treatments available because sometimes the doctors don’t yet know which are the best treatments.

We are only now starting to get a handle on the role of asymptomatic carriers, whether antibodies play a protective role, whether once negative turned positive can turn negative and then positive again.

We believe, mainly from other countries that have done better controlled tests -- and even these are not conclusive -- that elementary school children can suffer the virus and walk through it better than their teenage friends.  And we believe the teens do better than the college age students, who do better than the adults under 55.  So just as we are comforted – comforted! – that 50% of the deaths are people 60 to 80, we are learning that thousands of younger adults are even now increasing in  hospitalization  and dying and even teens and children are facing morbidity even when parents are doubtful if they have other underlying health issues.

A state like my Wisconsin stayed off the national radar until July 11 when it climbed into the record-setting daily positive covid rate alongside Texas, South Carolina, Alaska, Arkansas, North Carolina, Idaho, Oregon and Hawaii.

Simply put, the pandemic disaster in the US – not in the world -- is of epic proportions and we still know too little in the world’s most technologically advanced nation.  And that, no matter how you slice it, is Trump’s fault. After killing thousands, he is demanding putting thousands more at risk by insisting that all 13,000 public school districts reopen schools.

He has a secretary of education who sounds even stupider than he does when she goes on TV to say there is nothing dangerous for kids going to school.   Yet meanwhile the World Health Organization that Trump discounts has concluded that the virus is airborne in crowded indoor spaces with poor ventilation, which sure sounds to the New York Times like a description of many American schools

Nor do we know because of huge gaps in contact tracing and research how children become infected and how, if and when they transmit the virus.  Trying to re-open would seem to require just the sort of research and discussion that Trump opposes.

Yes, there is research from other countries that loosely suggest younger children are less likely than teenagers to infect other people, but from that point scientists are forced to guess why.  Could it be that elementary school children don’t have the lung capacity or the vocal strength to spray droplets as far as teenagers do?  In that case, you’d better stifle any budding Julie Andrews or Judy Garlands among your young ones and probably drown any future Brenda Lee.

Or could it be that,  unlike the 1918 pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands mainly young people, this virus doesn’t impact the younger as it has the older citizens with underlying   health conditions? Or, since we have never successfully developed a lasting vaccine from nasal covid infections, could it be that the covid-19 in its so far harmless mutations has another kick in the age breadbasket coming?

Scientists simply don’t have enough evidence to speak with certainty – and after six months of on again off again direction, whose fault is that?  Parents and school leaders are forced to take the gambles and make the decisions even as epidemiologists predict the fall could be even worse.  Who can blame the people for not expecting any sensible advice from Betsy DeVos or Trump?

I admit that I am a prime candidate to be felled quickly by the pandemic – in my seventies, with a Pacemaker and with lingering COPD even after I stopped smoking 15 years ago.   I don’t blame Trump for how the pandemic tossed out my pleasure of attending plays, films and concerts that I long enjoyed writing about – that departure was a common sense reality imposed by covid. As is my family's steps toward full quarantine.

But when I think of my grandchildren, and all the grandchildren, and how their future education and survival have been threatened by the actions of our current president, when I think of the 140,000 whose deaths he careless dismissed as the price of running a nation, I can’t wait for him to be gone.  There is no punishment that fits his crimes.

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. 

MPS SEEKS A REGIONAL EARTHQUAKE IN SOCIETY AND EDUCATION

By Dominique Paul Noth

It’s being treated by some as a utopian dream from the Milwaukee Public Schools’ controlling board. It is a unanimous resolution that, if adopted by southeastern Wisconsin,  would refocus the anger and marches over  George Floyd’s murder. It is a bold  effort to harness outrage among black, brown and white to address not just the Floyd circumstances but the complicated  core of our hardened societal attitudes, not just the momentary passions against racism  but real change, the sort that films and books are being written about but no one is yet sure can happen. 

More than a resolution to discuss things, it is a summons to regional arms. For many observers it is a sign of maturity at the once squabbling board -- sidetracked by small fights and petty disputes in the past –to   finally embrace reality and look far beyond themselves to produce a lasting change not only in how public schools are funded but in what they are supposed to be teaching.

“It’s hardly pie in the sky,” agreed several community organizers I spoke to. One reflected how it was just this sort of community engagement that solved the teen pregnancy problem that most of the community thought was so ingrained in Milwaukee society that it would never go away.  But a united effort – indeed a United Way effort – turned it around.

The solution to hyper-segregation in K-12, the MPS board now realizes aloud, must be regional -- not just within its own public school system but by motivating a regional army.

If the world is listening – and that means the WOW counties, plus Racine and Kenosha -- the board is flatly stating that it is not the police, not the justice system, not the elected officials alone but the whole massive infrastructure that must change.  The Floyd marches have to look hard and deep over decades to the actions and attitudes that created a muddy heritage about racism, housing patterns, meaningful jobs, economic status and social equity.

Addressing the re-emergence of hyper-segregation within our public schools is key to any lasting change. It requires an opening of black, brown and white minds that have created their own underlying tensions toward each other.

This has to be a massive assault, metro-wide and growing, by activists, community organizers and regional leaders on the built-in attitudes that have affected our children for generations and keep us in separate boxes.

These are mighty entrenched boxes that require discussion and action.  It’s far more than better police behavior.  It will require an empathy and admission of overlooked morality by the larger society itself.

When the Floyd marches took to Menomonee Falls.

The Milwaukee marches for Floyd that flooded downtown have spread out in June and July to Brookfield, Cudahy, Menomonee Falls and South Milwaukee, and the leaders report this emphasis will continue in the all-important suburbs and feeder communities. The new social awareness the Floyd case has generated was clearly much on the mind of the MPS leaders. So they are expanding the wake-up call in a belief that now is the time for the community to listen.  Not just in spite of the pandemic but in a curious way because of it.

There are some 13,000 public school districts in the nation, all trying to figure out how in the fall they can reopen for some days of in-person schooling and/or other days of distance learning.   Unlike coronavirus pandemics of the past, which seemed to target the younger, this brand of covid-19 has only slowly been spreading younger and right now dominates in the older  people with underlying health problems. That could change, even as we develop newer treatments and contact tracing knowledge.

 Right now, parents may mainly be thinking about how to get the kids out from underfoot, but is there a better time to examine what sort of society they will be trained to take their place in?  What are the schools going to teach them about those old-fashioned terms like history, civics and social trends?

The growing awareness of social injustice may be the appropriate time to address a changing vision of society that many surprisingly young children are already aware of. In fact, many of those children will balk at anything less meaningful as they go back to school.

The coronavirus virus on the one hand makes infinitely more complicated the case of racial justice, but it also has crystallized for young and old the importance of moving ahead more openly to true diversity, free of old conflicts.  

The board is not alone in wanting to see expansion into lasting change for the festering racial heritage. 

With its regional integration push, MPS is making an extraordinary effort to solve the core of Milwaukee's segregated realities.  It is using the excellent research of UWM’s retired professional expert in this field, Marc Levine, whom I have quoted in previous stories (including one on the Sherman Park uproar four years ago that anticipated many of the issues in the Floyd marches).

The MPS has assembled information not just on hyper-segregation in the classroom but on the complicated realities that make Milwaukee simultaneously top the list of segregated cities and the list of diversity of races within a city,  as Urban Milwaukee editor Bruce Murphy explored in a recent column.  This is the sort of complexity that our society must tackle before it can pretend to see solutions.

What MPS hasn’t openly admitted, though I am editorializing about it  here,  is that solutions also require changing the GOP stranglehold on the state legislature.  This is a basic political reality because, right now, only one of two major parties is invested in listening --  the Democrats.  That is a tragedy because solutions benefit  the state as a whole.

For years of writing about MPS problems, I've described piecemeal efforts by the MPS itself and its allies  to address religious schools and the voucher largesse,  the gross failure to tell the public how many of the tax  dollars were going to support religious schools (one of my highest read stories),  the slow steady stealing of state taxpayer money away from public education, the efforts by Milwaukee officials to slow the growth of religious schools in taking tax money, only to be undone by the state  legislature’s canny efforts to put on more screws.

What has made the problem doubly difficult, I wrote, is that the pawn is often black parents, who want their children to get religious-based education from the public schools and think the religious schools, through their clever funding scheme, are giving them taxpayer money for free – after decades of feeling ignored by the state largesse. All this is  built on the fiction that state dollars “must follow the children” though the parents are mere pass-throughs to religious institutions that regularly rely on their religious givers to add to the $740 per pupil the state now provides.

There are ironies and paradoxes in the role that integration plays in all this. In the 1950s everyone was pleased when the US Supreme Court in  Brown vs. Board recognized that separate but equal schools was not really  equal and caused a national and often divisive sequence of decisions  to integrate school systems.   One famous result was white flight from urban centers.  Another was the growth of religious and private schools getting taxpayer money from states. 

The upshot in so many places seems like two divergent  school systems subsidized by the taxpayer – public school districts, which in Wisconsin actually operates most charter schools, many successfully, and religious or private voucher schools, some of which are good while most  have motives other than  academics that keep them humming. Yet all in PR pamphlets describe themselves as “great schools” while public school districts struggle to survive on less money.  In  the city of Milwaukee, that means 70% of  attendance stems from minority families, too poor to finance the range of resources suburban schools enjoy.

This is just one irony reinforced in the new data sets the MPS resolution provides.  From 50-50 in racial segregation in the public classroom 70 years ago, then a big plummet and then several gains back toward the middle in the 1970s, the state voucher payments came along in the mid nineties – and that began a steady growing racial imbalance in the Milwaukee Public Schools, which became dominated by black students.  Only some of this  can be blamed on white flight and housing patterns, but some also stems from the legislature’s  deliberate efforts on behalf of religious and private schools. 

Peterson in a photo by his wife

As Bob Peterson, school board member and former leader of the teachers union, notes: “These data expose hyper-segregation in MetroMilwaukee schools. It's past the time to end the new Jim Crow in MetroMKE -- in schools and other areas of society.”

 Peterson should know. He is a force behind the resolution, has been intimately involved in public schools as teacher and union leader before service on the board.  His wife, photographer and author Barbara Miner, in 2013 wrote what stands on the most incisive book about  what happened in Milwaukee schools – “Lessons From the Heartland: A Turbulent Half-Century of Public Education in an Iconic American City.”

The board is pushing for  regionwide discussion, action and commitment not just from parents of schoolchildren but society on a whole.  Otherwise, many argue, movements like the Floyd marches are condemned to failure. 

Another reason why the MPS initiative is long overdue is how Wisconsin has become the GOP test tube for ignoring integration and in effect validating hyper-segregation.  For decades, the best corrective for education inequities was statewide integration and uniform funding – sensible in Mississippi, which has a lousy public school system, but it is equally lousy for blacks and whites who live in all counties.  Wisconsin may have 72 counties, but black and brown students are squeezed into a handful of urban counties, where the state funding disparities hit hardest.

This new MPS effort to rouse the regional community requires the black community to look at its own flaws at the same time as the activists are forcing the white community to examine its longer and more entrenched flaws -- the advantages of white privilege that white citizens have relied on both consciously and un. The lingering economic impact of this disparity has been slow to grab the conscience of white America, while black America has been open to economic come-ons (from mainly white right-wing money) they might not embrace so hard if our history had been different.

America has to look deeper than  the BLM T-shirts if it wants to truly address the chronic despair and real remedies for Wisconsin's African American communities. 

MPS is issuing that challenge, but it will be for nothing unless the larger community responds.   At a time when the coronavirus is forcing greater social distance, American must mentally move closer together on racial justice and  ingrown inequity.  Imagining that we can do this – well, that may be the biggest hurdle.

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. 

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.