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.

SPECULATING ON WHY TRUMP WILL AVOID IMPEACHMENT HE DESERVES

By Dominique Paul Noth

As much as the impeachment trial does, the nearly two year old recording of Donald Trump at a hotel dinner party reveals his modus operandi -- perhaps more than the public yet realizes. Low cunning rather than intellectual prowess is constantly at work in the president’s behavior, which is why Trump, like a hunted animal, never backs down and circles every territory as if he owns it no matter what happens.

Lev Parnas (right) has provided this 2014 photo with Trump.

In that recording in April 2018 (about a year before Joe Biden announced his candidacy for president and immediately shot to the top of national polls)  Lev Parnas discussed aloud with Trump and dinner guests how he hears (since retracted) that the US ambassador to Ukraine is badmouthing Trump.  No one knows her name at this point but Trump leaps in to insist someone fire her, get her out of there – and maybe do worse.

But nothing happened for a year though Parnas, who knew the Trumps for a decade despite denials from the president and was working then on a natural gas deal (only later becoming a key component of Giuliani’s campaign against Biden in Ukraine), recalls Trump talked of firing Marie Yovanovitch – his staff finally learned her name -- several times before it actually happened.

Why?  Let’s speculate how Trump’s constant volatility today may color our view of his volatility then, thinking that dinner in 2018 connects to the events unraveling today.  Over the years he may demand squads of firings for the many people he hears dislike him.  Their numbers have to be legion and his temper tantrums famous. You can see the minions in his social orbit feeding the frenzy.  His aides seem to have become pretty good at holding him off and counting on him forgetting who he was angry at this week.  Plus he tends to wait until it does him some good.  But somewhere in his head the info is lurking until needed, like a bear remembering where the honey tree is.

That old recording at the least gives a flat-out lie to Trump saying he doesn’t know Parnas or Igor Furman, on whose phone the whole thing was recorded. Trump also knew in 2018 how important the military aid was to Ukraine but not discussed was how it was also a big domestic selling point for his new administration, pushed by both Democrats and Republicans. Javelins as part of the military aid was something Obama resisted (despite supporters of Javelins  like Joe Biden) because he feared Soviet reaction so shortly after its invasion of Crimea – and also because corruption was then a continuing problem.  So Trump used Javelins as something else he could do that Obama balked at doing, which really seems to light the fire of his decisions. Plus a natural gas deals translates in his mind to US energy.  So the time wasn’t ripe in 2018 to make a big fuss about Ukraine

A year later, an actual real reformer had taken over the government of Ukraine and Trump was also facing Biden’s entry into the presidential race. He learned there was video of Biden’s role in firing a corrupt Ukraine prosecutor on behalf of the US government. He was also reminded of something on the periphery -- how Hunter Biden got a board job at a Ukraine private company working on improving its reputation with the West. 

So two and two began to make four.  Yovanovitch would stand in the way of his new plan to extort a new government. He knew how important the military aid was to them, so a little coercion seemed in order – to get a friendly White House meeting and play games with the aid unless Ukraine announced an investigation of the Bidens. It had to seem unlikely to the leader of the world’s most powerful government that a little pipsqueak of a new leader would offer any resistance.

It has always struck me as strange that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo took weeks to replace Yovanovitch with a respected charge d’affaires Bill Turner, giving just enough time for Trump’s personal lawyer Giuliani and the three amigos to take over the Ukraine planning.  Turner, we should point out, testified twice to the House about what happened and has now departed from his Ukraine post under cloudy circumstances. It sure sounds like he now knows he was a pawn.

It was also striking how Trump, in typical fashion once his plotting unraveled, tried to double down on the lie. Suddenly the phone call was perfect. Suddenly an incomplete summary was called a transcript. Suddenly the Bidens were a legitimate target for investigation (maybe Giuliani will find something under a rock) rather than clearly a violation of the presidential oath the minute he named them as targets

Suddenly the right wing media suggests that Hunter was paid $50,000 a month by Burisma as a board member from 2014 to 2019 even though there is not a record of a single payment, just his New York-based capital management firm Rosemont Seneca Bohai paying far less for his work for dozens of companies.  

How unlikely that Democrats would be begging for
John Bolton to testify.

And now a respected conservative name – John Bolton, a hawk among the hawks who wants to continue influence on the Republican Party – has reportedly said in his new book that Trump indeed tied the military aid to investigating the Bidens, bringing deeper calls for his testimony at the impeachment trial.

Now when you turn this all back to Trump’s continued stubbornness in blocking more witnesses under “executive privilege” exaggerations that will take months to unravel in court, you’ll understand why the Senate Republicans are willing victims to the lowest form of animal cunning named Trump.  The president will refuse to budge an inch and either they go along or face his wrath, which apparently worries them more than the voters’ wrath.

That is why I suspect they won’t do even the minimum job of allowing witnesses. McConnell has three votes to play with and if he can separate any witness requests one from the other, none will move forward. Even if a Republican like Mitt Romney has the temerity to ask for one.  Four will have to unite to ask for the same witness.

The House impeachment managers have taken a clever path.  They don’t doubt that any of the witnesses, powerful conservative names they may be, will further convict the president.  The Republicans may be risking the ire of the voters (some 70% in both parties want witnesses), but they’d rather risk that ire in the future rather than Trump’s more instant rage in primary votes.

The best defense they can muster – what he did was wrong but maybe not impeachable – is silly cover, but Trump won’t even let them take that route to safety.

The bear is circling the tree and no Republican is willing to step down.

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.

MILWAUKEE’S FIERCE CHANGE IN NEWS AND ARTS COVERAGE

By Dominique Paul Noth

A major horror story of the 20th century turning into the 21st was how the nation’s legendary local print newspapers evaporated into nearly invisible ink after serving crucial importance and high circulation numbers.  

Some of the best investigations and commentary on the Internet still stem from people trained by print outlets or from the newspapers themselves, though those articles are often repositioned without credit or compensation. But there isn’t a national lament over the loss of vitality, reliable brands and established avenues of influence.

Rachel Maddow has become the lone lonely champion
of local print newspapers.

The closest we have come to a lament is MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. She has led broadcasts with the unlikely heroes of the DC impeachment hearings and the Midwest reaction to the killing of an Iranian superstar general by pointing out how that coverage is playing in local newspaper markets.  She treats as still influential the Page One designs, headlines and color photography that stirred life into print readers in Kansas City, St. Louis, Florida and the Northwest, suggesting that if anything is going to wake up the common citizenry to the dangers of our times it is the full-throated views of newspapers right and left in local markets.

Her view – a bit through rose-colored glasses in my estimation -- was that the depth and power of local coverage was going to change impeachment from a Beltway wonder to the potent national issue it should be.

None of her choices were from Milwaukee, though there were decades dating back to the 1950s when The Milwaukee Journal and even its rival the Sentinel (one moderately liberal, the other flaming Hearst or what passed for conservative in those days) were regarded as eminent leaders in local coverage and The Journal was also the pioneer for the nation in color photography and Pulitzer initiative.

Yet even the newspaper brands outside New York City and D.C. that Maddow chose are in circulation decline.  If she’s right and they still have any impact on their communities, that just emphasizes how far Milwaukee has fallen.

As both writer and senior manager I was eye-witness from the 1960s into the 1990s of that plunge from influence, which does not mean the Milwaukee newspapers were so remarkable before.  But they did have ethical standards that stood out from how advertising is wagging the media dog these days and they had an appeal to consumers that the Internet would take away -- key factors in their doom.  The marketplace for want ads, classifieds, romantic advice, movies and plays, recipes and more as well as news and opinion skipped away from print. The newspapers never adapted.  Their actual choices of change may have sped their plunge. The specific reasons are best left to memoirs.

But there was a remarkable shift from the days when copy and news were written specifically to appear in print.  These weren’t advertorials as is often the case today.  It was news and features that attracted and benefited consumers but were fashioned with an interest in warts and all coverage. 

By the 1980s in Milwaukee, news and feature coverage had been bent away from this approach to emphasize the newspapers’ own marketing concerns rather than the importance to the locals of people coverage or vital issues in print. One method was to create regional pages with advertising sold specifically in the neighborhood and news coverage similarly leveled.  Large part-time staffs were hired for that purpose.

The metro reporters at first thought the development of regional pages would deepen their hard news values, but it was mainly spreading the interference of other floors than the newsroom. It became more important to create area editions based on what could be sold rather than where news was happening.

Features had already seen the changes particularly when it came to radio and TV the same company owned and in the choice of what sort of artists and events to cover and what sort of feisty columns to allow. 

The newsroom made a bigger mistake. Its top editors started promising the corporate leadership their insights would lead to higher circulation numbers and higher suburban penetration, which translated into more cautious treatment of Waukesha and Washington counties where many advertisers were now ensconced and where the newspapers now desperately hunted for readership inroads.

The once familiar slowly evaporating merged logo.

By the time the Journal and Sentinel merged in 1995, the rationale was advertising far more than news coverage. The vain belief was that a short-term hit in circulation numbers would be followed by massive increases.

The promised boost in circulation actually led to a massive fall-off in those numbers.  The Sunday Journal which once boasted half a million subscribers has fallen toward nothing burgers.

For the arts, losing separate voices particularly hurt and it caused a sea change among these arts companies’ own marketing plans. It was also that 1990s time period I left as did hundreds of others, some by choice, some not.

In sum, newspapers are no longer a main artery of arts coverage. Mail and online campaigns are. JS eliminated individual voices for TV, theater and films, much as they had already done to books, architecture and the visual arts.

Today online newspaper sites like Urban Milwaukee -- and even the online sites of print brands -- are more sought for coverage along with Facebook, Twitter and social media in general. 

The common methods for arts groups and even community organizers are a large consumer snail-mail list and email campaigns that provide an echo of the past methods for readers who still like dialog and debate.  Smart performing arts groups not only excerpt from favorable reviews in their posts but also link the readers directly to those reviews on the originating websites, so they get the full taste of what the reviewers said.  Regularly you see this done for Next Act, Milwaukee Chamber Theatre, Skylight, Renaissance Theaterworks and so forth.

There is one amusing exception. The Milwaukee Rep, which once heavily relied on print coverage, is now controlling its own voice.  It runs similar online ads and email campaigns, but in their emails and lures on Facebook and the like, the one-line quotes are not back to the original sources but to the Rep’s own online site.  The power of outside voices to inform the arts is further diminished.

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.

FOR HOLIDAYS, PELOSI GIVES MITCH A LUMP OF COAL

By Dominique Paul Noth

It is one of the most obvious cases in history of presidential wrongdoing. It jumped into rank criminality the minute Trump asked another country’s leader to investigate Joe Biden. Yet Sen. Mitch McConnell describes Nancy Pelosi as full of fear to bring him “so shoddy a case.” Similarly his House GOP counterpart, Kevin McCarthy, describes her as embarrassed to move impeachment forward.

The American public may not know much but they know Pelosi doesn’t operate out of fear or embarrassment.  The feeble nature of the GOP’s excuses has elevated the Speaker of the House into a prime role though legally she doesn’t have much influence into the doings of the Senate.

Yet now as her Christmas present to the nation she represents a firm roadblock, since she will not move the articles of impeachment forward or name the House managers (prosecutors) until after New Year’s.  She will be accused of playing politics but she is merely pitting Trump, who desperately wants the trial to proceed, against McConnell, who claims he doesn’t care if it never gets to his chambers.

Trump hoped for swift vindication by the Senate. Well, acquittal is still likely given the two-thirds for conviction rule.  But swift is gone. And it only takes a simple majority to set the rules of the road. The Republicans hold 53 seats; the Democrats and independents 47.

There is as yet no real delay, so Republicans can’t claim that Pelosi was stalling the desired effort of the House to get Trump out of Dodge before sundown.  No, McConnell had always indicated the Senate wouldn’t take up the trial until January.  He was lackadaisical from the start. So he now has given Pelosi the entire holiday season to delay putting him in control.  And that leaves the president twisting in the wind about when she will do the deed.

All she’s saying to McConnell, after the House invested its blood into its impeachment process, that the representatives have a right to know the outlines of the Senate process.  So she’s waiting on him before sending over the articles and picking the managers as the process requires.  “When we see what they have, we will know who and how many we will send over,” she said. 

She pointedly added in case Mitch didn’t get the message: “I don’t think anybody expected that we would have a rogue president and a rogue leader in the Senate at the same time.”

The clever lady has imposed some interesting wrinkles on the Senate.  Public polls indicate Republican supporters want to see witnesses (they are certainly being pressured in that direction) or else it’s hard to call it a trial. Trump wants to see the Bidens plus Schiff and even Pelosi, though what they have to do with the actual case (except as objects of insults) is unclear. 

Sen. Charles Schumer and the Democrats want to see Mulvaney, Bolton and some other direct witnesses, while I and others in the public would like to hear from Pompeo who was on the call and the White House lawyer who weirdly moved the still unreleased recording (Trump mislabels his  account as a transcript) to a key-code protected server.

Expect Trump’s actual henchmen to do some twisty legalistic maneuvering to refuse a call to testify at the Senate, which could actually come not just through a vote of the majority but through the presiding justice, Supreme Court chief John Roberts.  Unless these henchmen have exculpatory evidence (Pelosi carefully explained to the sometimes illiterate Trump that exculpatory meant evidence that would clear him) they don’t want to testify, and no one thinks they have any such thing.   So refusal just underlines the obstruction of justice charge in the articles of impeachment.

It’s a box of poisoned cookies though Mitch thinks he holds the antidote. Traditionally the majority leader sets the rules, but is Roberts’ rules of order only ceremonial? It was in the past, but the chief justice could change things if he insists. 

Mitch is in charge only as long as he controls the majority. The senators who have now gone home for the holidays traditionally hear a little bit directly of what people are thinking. If the people are loudly thinking they would like to hear testimony, the pressure on the senators puts pressure on Mitch.  He will seek to ignore all that, convincing the impetuous president to listen to him while doing the same dance with the senators.

He may not ditch his master plan, but Pelosi has made sure the decision is no longer his alone. She has set him up for a nightmare holiday season.

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.