Centrist Politics

Largely because of the lie of FOX news we have accepted a premise that the country has a liberal bias in our media and news.  It doesn't and never did but  by saying it over and over it starts to stick.

The middle of the political spectrum is what the majority believe.  It can and does shift over time but the majority view is the moderate view.

The current moderate view may have been a conservative or a liberal view at one time but now it is the middle(moderate) view.

There was a time when the programs from the new deal were liberal but supporting Social Security is now clearly mainstream.

Still we see people with mainstream positions labeled liberal or even radical liberal.

This is an attempt to see the conversation with a negative bias. 

This has tainted issues like global warming or wearing masks.  Science has been accused of being liberal.  Probably because it sale in facts, not fantasy.

The great majority of us support things like equal rghts, accessible health care, sensible gun laws, fair taxation and fair elections.

They don't represent a radical agenda, they are American as Apple pie.

How Are We Doing?

When you look at the news of the day it gives you a sense of where we stand as a nation on a number of issues.

Clearly the cases and deaths from the virus are not good indicators.  If the pandemic was simply an unfortunate event that happened to originate in China, we were obviously woefully unprepared.

If on the other hand China is somehow to blame for spreading the virus, we were obviously woefully unprepared.

Placing blame doesn't provide an excuse it provides a diversion.

In the second case of course we might need to do something, but it doesn't change our vulnerability.

Similarly building a wall on the Southern Border is unlikely to do anything to halt illegal immigration.  It might divert them elsewhere but I'm not sure that's worth the billions of dollars.

Meanwhile we see a dam fail in Michigan because our national infrastructure is old and fragile.  Many other structures are at risk but we are diverting a lot of effort into a folly on the border.

The main point is actually that even if it worked, what would it accomplish.  This issue has very little actual impact on the vast majority of Americans and the ones impacted actually like the cheap labor.  Billions wasted to no end.

I don't like to harp on the weather because it is variable but over time weather equals climate and it seems we are starting to see the effects of climate change in daily weather.  In the last decade we have had once in a lifetime events or once in a century events fairly frequently.

We see unemployment that would have been unimaginable just a few months ago and an explosion of the national debt in response.  Still the stock market climbs because in all honesty, the current economy doesn't care about how many are working, just how much they can spend.  Of course it has hurt travel and entertainment companies but the fact that JC Penny or J. Crew is bankrupt is hardly relevant.  They just sold stuff made elsewhere.  Amazon can do that.

Online shopping, but for some reason on-line voting is a problem.  Well maybe for the current administration any voting is bad.

Fortunate Son

Because I grew up in a working class neighborhood, when this song came out I knew it was basically about me and almost everyone I knew.

Those folks born with a silver spoon were effectively aliens to us.  They lived in different areas, they went to different schools and they had a path ready for them in life.

This being America the goal was to become one of them, not to bring them down.  The hope was that we could work hard, do well and provide a better life for our children.

Since we aspired to become wealthy we accepted the wealthy as part of the family.  We thought we could get accepted by them and mingle.

That was never going to happen.

Yes some people, a relatively small number got rich but they didn't become part of that club.

Maybe their children or possibly their grandchildren will but you don't just become "old money" in a single generation.

In the Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald notes that the rich are different than you and I.  He points out they learn very early that they are entitled and will always feel that way.

Working people react in one of two ways towards these people.

Many want to become them so they imitate their behavior, try to accumulate wealth and work to send their children to the right schools.  While the odds are against them, some do manage to join their ranks but they take a generation or two to actually fit in.

Others rebel.  Rebellion sometimes actually spills over into actual conflict but generally it expresses itself in other ways, rebellious clothes, drinking, drug use and other behaviors.

Still many of these people have a deep inbred respect for the wealthy and when one of them actually acknowledges them they become his/her loyalists.

Of course you have to remember that the fortunate son is different so the loyalty is one way.

Founding Fathers Disagreed

You see a lot of people who cite the founding fathers to support a particular position.

Of course this is generally BS since there were many founding fathers and they had trouble agreeing on most things.  The first association they created using Articles of Confederation effectively failed and were replaced by our current constitution.

There are many things left undecided in that documents and many compromises.  It was so deficient that they had to add the first 10 Amendments to get it passed.

So when you quote the founding fathers please identify which one you mean since there is probably at least one who would disagree with you.

They didn't even like each other very much as well documented.  The conflict continued in the early years of the Republic and could be considered the root of our Civil War.

We have amended the original Federalist Constitution 27 times to correct omissions or deficiencies.

It also has been interpreted many times by the Supreme Court and depending on the times and the justices it has changed and sometimes changed back again.

So when you tell me the founding fathers had an opinion, my response is they had many opinions and I'm much more interested in what we need today.

Speak for yourself and don't hide behind a myth.

The Blame Game

One of the things you can be sure of in our society is that we want to find someone to blame.

I may be thinking of the past with rose colored glasses but it doesn't seem like we always were like this.

At some point it seems we started to sue everyone we could whenever we could.  Among other things it has driven up things like medical costs as it required that doctors and hospitals performed all sorts of unnecessary procedures to make sure there wasn't something they could be sued over.

We decided doctor's judgements were not trustworthy because maybe 1% or less of the time they were wrong.

This has spread into all walks of life and is almost our main political method.

Of course it was always common to criticize the other candidates views but we now see it raised to an accusation of illegal behavior much of the time.  We saw this work successfully four years ago when things like Benghazi, E-Mail servers and innuendo were elevated to criminal behavior.

None was although many still believe those lies.

China is accused of bad behavior and as a communist regime they are guilty of crimes against their own people but they are not guilty of a bat virus that has spread.  Should they eat bats?  Well we ear all sorts of things and lots of people think eating any animal is wrong.  However because Westerners generally don't eat them is simply cultural, not criminal.

Still because our inadequate response has come under attack we see an attempt to shift blame to China.  Our response was inadequate and then maybe too restrictive.  There are lessons to be learned there but we immediately shift to blame.

Blaming politicians for being incompetent is sort of like being surprised that dog's bark.  Some are worse than others but running things is quite complex, who knew?

Sexist Politics?

People are of course entitled to their own opinions and in this country they even have the right to express them freely.  There may be some people who think a woman running for President faces challenges that a man doesn't.

We only have one example of this and that woman got a lot more votes than the man but lost because of the electoral college.  Even there, the number of votes that decided the election in a few states were a very small number.  It is certainly possible that some men and maybe women too, voted against her because of her sex.  I suppose some voted for her for the same reason.  Did it impact that election?  Maybe.

It would be non-sensical for anyone to think that a woman couldn't win an election, one already did per the popular vote.

So did Bernie Sanders take that position in 2018  It seems very unlikely both based on his progressive record, his experience in losing to a woman and common sense.

It also seems clear that Elizabeth Warren heard something that made her think he did say it.  Perhaps he did say it in some context which we don't have.  It doesn't make sense on its face which makes it difficult to believe.

More importantly it doesn't matter.  If in fact he thinks any group can't be elected, that's his right.  I didn't think America would elect a black president until they did.  My opinion wasn't based on my beliefs but rather my interpretation of the country as a whole.  How does this reflect anything about me except my wrong analysis?

If the view was that a group was unfit to be president, that might be newsworthy, but thinking they might lose seems like a simple prediction.

Why Warren even brought it up is political and why the media is playing it up is, well its the media.

Who really cares?

Boring Politics

If you follow the news you sometimes think that politics is something really important to Americans.

Well many Americans can't tell you who their elected representatives are.  Most are aware of who is President, hard not to notice, but not so much everyone else.

I'm sure there are plenty of surveys out there about this, but I simply check with young people I now and discover that they are much more interested in other things.

Life is what happens on a daily basis.  Certain things are related to politics but most things don't seem to be.

If you can't get a good paying job or if you can you probably don't think politics is the reason, although it might be.

I do think that most young people are concerned about climate change, how could they not be, but they tend to blame all politicians and older people without thinking about the politics involved.

One of the problems is how boring politics are.  Both the Impeachment hearings and the Democratic debates are hard to watch unless you are already committed.  Trump rallies on the other hand are much more entertaining.

Hopefully between now and the election we will find a way to energize Americans about the issues.

Arguing the finer points of how to achieve universal health care or other issues that are hard to follow won't do it.

Tactics

I've lived through three presidential events, two impeachments and one resignation and while certainly each is unique what we are seeing is something new in this one.

With Nixon you had an unfolding of evidence where both sides were determined to find out the truth.  Certainly he had supporters, less over time but they acted like a tribunal in search of the truth.

It seemed likely that as dramatic development unfurled he was going to be both impeached and convicted and seeing the handwriting on the wall he resigned.

With Clinton, the act he was accused of was lying about an encounter with a young intern.  Once it was proven the encounter had happened and he apologized the crime he was accused of was effectively perjury under oath.  He was clearly guilty but he was not removed from office, partly because while a serious matter it was more of a personal issue where he lied about infidelity.  It didn't really have much to do with the National Interest.

Now in the current one we see charges of attempting to use national resources to further personal interests and then obstructing the investigation.  What seems different this time is that instead of trying to determine if the events happened, it is likely they did, his supporters  are on the attack, politicizing the process while accusing the opposition of being political.

Now we know the phone call happened and we know that witnesses and documents are being withheld.  The American public would like to see these documents and hear these witnesses, so the question becomes, was there enough evidence already for the House?

There was and if in fact there is evidence that the motivation was indeed perfect, one would think the Senate supporters would roll out the documents and witnesses to refute the accusations.

They aren't going to do that, they will simply acquit based on political reasons.

They think the American public will agree and some will.

I don't think it is enough for those who aren't already rabid supporters.  We will see.

The Constitution

Many Americans give the Constitution a sort of magical quality and consider it nearly perfect.

It isn't but the best quality about it is one we use the least, the ability to update it.

This document was reflective of its times and permitted slavery, denied women the right to vote and is heavily geared to protect property owners and doesn't support one person one vote very well.

In fact in order to pass it we had to tack on the first 10 Amendments (the Bill of Rights) almost immediately.

The Constitution itself does a good job of creating three equal but separate branches of Government with three different intertwined roles.

There are still issues in this country that should be updated, if we want a democratic country.  For example the electoral college and the distribution of Senators by State are not democratic in  implementation and lead to states with lower populations having more influence than populous states.

States or ex-colonies had a lot to do with this as the federal government was primarily designed to deal with things like foreign policy while the States concerned themselves with the everyday stuff.

It is still an important document that has helped this country thrive but it did also allow this country to fight a bloody civil war.

Amendments have corrected some of its early flaws, but we haven't fixed some others.

We need to.

The Bully President

We are seeing a rather unprecedented, for this country, heavy handed takeover of a major American party.

It doesn't seem like this is going to be the new norm or even if it will last any time at all, but we have seen a large group of Americans who were elected to represent the American people, representing one person who may or may not even care about the country.

Without arguing about the motives of the party dictator, the more interesting factor relates to how they were forced to toe the line?

As always the primary motivator was fear, fear of losing their seat to his rabid followers.

One of the problems we have in this country is our process of selecting party nominees.

They are all subject to potential primaries after which they have to win an election.

Not long ago, a sitting politician hardly worried about the first, he was likely unchallenged and many were fairly assured of winning the second.

Today we see a situation in which, using social media, an upset President can turn his followers against you overnight.

So step out of line and face an expensive primary fight which even if you win is likely to hurt you badly in the general election as his followers aren't the type to turn around and support you.

It didn't take a lot of this to scare the bejesus out of the politicians who primarily only care about their continued employment.

The bully President has no loyalty to anyone in his party who steps out of line and they know it.

In the soviet union the penalties for stepping our of line were often a trip to the GULAG, here its simply having to get a real job, a terrifying prospect for many of them.

The Issues are the Issues

Nowadays people running for office are required, at least in some cases, to account for things that they did or didn't do, even when that event is simply routine life events.

I'm not talking about things which were crimes or which related to deeply felt political beliefs but simply actions which people do in the ordinary course of their lives.

Take a situation such as we have with Senator Elizabeth Warren who earlier in her life indicated on some documents that she had native American ancestry.

She does in fact have some but the amount is apparently inconsequential by some standards but was relying on some family traditions which spoke of it.

There is no evidence that she has specifically benefitted by this and she has never claimed tribal membership, however, it has led to her getting a nickname from the philanderer in chief and is almost guaranteed to become a prominent issue, at least at certain rallies if she becomes the Democratic nominee.

This obsession we have with inconsequential facts from people's past lives is ridiculous when you think about it.  The longer you have been alive and the more situations you have experienced. the more likely you are to have some things in your past that might be held against you.

God forbid they discover a photo or document detailing some foolishness you might have engaged in n school or elsewhere when you were still too young to know better.

What should matter, barring some real dark past is your current life and qualifications.

Of course with the rise of social media we will soon have a vast amount of opportunity to find "flaws" in the future.

You support Universal Health Care, but here is a picture of teenage you engaging in silly behavior!  Lets focus on that.

Voter Turnout.

The process we now use in this country to pick our candidates and ultimately our leaders and regulators is based on Democracy.

It is at best partially Democratic since we don't get 100% voter participation.

Whether people who don't bother to vote would make a significant difference in who gets elected is arguable, but there are enough of them that they could make a difference.

There have been some demographic studies that show that non-voters are less white, less wealthy and younger than voters.

Those factors would indicate that they are likely to be a more liberal group, on the whole, than voters which partially explains why one of our political parties is into voter suppression as a tactic.

So getting out more voters, as the Democrats did in 2018 but failed to do in 2016 would seem critical to winning that election.

How to get these voters interested in the process is the problem.

Many are so disgusted by politics in general that they don't thing voting is worthwhile.

Changing that perception might be key and maybe some of the policies that appeal to them need to be prominent.

Of course if you alienate current voters you may have a bigger problem.

A Nation of Laws

Next week the Impeachment hearings go into another phase with the judiciary committee taking over.

Unfortunately it is probably a fairly meaningless exercise.

The facts have been clear for a while for anyone interested in the truth.

The President has violated any number of laws and constitutional prohibitions by using his office and public funds to further his private interests.  He has also engaged in obstruction of justice and as part of that witness interpretation.

The only thing that you can say he hasn't done is perjure himself since his lies weren't done under oath.

Now some of his defenders will argue that what he has done isn't an impeachable offence, with no real basis for that since the actions clearly violate the constitution.

Still there are arguments that seem to work with some of the American people which are simply strategies.  First they want to paint this as a Democratic witch hunt.  It turns out that it is almost exclusively a Democratic situation because of the stranglehold exerted on the Republican party by his base.  Because of the flaws in our primary system, it is fairly easy for a motivated group to either win or make life difficult in party primaries and since our congressmen and women are primarily interested in winning reelection, it is a powerful weapon.

Still it seems inevitable that impeachment will pass in the house but he won't be convicted in the Senate.

How this plays our in the general election remains to be seen.

We need to stay a nation of laws for our democracy to survive, if it can.

A Country in Debt

If you consider a simple economic construct, the country and many of its citizens are living on borrowed money and therefore borrowed time.

You can blame it on any number of things, but in many cases it simply comes down to wanting what we want now, and worry about tomorrow later.

This was part of the issue involved in the financial crisis of 2008-2009 where an assumption that home prices would only continue to go up led to loans on what is best described as a whisper and a prayer.

When they didn't go up and many of the mortgages couldn't be refinanced or paid, we had a collapse that almost drove us into a depression.

To solve that problem we inserted a great amount of money into the economy via stimulus to give us a jump start.

We are still living off a series of jump starts as we haven't reigned in spending and individual income growth has not kept up with debt increases.

We can't afford many of the things we want and the Government can't afford the programs it already has.

No one seems willing to do what needs to be done to address it so I guess eat, drink and be merry, until they take the T-Bird away.

Deflection!

Realistically, it is pretty obvious that Hunter Biden only got the job with Burisma because of who his father was.  That is of course not corrupt unless it led to some sort of "quid pro quo" where Burisma benefited here.

Some say that this was when the VP got the Ukraine to fire the corrupt prosecutor, but since there is widespread consensus that this was strongly supported by the International community and his investigation into Burisma was over, it isn't much.

Children often benefit from famous parents, i.e. the Trump children but it isn't corrupt unless it actually is.

One may wonder if having Hunter Biden on the board didn't help Burisma in some situations where it could appear to others that it gave them an inside track to the American Government, but clearly they hired him for that very purpose and unless he did something corrupt for them it is simply the way business is.

Of course some will cling to the idea of corruption because it helps cloud the corruption of withholding Government assets or using your office for personal gain.

Those are actual acts of corruption, not flights of imagination.

Proof vs innuendo, I prefer the proof.

Fresh Blood

One of the things that is as certain as death and taxes is that people age.

This is a natural event and it can't be stopped.

Of course we live in an age where people live longer than ever and we like to imagine that age is something we can control, but of course we can't.

Watching the debate last night I simply couldn't get past one fact, the leading candidates are older than they really should be.

It is both a physical issue and mental one potentially but its more of a cultural one.

They may or may not experience significant deterioration in four to eight years, but certainly they are high risk.  However listening to their answers they tend to reflect things not as relevant as they once were.

Take Joe Biden's attitude toward Marijuana, which he tried to correct last night but considering how most of his life he was in a world where it was considered bad he has deep cultural embedding to overcome.

Similarly, Elizabeth Warren thinks fondly of how her brothers served, and remembers inaccurately I think her mother checking the mail each day.  A letter made her day and assured her the son was still alive.  Her fond memories of military or alternative service was one step short of reinstituting the draft and her response seemed to assume only men would be asked to serve.

I generally think Bernie Sanders simply reflects the radicalism of his youth and while it plays fairly well, it just seems dated to me.

We are what we were and the world these folks grew up in is not the world of the future.  There has to be a time when we pass the baton on to a new generation, and it just seems like its time.

A Conspiracy for Everything!

Perhaps the worst thing about the explosion in media access that took place over the last 20 years or so is that we have enabled a golden age of conspiracy theories.

These conspiracies always existed but they lived on the fringe, not on our newsfeed.

It is more democratic but this is the real fake news, although each theory has proponents who would argue that.

Combined with the growing mistrust of "Government" we now find conspiracies everywhere.

If the Government experts announce vaccines are safe but some erroneous data indicates erroneously that it might correlate with an increase in autism we spawn a anti-vax movement, based on nothing at all.

In fact since vaccinations became nearly universal, you can correlate them with any thing else that also increased.  Of course that isn't cause and effect, but not everyone understands that.

We have a menu of conspiracy theories so you can pick the ones you want.  Our President likes anything that makes him look better, no matter how far-fetched.  He obviously delves into far right web sites which in some cases simply make them up based on next to nothing.

It just seems like a big conspiracy.

The Tide of Change

It was true in the early 1800s and is true today, the growing populations in certain areas is predictive of the politics of tomorrow.

It is fairly inevitable and while it takes a bit of time, like the tide it can't be stopped, just delayed.

Democracy is designed to create a Government that reflects its citizens and as the citizens change so does the Government.

Some might not like the changes and want to hold them back as long as possible, but one way to make them happen even faster is to tweak the dragon.

Inevitably we will have a significant change n the Republican party or they will cease to be relevant eventually.

Not everywhere and not all at once, but policies that rely on an aging population that is shrinking as a percentage of the total population can not survive forever.

Its what Democracy is supposed to do, represent the people, the people here now, not some past time.

Its actually a good thing and its happened before.  Many things we considered essential to Government were not even considered a couple of hundred years ago.

Its call progress.

Politics Are Local

America has always had certain divisions.

Even when we were colonies under England we might have been unified because we were all on this continent but our origins and evolutions were very different.

Yes we sort of united to defeat a common enemy, England, but it took us a while to form a constitution and in that document we added the Bill of Rights because we didn't trust each other very much.

Our earliest divisions were central government vs states right.  This evolved partly because of slavery as the slave states argued for states rights while opinions generally swung against slavery overall.

We had a bloody civil war but it might have ended formal slavery but it didn't end the conflict.

In fact, in many ways, once reconstruction ended the states enjoyed significant freedom.

It took the great depression and the subsequent world war for the federal government to rise again.

The country once again untied against a common enemy, Communism, and in doing so we saw significant trends toward centralized Government.

We are seeing a new crisis in which the efforts towards nationalized policies is running up against some opposition.

It seems fairly obvious that many of the issues are national in scope but this creates resistance.

Since our constitution has built in safeguards for the States (the Senate, the Electoral College), the issue has to be fought locally.

You can't just tell them one way is better, you have to convince them.

All politics are local after all.

Democrats Should?

In show after show about the upcoming primaries and subsequent election you hear pundits talk about what the Democrats should do.

They need to nominate a candidate who appeals to independent voters or who shuns far left policies or who can beat the incumbent.

Of course the advice is part of the new world we live in where cable has created so much time that simply needs to be filled with something.

Maybe years ago when party bosses decided who the nominee was going to be strategy like this could happen.

Today, however the decision is made in the primaries and those are decided by the people who vote.

The primaries have many flaws, participation is not what it should be and potentially we nominate candidates who don't really represent the party as a whole.

However the primaries are a form of Democracy which allows the voters to select the candidate.

The reasons any one person might vote for any one candidate can be complex, but I know we don't all get together and decide who to vote for.

The Democrats and the Republicans don't get to decide the candidate via back room deals.\\

Look at the last round of Republican primaries where the outcome was clearly not expected.

Democracy is simply a messy process, it will be who it will be.