Time After Time 11.6.22
Campaign Closers, Comic Relief, Fallbacks
Greetings, with election-week headlines and highlights. There’s a variety of shared cartoons and video too, thanks to several of you.
For many of us the effect of American politics has long felt oddly contradictory. It’s emotional roller-coaster, rising hopes plunging to alarms all-too-real. And it is utterly mind-numbing tedium of relentless repetition.
One word comes to mind from the standpoint of mind, body and psyche or soul: weary.
Maybe for once the week’s extra fallback hour of sleep is well-timed, even for the legions who detest the semiannual clock-changes.
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Beyond this News Notebook’s title topics, a more fundamental theme — and for me a grave concern — is woven through all of today’s news selections.
“Small-d democracy” and soul
You may recall the newShrink mission, from dual perspectives of journalist and psychologist, of tracking our American soul or psyche through what shows up in all kinds of news of the day — including politics. As with soul, in this sense democracy is the universal “small-d” variety, not the R/D labels of political parties or campaign platforms that shift over time (and historically have even totally interchanged).
From the depth psychology perspective, both democracy and the soul (unconscious) are messy — encompassing and reckoning with not just the best and brightest about us, but also the darkest, most frightening, shameful or mortifying. So this is my frame for how to discuss or even much think about midterm-campaigns, voting and the larger political environment.
And this season my head keeps exploding over the widely heard, all-too-true statement: That “democracy is on the ballot.” (More disturbing is that it needs to be.)
At this point, the questions of “who and what is winning, likely to win and then-what?” start to awaken the overused metaphors of my years in corporate speechwriting. These range from the more dire “arranging deck chairs on the Titanic” to the cheerful optimism-overreach of “we’re changing the tires on our tractor-trailer as it barrels down the highway at 75 mph.” Choose a preferred cliché, or feel free to substitute your own favorites here!
From this quirky state of mind (and speaking of clichés!) this News Notebook compiles headline items ranging from democracy-itself and “closing-argument” efforts to several alternative-opinion pieces from conservative-leaning columnists. A list and links also provide an “across-the-waterfront” sample look at some pivotal state races and such overarching campaign issues as money/the economy, race/racism and abortion/reproductive rights.
A Note on Today’s Structure: Today’s edition has less text, but many more-than-usual live links allowing direct access to articles and videos. The “across-the-waterfront” list of headlines and links is under Post Notes at the very end after closing of this post.
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Democracy on the ballot
Biden Warns That ‘Big Lie’ Republicans Imperil American Democracy (The NewYork Times)
In a prime-time address, President Biden condemned election violence and voter intimidation just days before Tuesday’s midterm elections.
Here is a full transcript of President Biden’s Wednesday speech on saving democracy (NYT)
Obama says democracy ‘may not survive’ if Arizona Republicans win (WAPO)
The warning Wednesday in Phoenix illustrates alarm about voters putting a slate of election deniers in charge of the state’s elections.
Closing arguments
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The updated visual below illustrates the range of election-related events, headlines and issues. In addition to items below, I emphasize my ongoing recommendation for near-daily as possible reading of political historian Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from and American (heathercoxrichardson.substack.com). Her thoroughly factual connecting of current and historic contexts, calmly methodical tone and presentation are simply peerless. Lawyer-activist Robert Hubbell’s Today’s Edition also pulls a wide range of well-reported political journalism together with sane and helpful perspective on a daily basis. (Both of these resources have free subscriber-reader options.)
The following story, and the high-profile poll it describes, may be this election cycle’s most disheartening. The many, head-spinning contradictory ideas and opinions expressed by these voters have me questioning the impacts of even highly regarded, reputable opinion-polls like this one.
I increasingly wonder if the repeated asking, then widespread reporting of results, of unchallenged, unquestioned, top-of-the head answers to pure-opinion questions might be diminishing all of our collective capacity and motivation to form opinions and decisions based on critical thinking, facts and data.
Voters See Democracy in Peril, but Saving It Isn’t a Priority (NYT)
A New York Times/Siena College poll found that other problems have seized voters’ focus — even as many do not trust this year’s election results and are open to anti-democratic candidates.
Voters overwhelmingly believe American democracy is under threat, but seem remarkably apathetic about that danger, with few calling it the nation’s most pressing problem, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll.
In fact, more than a third of independent voters and a smaller but noteworthy contingent of Democrats said they were open to supporting candidates who reject the legitimacy of the 2020 election, as they assigned greater urgency to their concerns about the economy than to fears about the fate of the country’s political system.
This story further explores what this poll’s results look and feel like to people interviewed in a community.
Fears Over Fate of Democracy Leave Many Voters Frustrated and Resigned (NYT)
As democracy frays around them, Republicans and Democrats see different culprits and different risks.
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Although an Arizona-specific story, this weekend closeup from The Washington Post is included here for its national relevance… and to me a close second alarm to the above findings of voter apathy about democracy. Perhaps most chilling in this one, amid the all-American resourceful energy of the ego-developing young adults involved, is the utterly absolute adherence to a winning at all costs “ethic.”
To my several friends and readers with a deeply lasting affinity, core values, family and/or voting history that cherishes or enshrines “John McCain-style moderate conservatism” as an ideal, you may want to consider this an excruciating must-read:
How a pro-Trump youth group remade the Arizona GOP, testing democracy (WAPO)
Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA and its affiliates have boosted Kari Lake and other allies in Arizona as they worked to purge officials who affirmed the 2020 election results.
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Given polling’s vast influences both plus and minus over the past several election cycles, this pundit takes a useful look at the process of polling itself.
Opinion: Three reasons why the polls could be wrong (Bloomberg, Jonathan Bernstein)
Conducting opinion surveys is much harder than it used to be.
Bernstein’s three reasons:
🔷 Greater than usual polling error due to far fewer polls being done;
🔷 Difficulty getting polling done with fewer landlines and continuing challenge to stay ahead of technology and methodology trends; and
🔷 Defining accurate polling samples given changes in habits regarding who votes, when and how (eg. by mail, early, or only in-person on election day) — and across states whose election laws and voter access vary hugely.
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Culminating my darkly low-energy mood after the President’s somber midweek call to all Americans, I found Susan Glasser’s piece in The New Yorker contagious. (Despite that, the entire piece is well worth a read. In case the paywall makes that impossible here, the larger block of quoted text captures main themes.)
I’ve got a bad case of election dread (Susan Glasser, The New Yorker)
Whether or not there’s a red wave, it’s clear where this thing is going.
On Wednesday night, less than a week before the midterm elections that will determine the future of his Presidency, Joe Biden summoned the television cameras for a hastily planned speech at Union Station. Against a backdrop of American flags, he offered a closing argument for the campaign that was chillingly direct, if not exactly what the Party’s message gurus would prefer: Democracy itself, the President said, is on the ballot.
Biden began by mentioning the recent attack on “my friend,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s eighty-two-year-old husband, Paul Pelosi, whose head was smashed during an encounter with an intruder who told police he was searching for his wife. But the heart of Biden’s speech was about Donald Trump’s Big Lie about the election of 2020 and how it has reshaped American politics into an ongoing crisis over basic adherence to the Constitution. “He’s made a big lie an article of faith in the magaRepublican party,” Biden said of “the defeated former President . . . who refuses to accept the fact that he lost”….
… A few hours later, I received the last in that day’s barrage of fund-raising e-mails from Donald Trump. It contained, more or less, his version of a closing argument. The former President’s pitch was not about the future of democracy or even, for that matter, about what to do for the economy; it was about Hunter Biden’s “Laptop from Hell” and his own claims of endless persecution. “The Witch Hunt continues,” Trump lamented, even though, “after 6 years and millions of pages of documents, they’ve got nothing.” It wasn’t clear from the e-mail what persecution he was referring to, but that wasn’t really the point. The point was that they were out to get him, whoever “they” are, and it wasn’t fair. “If I had what Hunter and Joe had,” Trump said, “it would be the Electric Chair…”
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All of which made this next later item surprising, a welcome serendipity.
“The Closer”?
This appearance by Senator Elizabeth Warren was in the casual comedic setting of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. But here she delivers a crisp, energetic, intelligently thorough, near pitch-perfect summation of her party’s “closing arguments” to prospective voters.
Warren makes the case I was wishing to hear from President Biden, his predecessor Obama and the week’s several other surrogates campaigning.
Warren succinctly delivers what could be useful talking points on Democrats’ four-point platform, complete with concrete examples:
🔷 The Economy (positive impacts of many Administration initiatives cited specifically, from reduced Rx and energy prices to safeguarding Medicare and Social Security);
🔷 Roe v Wade, reproductive freedom and abortion rights;
🔷 Climate Change (including positive economic energy-cost impacts for working and middle-class families); and
🔷 Democracy-on-the-Ballot.
To Warren’s four points, I’d like to hear added the clear and positive Democrats’ action steps and case to be made around both Crime and Immigration reform
I highly recommend watching this video also just for fun — listen for the ad lib moment about “long tongues”! An additional thought to hold while watching: This whip-smart wit, in top form with the firecracker energy, is what a scrapper of a 73-year-old political leader looks and sounds like… Wish more 40-year-olds did.
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Given noisy, chaotic and rhetorical extremes of today’s Republican Party, it’s valuable and maybe natural to seek their voices of moderation.
The view from some moderate- to centrist-conservatives
This first piece is from The Washington Post’s Marc A. Thiessen, whose solidly conservative-leaning columns I read fairly routinely. I found the scope and implications of this piece rather staggering. And Thiessen’s choosing to write about this topic during election season, with such unfiltered candor and thoroughness, are both surprising and commendably professional. (This item also could fall under the “follow the money… if you can” category of issues among Post Notes links below.)
Opinion/McConnell’s PACs put money where Trump’s mouth is (WAPO columnist Marc A. Thiessen)
Both had significant war chests; only the 'Old Crow' has put money where his party needs it.
If Republicans take back the Senate next Tuesday, thank Mitch McConnell.
Through his super PAC, the Senate Leadership Fund (SLF), and other affiliated groups, the Republican leader has led an extraordinary, quarter-of-a-billion-dollar effort to rescue struggling Trump-backed Senate candidates — while the former president sits on a $92 million war chest and spends almost none of it.
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Here’s a notably even-handed assessment from Ezra Klein. (His companion piece due this week on the opposing red team was not yet available at writing time.)
Opinion: Do the Democrats Deserve Re-election? (NYT columnist Ezra Klein)
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Here (of course!) are contributions from my usual love-hate favorite conservative pundit David Brooks of The New York Times.
Clearly the point and purpose of this first column is a simple (and pretty dialed-in forumulaic) pre-election “calling of the horse race” by Brooks. Here his merely perpetuating at-best flawed talking points unchallenged, with tone of “tsk-tsk, too bad” dismissal, is just… bad. Two glaring examples are paragraph subheads “Democrats have a crime problem” (with no mention or discussion of actions around gun violence and common-sense gun safety, just for starters). Then the column’s closing example of success: “Republicans may just have a clearer narrative” (for which he cites Arizona’s Kari Lake’s exemplary campaign — not because it’s good or true, just because it seems to be working.)
Brooks is a well-respected conservative opinion-writer, not a presumably “neutral” reporter. He has made a lucrative 40+-year-career of presenting the “moderate-conservative view amid liberal-intensive-media.” In such times as these, if not the likes of Brooks, then who is to articulate the effective clarion-call message for the legions of sanely moderate-conservative voters — many of them in suburbs like mine?
Opinion/Why Republicans Are Surging (NYT columnist David Brooks)
This next Brooks column is better, making a well-argued and supported case for a growing education-gap as a key factor in the deepening divide between red and blue America (higher education levels correlating with voting Democratic and lower education, Republican.) Now it would be good to see a Part 2 to this column, in which Brooks raises and addresses the many questions begged and left hanging here. For example, how, for how long and most of all who benefits from what for over a generation has been a systematic dumbing-down of America, mass devaluing of education and critical-thinking. (Just the development and roles of Fox News Channel and reality TV would be good starting points for discussion.)
Opinion/Why Aren’t the Democrats Trouncing These Guys? (NYT, David Brooks)
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Then this…
Dems likely to lose Congress as voters break late to GOP (From Bloomberg News, in The Charlotte Observer)
At which point comic relief is overdue…
There was this story we all might only wish were a joke:
Herschel Walker's Story About Bull Ditching Pregnant Cows Raises Eyebrows (Newsweek)
Thanks for this counterpoint, from reader Lynne Wilson Farkas and spouse Terry of Atlanta. (Lynne’s a longtime friend from our neighborhood and classmate years back at Lansdowne Elementary School in Charlotte. Whew!)
Here’s Jamal Bryant, accomplished Morehouse and Duke alum and pastor of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church. (For full disclosure he’s also reportedly well-known among reality TV fans as the ex-husband of one of the Real Housewives series.) This well-delivered take-down of Herschel Walker’s candidacy is funny and disturbingly spot-on.
And now for fallbacks…
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Right in time
For seasonal time-change ritual I love re-sharing these gems from Ann Ahern Allen:
A quirky favorite “fallback” was during 2013 final-final draft edits in my years-long dissertation process. At that point of writing it can take so long to spool-back-in after a break that it’s easier to stay with it in longer, sometimes later, sessions.
That’s how I wound up glancing up at my laptop clock, just in time to see the time flip to repeat the hour!
It seemed a little like when we fly across the International Date Line, finding ourselves in… tomorrow. (Or, yesterday.)
Next week the seasonally attuned depth- and clinical psychology focus of newShrink is planned as a multi-faceted look at sleep (and lack of it) in America and Americans. That will incorporate ways that is — and isn’t — related to daylight and clock time. There I’ll address elements valid, and not-so-much, in articles like these that you might have seen or even reposted.
Clock switching isn’t healthy. Neither is daylight saving time (The Charlotte Observer, Saturday 11.5.22)
Clocks’ fall-back is today as usual, and bill to change future DST changes stalls in Congress (Providence, RI Journal)
Clocks turn back this weekend, but the future of daylight saving time is far from settled (NBC News, Wednesday 11.2.22)
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I'll leave you now with a garden message: The burning-bush (euonymus alatus) is officially aflame! (The spontaneous light-and-shadow effect here was a fun surpise.)
And, that is all I have! Talk to you next week.
🦋💙 tish
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… it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
— William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”
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Post Notes: Across the waterfront
A sampler-glimpse across geography in pivotal state races and key campaign issues.
Follow the money… (if you can)
GOP congressional majorities would pivot to spending cuts, Biden probes
Republicans hope to end two years of Democratic control of Washington but are divided over how to combat inflation and bring down government spending.
Fear of Crime Looms Large for Voters, to Republicans’ Advantage (NYT)
As Midterms Near, Political Ads Seize on Voters' Fears about Crime (Voice of America)
Editorial Endorsement: Mandela Barnes is so much better for Wisconsin than Ron Johnson (Wisconsin State Journal ofMadison)
Editorial Endorsement: Vote for Tony Evers and Mandela Barnes to defend our democracy. Here's why (Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel)
Republicans focus on ‘parental rights’ in closing days of campaign
As Democrats struggle elsewhere, abortion shapes a governor’s race in Michigan (The Washington Post)
Michigan's candidates for governor: Where Gretchen Whitmer and Tudor Dixon stand (Detroit Free Press)
Opinions | In Nevada, election deniers prepare to sabotage the midterms (WAPO columnist Dana Milbank)
Val Demings goes on attack against Marco Rubio in Florida Senate debate (NPR)
Cheri Beasley Endorsement: The Editorial Board’s choice in North Carolina’s U.S. Senate race (The Charlotte Observer)
Kemp and Abrams Attack and Counterattack in Rematch for Georgia’s Governor (NYT)
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