Saturday, January 13, 2024

Long Shot

 It may be hazardous, from a reputational perspective, to issue political predictions this early in an election year, but it can be fun to do so.

So here goes.

Against all odds and the polls to date, I don’t think a Biden-Trump rematch is going to happen. Both candidates are simply too old and have too many negatives, from my perspective, to make it to the finish line.

Why do I think that?

First, on the Republican side, Trump at the moment is the overwhelming favorite to amass enough delegates in the early state primaries to knock his competitors out of contention as soon as later this month.

He’ll win the Iowa caucuses on Monday; that seems certain. But under my alternative scenario, Nikki Haley will come in second and then mount a serious challenge to Trump in the New Hampshire primary, perhaps even winning it.

Next the battle for delegates moves to South Carolina, Haley’s home state. It’s not hard to imagine a Haley surge that brings her into an essentially even position with Trump after those tree contests.

If so, that would pierce Trump’s “inevitability” advantage, and from there on, the race could be back-and-forth until the national convention.

During that period, Trump’s numerous legal battles may gradually sap his support, not from his base, but from the moderate elements that still exist in the Republican Party, plus among independent voters.

It is also possible that Trump would be convicted in one or more of the Jan. 6th-related cases, and polling indicates that such a conviction would drain away a small but significant slice of his support.

Remember that the outcome of the election in November will revolve around the decisions of perhaps 5 percent of the electorate in perhaps six swing states. If Trump stumbles along the lines I outlined above, he may lose his appeal as the party’s strongest candidate, again assuming that Haley can come along quickly.

Of course that is a huge assumption because to date she has been a terrible candidate, hardly ready for prime time. She’ll need to be able to answer basic questions, like what caused the Civil War, to have any shot at all. But better media training could make a difference.

Of course this is all conjecture, which is fun, so let’s keep going.

On the Democratic side, it has become clear that Biden’s main motivation to stand for re-election is to prevent Trump from returning to office. But Biden’s approval ratings are awful and his advanced age is an issue that he can do nothing about.

He looks and sounds old, walks extremely tentatively, which can be an indicator of impending dementia, and stumbles verbally while speaking. My guess is he is more ambivalent about running than he has admitted to date, and his family members probably are too.

If Trump is not going to be the GOP nominee, that provides the perfect excuse for Biden to step aside. The problem for Democrats with this scenario, is that Vice-President Harris has not yet shown that she can be a strong candidate on her own.

So, under the circumstances, Democrats might well turn to one of their youngish state governors, like Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan or Gavin Newsom of California.

Or, according to persistent whispers among party insiders, Andy Beshear of Kentucky. I have no idea what kind of candidate he would be nationally but he sure is popular as the blue governor in a deeply red state.

There are perfectly good reasons both parties often select governors from southern and border states as their candidate. First and foremost they neutralize the red-blue divide for Democrats (think Carter and Clinton); or for the Republicans, solidify the base (think George W. Bush).

So there you have it — my prediction. Haley vs. Beshear.

A long shot? For sure. But don’t be surprised if it ends up being our choice come this November. And you heard it here. 

HEADLINES:

  • Iran Wins With US Airstrikes on Houthis in Yemen (Bloomberg)

  • The U.S.'s military strike on Yemeni Houthis is deeply misguided (MSNBC)

  • US attacks in Yemen sharpen Biden’s military and political dilemmas (CNN)

  • Looming Starvation in Gaza Shows Resurgence of Civilian Sieges in Warfare (NYT)

  • Israel says South Africa distorting the truth in ICJ genocide case (BBC)

  • Ukraine, Britain announce security agreement during Kyiv visit by PM Sunak (Al Jazeera)

  • Tens of thousands of opposition supporters massed outside Poland's parliament to protest against the new government's changes to state media and the imprisonment of two former ministers convicted of abuse of power. (Reuters)

  • ‘Brutal’ Arctic blast expected to bring frigid temperatures to North America (Guardian)

  • In the first few days of this year, lawmakers in several states have already continued their assault on progressive ideals — an escalation of the culture wars that have become central to the GOP agenda. But polling shows these policies aren't popular, HuffPost's Nathalie Baptiste reports. [HuffPost]

  • Winter storm disrupts Trump, DeSantis and Haley events in Iowa (NBC)

  • Worried about losing in 2024, Iowa’s Republican voters are less interested in talking about abortion (AP)

  • Two Iowa counties an hour apart show America’s growing political divide (WP)

  • How the Pros Think the Iowa Caucuses Will Shake Out (Politico Mag)

  • Trump’s Fraud Trial Draws to an End With Closing Arguments (NYT)

  • Former President Donald Trump is going all in on his new election-related conspiracy theory: That President Joe Biden has personally orchestrated almost all his legal problems. Even, apparently, the state-level cases. [HuffPost]

  • Jan. 6 ‘hostage’ comments fuel House GOP divisions in tough election year (WP)

  • Top US Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer said he was taking the first procedural step toward passing a stopgap funding bill to avert a partial government shutdown starting late next week, as House Republicans again found themselves in the midst of a possible revolt over spending. (Reuters)

  • Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said his state continued to use “every tool” available to stop migration along its border with Mexico but added that the only thing his officers weren’t doing was “shooting people who come across the border, because, of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder.” [HuffPost]

  • Hunter Biden pleaded not guilty to federal tax charges filed after the collapse of a plea deal that could have spared him the spectacle of a criminal trial during the 2024 campaign. [AP]

  • Justice Department to pursue death penalty against Buffalo supermarket shooter Payton Gendron (ABC)

  • Same-sex union question is fracturing major Christian denominations (AP)

  • Substack’s woes deepen as tech blog leaves over Nazi content (WP)

  • Archeologists uncover "lost valley" of ancient cities in the Amazon rainforest (CBS)

  • Are fingerprints unique? Not really, AI-based study finds (CNN)

  • AI Chatbots Are Here to Stay. Learn How They Can Work for You (CNET)

  • Open-Source AI Is Uniquely Dangerous (IEEE Spectrum)

  • NYT Games Adds Feature That Sends Reporter To Player’s House For Round Of Scrabble (The Onion)

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Friday, January 12, 2024

Voice From the 1890s

Among my possessions are two things from my grandmother on my father’s side — her wedding ring and a 12-page typed manuscript about growing up in a hard-scrabble frontier family in Canada’s Huron County.

It was a difficult life. Born in the 1870s, she was the second youngest of eight kids. Her father mainly seems to have made money by selling things that he cleared from the land — logs and limestone — or that his wife and kids gathered like wild blueberries and raspberries. They did grow a few crops, and had an apple orchard, plus a few pear trees that didn’t produce. 

They also had a handful of farm animals.

She says that it was a two-mile walk to school and that many times her hands and feet “froze” in winter, but that they were fine once she was able to thaw them out. Her father sounds like a pretty uneven character who was abusive to the point that one by one all of the family members ran away, only to return for a while before disappearing once again.

When they left, they weren’t reachable even if they wanted to talk. There were no telephones yet. For my grandmother, after her own mother finally ran off, life became simply unbearable. She was expected to cook and clean the house for her father and older brothers and to stop going to school, which was her one true love.

Besides being able to see friends at school, she loved to read and write and make up stories.

When she was around 16 she finally ran away from home, taking her younger sister with her. They found another farm family where the situation was friendlier, and for the most part she finished her growing up and schooling there.

Eventually, as an older teen, she found happiness singing and dancing with other farm kids on Saturday nights until three or four in the morning, then grabbing an hour of sleep before rising to do another day’s hard work.

I had read about all of this in her manuscript before but that was soon after she died in the late 1960s, when I didn’t really appreciate it at the time. But yesterday as I reread it for the first time in many years, a new detail jumped out at me. When she was only 14 or so, my grandmother apparently wrote a book!

It must have been short and definitely was fiction, even though at the time she says she had not yet read a work of fiction by anyone else. She says her siblings loved her book and asked her to read it to them over and over. There is no indication what the story was about.

My grandmother was hardly what you’d call an intellectual. She didn’t come from a long line of literary greats, but she created stories of her own almost by instinct, I believe. It makes me wonder about the origin of fiction much further back in human societies.

Anyway, so far as I can determine, this novel of hers from 130 years ago was not preserved. It would have been written with a pencil in some sort of school notebook, which was no doubt lost somewhere along the way.

All I have now is the knowledge that it once existed. Plus the additional fact that her youngest son, my father, also wrote an unpublished novel on his own, which I discovered among his possessions after he died.

At the very least, I know I’m not the first story-teller in the family. No doubt there were many others in the distant past. And I also won’t be the last.

BTW, I also have my grandmother’s wedding ring, a simple metallic thing distinguished by a heart, given to her by David Weir, my grandfather who died two decades before I came onto the scene.

Everything else I just have to imagine. 

(I first published this last year in February.)

(Read also: Finding Dad’s Novel.)

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Thursday, January 11, 2024

Mutual Destruction

Wednesday night featured the last GOP debate before the Iowa caucuses next Monday.

Two of the tree candidates who qualified showed up — DeSantis and Haley. The third and the frontrunner in the polls did not.

That would be Trump.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, DeSantis and Haley spent most of their time attacking each other as opposed to going after Trump. Their criticisms of the former president have escalated somewhat in recent weeks but still remain tepid.

Accordingly, they probably succeeded in undermining each other more than cutting into his lead.

Meanwhile, the only openly anti-Trump candidate in the Republican field, Christie, suspended his campaign.

So it’s increasingly likely that Trump will be the Republican Party nominee, barring some major shift in the next few weeks.

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Wednesday, January 10, 2024

No Immunity for a Criminal

In America, is it actually true that no person is above the law, not even a president?

That bedrock principle, so fundamental to our democracy, was the subject of a hearing before a federal appeals court Tuesday in Washington, D.C.

Lawyers for former president Trump argued he should be ruled immune from culpability for his actions on January 6th, 2021, before a panel of three judges.

The judges indicated deep skepticism at the lawyers’ argument and posited scenarios that rendered them absurd. If a president sent Seal Team Six to assassinate a rival, under such reasoning, wouldn’t he be immune from prosecution? Trump’s lawyer fumbled and couldn’t refute that logic.

We may find out whether the court’s skepticism will translate into another legal defeat for Trump sometime soon. Or we may not. The legal process is complicated.

For the sake of our democracy, let’s hope it's soon. Because the authoritarian future Trump promises is drawing closer to reality.

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Tuesday, January 09, 2024

Daisy's 10th Birthday

Wearing earrings designed and produced by Aunt Julia!



 

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On the Attack

 In another landmark speech, President Joe Biden appeared at Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina on Monday.

This church, which is one of the oldest black churches anywhere, was the site of a massacre of nine worshipers by a white supremacist in 2015.

In his remarks, Biden took on white supremacism directly, tying it to his presumed opponent, Donald Trump, who frequently praises such supporters as “good people.”

It was the second campaign event of the year as Biden seeks to ignite the Democratic base in light of polls suggesting he is trailing Trump at present.

Once again, as in his recent appearance at Valley Forge, Biden was forceful and received an enthusiastic response.

You can view the speech at CSPAN.

***
Top story: Michigan wins College Football Playoff National Championship over Washington, 34-13 (Fox)

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Monday, January 08, 2024

Aging, Memory

That older people seem to have memory problems is a cliche and the object of endless humor. And while many cliches, stereotypes and other random bits of conventional wisdom are at least partially true, I’m not sure this is one of them. 

It may be that older adults (60-85) actually have better memories than younger people, but we have to sort through so much more information that the retrieval process becomes an occasional issue.

A study from the the journal Trends in Cognitive Science posits an intriguing theory to bolster this view.

The study suggests that the problem may be brain “clutter,” i.e., older people are trying to form too many associations between too many pieces of information.

Or in a shorthand formulation I prefer, maybe we just know too much.

“It’s not that older adults don’t have enough space to store information,” lead author Tarek Amer said. “There’s just too much information that’s interfering with whatever they’re trying to remember.” 

Older adults may have a harder time focusing on one piece of information because irrelevant information can be “stored in the same memory representation as the one that contains the target information,” Amer said. 

Anyway, I like this study for two reasons — one, because it has been my experience that my own memory is noticeably better than when I was younger.

Second…oops, I can’t remember the second reason.

(I posted earlier versions of this piece a year ago and two years ago. Please note that I am not referring to of the cases of dementia that beset some older people. That is a separate, much more tragic matter.)

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Sunday, January 07, 2024

Why (Some) Journalists Speak Out

Over many decades of teaching classes, appearing on panels, speaking at ethics seminars, and doing or supervising hundreds of reporting projects, one of the most frequent questions I faced was how journalists were supposed to possibly stay objective when doing this work.

The short answer to that is that we can’t. And we don’t.

In the course of producing stories, we learn so much about the various people and institutions we cover that it is simply not possible to avoid drawing conclusions and forming opinions about them.

So of course we do. And the more informed we become, the stronger our opinions may become. 

The question is can we keep covering the same topics?

Traditionally, in newspapers, there was a strict line between the reporting we did in news coverage and the opinions expressed on the editorial page. Beat reporters rarely ventured over to the opinion side, which was considered unseemly. But there was more than a bit of irony in that as we were often the best-informed people employed by the paper on the subjects on the editorial page.

One attempt to bridge this gap was to have the beat writers produce analysis pieces, which bridged the gap between reporting and opinion and were traditional journalism’s answer to the objectivity problem.

Though the distinction between “analysis” and “opinion” was largely fictional, it was a useful fiction that newspapers employed successfully for many years.

Another aspect of the objectivity problem was that the ownership of the newspaper often held different opinions and loyalties on the major topics of coverage from the reporters and editors who provided that coverage on a day-in, day-out basis.

This led to a great deal of tension on occasion between the news staff and those in charge of the editorial pages. Trust me, anyone who ever visited the nearest bar to a big-city newspaper office knows exactly what I am talking about.

When baby boomers — the largest generation ever to hit American workplaces including media — came along, we brought a new level of tension to this traditional dichotomy between news and opinion — and the myth of objectivity.

For one thing, we were better educated than the older generation and many of us had been too affected by the civil rights and anti-war movements to remain neutral on the great issues of the day. We weren’t neutral at all on questions like racism or colonial wars — we knew right from wrong.

Furthermore, we didn’t like what we found of the culture inside most newsrooms, which was all too often misogynistic, racist, homophobic and more like an arm of the local police union than a force for truth.

At the same time, we met heroes — established reporters and editors who resisted all those entrenched prejudices and practices that simply acted to reinforce powerful interests. These guys challenged those very interests on more than one occasion.

We also discovered that there were plenty of enlightened owners and executives in media who would support the type of crusading journalism we aspired to, so we worked for them whenever possible and joined the great muckraking traditions that long have served as a counterweight to mainstream, by-the-books news mongering in America.

When it came to remaining objective, we agreed that it was absolutely necessary to stay open-minded when we were gathering the facts about any situation. We needed to be open to adjusting our analysis as those facts came to light, and it was vital that we remained our own worst devil’s advocate to counter the biases and prejudices we inevitably brought to the story.

But you can’t discover the truth as you wish it to be, you have to accept the truth as you discover it to be. Equally importantly, you can’t bend the facts to fulfill the wishes or desires of your bosses or your audience — the chips must fall where they may.

Once all of that was said, once you’d been as fair as you could possibly be during the process of gathering facts, it became completely appropriate and indeed obligatory for any journalist of conscience to speak out when asked about the meaning of what we had found.

That’s how many of us became what some considered advocates or activists as well as journalists during our careers. We were often called “alternative journalists” or “new journalists” or “gonzo journalists.” Take your pick. And of course the traditionalists denounced us, for good reason. But once our reporting was complete, we made a point of speaking out. 

That practice remains controversial to this day. But as my esteemed former Stanford colleague, Prof. Ted Glasser, once observed (and I paraphrase), “In the end, being a good citizen trumps being a good journalist.”

Amen.

Note: I’ve published this essay previously a number of times, most recently in May last year.

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