Monthly Archives: August 2020

The Only One in the Room

Culture, Politics

 

10 Awesome Optical Illusions That Will Melt Your Brain | Cool ...The downfall of many corporate giants comes from their believing they are “the smartest people in the room.”  One need look no further than Bethany McLean’s chronicle of boardroom hubris The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron.  In recent cinema annals, the go-to actor when casting the self-proclaimed genius among peers is Jesse Eisenberg.  Whether portraying real-life characters such as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network (2010) or the fictional magician Danny Atlas in Now You See Me (2013), Eisenberg exudes the right mix of confidence and arrogance to forewarn viewers he will eventually get his comeuppance.

One thing is a sure bet.  Any individual who proclaims to be “the smartest person in the room” probably isn’t.  So, when Donald Trump maintains he is a “stable genius” you can bet the mortgage on a roll of the dice at any bankrupt Trump casino, he is neither.  Even his most avid supporters know that.  Then why, you ask, can 40 percent of the voting population believe he deserves another four years in office?  Because, like most decisions we make in life, it depends less on what we know than what we feel.

The same is true when we decide which presidential candidate deserves our support.  The proof is not in the winners, but the also-rans.  Michael Kukakis ran on a platform of “technical competence” after four years of Ronald Reagan platitudes that sounded more like Hallmark greeting cards than an agenda for the future.  Al Gore was going to save the planet, but nobody wanted to sit down with him because they knew he would dominate the conversation.  He thought he already had all the answers.  Mitt Romney was the ideal candidate to prove what America needed was a businessman in the White House but made his pitch in macro-esque terms, not micro-appeals to individuals.  Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren had plans for everything, but the majority of voters could not have cared less.  Why aren’t party platforms given more attention?  One simple reason.  They don’t matter.

Which brings me back to the enigma of Trump’s support.  If the polling is correct, the question that is the single most reliable predictor of voting preference is, “Which candidate cares most about people like me?”  You know, that empathy thing.  But as Bill Clinton would have said, “It depends on what the definition of empathy is.”  If you are a living, breathing human being with a heart, you ask, “How could anyone vote for a man who time and time again fails to acknowledge the loss of 150,000 Americans to COVID19, even if his assertion is true that many more would have died but for his administration’s response?”  The media outlets drive home this point with split screen images of Trump and Biden.  One claims, “It is what it is.”  The other, “I know what it’s like to lose a member of your family and, believe me, there will be a day when a smile comes to your face before a tear comes to your eye.”

No contest?  I repeat, it depends on what the definition of empathy is.  Consider the following examples which explain how Trump’s coalition of support can include both billionaire Sheldon Adelson and former KKK grand dragon David Duke.

  • “Look at my stock portfolio.  Joe Biden would not have encouraged the Federal Reserve Bank to buy up stock after the market tanked in March.  Just goes to show, Trump cares about people like me.”
  • “America has always been a Eurocentric, Christian nation.  Trump understands that.  He cares about people like me.”
  • “I’m tired of the government telling me how many hours I can drive my rig.  I’m paid by the mile.  Getting rid of unnecessary safety regulations shows Trump cares about people like me.”
  • “Trump is the only person out there who stands up for law enforcement officers reminding people we are not responsible for a few bad apples.  He cares about people like me.”
  • “No one can force me to wear a mask.  Trump cares about people like me who believe in individual freedom.”

Put them all together and what have you got?  Forty to 42 percent of the voting population.

Yet, it also explains why 42 percent is also the likely ceiling of support this time around and the decline in support among two groups who were critical to Trump’s electoral college victory in 2016: the elderly and women.  Let’s start with older voters.  They may have healthy stock portfolios, hold negative views of people of color and immigrants or think police are getting a bum rap.   But if they die from the coronavirus, they are deprived of the opportunity to enjoy their assets and prejudices.  Thomas Jefferson knew what he was doing when he put “life” before “liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”  The latter two are irrelevant if you’ve breathed your last breath.

Then there are women among whom Biden holds a 56-35 lead according to a June 2020 NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.  In an earlier Hill-HarrisX survey, 62 percent of women voters said they were unlikely to vote for Trump.  There are a lot of reasons for this.  For example, younger, college educated women resent Trump’s efforts to deprive them of birth control under their employer’s insurance plan if the boss believes Jesus would have disapproved.  But that was also true in 2016.  What has changed?  Suburban white women are increasingly abandoning the Trump bandwagon.  Listen to the reasons reported in a June article in the Los Angeles Times.

I do like Trump, but I think he should set a better example.

If he’s not taking issues like this (pandemic) seriously, what else is he not taking seriously.

Honestly, I think he needs to stay off Twitter.

Sound familiar?  Despite enlightened views on gender roles when it comes to raising a family, women are still on the front line.  And their attitude toward Trump reflects that.  They want role models for their children.  And their concerns about Trump mirror their anxiety about their own offspring.  Why don’t they take school more seriously?  Are they spending too much time on social media?  They have to deal with their own adolescents on a daily basis.  The last thing they need is one more child to worry about even if he is president of the United States.

Nor do they appreciate someone who does not even pretend to be a partner when it comes to raising a family.  Imagine how you would feel if your husband told a national radio audience in 2005 he never changed his children’s diapers.  (Source: Opie and Anthony)

There’s a lot of women out there that demand that the husband act like the wife and you know there’s a lot of husbands that listen to that… I’m really like a great father but certain things you do and certain things you don’t. It’s just not for me.

I have had the opportunity to be in the same room with every U.S. president from Jimmy Carter to Barack Obama.   Among those six chief executives, one stands out when it comes to the empathy quotient, Bill Clinton.  Yes, his nickname “Slick Willy” is well deserved.  He cheated on his wife and was guilty of workplace sexual harassment.  He perjured himself in a deposition.  And he may even be a pedophile based on his association with Jeffrey Epstein.

But when he said, “I feel your pain,” you believed him.  Not because he was smart or articulate even though he might have been the smartest person in the room.  After all, there was a reason he was called on to be the “explainer-in-chief” to make the case for Obama’s re-election at the 2012 Democratic convention.  It was because, when you stepped into his office in Little Rock to discuss rural development, he complimented you on your tie.  Or when you needed to get his attention at a National Governors Association meeting after he became president, he turned around and called you by name.

You believed him because he made you feel like “YOU were the ONLY ONE in the room.”  The winner in 2020 must exhibit that same quality.

For what it’s worth.
Dr. ESP

 

Covert Capitalism

Media, Politics

 

A former Miami University colleague and lifelong mentor would always advise his students,  “If, at the end of a day, you cannot say, ‘I had fun or learned something today,’ it’s time to do something else.”  Five years and 580 posts later, I still have not hit that wall.  That said, there are still challenges which make some mornings at the keyboard more difficult than others.  This morning was one of those occasions.

The dilemma was what many might call a good problem to have.  Which of the topics deserving attention should I tackle first?  Having just watched the most recent video from The Lincoln Project, I wanted to address the conspiracy theories life-long Republican operatives like Rick Wilson and Steve Schmidt have an ulterior motive behind their efforts to help Joe Biden evict Donald Trump from the White House. Meanwhile, Trump continued his months long crusade to offend one demographic after another within the coalition on which his 2016 victory depended.

As the old adage promises, “Good things come to those who wait.”  Sure enough, there was a solution.  The key being, instead of too many competing topics, there were too few.  The missing piece of the puzzle turned out to be activist James Lawson’s remarks at John Lewis’ funeral during which he referred to the wealth gap in America as “plantation capitalism.”  Thus, this post became a juggling act, keeping all three balls in the air.

BALL #1: The Lincoln Project.  I am under no delusion Rick Wilson and Steve Schmidt have become flaming liberals or will be supportive of much of Joe Biden’s policy agenda.  They have staked their flag on the Democratic front line of the 2020 electoral battlefield because they share a concern Donald Trump is an existential threat to what American should stand for.  I have no doubt, if successful, their next project will be to try and re-establish a saner version of a political party grounded in conservative principles.  I can live with that.

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Democrats, questioning their motive does not bode well for post-election governance if you cannot see this arrangement is no different than Senator Majority Leader Bob Dole and President Bill Clinton coming together, in the midst of the 1996 election, to address the  ballooning federal deficit.  Or House Speaker Tip O’Neill and President Ronald Reagan joining forces to save social security.  Democrats and Republicans used to be able to put aside differences on those rare occasions when the consequences of not doing so were unacceptable to either side or more importantly the public interest.  There will always be time later for a return to partisan and ideological wrangling, something the founding fathers acknowledged was inevitable in any representative democracy.

BALL #2:  James Lawson.  I cringed when Lawson, who otherwise made a strong case for active engagement in the affairs of state, uttered the phrase “plantation capitalism.”  Was this the 2020 equivalent of Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s “God Damn America” rant in 2008?  How can Democrats, so often, be on the right side of an issue and fail to find a way to express their opinion without offending those they hope to convert?

I know what Lawson meant.  Those who own the major corporations (i.e. stockholders) and those who run them reap the benefits of the harvest while the laborers are left with the chaff.  One need only look at the major stock indexes at the same time GDP declines at an annual rate of 32.9 percent and 30 million Americans are out of work.  Or the fact that CEO income has risen 1008 percent over the last four decades while worker pay has increased by only 12 percent over the same period.  It is unconscionable, but you make no friends calling it “plantation capitalism.”  Who came up with that?  The same people who tagged law enforcement reform as “defund the police”?

Which is why Democrats and liberals, in this time of desperation, need allies like the Lincoln Project and Republican Voters Against Trump.  These are the same people who came up with a campaign theme in 2000 to gut the social safety net under George W. Bush called “compassionate conservatism”.  And turned a underqualified small town mayor from Alaska into the darling of the Republican right.  Theoretically, I might consider a defense lawyer who successfully represents the most disgusting clients the scum of the earth.  But if I am  the one facing ten years in the slammer, hand me his business card.

BALL #3: Donald Trump’s 2020 Election Strategy.  If Trump’s base of support was an onion, every action he has taken this year has been the equivalent of discarding one layer after another.  Criminal negligence handling the pandemic response has alienated the elderly.  Racial dog-whistling has offended suburban women.  Intervening in the prosecutions of his partners in crime has exposed the hypocrisy of his tacit support for justice reform.  His infomercials for Trump properties and promoting products like Goya foods and My Pillow reek of self-dealing and corruption.  And of course, his gaslighting the legitimacy of an election he is trying his damnedest to lose has generated a backlash among conservative voices from Rupert Murdoch’s  Wall Street Journal to William F. Buckley’s National Review to Steven Calabresi’s Federalist Society, the folks who brought you Brett Kavanaugh.  Trump has transformed his 2016 inside straight into a royal flush of remorse.

Too bad for Trump the masters of Republican advertising are on our side.  Otherwise, the campaign’s response to under the table dealings and abuse of power would be sold as “covert capitalism”.  Trump would be touted not as someone who RAN government like a business, but the person who MADE government a business.  The administration would be a pantheon to American capitalism in an arena where the fight was never intended to take place.

How did this happen?  Because Plan A, “overt capitalism,” was sidetracked when 77,000 voters, Russia and James Comey contributed to Trump’s victory in 2016.  Pre-2015, the Trump brand was associated with wealth and luxury. His target market was the rich and famous.  But as Mary Trump states in the title of her tell-all book, it was “never enough.”   Enter Trump University, a vehicle to fleece the poor and forgotten.  How better to reach that new market than free airtime and a campaign financed by the Republican Party?  Plan A was to lose the election but gain 40-50 million potential customers.

Plan B, “covert capitalism,” looked good on paper.  But the return on investment has been disappointing.  The brand has taken a hit with its original market as evidenced by the declining revenues at Trump resorts and hotels, even prior to the coronavirus.  Hosting certain public events at Trump properties is viewed as a conflict of interest and off-limits (e.g. the G-7 meeting and the WGC Golf Tournament at Doral National).  And government watchdogs are building a mountain of receipts that document the family’s self-dealing and potential misappropriation of campaign funds.

The only logical explanation for the Trump 2020 campaign is customer retention.  One has to wonder if Ivanka, Junior and Eric haven’t held an intervention in which they convinced daddy it is time to go back to Plan A.  Exhibit #1.  Last week the Trump Organization applied for a trademark for the term “telerally.”  The application stated “telerally” would be used in “organizing events in the fields of politics and political campaigning.”  And who do you think will be the audience for these events?  I won’t insult your intelligence by answering that.

Welcome to Trump Overt Capitalism 2.0.  The same voters who believed their lives would be enriched by a real estate shyster and reality television host will pay for the opportunity to listen to him whine about his victimhood, don Chinese-manufactured t-shirts and ball caps proclaiming “We Was Robbed,” and stay at Econo-Trump motels.  They will long for the “good old days” as they watch telerallies on the One America News Network, likely to be renamed the Trump Resistance Channel.  Yet, each and every one of them will still benefit from the health care and government transfer payments of which Trump did his best to deprive them.  And complain about it all the way to the bank.

For what it’s worth.
Dr. ESP