Fragments but complete

“Study for Torso of Walking Man,’’ by Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), in the show “Rodin: Truth, Form, Life,’’ through Dec. 21 at the Fairfield University Art Museum, Fairfield, Conn., through Dec. 21.

This exhibition displays 22 bronze sculptures by the renowned sculptor. The museum notes he used a variety of materials to create his sculptures, but all used modeling to emphasize his personal response to the subject. Many of his sculptures are meant to be fragments, with heads, hands and torsos lacking the rest of the body. Rodin saw these fragments as complete works in their own right. He heavily influenced the development of 20th-Century modernist sculpture.

The museum is on the first floor of the renovated lower level of Bellarmine Hall, above, on the campus of Fairfield University, a Jesuit institution.

Plotting, not idling

“Two Idlers” (detail), by Robert Frederick Blum (1857-1903), in the show “For America: Paintings from the National Academy of Design,’’ in New York, at the New Britain (Conn.) Museum of American Art through Jan. 26.

(This image courtesy of the American Federation of Arts.)

The show features artist members of the National Academy of Design, such as Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer and Andrew Wyeth, along with masterworks from genres of art such as the Hudson River School and American Impressionism.

The New Britain Knitting Co. factory shown in this set of directions for washing some of its products, about 1915. For many decades the city was a major manufacturing center.

Don't depend on one company; mill village in verse

Cleanup activity at one of the General Electric Pittsfield plant Superfund sites on the Housatonic River, which the company heavily polluted in its heyday.

One thing that any community —in New England or elsewhere — should avoid is over-reliance on one or two big companies. Pittsfield, Mass., found that out when General Electric, which once employed 14,000 people at its facilities in that little city, closed most of its operations there, leaving economic devastation. Now, Pittsfield (the capital of the Berkshires) seeks a diverse collection of much smaller firms and is having modest success in turning around the city.

Jonathan Butler, the president and CEO of 1Berkshire, a business development group, told New England Public Radio:

“If we were to have another employer with 10,000 or 15,000 jobs come in, {to Pittsfield} that would scare me. I think that would scare those of us [who] work in economic development.”

I have strong memories of covering the 1970 elections in Pittsfield for the old Boston Herald Traveler. It then still had a thriving downtown, though you could sense slippage.

To read more, please hit this link.

Assawaga Mill, Dayville, Conn., in 1909

Factory Town in Verse

Old New England mills (many of them beautiful, and built for the ages) and the towns that grew around them have become the subjects of a curious form of romance in recent years. So now we have poet, novelist, essayist, environmentalist and former Connecticut deputy environmental commissioner David K. Leff out with a verse novel, The Breach: Voices Haunting a New England Mill Town, which studies the decline of such a community facing economic and an environmental crises.

To hear Mr. Leff talk about his book, and read from it, please hit this link.

Grace Kelly: A lovely urban park over a brownfield

ecoRI News photos by Grace Kelly

From ecoRI News (ecori.org)

The Woonasquatucket River Greenway, in Providence, is an oasis wrapped around Route 6 and urban sprawl. And it recently officially opened its latest addition: the Woonasquatucket Adventure Park.

Blue jays and cardinals weave through browning tall grasses and perch on sumac trees, as Donny Green, bicycle-program director for the Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council (WRWC), and I trudge over rain-soaked ground to a large gray structure. A bike path cuts a line next to us.

“This is the pump track,” said Green, gesturing to the wave-like structure. “It’s really made for BMX bikes, and the idea is that you start in a high place, drop in with momentum, and pump the bike through and push through turns, using the body to keep momentum through the course.”

Next to the pump track is a parkour course and a field with off-road biking and walking trails that wind their way through wildflowers (jn season).

It’s not your typical playground. The idea is to provide access to alternative sports for kids who aren’t interested in soccer, football, baseball and the like.

The park’s pump track is designed for BMX bicycles.

“I run a program called 1PVD cycling which is a high-school racing program that focuses on kids who don’t have access to what is a relatively exclusionary sport,” Green said. “And before this was all built, I was here with one of my students and we were looking at this space and we thought, ‘This is a perfect practice spot.’”

While this space is being used to bring alternative outdoor activity to an urban area, it’s also the cherry on the cake of a brownfield-reuse effort.

Once home to the Lincoln Lace and Braid mill, which burned down in 1994, the space was riddled with rubble and polluted soil. It was originally slated to be a passive vegetated area after remediation.

“Unfortunately, we had an issue with ATVs regularly using the area and potentially damaging the cap,” said Lisa Aurecchia, WRWC’s director of projects.

So when Green and some of his students came up with the bicycle/park idea, it provided a unique solution

“We kind of walked into an idea that everyone really ran with,” Green said.

But it wasn’t easy. To make the area safe for adventure activity took another three years, demolishing what was left of the mill, removing contaminated debris, covering contaminated soil with an impervious cap, and installing rain gardens and native plants to reduce flooding.

“It was always a struggle finding a use for this space because it was a brownfield, but you see this hidden space, and it’s a quiet space which is actually really beautiful,” Green said. “That sort of helped us decide to go forward with it, because yes it has these complications but this is a gem. We've got greenway already built onto it, we're connected to two other parks in this area, and there's neighborhoods around that could utilize it. We thought, it’s too good a space to leave alone, let's make something out of it.”

Grace Kelly is an ecoRI News journalist.

He only looks happy

““Wa

“Whale’’ (fine art print), by Cape Cod-based photographer Bobby Baker, in his “New Bedford Collection”.

© Bobby Baker Fine Art

Sam Pizzigati: Bloomberg could buy 2020 election and still make money

Via OtherWords.org

BOSTON

Gracie Mansion, the official residence of New York’s mayors since 1942, hosted billionaire Michael Bloomberg for three terms.

The first of these terms began after Bloomberg, then the Republican candidate for mayor, spent an incredible $74 million to get himself elected in 2001. He spent, in effect, $99 for every vote he received.

Four years later, Bloomberg — who made his fortune selling high-tech information systems to Wall Street — had to spend even more to get himself re-elected. His 2005 campaign bill came to $85 million, about $112 per vote.

In 2009, he had the toughest sledding yet. Bloomberg first had to maneuver his way around term limits, then persuade a distinctly unenthusiastic electorate to give him a majority. Against a lackluster Democratic Party candidate, Bloomberg won that majority — but just barely, with 51 percent of the vote.

That majority cost Bloomberg $102 million, or $174 a vote.

Now Bloomberg has announced he’s running for president as a Democrat, arguing he has the best chance of unseating President Trump, whom he describes as an “existential threat.” Could he replicate his lavish New York City campaign spending at the national level? Could he possibly afford to shell $174 a vote nationwide — or even just $99 a vote?

Let’s do the math. Donald Trump won the White House with just under 63 million votes. We can safely assume that Bloomberg would need at least that 63 million. At $100 a vote, a victory in November 2020 would run Bloomberg $6.3 billion.

Bloomberg is currently sitting on a personal fortune worth $52 billion. He could easily afford to invest $6.3 billion in a presidential campaign — or even less on a primary.

Indeed, $6.3 billion might even rate as a fairly sensible business investment. Several of the other presidential candidates are calling for various forms of wealth taxes. If the most rigorous of these were enacted, Bloomberg’s grand fortune would shrink substantially — by more than $3 billion next year, according to one estimate.

In other words, by undercutting wealth-tax advocates, Bloomberg would save over $6 billion in taxes in just two years — enough to cover the cost of a $6.3 billion presidential campaign, give or take a couple hundred million.

Bloomberg, remember, wouldn’t have to win the White House to stop a wealth tax. He would just need to run a campaign that successfully paints such a tax as a clear and present danger to prosperity, a claim he has already started making.

Bloomberg wouldn’t even need to spend $6.3 billion to get that deed done. Earlier this year, one of Bloomberg’s top advisers opined that $500 million could take his candidate through the first few months of the primary season.

How would that $500 million compare to the campaign war chests of the two primary candidacies Bloomberg fears most? Bernie Sanders raised $25.3 million in 2019’s third quarter for his campaign, Elizabeth Warren $24.6 million. Both candidates are collecting donations — from small donors — at a $100 million annual pace.

Bloomberg could spend 10 times that amount on a presidential campaign and still, given his normal annual income, end the year worth several billion more than when the year started.

Most Americans don’t yet believe that billionaires shouldn’t exist. But most Americans do believe that America’s super rich shouldn’t be able to buy elections or horribly distort their outcomes.

But unfortunately, they can — or at least, you can be sure they’ll try.

Sam Pizzigati, based in Boston, co-edits Inequality.org for the Institute for Policy Studies. His recent books include The Case for a Maximum Wage and The Rich Don’t Always Win.

A New England personality?

The poet resting place in the Old Bennington Cemetery, Bennington, Vt. While he is deeply associated in writing and temperament with New England, he was born in San Francisco and spent much of his winters in later life in Florida.

“People in the north-central Great Plains and the South tend to be conventional and friendly, those in the Western and Eastern seaboards lean toward being mostly relaxed and creative, while New Englanders and Mid-Atlantic residents are prone to being more temperamental and uninhibited,’’ according to a study published online by APA’s Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

I think that there’s something to this, though I might add “irascible’’ for New Englanders. And what do they mean referring to “Eastern Seaboard”? Isn’t New England there? For the region with the most crooked folks, I vote for the South, with its sweet-talking con men.

These studies are lots of fun but of course have marginal utility. To read more, please hit this link.

'Planning with people'

Edward Logue, far right, presents some Boston redevelopment plans to Mayor John Collins and Cardinal Richard Cushing.

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

Hearing of the publication of Lisabeth Cohen’s new book, Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age, reminded me of cities I lived in or near over the decades, though it didn’t particularly remind me of Providence.

When I lived in Connecticut, in the early and mid ‘60s, Edward Logue (1921-2000) was already something of a national figure for his sometimes too confident efforts to push urban renewal in New Haven, where he was the city planner. He was determined to create a “slumless city’’ through assorted public-housing projects and a huge downtown mall. He did help save and/or improve some neighborhoods but overall he failed to turn around the city, home of very rich Yale University, of which he was an alumnus. Indeed, the city, run by the also “visionary” Mayor Richard Lee, continued to decline during their tenures, in part because of the destabilization caused by their tearing down of some lower-middle-class neighborhoods. Well aware of New Haven’s rising crime rate, I learned to walk fast through the city, whose train station I often used in the ‘60s.

In Boston, Ed Logue performed duties somewhat similar to what he handled in New Haven. He was an integral part of a huge effort to create what was called “The New Boston’’ in 1961-68. I worked in Boston as a reporter in 1970-71, when I saw much of his recent handiwork. The city, for so long down-at-the heels, was starting to look better – in general – though some of the new buildings were/are cold and sterile-looking.

While Mr. Logue undertook some actions that led to evisceration of some neighborhoods – some probably worthy of evisceration, such as honky-tonk Scollay Square -- he learned from the social damage he inadvertently helped create in New Haven not to willy-nilly tear down some beautiful old buildings that could be repurposed, and he consulted neighborhood leaders more than he had in New Haven. But he also was one of those pushing to create Government Center as a Scollay Square replacement whose unfortunate centerpiece is the hideous City Hall Plaza, which planners have been trying to “fix’’ ever since.

When I moved to New York, Mr. Logue was there, working on big redevelopment projects.

Mr. Logue had some big successes in reversing urban decline in some neighborhoods, along with some abject failures. He found that cities are more complicated than even the smartest and most well-meaning city planner can imagine, and that while there’s a role for top-down planning, even involving what may be unpopular decisions (if only in the short term), old cities have physical and social fabrics that are easier to tear apart than to repair. So his belated motto became “planning with people.’

What brought back some big cities, notably New York and Boston, more than planning and urban renewal, included the growing fatigue with car-based and “boring” suburbia, as well as demographic change, which brought lower crime rates and a growing percentage of single people. Then there were the multiplier effects of increasingly thriving industries in certain cities, such as technology in Greater Boston and finance in New York. Some cities became “hot’’ again.

As for Ed Logue, he spent the last part of his life happily living in rural, or maybe call it exurban, Martha’s Vineyard, amongst other refugees from urban angst.

An ER for geriatric patients in northern New England

Main entrance of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, in Lebanon, N.H.

Council member Dartmouth-Hitchcock has announced plans to open a Geriatric Emergency Department in Lebanon, NH. Dartmouth-Hitchcock is New Hampshire’s largest private employer and only academic health system.

Dartmouth-Hitchcock will partner with West Health, a group of nonprofit, nonpartisan organizations dedicated to lowering healthcare costs for seniors, to establish their geriatric ER. Over the next three years, Dartmouth-Hitchcock plans to develop specialized areas within its emergency department and then use telehealth to spread the practices to four other sites in the region. The geriatric ER will be designed with protocols, resources, and specialized care areas to optimize the acute care of senior citizens. The majority of hospitals implementing geriatric ER’s are located in urban or larger medical centers, making the Dartmouth-Hitchcock-West Health partnership the first in the nation to focus on a largely rural population.

“Improving the delivery of care in rural areas is one of the strategic imperatives for Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health, as we grow to meet the needs of patients around the region,” said Dartmouth-Hitchcock CEO and President Joanne M. Conroy, MD. “With our strong programs and passionate providers in Emergency Medicine and Geriatrics, along with our dynamic Connected Care Center, we are uniquely qualified for the development of a rural telehealth model of geriatric emergency care that this collaboration will enable.”

Weep for what could make them glad

“First there's the children's house of make-believe,
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,
The playthings in the playhouse of the children.
Weep for what little things could make them glad.
Then for the house that is no more a house,
But only a belilaced cellar hole,
Now slowly closing like a dent in dough.’’

From “Directive,’’ by Robert Frost, written in 1946 and widely considered the greatest poem of his later years, and one of his most unsettling.

To read the whole poem, please hit this link.

David Warsh: Take Trump's attempted extortion to the electorate

Pennsylvania Station in the 1910s. It was torn down in 1963.

There was a time when New York City had the gateway it deserved.

Demolished more than half a century ago, the former Pennsylvania Station by McKim, Mead & White was hardly the first great building in town to face the wrecking ball. The Lenox Library by Richard Morris Hunt and the old Waldorf-Astoria by Henry Hardenbergh on Fifth Avenue also came down. For generations, New Yorkers embraced the mantra of change, assuming that what replaced a beloved building would probably be as good or better.

The Frick mansion, by Carrère and Hastings, replaced the Lenox Library. The Empire State Building replaced the old Waldorf.

Then, a lot of bad Modern architecture, amid other signs of postwar decline, flipped the optimistic narrative.

From “Penn Station Was an Exhalted Gateway. Here’s How It Became a Reviled Rat’s Maze,’’ by Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times. April 29, 2019

You hear a lot these days about narrative. I don’t know anyone better on the topic, at least in the world of economics that I follow, than Mary Morgan, of the Department of Economic History at the London School of Economics.

Morgan is an expert because she is an accomplished practitioner. The World in the Model: How Economists Work and Think (Cambridge, 2012), is based on eight scrupulous case studies of how mathematical models gradually supplanted words in workaday  technical economics. The philosophical examination established Morgan among the world’s leading historians of economic thought.

A related group research project on the nature of evidence produced an edited volume of essays, How Well Do Facts Travel? The Dissemination of Reliable Knowledge (Cambridge, 2011).  Since 2016, she has led a scholarly European Commission research project on “Narrative in Science.”  Elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2012, she served four years as its vice president for publications.

From Morgan’s introduction to a special issue of Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, “Narrative knowing is most immediately relevant when the scientific phenomena involve complexity, variety, and contingency….”

From her essay in the same issue, “What narratives do above all else is create a productive order amongst materials with the purpose to answer why and how questions.”  Their power is illustrated in novels, she writes; their question-answering and problem-solving capabilities are most evident in detective stories.

I’ve been reading Morgan in connection with an economics story.  But I thought of her in connection with events these last two weeks in Washington, D.C.

I had no time to listen to the impeachment hearings last week. I gathered from the news reports I read that the testimony was damning.

Republicans seem to believe that the attempted extortion of the government of Ukraine was, as Wall Street Journal editorial columnist Daniel Henninger put it, nothing more than Donald Trump’s  “umpteenth ‘norms’ violation.”  The Ukraine caper wasn’t a constitutional crisis. But is clearly was a crime. The fake Ukraine election-interference story was even more shocking.

Therefore it seems right to bring the case. Still, it doesn’t seem sufficient reason to remove the president from office at a time when an election is at hand, especially since a significant minority of voters seem not to think the president did anything out of the ordinary. Impeachment forces Republicans candidates to clarify their views – and to go on clarifying them for years to come.

The thing to do is to take it to the electorate.  The attempted extortion was an anecdote – a short, grimly entertaining account of something that Trump did, an illustration of a good tradition torn down.  But it is only one anecdote of many.

Next year’s election is the key event. The order of American presidents is among the most fundamental narratives of the history of the United States.  Let the House leaders draft the impeachment articles, the membership pass quickly them, and the Senate debate. Move on to the Democratic Party primaries.

The Moynihan-conceived plan to convert the Farley Postal Building across the street across the street from Penn Station (also designed by McKim, Mead & White, into a new train hall is going forward.  But only Donald Trump’s defeat next year can begin to flip the pessimistic narrative of the nation.od

David Warsh, an economic historian and veteran columnist, is proprietor of Somervillle, Mass.-based economicprincipals.com, where this column first ran.

Just keep it away from Facebook

“Data Collection” (onionskins, dye and acrylic on canvas), by Marsha Nouritza Odabashian, in her show “Stir: Drawings and Paintings,’’ through Dec. 1 at Galatea Fine Art, Boston

'Treading on shadow'

Looking down the Charles toward Boston

“Taking the well-worn path in the mind through dusk encroaches
upon the mind, taking back alleys careful step by step
past parked cars and trash containers, three blocks to the concrete ramp
of the footbridge spanning the highway with its rivering, four-lane
unstaunchable traffic, treading on shadow and slant broken light

my mother finds her way.’’

— From “Island in the Charles ,’’ by Rosanna Warren

Laundering social dysfunction

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

In another sign of our society’s dysfunction, Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza has put forward a plan, which apparently isn’t going anywhere for now, to spend $50,000 to buy washing machines to put in schools. The idea is that this would reduce absenteeism by students embarrassed to come to school in dirty clothes.

But cleaning clothes is a household function, not the schools’. Why are some parents – and their children - not dealing with this? I suspect it’s connected with the chaos at home of some single-parent (overwhelmingly it’s the mother) households. Please, let’s bring back marriage and two-parent households, especially in low-income places. For the schools to provide such basic services as laundry will only encourage people to throw more such intrinsically private obligations onto the public sector.

Far too many young people are ill-prepared economically and psychologically to be parents.

Chris Powell: Mass transit can be tough to do in suburbia

Entering the Merritt Parkway, which serves mostly suburban Fairfield County.

Highway tolls aren't the only objection to Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont's transportation-infrastructure plan. Now that the Democratic majority caucus in the state Senate seems to have blocked tolls for another year or two, there are also complaints about how the governor recommends spending whatever money still can be raised for transportation.

Some people say the governor mistakenly emphasizes highway widening over mass transit and that the "bottlenecks" he wants to remove can never be removed because "if you built it, they will come" -- that new traffic eventually will materialize to clog whatever highways are widened.

There is some truth to that, but it is not dispositive. For if increased traffic really should disqualify highway construction, the Boston Post Road, U.S. Route 1 northeast from New York, never could have been more than a footpath, never widened for wagons and paved, and the mail between the two cities forever would have had to be carried by boat through Long Island Sound and around Cape Cod.

Politically incorrect as it may be, population growth almost always will require road construction and widening, and it will always be a matter of judgment as to how much crowding and traffic signify too much growth.

Of course just as when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail, when you're a roadbuilder everything looks like it needs paving, and most of the recent support for tolls in Connecticut came from construction businesses and labor unions that stood to receive most of the toll revenue and so were indifferent to which forms of transit might be best. Roadbuilding can get out of control, as it did in New York City in the 1950s and ‘60s during the tenure of the now-infamous parks, bridge, and tunnel commissioner Robert Moses, though the city, being so densely populated, was perfect for expanding mass transit. As a result ,construction of the Second Avenue subway line has been nearly a century behind schedule.

Today the transit dilemma identified by the governor's critics arises mostly where city and suburb meet -- where population density falls below the level needed to prevent mass transit from operating at an impossible deficit. Unfortunately, that's Connecticut for you -- largely suburban. Rebuilding the railroad line between Hartford and New Haven just cost the state and federal governments almost $800 million and each passenger's one-way trip incurs a grotesque operating cost of almost $60 even as the price of a ticket is only $8.

Mass transit works best where it is comprehensive -- where travelers don't need a car at either end of the line or where there is commuter parking at one end and the last leg of the trip is short. That is often the case in lower Fairfield and New Haven counties, along the Metro-North commuter railroad, the busiest such railroad in the country, but not in the rest of the state, which still needs roads more than rails.

Another complaint made lately in regard to tolls is that people in Connecticut think that highways should be free. But they don't really. Rather they are realizing that they have been paying for highways through fuel and related taxes while much of the revenue has been diverted to state employee pensions and other irrelevant purposes.

Connecticut could greatly reduce its transportation-infrastructure needs if it ever reduced poverty in its anarchic cities enough that middle-class people wanted to live there again. But maintaining poverty here is a bigger business than maintaining the roads and rails and it can't be questioned in polite company.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Night falls on Andover

At Alpers Fine Art, Andover, Mass.: Above, “Ignite the Night” (mixed media on canvas), by Debra Corbett, below, “Sundowner” (oil painting), by Sue Charles

'Geological strata'

“Compression 2” (books and wax), by Jessica Drenk, in her show “Jessica Drenk: Second Nature,’’ at Heather Gaudio Fine Art, New Canaan, Conn., Nov. 23-Jan 11.

The gallery says:

“For Drenk, the material is the starting point of her artistic inquiry, an exploration that takes her from simple notions and ideas to complex expressions of information, systems and patterns. She reconfigures every-day materials such as books, pencils, plastic bags, even PVC pipe, drawing on their physical properties to re-contextualize them into visually compelling and thought-provoking sculptural outcomes.

“The exhibition will feature a new body of work emerging from mass-produced utilitarian and readily discarded objects: plastic bags. Spliced and organized by color, they are transformed into banded formations, layers resembling geological strata. Repurposing this product into a structure resembling its material origins, plastic as a by-product of petroleum, Drenk's reconfiguration timely questions the reverberations of our every-day consumption and its long-lasting environmental impact.’’

Llewellyn King: Will Democrats break their Christmas present?

Historical sea level reconstruction and projections up to 2100 published in January 2017 by the U.S. Global Change Research Program for the Fourth National Climate Assessment.

The Democrats have no need to fret about what they’ll get for Christmas this year. Their worry shouldn’t be the gift, but rather how they choose to open it.

The gift is global warming.

Don’t call it climate change; that fuzzies the issue. Call it for what it is: global warming. It is heat that is melting the polar ice cap, stripping Greenland of its ice sheet, opening Arctic shipping lanes and sinking Venice, one of the jewels of civilization.

Global warming isn’t an existential threat but a real problem that is here, real and now. It is happening today, this hour, this minute, this second.

President Trump has taken his stand. He said of the rising seas and wild weather, which are science-supported evidence of global warming, “I don’t believe it.”

That is a political gift, shimmering and alluring. That is a target affixed to Trump. That is an image as evocative as Nero’s fiddling or Canute’s apocryphal ordering the waves from the incoming tide to stop. That is an opening wide enough for the Democrats to drive a truckload of election victories through.

Democratic strategists need to tell their candidates, “The climate, stupid!” All they must do is to hammer the Republicans and the administration relentlessly on the matter of global warming.

But this gift, looking so unassailable, may be undermined by the current stars on the left of the party. They have a sledgehammer approach and they may do damage to the gift before it is unwrapped.

Their passion is for the simplistic-but-seductive Green New Deal. It defines the problem as fossil fuels and wants to ban them. Then it prescribes the fixes. Bad move.

The cost and disruption of the fixes are ignored. That is why former Secretary of Energy Ernie Moniz -- a man who knows a lot about both politics and energy -- is pushing a concept he calls the Green Real Deal, which aims not to eliminate all fossil fuel use but to move to “net zero.” It means that many technologies will be used, including nuclear power and carbon capture and storage. It means that some fossil fuels will be used so long as their impact is mitigated by gains elsewhere.

These finer points of energy policy and environmental mitigation are too complicated for an election debate. They give too many opportunities for opposition ridicule. Too many handles for the Ridiculer in Chief and his acolytes to grab.

The Democrats need to repeat that the Republicans denied global warming even as the seas are rising. They need to sound the alarm that Boston, New York, Charleston and Miami may be headed for disaster very soon. They need to repeat it over and over, and then some more.

When running an election, a simple, repeatable message, without the details of how the goal will be achieved, wins the day. Clinton’s message served up by James Carville, “The economy, stupid!” won the day. Trump’s enticing “Make America Great Again” cry resonates.

The Democrats need only to dwell on rising sea levels and that the Republicans have repudiated the science. “The seas are rising and we’re going to do something about it,” is a reasonable Democratic message.\

Nixon showed us the effectiveness of framing the problem and hinting at a solution. “I have a plan,” he said about Vietnam. He didn’t mention it included bombing Cambodia.

The Democrats can win on a strong climate message. The seas are rising, wildfires ravage California year after year, Puerto Rico and other islands have been devastated by high-category hurricanes, and we may lose Venice.

A slam dunk in 2020? Don’t count on it. The Democrats likely will lard the message with social concerns, impossible marketplace tinkering and, in so doing, smash their winning gift as they open it. The Democrats are good at that, fatally so.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

New proto-centrist party in Mass.

Charlie Baker

Perhaps the country’s most interesting political development right now is in Massachusetts, where Gov. Charlie Baker, a moderate Republican, is supporting a sort of proto-new party called Massachusetts Majority that gives money to candidates of both parties whom Mr. Baker, currently America’s most popular governor, support. As Ed Lyons wrote in CommonWealth Magazine:

‘’By all appearances, Massachusetts Majority is the engine of a new statewide political party, targeting that sizeable majority of largely unenrolled voters who support Charlie Baker and his politics but are not being served by loud partisans to the left and right. These voters do not want to choose between supporting the positions of Donald Trump or progressive purists. Massachusetts Majority is specifically designed to be the organization they can finally support.

“Can Charlie Baker be the most popular governor in America, govern as a Republican, and also be the detached head of a third party here that supports Republican and Democratic candidates? It’s remarkably non-binary of him, and I think people in this state will be OK with that. After all, it is strict binary choices, and the accompanying polarization, that is destroying American politics. Here in Massachusetts, more than half want non-binary choices.’’

Can the newish organization be part of a foundation for a thoughtful new center or center-right national party? The old Slave States are probably off limits but perhaps something like the Massachusetts Majority can spread to large areas of the Northeast, Middle Atlantic, Upper Midwest and West Coast. The Northeast and Upper Midwest were the original heartland of the Republican Party – a party now dominated by the political descendants of the old Southern Democrats in the great 180-degree political party turn of the last half century.

To Mr. Lyons’s piece, please hit this link.

Shefali Luthra: Do 160 million people 'like' their health care? Kind of

From Kaiser Health News

Articulating his proposal for health-care reform, former Vice President Joe Biden emphasized the number of Americans who, he said, were more than perfectly satisfied with the coverage they have.

“One hundred sixty million people like their private insurance,” Biden said during the November Democratic presidential primary debate.

That argument is at the heart of many moderate Democrats’ criticism of the “Medicare for All” proposal backed by two presidential candidates from New England — Senators Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). We decided to take a closer look.

We reached out to the Biden campaign for comment. The campaign directed us to his next point — that people who don’t like their private coverage could, under his health plan, opt into government-sponsored coverage.

160 Million, And Some Squishy Polling

The figure appears to refer to the number of Americans who receive health benefits through work — so-called employer-sponsored health insurance. Under Medicare for All that would no longer be an option.

On first blush, polling seems to suggest that most people with employer-sponsored coverage like it.

Polling done earlier this year by the Kaiser Family Foundation with the Los Angeles Times found that most beneficiaries are “generally satisfied” with this insurance. (Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the foundation.)

But that doesn’t get at the whole story.

“Most like their policy, but not all,” said Robert Blendon, a health-care pollster at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

The context matters.

In the same KFF/L.A. Times poll, about 40% of people with employer-sponsored coverage said they had trouble paying medical bills, out-of-pocket costs or premiums. About half indicated going without or delaying health care because — even with this coverage — it was unaffordable. And about 17% reported making “difficult sacrifices” to pay for health care.

Beneficiaries who have higher-deductible plans — that is, they are required to pay larger sums of out-of-pocket before health coverage kicks in — are also less likely to be happy with their coverage, and more likely to report problems paying for health care.

And it’s also worth noting that these high-deductible plans have grown increasingly common, even for the 160 million Americans who get insurance from work, though that trend may now be losing steam. Research from the Commonwealth Fund, meanwhile, notes that increasing numbers of “underinsured” people do, in fact, have employer-sponsored health insurance. Underinsured people are those who have coverage but delay care because they still can’t afford it.

Meanwhile, other polling, such as a January Gallup survey, suggests that about 7 in 10 Americans believe the nation’s health-care system is in crisis.

So while Americans may individually not express frustration with their specific private plans, more are learning that, when they try to use that coverage, it doesn’t meet their health needs..

These findings cast significant shade on the idea that all 160 million Americans with employer-sponsored coverage actually like it.

Biden argued that “160 million people like their private insurance.”

A cursory look at polling would suggest that most of the people he’s talking about — Americans who get coverage through work — are happy with their plans.

But once you dig a little deeper, that narrative gets more complicated. Even while Americans say they like their plans, large proportions indicate that the private coverage they have still leaves meaningful gaps, requiring them to skip or delay health care because they cannot afford it.

Biden’s argument is technically correct, but it leaves out important context and relies on a somewhat squishy number. We rate it Half True.

Shefali Luthra is a reporter for Kaiser Health News.

Shefali Luthra: ShefaliL@kff.org, @Shefalil