Philip K. Howard: Principles to unify America
The Great Seal of the United States. The Latin means “Out of Many, One’’
“America is deeply divided”: That’s the post-mortem wisdom from this year’s election.
Surveys repeatedly show, however, that most Americans share the same core values and goals, such as responsibility, accountability and fairness. One issue that enjoys overwhelming popular support is the need to fix broken government. Two-thirds of Americans in a 2019 University of Chicago/AP poll agreed that government requires “major structural changes.”
President-elect Biden has a unique opportunity to bring Americans together by focusing on making government work better. Extremism is an understandable response to the almost perfect record of public failures in recent years. The botched response to COVID-19, and continued confusion over imposing a mask mandate, are just the latest symptoms of a bureaucratic megalith that can’t get out of its own way. Almost a third of the health-care dollar goes to red tape. The United States is 55th in World Bank rankings for ease of starting a business. The human toll of all this red tape is reflected in the epidemic of burnout in hospitals, schools, and government itself.
More than anything, Washington needs a spring cleaning. Officials and citizens must have room to ask: “What’s the right thing to do here?” If we want schools and hospitals to work, and for permits to be given in months instead of years, Americans at every level of responsibility must be liberated to use their common sense. Accountability, not suffocating legal dictates, should be our protection against bad choices.
But there’s a reason why neither party presented a reform vision: It can’t be done without cleaning out codes that are clogged with interest-group favors. Changing how government works is literally inconceivable to most political insiders. I remember the knowing smile of then-House Speaker John Boehner’s (R.-Ohio) when I suggested a special commission to clean out obsolete laws, such as the 1920 Jones Act, which, by forbidding foreign-flag ships from transporting goods between domestic ports, can double the cost of shipping. I also remember the matter-of-fact rejection by then-Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D.-Ill.) of pilot projects for expert health courts — supported by every legitimate health-care constituency, including AARP and patient groups — when he heard that the National Trial Lawyers opposed it: “But that’s where we get our funding.”
Cleaning the stables would help everyone, but the politics of incremental reform are insurmountable. That’s why, as with closing unnecessary defense bases, the only path to success is to appoint independent commissions to propose simplified structures. Then interest groups and the public at large can evaluate the overall benefits of the new frameworks.
Over the summer, 100 leading experts and citizens, including former governors and senators from both parties, launched a Campaign for Common Good calling for spring cleaning commissions. Instead of thousand-page rulebooks, the Campaign proposed that new codes abide by core governing principles, more like the Constitution, that honor the freedom of citizens and officials alike to use their common sense:
Six Principles to Make Government Work Again
Govern for Goals. Government must focus on results, not red tape. Simplify most law into legal principles that give officials and citizens the duty of meeting goals, and the flexibility to allow them to use their common sense.
Honor Human Responsibility. Nothing works unless a person makes it work. Bureaucracy fails because it suffocates human initiative with central dictates. Give us back the freedom to make a difference.
Everyone is Accountable. Accountability is the currency of a free society. Officials must be accountable for results. Unless there’s accountability all around, everyone will soon find themselves tangled in red tape.
Reboot Regulation. Too few government programs work as intended. Many are obsolete. Most squander public and private resources with bureaucratic micromanagement. Rebooting old programs will release vast resources for current needs such as the pandemic, infrastructure, climate change, and income stagnation.
Return Government to the People. Responsibility works for communities as well as individuals. Give localities and local organizations more ownership and control of social services, including, especially, for schools and issues such as homelessness.
Restore the Moral Basis of Public Choices. Public trust is essential to a healthy culture. This requires officials to adhere to basic moral values — especially truthfulness, the golden rule, and stewardship for the future. All laws, programs and rights mist be justified for the common good. No one should have rights superior to anyone else.
Is America divided? Many of the problems that caused people to take to the streets this year reflect the inability of officials to act on these principles. The cop involved in the killing of George Floyd should have been taken off the streets years ago — but union rules made accountability impossible. The delay in responding to COVID was caused in part by ridiculous red tape. The inability to build fire breaks on the west coast was caused by procedures that disempowered forestry officials.
The enemy is not each other, as President-elect Biden has repeatedly said. The enemy is the Washington status quo — a ruinously expensive and paralytic bureaucratic quicksand. Change is in the air. But the politics are impossible. That’s why one of first acts of President Biden should be to appoint spring cleaning commissions to propose new frameworks that will liberate Americans at all levels of responsibility to roll up their sleeves and make America work again.
American government needs big change, but the changes could hardly be less revolutionary. Instead of attacking each other, Americans need to unite around core values of responsibility and good sense.
Philip K. Howard is founder of Campaign for Common Good. His latest book is Try Common Sense. Follow him on Twitter: @PhilipKHoward.
Mr. Howard, a lawyer, is the founder and chairman of the nonprofit legal- and regulatory-reform organization Common Good (commongood.org), a New York City-based civic and cultural leader and a photographer. This piece first ran in The Hill.
Julie Rovner: A GOP Senate likely to block many Biden health proposals
Former Vice President Joe Biden secured the 270 electoral votes needed to capture the White House on Saturday, major news organizations projected, after election officials in a handful of swing states spent days in round-the-clock counting of millions of mail-in ballots and early votes.
The Democrat’s victory came after the latest tallies showed him taking an insurmountable lead in Pennsylvania, a state that both Biden and President Trump had long identified as vital to their election efforts. Trump has signaled he will fight the election results in several states, filing a number of lawsuits and seeking recounts.
“America, I’m honored that you have chosen me to lead our great country,” Biden tweeted shortly after the news organizations called the race. “The work ahead of us will be hard, but I promise you this: I will be a President for all Americans — whether you voted for me or not.”
The Democratic celebration was tempered because it appeared the party would have a hard time taking back the Senate majority it lost in 2014. If that bears out, it will likely keep Biden and Democratic lawmakers from enacting many of the plans they campaigned on, including major changes in health care.
Party control of the Senate may not be determined until January — thanks to what preliminary returns suggest will be runoffs for both Senate seats in Georgia. No candidate for either seat reached the required 50% threshold.
Without a Democratic majority in the Senate, Biden will likely face strong Republican opposition to many of his top health agenda items — including lowering the eligibility age for Medicare to 60, expanding financial assistance for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, and creating a “public option” government health plan.
However, his administration would be a bulwark to defend the ACA against Republican attacks, although the Supreme Court case challenging the health law — which will be heard next week — presents a major wild card for its future.
Health care was a key element of Biden’s campaign, especially improving the federal response to the coronavirus pandemic. He championed the use of face masks and blasted the Trump administration for shifting to states much of the responsibility for fighting the virus and helping hospitals. He was regularly mocked by the president for wearing a mask, working and campaigning from home, and not having an in-person Democratic convention.
Even before the latest vote tallies were released late Saturday morning, Biden had begun moving toward setting up his administration. On Thursday his transition team unveiled a website, BuildBackBetter.com, although it was only one page. And the former vice president held a meeting Thursday with health and economic advisers on the pandemic.
In a brief television statement Friday night, Biden reiterated his commitment to fight the pandemic, which he said “is getting more worrisome across the country.”
“We want everyone to know on day one we are going to put our plan to control this virus into action. We can’t save any of the lives that have been lost, but we can save a lot of lives in the months ahead,” Biden said.
The electoral outcome is not the one Democrats were hoping for — or, to some extent, expecting, based on preelection polling. Andy Slavitt, who ran the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services during the Obama administration, noted that frustration in a tweet Wednesday. “A large disappointment is that many hoped for a significant repudiation of Trump & his indifference to human life, human suffering, his corruption, and goal of getting rid of the ACA. No matter the final total it will be hard to make that claim,” Slavitt said.
Still up in the air is how willing a Republican-led Senate will be to provide further relief to individuals, businesses and states hit hard by the pandemic, and whether they will participate in previously bipartisan efforts to curtail “surprise” out-of-network medical bills and get a handle on prescription drug prices.
Julie Rovner is a Kaiser Health News reporter
Julie Rovner: jrovner@kff.org, @jrovner
Don Pesci: My Journal of the plague year, continued
Thank God for such friends.
October 25, 2020
VERNON, Conn.
Life goes on. {My wife} Andree’s brother Ernie died in Florida. Titan, Andree’s guide dog for the last dozen years, died as well. And my cousin, the city mouse, writes to tell me: “There are two kinds of cynics among us, Republican cynics and Democrat cynics. The Democrats are better able than Republicans to dress their cynicism in gorgeous, empathetic cloth. They are here, they want us to know, to help with the problems they have caused. It all reminds me of a quip by Karl Kraus on psychoanalysts – they are the disease they purport to cure”
In an earlier letter, he wrote, “Whatever the problem is, you may be sure that a political solution to it can only make matters worse.”
And he wonders why cultural antibodies in the United States have not yet produced an Aristophanes or a Lucian, author of the biting satirical play The Sale of Philosophers. Instead we are confronted daily with unintentionally comic politicians. And our too, too serious politics has murdered comedy. Lincoln could never have survived this poisonous sobriety.
Fall has arrived. Brown leaves are scattered across the property. I’m waiting for the wind to do the work of raking. The wood pile and the furniture out front and down by the lake, now sprinkled with a bib of leaves, have been covered with tarpaulins. We are waiting on winter. Certain as the arrival of dawn and midnight, it will come and cover all in a blanket of purist white silence.
Andree is having some difficulty in attaching the new dog’s name, Dublin, to her commands, and the commands too have changed. Thank God and Fidelco for Dublin, a sleek and attentive, male German Shepard with large eyes and silver-tipped fur. Andree mentions to the many strangers who pause to comment on the dog, “He is the only Irish German Shepard in Connecticut.”
Every so often, Titan’s name is mentioned. This is usual; in our naming and our prayers, we cling to a safe and bountiful remembered past. I have had two dreams in which my father was a presence. This is very unusual for me. One does not dream of the center joist of a house. It is simply there in one’s life, preventing the whirlwind from carrying away all treasures; for that is what a home is – a bank of treasures much more reliable than bank notes.
The pandemic, the city mouse tells me, is useful primarily as a political hobgoblin to frighten people into an attitude of compliance and submission, not to say that it is not a serious threat.
He certainly has his finger on something there.
Did I watch the last presidential debate, he asks?
God no!
To the country mouse,
Well then, you missed a gaudy show, a significant part of it – Hunter Biden’s delinquencies, and his father’s memory lapses -- unreported by Connecticut’s left of center media. Trump was his usual solipsistic best. Biden looked as if he had been biting bullets for weeks while hunkering down in his bunker. The less one sees of Biden, the more popular he becomes. His is the first “front-porch-campaign” the nation has seen since the McKinley’s 1896 campaign and the advent of 24/7 news.
The opposite is true, of course, with {Connecticut} Governor Ned Lamont. As befits an autocrat, he is seen everywhere, rearranging the constellations in the sky, crowing up the sun, destroying yet another business, citing for the hundredth time the death toll in Connecticut, 60 to 70 percent of which is attributable to bad political decisions made by the autocratic governor.
There will come a time when even the most insensate retailer of fact in Connecticut realizes that Coronavirus is not responsible for a single business closure in the state – all of which have been shuttered by politicians, not a virus – and that our economic malady is every bit as serious AND DEADLY as Coronavirus.
But not yet. Perhaps after the November elections have been concluded to the satisfaction of the state’s dominant left of center party, the truth may once again resurfaced and break the hard-shelled exterior of campaign propaganda.
My city cousin certainly is right there. Coronavirus is a viral infection, not a politician, and viruses, unlike governors out rigged with plenary powers, are powerless to close by gubernatorial edict a school or a nail salon.
A Hartford Courant front page, above the fold, headline screams, “Just how bad could the latest spike get?”
About a week and a half before Election Day, Lamont, it would appear, has hoisted himself on his own petard. Connecticut’s Coronavirus numbers, though still far below spring numbers, are rising steadily. Connecticut is now “on the pathway to being bad.”
“I am concerned,” Lamont said. “I take nothing for granted.”
Sure, sure, but when will be pull the lockdown trigger?
“We need to slow the resurgence right away,” a Courant editorial barks this Sunday. Clamp down on the number of people allowed at indoor gatherings; stop playing softball with coaches and sport parent; order all schools to revert to hybrid learning models, and stop saying the surge was “expected.”
Find a hole, jump into it, pull the hole in over your head. Don’t worry about Connecticut’s economy. The state is in arrears in payments to its public employees by about $68 billion; we are among the highest taxed, most progressive states in the nation; businesses have fled the state for greener pastures elsewhere; clamorous state employee unions are still petted by the progressive politicians they help to re-elect; and the only sunbeam shining through the darkness is that the real-estate sector is flourishing, because whipped millionaire New Yorkers are fleeing that state and settling in Connecticut’s Gold Coast, abandoned by companies such as GE and Raytheon Technologies, formerly United Technologies.
Lucian, where are you?
... to be continued
Don Pesci is a columnist based in Vernon.
Joshua Cho: Even in Pennsylvania, opposing fracking isn't 'political suicide'
Fracking in progress
Via OtherWords.org
In this year’s vice presidential debate, Sen. Kamala Harris reiterated Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s rejection of a fracking ban, despite her earlier call for one when she was a presidential candidate.
“I will repeat, and the American people know, that Joe Biden will not ban fracking. That is a fact,” Harris said.
Whenever there are discussions about banning fracking, media coverage seems to prioritize potential “risks” to Democrats’ electoral prospects, or potential economic downturns. Unfortunately, a lot of this coverage is quite sloppy.
For instance, The New York Times quoted absurd claims that a fracking ban would mean “hundreds of thousands” of Pennsylvanians would be “unemployed overnight.” In reality, about 26,000 people work in all of Pennsylvania’s oil and gas sector.
Still, The Times suggested that any presidential candidate who supports a national fracking ban would risk losing Pennsylvania, calling the issue “a political bet.” A fracking ban “could jeopardize any presidential candidate’s chances of winning this most critical of battleground states — and thus the presidency itself,” the paper wrote.
NPR likewise made dubious pronouncements on the opinions of swing-state voters the focal point of the story, reporting that “aggressive” climate action “could push moderate voters in key swing states to reelect President Trump,” and even cited — without rebuttal — a claim from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that a fracking ban would eliminate 17 percent of all U.S. jobs.
Soon after the debate, Quartz explained that Biden and Harris don’t support a fracking ban because it “tempts political suicide in swing states like Pennsylvania and Ohio where fossil fuels still rule.” And the Los Angeles Times described Biden’s opposition to a fracking ban as a “nuanced position.”
There are two big problems with these arguments.
First, as journalist David Sirota pointed out, “the idea that a fracking ban is political poison in Pennsylvania” simply “isn’t substantiated by empirical data.”
A January poll of Pennsylvania voters found that more registered voters support a fracking ban (48 percent) than oppose it (39 percent). A later CBS/YouGov poll in August found 52 percent of Pennsylvania voters supporting a fracking ban. These numbers hardly suggest “political suicide.”
Second, there’s simple climate science.
In 2018, the U.N. announced that carbon pollution needs to be cut by 45 percent by 2030 to prevent irreversible planetary devastation.
Unfortunately, fracking releases large amounts of methane into the atmosphere, which can warm the planet 80 times more than the same amount of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. And recent reporting has suggested that fracking is an even bigger contributor to global warming than previously believed.
At the debate, Harris emphasized that Biden “believes” in science.
She claimed he “understands that the West Coast of our country is burning” and “sees what is happening on the Gulf states, which are being battered by storms,” and that he has “seen and talked with the farmers in Iowa, whose entire crops have been destroyed because of floods.”
But on this issue, the science clearly points in one direction: away from fracking.
Finally, banning fracking doesn’t need to mean eliminating jobs. Environmental and labor activists, economists, and scientists have for years discussed the need for a full employment program based on green jobs to serve as a just transition for workers. Green industries could employ many, many more workers than fossil fuels.
There is no reason for a fracking ban to be “political suicide” — except, maybe, for the fossil fuel industry.
Joshua Cho (@JoshC0301) is a writer based in Virginia. This op-ed was adapted from a longer piece at FAIR.org and distributed by OtherWords.org.
Sam Pizzigati: Biden tax plan would reduce inequality
“The tax collector's office,’’ by Pieter Brueghel the Younger (1640)
Via OtherWords.org
BOSTON
Want to know where the 2020 presidential election is heading? Don’t obsess about the polls. Pay attention to tax lawyers and accountants.
These experts in reducing rich people’s tax bills understand what many Americans still haven’t quite fathomed: The nation’s wealthiest will likely pay significantly more in taxes if Joe Biden becomes president.
Why? Because the massive tax cuts for corporations and the rich that Trump and the GOP passed in 2017 may soon be shredded.
If these rich don’t take immediate steps to “protect their fortunes,” their law firms are advising, they could lose out big-time. “We’ve been telling people: ‘Use it or lose it,’” says Jere Doyle, a strategist at BNY Mellon Wealth Management.
At first, these concerns may appear overblown. Under Biden’s plan, the tax rate on America’s top income tax bracket would only rise from 37 percent back up to 39.6 percent, the Obama-era rate.
But the real “backbreakers” for the rich come elsewhere.
Among the biggest: a new tax treatment for “investment income,” the money that rich people make buying and selling assets.
Most of this income currently enjoys a super-discounted tax rate — just 20 percent, far lower than what most working people pay on their paycheck income. The Biden tax plan ends this favorable treatment of income from “capital gains” for taxpayers making over $1 million. It would also close the loophole where wealthy people simply pass appreciated assets to their heirs.
Biden is also proposing an overhaul of Social Security taxes. The current 12.4 percent Social Security payroll tax — half paid by employers, half by employees — applies this year to only the first $137,700 in paycheck earnings, a figure that gets annually adjusted to inflation.
That means that a corporate exec who makes $1 million this year will pay the same amount into Social Security as a person who makes $137,700.
Biden’s plan would apply the Social Security tax to all paycheck income over $400,000, so America’s deepest pockets would pay substantially more to support Social Security. Meanwhile Americans making under $400,000 would continue to pay at current levels.
Corporations would also pay more in taxes. Biden would raise the standard corporate income tax rate from 21 to 28 percent, set a 15 percent minimum tax on corporate profits, and double the current minimum tax foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies have to pay from 10.5 to 21 percent.
Among other changes: Big Pharma companies would no longer get tax deductions for what they spend on advertising. Real estate moguls would no longer be able to depreciate the rental housing they own on an accelerated schedule, and fossil-fuel companies would lose a variety of lucrative tax preferences.
Together, these ideas could measurably reduce inequality.
The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy has crunched the numbers: In 2022, under Biden’s plan, the nation’s top 1 percent would bear 97 percent of the direct tax increases Biden is proposing. The next most affluent 4 percent would bear the remaining 3 percent.
Despite some misleading Republican talking points to the contrary, no households making under $400,000 — the vast majority of Americans — would see their direct taxes rise.
Even if Democrats win the Senate, actually passing this plan will take grassroots pressure — the only force that has ever significantly raised taxes on the rich.
Wealth inequality remains an even greater challenge, and the Biden plan includes no wealth tax along the lines of what Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, two of Biden’s primary rivals, advocated. But more pressure could also shove that wealth tax onto the table.
If that happens, we might finally begin to reverse the staggering levels of inequality that Ronald Reagan’s 1980 election ushered in.
Sam Pizzigati, based in Boston, is the co-editor of Inequality.org and author of The Case for a Maximum Wage and The Rich Don’t Always Win.
Llewellyn King: Bundle up for a very bleak winter
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
A winter of discontent looms. Unlike in Shakespeare’s Richard III, no one can say it will be made glorious summer by anything now in sight. Instead, it promises a tsunami of misery for many and the ugliest election in U.S. history.
At a time that calls for new energy, new thinking and a recasting of the social contract, two old men -- who more rightly should be eyeing the sunny side of the veranda at their retirement homes -- are in contentious dispute for the presidency.
Whoever wins, President Trump or former Vice President Joe Biden, the winter will be the harshest in memory for many Americans, particularly those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder.
The COVID-19 pandemic has evaporated millions of jobs and the small companies that provided them. Most obvious in this slaughter are the restaurants. Yelp, the restaurant reporting service, estimates that 53 percent of the restaurants now closed will never reopen.
Restaurants are among the most fragile and perishable of small businesses. At the best of times, most inhabit an inhospitable space between the restaurant chains and their landlords.
Restaurants are quick to hire and quick to fire. It is where the unskilled (dishwashing and prep) to the low-skilled (line cooks and front staff) find work most easily.
Restaurants tell the temperature of the economy ahead of the official soundings. When business turns down, they stumble.
They also are places of hope: The chefs and waiters of today are the restaurant entrepreneurs or stage and screen stars of tomorrow. They’ve put untold thousands through college. When restaurants close jobs go, hopes and dreams go, and often the life’s work of the owners go.
The individually owned restaurant epitomizes entrepreneurism, determination, the capitalist spirit, and the joy of self-employment for the owner. All the virtues of small business, routinely drooled over by the politicians, are present even at the humblest greasy spoon. Free enterprise is always on the menu.
And restaurants are part of the fabric of our lives, where we celebrate, occasionally mourn, and frequently refresh.
Much of what is true for restaurants is as true for the whole hospitality industry. Those who do the housekeeping in hotels, the porters and, of course, the restaurant staff are all semi-skilled and in need of work to survive. They are, I submit, not easily re-trained: You don’t go from making beds to computer programming in a short time.
Only Congress can assuage the immediate suffering at the bottom of the employment pyramid. But a new relief package has been tied up in party strife.
Trump said on Oct. 6 that he had withdrawn from negotiations with the Democrats over the package. Now he says he will sign a simplified measure, guaranteeing a payment of $1,200. That came after the stock market -- the only index Trump follows -- faltered.
Dark as things may be for the workers at the bottom, they are bleak for all. Trump won’t say that he’ll accept the results of the election if he doesn’t win. He’s laid the groundwork for this potential coup by criticizing mail-in voting. Without evidence, he’s sought ahead of the election to invalidate mail-in voting and has even trashed the U.S. Postal Service, maybe to facilitate this election subterfuge.
If Biden wins, he may be presented with his greatest crisis before he is sworn in: leading the movement for accepting the vote. He’ll be required to lead the millions who may flood the streets, prompting violence between themselves and Trump hardliners.
Shiver, people, shiver. There is much to fear as winter unfolds even if you have a paycheck.
If Trump loses and accepts the result, there will be the time from certification of the election to Biden’s swearing in when an unfettered Trump can indulge his passion for executive orders, abrogating treaties and sowing wanton havoc.
The only sunshine may come from science in the form of a somewhat effective vaccine for COVID-19. This won’t occasion us to immediately strip our masks, as it will take a year to inoculate the whole population. But its prospect will put warmth into a cold Christmas.
As the nation returns to health, a hard look at the predicament of those at the bottom will be needed -- an amendment to the social contract, if you will. Top of my list: fix health care and repair education.
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.
Website: whchronicle.com
Llewellyn King: Biden elicits little excitement even among Democrats
Joe Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris
WEST WARWICK, R.I
Four years ago, Democrats slouched to the polls and voted, holding their noses figuratively. Somehow the party had come up with a presidential candidate that even many Democrats didn’t like very much: Hillary Clinton.
Pitted against a risible president, Donald Trump, who is a climate-change-doubting, class-dividing, race-baiting, immigrant-bashing, law-bending, treaty-tearing, dictator-loving, truth-challenged, dissembling incompetent, this time, it should be an easy White House win for the Democrats.
This time, there should be white-hot passion for Democratic challenger Joe Biden, the candidate who would restore our moral base, our international standing, salve our wounds, and give us a sense that the nation is moving forward to a sunlit future. But there is no surge of feeling, zero passion.
Biden is the candidate who would deal with the COVID-19 pandemic and the environmental catastrophe that is unfolding with pestilences of a biblical scale: serial hurricanes striking the Gulf Coast and wildfires from hell in the West. He is the man who should give us confidence in our systems, from health care to voting, to the rule of law at the Justice Department. But there is no surge, no passion.
Instead, the closest thing to enthusiasm I find among voters is resigned, faint praise. “He’s a decent man,” I’ve been told over and again. I’ll have a struggle in not offering the next Democrat who tells me in a woeful voice that Biden’s “a decent man” a physical rebuke.
One may discount the great man or woman view of history, but there is no great argument for the “decent man” view of history. You can have decent men who were great, Truman and Reagan, but you can’t move the needle of history with flaccid decency.
Poor old Joe Biden -- yes, he is old for the job — he’ll be 78 on Nov. 20 -- is defined mostly by having been there, like the TV-watching gardener played by Peter Sellers in the movie Being There. He was in the Senate for a long time, he was vice president to Barack Obama for two terms. He clears the being-there bar, but it is a low bar, very low.
No one is passionately against Biden. Trump’s attempts to paint him as a socialist ogre about to take us to Stalinism have fallen flat. Flat because they are unbelievable, and they are unbelievable because that isn’t Biden.
Biden has always been the quintessential man of the center of the situation. The pressure on his left wing, coming from Senators Bernie Sanders, of Vermont, and Edward Markey, of Massachusetts, and the group around Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of New York, is going to be a problem and a discomfort for Biden. He must also wonder where in that world his vice-presidential pick, California Sen. Kamala Harris, so far defined more by her ethnicity than her philosophy, will fit.
If, as still expected but not guaranteed, Biden makes it across the threshold in this election, his greatest strength will be his address book. His best strategy will be to use surrogates to fight his political wars. That means a strong Cabinet and a great White House staff.
Given Biden’s limitations, his chief of staff will be a critical player. He needs to give his Cabinet secretaries their heads. One of the many weaknesses of the Trump administration has been the pusillanimous nature of the Cabinet: Men and women who see the role only as pleasing the capricious and solipsistic president -- a chorus of lickspittle people singing hymns of praise to the chief.
Biden doesn’t need to point up Trump’s weaknesses: They are manifest. He needs to point up his own strengths beyond his affability and, yes, beyond his decency.
I’ve been watching Biden for years, nodding “hello” to him, and sometimes talking with him, the way it goes for reporters and politicians in Washington. I get the distinct feeling Biden isn’t the man he was eight years ago, when he would’ve been a more appealing candidate within his limitations. He seems diminished, his fire reduced to an ember.
As it is Democrats and renegade Republicans, needs must, will slouch to the polls to vote against Trump. Few in their hearts will be voting for Biden. There is a passion deficit.
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.
Website: whchronicle.com
Don Pesci: The old, tired and reclusive Joe Biden
Waiting to talk politics
— Photo by Visitor7
“If ever a time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin”
— Samuel Adams (1722-1803), Massachusetts politician and a U.S. Founding Father
VERNON, Conn.
I’m sitting in the Midnight Café, only half full on orders of Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont, having breakfast. The place names and personal names throughout have been changed to protect innocent non-politicians. The usual waitress, Sami, of indeterminate age, sporting her usual braided ponytail, greets me, a steady customer, and the order is quickly put on the table.
The next few booths are filled with electricians brought into the state by Eversource to reconnected houses and businesses with mostly repaired power lines. They are, many of them, on their way back to their home states after a grueling stretch in Connecticut dealing with the damage wrought by Tropical Storm Isaias.
Sami calls out to them, “Have a safe trip back, guys,” and they wave beefy forearms in her direction.
“Sami, look at this picture, and tell me what you think.”
The photo, top of the fold, front page, shows Sen. Kamala Harris, whom former Vice President Joe Biden has picked as his vice-presidential candidate, standing at a podium holding forth, while Biden, stone-faced, is seated in a chair that looks alarmingly like a kiddy highchair, legs wide open, his arms tightly clutching his stomach, his face masked in pretended interest.
Sami quickly assesses the photo and, never shy of sharing her opinion, smiles wickedly.
“Wonder if he had to use a stool to mount that chair?”
“Yeah, you noticed. If he were lying on the floor, he’d be in a fetal position.”
“Right. He’s hugging his tummy tightly.”
“Harris looks presidential though, doesn’t she?’’
“Very. I’m not sure that will help whatshisname,” (Same animated smile.)
It’s one of those pictures that are worth a thousand words.
The skinny on Biden, even among some Democrats, is that he has become a recluse, and not owing to Coronavirus. His early implication that he would choose as his vice president a Black woman had limited his range, but many Democrats feel that Harris might make a tolerable president when Biden, if elected, declines to run for a second term. Biden has not been able or inclined to answer successfully barely concealed imputations that he has become an in-the-closet presidential campaigner because he fears a public, mano a mano confrontation with President Trump.
It is thought by some that Biden's possible future foreign policy with respect to an aggressive and muscular China already has been compromised by Hunter Biden, his grasping son, who had been employed and monetarily rewarded by China because his daddy was Joe Biden, the Democrat’s Great White Hope in the November 2020 elections. And there is a suspicion that Biden has problems unspooling simple English sentences, that he will not be able to carry his weight in office, that he really has forgotten more than he knows, and on and on and on. Biden is 77 years old. His best days, many agreed, lie behind him.
The skinny on Trump is that he has been fatally damaged by repeated failed attempts to remove him from office, and a painfully protracted, failed attempt, lasting as long as his presidency, to find him guilty of collusion with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Some suppose that Trump will be easy campaign prey for a weakened Democrat presidential contender and his more vigorous, Black, female running mate candidate.
Under the hammer-blows of a Democrat opposition unalterably opposed to a Trump second term, it has been supposed that Connecticut Republicans, as happened in 2018, will tremulously withdraw in horror from a toxic president, thereby giving weight to Democratic assertions that even a damaged Biden-Harris administration would be preferable to four more years of an Trump regime.
In both law and politics, silence signifies assent; therefore, silence by Connecticut Republicans on two matters of importance to them – the re-election of a Republican president and the recapture of the U.S. House, as well as a stony silence on what is broadly called progressive social issues – can only be interpreted by state groups traditionally allied against Republicans as a permission to continue unimpeded many progressive programs that conservatives, libertarians, most Republicans and many unaffiliated voters consider repugnant and dangerous to the social fabric of the Republic.
In the new age now upon us, the center has not held, and The Second Coming, born in a dry desert, is slowly slouching toward Bethlehem. The media is now capitalizing “Black” in its reportage, as if “Black” were a race; it’s a color. “White” is also a color, not a race. Distinctions are not made between tolerable and even necessary mottos such as “Black Lives Matter” and political organizations and operations. George Orwell might well sweep all the rotgut Newsspeak away, but there are no Orwells among us.
And we have assented to the anarchic rule of windy and rootless politicians, never mindful of Ben Franklin’s answer when he was asked by a woman on the street, once the Continental Congress had finished its business, “Sir, what have you given us?”
“A republic, madam – IF YOU CAN KEEP IT.”
Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.
Looking tired? Joe Biden in Henderson, Nev., last February
—Photo by Gage Skidmore
David Warsh: How Buttgieg might win
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
Along with 14 million other viewers, I watched most of the Democratic presidential candidates’ debate last week. It seemed to me, as it did to the experts, that nothing much changed. The race appears to have boiled down to five viable candidates.
The most recent Real Clear Politics average of various polls had Joe Biden going into the debate at 26.8 percent, Bernie Sanders at 17.3 percent, Elizabeth Warren at 16.8 percent, Kamala Harris at 6.5 percent, and Pete Buttigieg at 4.8 percent. No other candidate is polling over an average 3 percent, nor does any seem likely to do so.
So I thought I should expand a little on my earlier conjecture that, a year from now, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., might just turn out to be the nominee. My reasoning is based on the conviction that party voters will, through the primaries calendar and perhaps the convention itself, decide to field a moderate candidate in 2020 instead of a progressive.
On this logic, Elizabeth Warren gradually squeezes out Bernie Sanders, Warren bests Kamala Harris in the California primary (or vice versa). When Joe Biden, 76, stumbles at some point, Pete Buttigieg, 37, inherits the centrist vote, and, in the end, Buttigieg defeats Warren for the nomination. To put it slightly differently: If the elderly Biden falters, the young Buttgieg become the leading moderate.
I leave to others the demerits of Biden, Sanders, Warren and Harris. The advantages of Buttigieg are simple. In his approach to the national electorate, Buttigieg resembles former president Barack Obama more nearly than anyone else. (Obama’s achievements in office were finally remembered by all on the dais last week.) The elusive quality of gravitas , which he possesses, gives him cross-generational appeal. And as mayor of a deeply divided industrial city in northeast Indiana, he has been well-prepared by his experiences for the job he seeks, should he survive the gantlet that begins in January, in Iowa. For a contrary view, see “The Buttigieg Money Pit.”
No one can possibly foresee all the twists and turns between now and next July. The rate at which print newspapers publish — one day at a time –– is the way the way ahead unfolds. But it is not unreasonable to think occasionally in the future perfect tense. When the time comes next year in Milwaukee, put all twenty-plus of the candidates who have vied on the convention stage for a thoroughly rousing cheer. Then let the nominee, whoever it is, take over. The next debate commences on Oct. 15.
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New on my bookshelf:
Capital and Ideology, by Thomas Piketty (English translation, Harvard, March 2020)
The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas, by Janek Wasserman (Yale)
Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing in an Age of Fraud, by Tom Mueller
David Warsh is an economic historian and veteran columnist. He is also proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this column first ran.
Biden's undiplomatic truth-telling
I got a chuckle over the rumpus after Vice President Biden noted that Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have aided Sunni extremists -- not directly the Islamic State but certainly members of the terrorist community, some of whom are now merrily murdering people (yes, they clearly enjoy killing) as Islamic State recruits. Saudi Arabia, of course, is the country that brought us al-Qaida.
Of course this was very undiplomatic, as is truth telling in diplomacy generally. And Mr. Biden is a chatterbox.