Tag: Bernie Sanders

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News News Blog

MEMernet: Bernie Goes to Memphis

CREDIT: Bernie Sanders/Twitter

Bernie Sanders/Twitter

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders splashed into the internet Thursday and Friday sending ripples to almost every corner of the MEMernet.

President Joe Biden took the stage Wednesday but it was Sanders who stole the inaugural show. Sanders, sitting in his trademark coat, has been pasted into photos around the globe.

Here’s what Sanders said in a Friday tweet:

MEMernet: Bernie Goes to Memphis

Well, OK then, Bernie. But everyone else was having a ton of fun.

Here are some of our favorites from the MEMernet so far:

@shelbylaclairsmit

♬ original sound – Makayla

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Don't mind me. I'm waiting for the zoo to open this Saturday.

#berniesanders #reopening

Posted by Memphis Zoo on Thursday, January 21, 2021

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Four Nights in Cyberspace — the 2020 DNC

My chief fear, as the virtual DNC began on Monday night, was that they didn’t make the mistake of over-producing it. Not for the last time, I found myself wishing it were possible to have a real rough-and-tumble convention.

And, after a needlessly slow start, killing prime time with the kind of desultory welcoming and filler material ordinary conventions start with in the morning or early afternoon, the DNC got going and massed several strong speeches and moments. The point to keep in mind is that in normal convention years the strong stuff starts right away— at 8 p.m. CDT or 9 p.m. EDT.

Having Bernie Sanders on fairly early was a good move toward answering several questions at once. A runner-up in 2020 as he was in 2016, could the Vermont Senator, an

Bernie Sanders

icon of the progressive left, close ranks with the Democrats’ centrist standard-bearer? Though he had made a speech on behalf of Hillary on opening night of the 2016 convention, it seemed not to have cleared away doubters — either in the Clinton ranks or in his own — and the remaining sense of suspicion left a tuft of malaise stuck to the coordinated campaign.

What he said this time around, speaking on a studio stage to the camera, not only sounded fully sincere, it was less a concession than a bona fide endorsement of the candidate who had bested him, Joe Biden. Indeed, it was the first example, of many to come in the convention, of what might be called testimonials from The Friends of Joe Biden — a group of illustrious and/or affecting exemplars who could implicitly be compared to the cronies and satraps of the incumbent President.

Bernie professed himself open to liberals, moderates, and even conservatives — a statement that put him on the same unity-minded platform as Biden — and provoked this thought: Those folks who worried that Sanders could not appeal to a national electorate, what were they thinking? Nobody could have been more obscure than an Independent Senator from Vermont, and look at the national following he had inspired with his attacks on economic inequality! And, the reality of Trump now a given, who could doubt this time that Bernie’s following would come with him in full support of the Democratic ticket?

In juxtaposition to Bernie Sanders on that first night was John Kasich, the moderate former Governor of Ohio who had been in the Republican field of candidates in 2016 and now served to bracket the ticket’s potential from the other side of the political spectrum. (In a sightly jarring and probably unnecessary acknowledgment of his role, Kasich would say he doubted that a President Biden would take any “hard left” turns.)

Michelle Obama was not a matter of right nor left. Nor was the former First Lady an old-fashioned adornment to the patriarchy. She came across as a truth-teller and a judge, sounding this more-in-sadness-than-in-anger note: “Donald Trump is the wrong president for our country. He has had more than enough time to prove that he can do the job, but he is clearly in over his head. He cannot meet this moment. He 

Bennie Thompson

simply cannot be who we need him to be for us. It is what it is.”

One more notable fact of that and subsequent nights: Mississippi’s venerable African-American congressman Bennie Thompson, sounding agreeably Old-Southern in his role as permanent Convention chair.

How about our girl Raumesh, one of several virtual testifiers on Joe Biden’s behalf to kick off Night Two of the DNC as sequential keynoters. Remember her floor speech from Phiadelphia in 2016? (Hillary, the state Senator from Memphis memorably said, was “a bad sister.” Unfortunately, she was also, arguably, a bad candidate.)

Raumesh Akbari

Raumesh Akbari, in any case, has been sprinkled with stardust twice — deservedly.

And, one thought, lookee at Caroline Kennedy and son Jack Schlossberg in a brief camera turn. Dang, he’s got those looks, almost a double for his late uncle JFK Jr.

A future-tense candidate?

Youth was similarly served by a pro forma nominating speech for Bernie Sanders by New York Congresswoman Aexandria Ocasio Cortez — AOC, as she’s increasingly called in tribute to her out-of-nowhere celebrity as an instant eminence of the left. Her speech was less about Bernie than it was about her wish list for the political future: “… 21st-century social, economic and human rights, including guaranteed health care, higher education, living wages and labor rights for all people in the United States; a movement striving to recognize and repair the wounds of racial injustice, colonization, misogyny and homophobia …”

It may have been obligatory to give time at some point to John Kerry, the party’s unsuccessful 2004 nominee — or was that old footage of Edmund Muskie? Not much, in any case, was advanced from the moment. Former presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were more effective links to the party’s past. It is impossible not to respect Carter nor to appreciate Clinton, for all the fresh tarnish on the latter’s image.

Caroline Kennedy and Jack Schlossberg

It was nice to see the friendship between Joe Biden and the late GOP maverick John McCain being remembered — not so much in the somewhat exaggerated hope of attracting fall-away Republicans as to remind the audience of Biden’s ability to work across third rails and party lines.

The absolute hero of the evening — both emotionally and ideologically — was the long-term ALS survivor Ady Barkan, who by his courage, perseverance, and very presence embodied the case for a revamping and extension of national heath care — a wider one, alas, than is envisioned (or at least publicly sanctioned) by Biden.

Jill Biden was a delight, and it was revealing to see her widen the domestic profile of her husband a bit further while giving us a preview of her likely presence-to-be on the national scene.

But, by all odds, the high point of Tuesday night was the roller-coaster ride across America in the form of the live roll call for President — the casting of the votes made sequentially from the scene of each of the nation’s 57 states and territories. What a trip, in every sense of the term! A virtue made of necessity — surely to be repeated in less pandemic future times.

Immigration had been touched on as an issue here and there on the Democratic Convention’s first two nights, but it became something more than that on Night Three when the nation was exposed to videos of 11-year-of Estela Juarez, daughter of an ex-Marine and an undocumented Mexican, crying over her mother’s forced deportation, alternating with excerpts of the President snarling about “animals” and his intention to “move ’em out.”

Estela Juarez

Yes, of course, Trump’s defenders would decry this as a trick of editing and would maintain that he was speaking of criminal elements in the illegals among us. Still, the images of Estela and her mother speak for themselves.

The evening would also see the wounded heroine, former California Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, survivor of a shooting at point-blank range in the back of the head by a zealot with a gun.

Another survivor of sorts was Hillary Clinton, the party’s 2016 standard-bearer, whose very presence, as much as her words, was a warning against complacency at the polls. It is pedantry of a sort, even nit-picking, to complain about certain kinds of style points, but here we go: “As the saying goes” is not the right way to introduce a certain famous comment by Ernest Hemingway, which, in its verbatim version, in “A Farewell to Arms,” goes, “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” Unmentioned by Clinton, as by most alluders to the sentiment, is the next sentence: “But those that will not break it kills.”

One very live and unbroken specimen is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who took her turn Wednesday night, as did Elizabeth Warren — both of them properly aggressive and examples of the unprecedented prominence of women in today’s Democratic Party.
At one point viewers were treated to a recitation of legislative accomplishments of Joe Biden, one of which was his sponsorship of the Violence Against Women Act. This was appropriate, but also a little brazen, in that Biden, as chairman of the Senate committee looking into sexual-harassment complaints of Anita Hill against then Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, had been regarded as less than properly vigilant.

The night would end with the two biggest moments — a take-no-prisoners address from former president Barack Obama who, from within his customary restrained persona, threw protocol aside and gave it back to his presidential successor, Donald Trump, followed by a This-Is-Your-Life bio of Kamala Harris, and then Harris in the flesh, to accept the vice-presidential nomination.

Obama stood before the cameras as an elder statesman, but you could still sense within him the wunderkind who came from out of nowhere at the 2004 Democratic Convention — the moderate, sensible presence that his political enemies insisted on trying to characterize as a radical Zulu. But Obama’s inner flame never materalized as firebombs; he could provide heat and light but never explosions. So it was this night:

“I never expected that my successor would embrace my vision or continue my policies. I did hope, for the sake of our country, that Donald Trump might show some interest in taking the job seriously; that he might come to feel the weight of the office and discover some reverence for the democracy that had been placed in his care.
“But he never did. For close to four years now, he’s shown no interest in putting in the work; no interest in finding common ground; no interest in using the awesome power of his office to help anyone but himself and his friends; no interest in treating the presidency as anything but one more reality show that he can use to get the attention he craves.
“Donald Trump hasn’t grown into the job because he can’t.”

There was no tit-for-tat to this, no understandable human response to the torrent of verbal abuse he has suffered from Trump. It was, more than anything else, a report card and a severe one.

Kamala Harris

And Harris, when she came on stage, was thereby largely enabled to eschew the tradition vice-presidential role of attacker, so as to complete the job of revealing herself to an America where she is still something of an unknown quantity. Smiling, and not without a fair amount of glamor, she described her scrambled ethnic heritage (part Black, part Indian of the East Asian variety), her stroller-view of the Civil Rights revolution, her rise in the legal world as a professional woman, and her simultaneous persona as a stepmother called Mamala. A homey presence altogether, but still a seasoned prosecutor and very much woke Senator. Someone who could plausibly say, “We can do better and deserve so much more.”

At the end of her remarks she was joined on stage by her husband Doug Emhoff, while the head of the ticket, Biden, stood awkwardly with his wife Jill a good 12 feet away. The two groups waved at each other and at the large overhead Jumbo screen showing a Zoom crowd applauding. No hands joined overhead of the two ticket heads, not in this socially distanced time. With the climactic night to come it all left an air of incompleteness. Or of expectation.

By and large, on the eve of the finale, the Democrats had managed to bring off a passable, even an impressive virtual show. Now, on Night 4, it was up to Joe to deliver. His surrogates, as well as his advance history, had created the profile of a likable, sincere and well-meaning presence. His adversary President Trump, had countered with a gaffe-prone bumbling caricature he called Sleepy Joe.

Thursday night would determine which of those personas would finish up on the stage.

Things didn’t begin all that auspiciously with some cheesy jokes in which Julia Louis-Dreyfus tried to riff on Mike Pence’s “foreign-sounding” name and declared, “I’m proud to be a nasty woman.” Functioning as the evening’s M.C., she would continue to be something of an edgy presence, only fitting into the mood of the Convention at the point later on when she spoke of her bout with cancer, thereby becoming one of the victims for whom Joe Biden is being posited as the hope.

Following a child’s reading of the Pledge of Allegiance, the erstwhile Dixie Chicks — now, post-George Floyd, just The Chicks — did the Star-Spanged Banner, and Sister Simone had to be in there somewhere because Senator Chris Combs thanked her by name when Wolf Blitzer of CNN cued him back in after a station break.

Civil rights icon John Lewis, memorialized upon his death two weeks ago, got one more lengthy reprise, and it seemed appropriate. Still, the evening was mounting toward Joe’s climactic moment, and everything else was patently build-up. Deb Haaland, a Native American member of the House from New Mexico, Cory Booker bloviating, Jon Meacham pontificating, Mayor Pete introducing all the old gang from the Democratic primaries who looked like Hollywood Squares as they traded Joe memories from their places on a Zoom screen.

Michael Bloomberg came on to boost the ticket and excoriate Trump. Smooth and fluent, he went far toward erasing the memory of that flat and defensive debate performance back in the winter that doomed his campaign and prepared the way for the revival of Joe’s.

There was a moment that mesmerized many onlookers when young Brayden Harrington, who met Biden in New Hampshire and was embraced there as a fellow stutterer, worked his way bravely through a reminiscence of the event before what he had to know was a national television audience.

Brayden Harrington

Then we got what looked like a sleepover image featuring the nominee’s four granddaughters, all smiles and fond recollections of their eminent senior kinsman. Steph Curry and his wife and two daughters would add their impressions, and the moment of truth got ever nearer as Biden’s two living children, son Hunter and daughter Ashley, prepared to bring him on with their own recollections.

Ashley is the daughter of second wife Jill, and, Hunter — he of Ukraine fame — is the survivor of two family catastrophes: a car crash that killed Biden’s first wife and a daughter and left both sons hospitalized; and the agonizing death from cancer of brother Beau, an ex-Marine war veteran and state Attorney General in Delaware on his way to higher things when the Reaper intervened.

Joe Biden’s all-too-obvious grief over Beau, coupled with the pummeling Hunter had taken from the Trump crowd, had created inevitably a sense of Hunter as a possible black sheep. He did not appear so Thursday night; in his coming-out before a national audience he looked and sounded like Joe’s son in every particular, more so than Beau in many ways. He was sympathetic and sincere about his dad, and Ashley, a bright presence, was another revelation.

And finally, after we got a filmed bio of the nominee’s life and times, the triumphs and tragedies, along with the curriculum vitae details of his long government service, there he was, all by himself, Joe Biden.

At this point, I am going to presume to borrow from a Facebook post by by former colleague and frequent partner on the campaign trail, Chris Davis:

“Joe did good. Between his lifelong stutter and a real affinity for putting his foot in his mouth, oratory never has been his thing. But tonight’s performance reminded me of the turning point in narrative cinema when filmmakers realized movies were fundamentally different than stage plays. This wasn’t the typical convention where viewers at home watched a public speaking event built to ignite a massive live audience. It has been intimate, if sometimes imperfect. One commentator positively described it as an infomercial, and that’s not a terrible comparison. I’ll continue to hold breath every time I see him on a live mic. But tonight Joe did good, and as several folks have pointed out before me, the medium really worked for him.”

Joe Biden

That’s one way of putting it. And the content of Biden’s speech complemented everything else that had been said and done earlier in the convention — in its concern for the powerless and the victims of injustice, its determination to transcend the Charleston debacle and fat-cat white supremacy and achieve at long last something resembling racial equity; in its defense of beleaguered pubic institutions like the Affordable Care
Act and the Postal Service; in its determination to revive our foreign alliances and confront the adversaries that the Trump administration has ignored or coddled; in its simple avowal that government is meant to serve and protect the American people.

“This is not a partisan moment. This must be an American moment,” Biden said. “This
is our moment to make hope and history rhyme.”

And with that the ticket’s two couples were on stage together again, waving at the applause on the Jumbo Zoom screen and, with obvious delight, turning to face the sky auspiciously exploding in fireworks.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Socialism’s Okay. We Already Have It.

CREDIT: CNN screenshot

It is said that if you’re not a liberal when you’re young, you have no heart, and if you’re not a conservative when you’re old, you have no brain. May I add that if you believe government is always the problem and never the solution, your philosophy needs a reality check.

CNN screenshot

Bernie Sanders

As the 2020 primary season begins and the poor and working classes threaten to coalesce around a “socialist” candidate, the GOP has predictably trotted out its latest version of the Red Scare. And, bless their hearts, Democratic candidates are too terrified or inept to explain what socialism really is. Not to mention that “democratic” socialism, such as that practiced in much of Europe, including Germany, is a system of the people, by the people, and for the people. Which, of course, is what terrifies the powerful.

Democracy is a political system. It is frequently conflated with capitalism, which is an economic system. One can exist without the other, and this obfuscation is no accident. Somewhere in the rugged individualist propaganda is the use of the word “freedom,” which is a well-worn rhetorical device used by conservatives to make sure the inflation-adjusted rate of CEO pay doesn’t keep pace with that of the federal minimum wage.

So, as you step into the voting booth amid this Chicken Little hysteria about the dangers of “gubmint,” please consider the following set of qualifying questions:

Do you live in an enclave of hearty pioneers who dug their own wells rather than rely on a municipal water supply? Do you travel on taxpayer-funded roads? Did you grow all your own food instead of purchasing comestibles inspected by the FDA and the USDA? Was that food nourished by clean air, soil, and water protected by the EPA? If these stores of food are threatened, do you have your own security personnel and have no need to rely on law enforcement? Were your homes built under construction codes designed to protect against an electrical fire? If such a fire occurs, is it extinguished by other residents armed with buckets instead of a fire department? If you live in a flood zone, do you self-insure? If that flood occurs, do you refuse FEMA assistance? Does your outpost have its own sewer system and power grid, too?

Speaking of utilities, does your band of rugged individualists eschew any entertainment that involves satellites? Does whatever news you receive about the socialist horde come from a traveling town crier who brings news of the outside world without any need of the internet?

Were your children born at home without the assistance of university-trained physicians and without modern medicine and equipment developed by government research institutions?

Will your travel plans eliminate using a publicly built airport to travel to a federally operated national park or to visit a war monument commemorating the military fallen who were paid with defense department checks? And if you wish to read what the Founding Fathers actually had to say about our origins, will you refuse to view these documents being housed in a taxpayer-provided facility known as the National Archives?

Long ago and far away, in the mythical America of Republican wet dreams where there existed no federal income tax and few laws constraining behavior, it might have been possible for those who lived in near isolation on a mountaintop to do as they pleased. Curiously, Republicans and libertarians (aka “closet anarchists”) never seem to consider the negative impact of this theoretical citizen if he dumps his garbage on a slope that rainfall sends flowing to his downhill neighbor. Nor does it occur to them that the power of the government is what protects the rights of the minority, including what remedies exist for the guy downhill.

Government can’t do everything, but neither does it achieve nothing. Government creates the thin veneer of civilization that mitigates “might makes right” and, in doing so, protects all of us who aren’t rich enough to purchase our own elected official or private army.  

At the core of the most ardent anti-government zealot is an opportunist who seeks to gain maximum social benefit with a minimum of financial responsibility. A citizen whose true philosophy and definition of socialism can be summed up as “any government largess from which I do not personally benefit.”  

So does that make all of us socialists? Unless your answer to all of the questions above was “no,” the answer to that one is “yes.”

Ruth Ogles Johnson is an occasional contributor to the Flyer.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Democratic Party’s Candidate Cluster

Somehow, “President Hickenlooper” just doesn’t sound right. But then neither does “President Trump.” But the former Colorado governor is one of nearly two dozen candidates running for the Democratic nomination for president in 2020. And despite his state having the No. 1 economy in the nation, Hickenlooper has no real chance of winning.

So why do they do it? Is it to embellish their profiles or just to raise money? And what happens to that money when they invariably drop out? Money talks and bullshit walks these days, so the most cash talks the most trash. Already, records are being broken for fund-raising, and the campaign hasn’t officially started yet. There are so many aspiring Democrats that you can’t tell the players without a program, so in no particular order, here are the top contenders for the opportunity to crush and humiliate the cruelest president in American history.

Joe Biden: Leave it to the Democrats to kneecap the front-runner before the race begins. Biden’s latest controversy comes from former Nevada state assemblywoman Lucy Flores, who has accused the 76-year-old pol of smelling her hair and giving her a “big slow kiss” on the top of her head. Ever seen Biden swearing in new members of Congress with their families? Joe hugs and kisses everyone. He’s just a hands-on guy. Some find it endearing, but Joe has promised to stop giving neck massages and sniffing hair. Biden comes with enough baggage to fill a cargo plane, already: failed runs for president, plagiarism accusations, the Anita Hill circus, his Iraq war vote. In his favor, Biden said of Trump, “I wish we were in high school. I could take him behind the gym. That’s what I wish.” If that event were put on pay-per-view television, we could clear up the national debt. And to his credit, when Biden was Obama’s Veep, it was a big fucking deal.

Bernie Sanders: I thought I was “feeling the Bern,” but it turned out to be just a urinary tract infection. Bernie’s no longer a novelty, so it will be a lot tougher for him to gain traction this go-round, despite raising $18 million and counting. Ever notice how he throws up a lot of “air quotes” when speaking? I can’t watch him anymore without thinking he’s doing a poor impression of Larry David doing an impression of Bernie. Now that Bernie’s ideas have reached the mainstream, who needs a 77-year-old Jewish Socialist from Vermont? Sit down, Gramps, you’re making me nervous and I’m holding a baseball bat.

Beto O’Rourke: Does he charge for those table dances, or does he do them for free? The former Texas congressman is this year’s golden boy, but just coming close to defeating Ted Cruz, the most loathed Senator in Congress, is not enough for a run at the presidency. He’s loved by millennials for being in a punk rock band called Foss, which is the Icelandic word for “waterfall.” As a teen, O’Rourke was in a computer-hacking group known as the Cult of the Dead Cow, named after an abandoned Lubbock slaughterhouse, where his nom de plume was the “Psychedelic Warlord.” Willie Nelson opened for him at a rally outside of Austin where Beto strapped on a guitar and joined the band in a version of “Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die.” He’s been compared to Robert Kennedy, but when you’re still skateboarding at 46, you’re no RFK, sir.

Pete Buttigieg: “Mayor Pete” of South Bend, Indiana, has become a phenom because he’s intelligent and informed, qualities that used to work in your favor. Buttigieg, pronounced  “Boot-edge-edge,” is a tough name to put on a bumper sticker, but he could use the slogan, “Go out on a ledge with Buttigieg.” Mayor Pete speaks seven languages other than English and although he is the first openly gay candidate, he would not be the first gay president. That honor goes to James Buchanan, the “lifelong bachelor” who was often considered the worst president in history until the orange putz emerged. At least he won’t be grabbing anyone by the pussy.

Elizabeth Warren: The Massachusetts Senator already has her nickname from the evil one, “Pocahontas,” for bungling her old family yarns about her alleged Cherokee heritage. But since Orangeface speaks with a forked tongue, she can get past it. Warren is the favorite for taking it to Trump, but the galloping palomino of history might have passed her by in 2016. Still a formidable foe who has suggested breaking up “Big Tech,” which is fine by me. We could use a trust-buster like Teddy Roosevelt, someone who Trump thinks is a Democrat.

Kirsten Gillibrand: Appointed by the New York governor to fill Hillary’s Senate seat, Gillibrand has morphed from a “Blue Dog” Democrat with a 100 percent rating from the National Rifle Association into a “Yellow Dog” Democrat who’s tilted mightily to the left. Known as the main cheerleader for drumming Al Franken out of Congress before it became known that it was a Republican hit job, Gillibrand voted to repeal D.C. laws banning semi-automatic weapons. That translates into no shot for the presidency.

Cory Booker: Rhodes Scholar, former jock at Stanford, vegetarian, and former mayor of Newark, New Jersey, Booker would be our first bald president since Eisenhower, if you don’t count whatever that mess is on Trump’s head. Passionate even when not needed, Booker lived in a low-income housing project called Brick Towers while serving as mayor, so at least he wouldn’t think the White House was a dump. Booker also saved his next-door neighbor from a burning building, making him the first potential Marvel Superhero candidate.

Kamala Harris: A former California prosecutor who made Brett Kavanaugh squirm, Harris would be the perfect candidate to try Trump for his high crimes and misdemeanors. While 27th District Attorney for San Francisco, Harris famously dated the then married mayor Willie Brown. Savvy and politically astute, Harris supports Medicare for all and legalization of marijuana. What’s not to like?

Julian Castro: The former San Antonio mayor is the first Latino candidate, but President Castro? I don’t think so. Too soon. At least he would have a built-in body double. 

Not enough space to get to Amy Klobuchar (mean to her staff), Tulsi Gabbard (first Hindu member of Congress), Eric Swalwell (appeared with a frosted buzz-cut in his high school yearbook and annoying presence on cable TV), or Andrew Yang (do we need another businessman?). There are just too many also-rans when the only objective is to boot Mr. Nasty out of office. The word “orange” has no rhyme, but that’s the color he’ll be wearing when he’s doing time.

My pick for the Democratic ticket: Warren/Harris. Make America Maternal Again, (MAMA).

Randy Haspel writes the “Recycled Hippies” blog.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

No Job For Old Men: Sanders and Biden Shouldn’t Run

CREDIT: JB

The joke among people my age is that every dinner party starts with an organ recital: Who’s lost a gall bladder, got a new kidney, or maybe just replaced a knee? What’s the pain of the day, and who sleeps through the night? Charles de Gaulle said old age is a shipwreck, so the question for the United States is whether it should consider the age of likely presidential candidates who, statistics and experience tell us, stand a pretty good chance of foundering on the rocks of old age.

JB

Bernie Sanders talking to Minnesota, Michigan, and Tennessee delegations on convention’s final day

I’m talking Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. Sanders and Biden are about the same age. Sanders is 77, and Biden 76, and because the next president will be inaugurated in 2021, I can say without fear of persnickety fact-checkers that both men will be almost two years older by then. It is not unlikely, therefore, that the next president of the United States will be well into his 80s before his first term is up. That’s a shocking figure.

Both men are now at about the age when the indomitable Winston Churchill started to hit the wall. He was a mere 77 when King George VI thought of approaching him to suggest he step down. Churchill did not — until a stroke forced him to. The argument here, of course, is that neither Biden nor Sanders lives a Churchillian life — no cigars, no whiskey for breakfast. On the other hand, they are not nearly as articulate.

Government statistics tell us that a man Biden’s age will live an average of 11 more years. He won’t, however, outlive Sanders, who is scheduled to kick five months later. These, though, are statistical averages, and neither Sanders nor Biden is anything of the sort. They are both white, middle-class by birth, and not likely to overdose on drugs, drive drunk, or get into a bar fight with someone wearing a MAGA hat, the dunce cap of our times. I am not sure if Sanders works out, but Biden sure does. I have been to the gym with him.

Vice President Joe Biden

But while looking good may be the best revenge, it isn’t the whole story. The brain ages. It slows down. It forgets. I know men in their 90s — Henry Kissinger comes to mind — who seem as sharp as they’ve ever been, but they are not the rule. It is not necessary to have great mental energy to get elected — President Trump is an intellectual sloth — but it helps. Old age can turn the delight in doing certain tasks into a plodding burden.

The old seek their own comfort zones. I wouldn’t be surprised if Biden thought Snapchat was a breakfast cereal. I wouldn’t be surprised if Sanders thought Drake was the English pirate who defeated the Spanish Armada. (How’s that for being an influencer?) It’s fine not to know about these things, but it suggests an unfamiliarity with a world that is ever-changing. The zeitgeist is forever on the move. When you’re over 70, it may well have passed you by.

Of course, a president need not be intimately familiar with youth culture. But he ought to feel at home in the world and feel that the culture is his, that he need not have to pause to translate a thought into politically acceptable language. I don’t know if either Biden or Sanders feels that way, but if they don’t occasionally hanker for a Beatles tune, they already lack all memory.

Most presidents were in their 50s when elected — mere youths by today’s standards. Most lived many years after leaving office. (Jimmy Carter, at 94, has been out of office for 38 years, a record.) John F. Kennedy was the youngest ever elected at 43, and Trump the oldest to be elected to a first term at 70. The rule here is that there is no rule.

Still, “September Song” has to precede “Hail to the Chief.” It is the lament of an old man for a young woman. It is about the passage of time, about how “the days dwindle down to a precious few.” It is about lost opportunities, about summer turning to autumn, and “one hasn’t got time for the waiting game.”

Biden and Sanders have waited too long. A pledge to serve only a single term would not reverse the clock. It would only hobble the president, making him a lame duck before his time. Of course, the ultimate decision is their own, but they have to know they will probably decline. If they don’t think so, they have gotten old without getting wise.

Richard Cohen writes for the Washington Post Writers Group.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

The Democrats’ Purity Tests Will Only Help Trump

Can you see what is taking shape on the left? That’s the look of liberals forming a circular firing squad to shoot at top Democrats running for the party’s 2020 presidential nomination. 

The Democratic Party is highly unified in its opposition to President Trump. Independent and swing voters also tell pollsters they disapprove of Trump’s policies on taxes, immigration, and race relations. And the Party of Trump — formerly the GOP — lost 40 House seats in the midterms. That political reality makes Trump a weak candidate for reelection.

Juan Williams

But the Democrats still have to find a good candidate with an attractive message to beat even a bad candidate. The president’s supporters can see what’s up. Right-wing websites and Trump cheerleaders on talk radio are attacking possible Democratic candidates as budding socialists who will increase taxes and let every illegal immigrant run across open borders.

Trump’s white, working-class base is being warned on racial grounds that any Democratic nominee will ignore them while playing “identity politics” that favor blacks, Latinos, immigrants, women, and gays.

Trying to divide voters by race is so predictable for Trump’s team. What is surprising is that Democrats are too often fueling the Trump camp’s caricature by insisting on race-based review of their candidates. How painful and ironic will it be if racial debates inside the Democratic Party are allowed to weaken the focus on beating Trump and his racism?

For example, look at the attacks coming from the left against the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination in early polls, former Vice President Joe Biden.

Activists on the far left are bashing Biden for his support of President Clinton’s 1994 crime bill.

That bill had support from the Congressional Black Caucus at the time, being seen as an answer to high crime rates in black neighborhoods. But the old crime bill is now condemned by today’s activists, who take their cues from the Black Lives Matter movement. They fault the bill for pushing more black people into jail as a result of increased sentences for selling crack cocaine, and mandating longer sentences for repeat offenders and violent crime.

Biden is trying to get past this line of attack by asking for forgiveness: “It was a big mistake that was made,” Biden said at a Martin Luther King Day celebration last week in Washington.

Next in line for allegedly failing the racial test is a black woman, California Senator Kamala Harris. Her sin is that she was a prosecutor and California’s attorney general. “To become a prosecutor is to make a choice to align oneself with a powerful and fundamentally biased system,” according to an essay on The Intercept, a liberal website.

Also in line for the gauntlet of race-shaming are white candidates who did not show an interest in racial injustice early enough in their careers. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who supported controversial “stop-and-frisk” police tactics, as well as Senators Kirsten Gillibrand, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren are all vulnerable on this point.

More broadly, this year’s Women’s March was a case study in how explosive racial issues — and, in that case, accusations of being soft on anti-Semitism — can splinter the unity of anti-Trump activists. Blacks, Latinos, and liberal women are at the heart of today’s Democratic base. There are record numbers of Latinos, Asians, and blacks now in Congress, and they are almost all Democrats. Honest debate about racial justice is overdue for both parties.

That debate will happen in the South Carolina primary, the first contest with a high percentage of minority voters. Early attention to that race indicates its importance for any Democrat trying to win the party’s nomination.

Democratic strategists know that Sanders would have beaten Hillary Clinton for the 2016 nomination if he had won more black and Latino votes. Democrats across the racial spectrum have to keep in mind that they have far more in common with each other than they do with Trump, a man whose racist rhetoric and white identity policies are damaging people of every color daily.

After a Black Lives Matter leader refused to talk with President Obama in 2016, Obama made the point that activists sometimes feel “so passionately … they never take the next step and say, ‘How do I sit down and try to actually get something done?'”

The most important “something” to get done right now is beating Trump. As liberal comedian Bill Maher is fond of saying, there is a big difference between a disappointing friend and a deadly enemy.

Juan Williams is an author, and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.

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Editorial Opinion

After the Conventions: On the Plus Side

The Republicans and Democrats have each held their quadrennial conventions and certified their nominees. As tradition would have it, now the American people can sink back into a late-summer torpor, not to fasten their attentions on presidential politics again until Labor Day.

Something tells us this will not be the case in 2016. For one thing, the murderous outrages inflicted on the world by the Islamic State (or, more likely, by copycat amateurs inspired by ISIS) have been happening with such ominous regularity of late that it is hard to imagine the perpetrators humoring the rest of us with a siesta period. And, given both the volume of combustible rhetoric among the Republicans at Cleveland and the resort to something remarkably like jingoism on the Democrats’ last day at Philadelphia, any new international incident or act of terror could swing the sentiment of this country’s voters in an unexpected direction.

In other words, watch out for sudden volatility and mood swings among the electorate. Whatever the polls are telling us about the probable election outcome at any given time is likely, to use the catchphrase of another not-so-distant political time, to become “inoperative.”

Meanwhile, let us take such comfort as we can. There were some silver linings in the storm clouds emanating from the pumped-up oratory of the conventions. The much-vaunted “social issues” that have distorted relations between persons and institutions and classes and tainted our nation’s politics for a generation or more may at last be on the way out. Give Donald Trump this: For all the patent demagoguery that has fueled his unexpected rise to political prominence, The Donald deserves some props for a tip of the hat in his acceptance address to a community of fellow citizens hitherto ignored or ostracized by his party (as they still are in the Comstockian language of the Republican platform). However awkward his bingo-call enunciation of the letters LGBTQ was, he crossed a threshold by the straightforwardness of his acknowledgment. The presence on the GOP dais of an openly avowed gay entrepreneur was another welcome move in that direction.

And on the Democratic side, that glass ceiling of gender discrimination has been exploded at last —by a woman whose personal prowess is so undeniable that even her political enemies have to magnify their claims of high crimes and misdemeanors in an effort to neutralize her. As state Representative Raumesh Akbari of Memphis told the Democratic convention proudly, Hillary Clinton, like her or not, is one bad sister!

One last threshold whose crossing is deserving of mention: There was a time when the word “socialist” was as disqualifying as any word in the American political lexicon. Through his steadfast and spot-on criticisms of the economic inequalities afflicting this nation, Senator Bernie Sanders gave the term new legitimacy and made enough converts to come narrowly close to winning his party’s nomination. Especially given the youthfulness of the new cadres that felt the Bern this year, the chances are excellent that, in election years to come, the economic facts of life can be faced and discussed squarely, without having to work around outmoded taboos in the political vocabulary.

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Politics Politics Feature

Democratic Discontent in Philadelphia

PHILADELPHIA — Unsurprisingly, internal tensions are predominating at this week’s Democratic National Convention — held, ironically, in a city whose name translates from its Greek roots as “city of brotherly love.”
In that regard, the Democrats gathered here face a challenge somewhat similar to one the rival Republicans had to deal with at their own nominating convention last week in Cleveland. In a rough sense, both parties have nominees that a significant part of their membership have doubts about.

In the case of the GOP, that was Donald Trump, the shoot-from-the-lip billionaire and newly minted politician who continues to be anathema to right-of-center Republicans who favored Texas Senator Ted Cruz, as well as a continuing irritant to establishment Republicans in general.

Cruz eased Trump out of his predicament somewhat by making a prime-time convention speech that conspicuously avoided even a wink and a nod toward formally endorsing the nominee. The speech was generally regarded, even by many delegates thitherto loyal to Cruz, as so lacking in elementary class and protocol as to deflate whatever resistance might have been building up against Trump.

The issue in Philadelphia also concerns a case of two rival candidates — former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose nomination for President was a given as the week began, and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, the “democratic socialist” whose challenge to Clinton’s inevitability seemed capable of succeeding at several points during their extended Democratic primary contest.

So close was that race, so late was Sanders’ concession to Clinton, that a WikiLeaks release of hacked emails showing what appeared to have been a concerted effort by DNC officials to slant the outcome toward Clinton threatened to cast asunder the party’s tenuous and newfound sense of unity.

Certainly it galvanized the doubts of disenchanted supporters of Sanders and his call for a political revolution, especially the youth brigades that had come to his support during the primary race in numbers huge and enthusiastic enough to recall the reformist fervor of the 1960s.

And those Sanders followers, along with partisans of Jill Stein of the Green Party, Black Lives Matter activists, and various other representatives of the political left, came together in Philadelphia to form a protest contingent so large and potentially unmanageable as to challenge local law enforcement (heavily augmented by police forces from elsewhere, as was the case in Cleveland).

On Monday, as delegates and other conventioneers inside the Wells Fargo expectantly awaited a prime time address by Sanders, thousands of protesters collected in a fenced-in park area, several miles long, adjacent to the arena, where they bore signs and shouted chants decidedly hostile to Clinton and the D.C. — the mildest of which was “Hell No, DNC, We Won’t Vote for Hillary!”

For all that, the Democratic establishment in Philadelphia, like the Republican establishment in Cleveland, caught a break. But, whereas the stroke of fortune fore GOP had come, as indicated, from the churlishness of the dissidents’ potential leader, Cruz, the deliverance from the Democrats was owing to the good will of Sanders, who acquiesced to Clinton’s victory with a strong statement of support for her in his convention speech, coupled with encouragement to his legions to fall in line.

The only potential mischief coming from Sanders was a statement from the dais congratulating his thousand-plus delegates on the convention floor and the glee he demonstrated in anticipating their votes for him during roll-call time on Tuesday night.

The strong Sanders feeling, and the unease of party members regarding the offending DNC emails released by WikiLeaks, could be observed in meetings of the Tennessee delegation, as well.

In a rousing address to the delegation’s Tuesday breakfast meeting at the Radisson Tower hotel in Valley Forge, one of that morning’s featured speakers, 9th District congressman Steve Cohen, minced no words.

Hailing the Sanders delegates in attendance, Cohen, a Clinton supporter, declared, “It was wrong, what the party did,” and said the responsible DNC members should be fired because “they crossed the line.”

But, said Cohen, “Bernie wants you to be for Hillary.”

The congressman also used the occasion to attack the administration of Republican Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam for what he saw as adulterations to the mission and purpose of the state lottery, which Cohen is acknowledged to have been the father of, as a long-time state Senator prior to his election to Congress in 2006.

Cohen criticized Haslam for freezing the maximum amount of the Hope Scholarships subsidized by the lottery at $4,000 per annum, even as inflation has raised in-state tuition rates to levels far beyond that figure, while meanwhile draining off lottery funds to pay for the free community-college tuition grants under Haslam’s Tennessee Promise initiative.

Arguing that those changes had routed money from a scholarship program that was both need-based and merit-based toward a “needless- and meritless-based” pattern of community-college subsidies, Cohen said the Promise program was created “because Bill Haslam wanted to leave office saying he did something,” and he said flatly “Bill Haslam is a terrible Governor.”

Another Memphian making an impact at the convention and elsewhere is District 91 state Representative Raumesh Akbari, who was scheduled to receive on Wednesday the National Juvenile Justice Network’s 2016 Reformer Award for her leadership efforts in juvenile justice reform.

 
That award was to be part of the Network’s annual forum at the University of Memphis Law School. It was unclear whether Akbari would be able to receive the honor in person, since she began the week as a member of the Tennessee delegation in Philadelphia, where on Thursday, as she will be one of the featured speakers on the main convention stage — one of several chosen to represent her party’s diversity.

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Editorial Opinion

Shelby County Democrats Need to Open Up

Among other significant matters that may go largely unnoticed by the general public this week will be a Thursday night meeting of the Shelby County Democratic Committee. The chief order of business will be the selection of a new chairman for a party that in theory should be the dominant political organization of Shelby County but, on the basis of actual election results for the last several years, manifestly isn’t.

Oh, the Democratic Party may come to look like the dominant local party for at least a week this November, when the county’s voters turn out to elect a president. If tradition holds, a majority of the vote in Shelby County will go for the Democratic nominee, who at this writing would seem to be almost surely former First Lady, Senator, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Of course, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders might somehow still be the beneficiary of a miracle. That would be partly the result of his own impressively over-achieving primary-season campaign and partly the consequence of as yet unforeseen external events — e.g., possible legal complications stemming from the zombie-like email controversy bedeviling frontrunner Clinton. If so, Sanders, too, could probably count on a majority out of Shelby County. The demographics of Shelby County, so largely African-American and working class, favor Democrats (though the Republicans will apparently have a presidential nominee this year whose unpredictable appeal could, er, Trump expectations).

But, if Democrats usually prevail locally in presidential elections, they have fallen into a rut in the quadrennial elections for countywide political office, losing most or all such races and losing them badly. Such has been the case in every county election since the institution of local party primaries in the mid-1990s. In recent years, Democrats have at least managed, by dint of fielding clearly qualified candidates with crossover potential, to win the offices of Shelby County Assessor and General Sessions Clerk in off-year elections. (For what it’s worth, legislative changes in the election cycle leave that clerkship as the only county position on this year’s August 4th ballot.)

What accounts for the discrepancy between the outcomes of local races and those for president? One explanation — and, to be sure, it is controversial — is that, in an age of transformative and fluid political loyalties, local Democrats (or those who have prevailed in the party’s executive committee) have adopted a “closed-shop” view of party membership and have adopted rigid bylaws and policies that make it virtually impossible to attract converts of mixed political backgrounds or to license them to run for office under the party banner. Local Republicans have adopted, by contrast, a relatively “open door” policy, and their ranks teem with former Democrats — one possible explanation for their consistent primacy in races for local political offices.

When the Shelby County Democratic Committee meets to hold its ad hoc reorganization meeting, and beyond that point, for that matter, its members would be well advised to keep this thought in mind. While they’re jibing at Republican presidential candidate Trump for his infamous proposal to build an exclusionary wall, they should be on guard against self-defeating tendencies within their own party in favor of building one.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Appeasing the Bern

What does Bernie Sanders want in exchange for endorsing Hillary Clinton?
And what can Clinton and the Democratic Party give Sanders to get him to campaign aggressively for her in the fall, harnessing the voting power of the passionate, mostly young, white, left-wing voters who favor him?

Obviously, Sanders expects a prime-time speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention. Neither the Clinton camp nor the party’s leadership will have a problem with that demand. But wh

at if he wants to be the vice presidential candidate on a Clinton-led ticket? That’s a reach.

Sanders’ “socialist” label is a liability in a general election. The Vermonter will hurt Clinton’s effort to win support from political moderates, especially older voters. Sanders would also be a bridge too far for Republicans disenchanted by their party’s wild primary season and the prospect of either Donald Trump or Sen. Ted Cruz as the GOP’s presidential candidate.

But if Sanders is not to be made the prospective veep, Democrats will have to find something else to give him. He has exceeded all expectations during the primary season. The depth of his support was underlined by his three strong victories in Alaska, Hawaii, and Washington. And Democrats fear him mounting a third-party run along the lines of the populist campaign run by Ralph Nader in 2000 that arguably gave the White House to George W. Bush.

The heart of this troublesome political puzzle for Democrats is how to get Sanders’ passionate supporters to line up behind Clinton. In early March, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found a third of the people voting for Sanders saying they “cannot see themselves voting for Hillary Clinton in November.” The Nation magazine reported recently that “nearly 60,000 people have signed the ‘Bernie or Bust’ pledge,” vowing to remain loyal to him even if Clinton wins the nomination.

President Obama is now getting involved in this escalating debate. According to The New York Times, the president privately told Texas Democrats that Sanders’ continuing campaign against Clinton stalls party organizers, donors, and activists from getting started on beating the GOP in the fall campaign.

The president and leading Democrats in Congress are all but calling for Sanders to get out of the race now. The Democrats’ unstated anxiety is that Clinton, while a clear winner among primary voters, does not set the campaign trail on fire. Sanders and Trump, the leading candidate for the GOP nomination, are arsonists by comparison. Sanders has continued to condemn a “corrupt campaign finance system which is undermining American democracy.” Clinton’s campaign is taking money from political action committees while Sanders’ is not.
Sanders is also casting an unfavorable light on Clinton by celebrating the “energy and excitement” of his crowds and claiming that it is because “we are telling the truth.” He does not mention Clinton, but the comparison is obvious, if implicit.

Sanders’ big issue is income inequality. He continues to accuse Clinton of being too close to Wall Street, further arguing that this makes it implausible that she will rein in wealthy bankers and hedge-fund managers. It is easy to see how his followers might be convinced Clinton is the no-change, establishment candidate and become permanently turned off to her.

Sanders’ lack of formal connection to the Democratic Party is another part of the problem. At an Ohio town hall meeting, he admitted having considered running for president as an independent but decided to run as a Democrat because “in terms of media coverage, you have to run within the Democratic Party.”

Last year, former New York Congressman Anthony Weiner (D), whose wife Huma Abedin is a top Clinton aide, publicly expressed the reservations Democratic insiders still have about Sanders.

“What exactly does he think he’s doing in a Democratic presidential primary?” Weiner wrote in Business Insider last July. “Why is he asking for the nomination of a party he always avoided joining? Now he wants to not only be a member of the party but its standard bearer?”

To bring Sanders inside the camp, Democrats will have to do more than make him a TV star at the convention. They will also have to put Clinton, union organizers, and money behind his issues, creating a permanent movement inside the party for a living wage, for lower-cost college education, and a sharper critique of Wall Street.

The party is going to have to buy into Sanders if they want him to buy into them.

Juan Williams is an author and political analyst for Fox News Channel. His latest book is We the People.