Tag: James Carville

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Whoa, Nelly!

CREDIT: New Jersey State Police

“Dr. [Manoj] Jain … provided his estimates on cases and hospitalizations thru December and believes we will see an average of 230 daily new cases and a 240 daily hospital average in July; 360 and 360 in August; 500 and 550 in September; 620 and 700 in October; 670 and 780 in November; and 620 and 740 in December.”

This is from a media briefing I received on July 3rd on the Shelby County COVID-19 situation. To say it is sobering is an understatement. If these numbers are anywhere near on-target, it’s clear that we will be dealing with this nightmare of a pandemic well into 2021, with around 95,000 cases in Shelby County by year’s end. All the blue-sky talk about schools opening and football and basketball seasons beginning looks a little sketchy right now. We are already matching Dr. Jain’s projected July numbers and then some, hitting 400 new cases on some days.

New Jersey State Police

In early May, after several weeks of a “stay at home” mandate, Shelby County’s infection rate dropped to 4 percent and its new case numbers were leveled off. We flattened the curve. Now, two months later, the infection rate is consistently over 10 percent — and rising steadily, week over week. We got the horse into the barn for a little while, then we opened the door and said “Please don’t go into the pasture, Nelly.” That policy of hoping for self-restraint has been an epic failure. Mainly because too many Americans resemble the back-end of a horse, including our president.

It’s not like there isn’t a blueprint for how to stop this thing. Most countries figured it out and are now getting back to normal life, while in the U.S. we’re looking at another six months of pandemic. In New York and New Jersey, state leaders, led by Governor Anthony Cuomo, also figured it out: Test as much as possible, lock down everything, trace every infection, keep the public informed with daily briefings. Even so, New York was filling truck trailers with bodies and turning non-COVID patients away from hospitals before it got the disease under control. Most New Yorkers are still wearing masks. They learned their lesson.

Unfortunately, there is no Governor Cuomo in sight below the Mason-Dixon line. Hospitals are already near or at capacity in large areas of Texas, with infection rates climbing every day. Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city, is about to look like New York did in March. Florida’s infection rates and death totals are surging, with many more to come. Meanwhile, here in Tennessee, Governor Bill Lee stands on the capitol steps shouting, “Nelly, come home!” as the state he “leads” lurches into the top 10 of infection rates nationwide.

In 1992, Democratic strategist James Carville coined the phrase, “It’s the economy, stupid,” while managing Bill Clinton’s campaign against George Bush the Elder. Bush had led the country in a brief but popular invasion of Kuwait, and his popularity stood at 90 percent afterward. Then the economy slipped, all other issues faded in importance, and Clinton took the presidency — though it didn’t hurt that mavericky Ross Perot siphoned off some GOP voters from Bush.

Now, almost 30 years later, the American economy is a dumpster fire, due almost entirely to the pandemic. It simply won’t recover unless this disease gets put back in the barn. The two are inextricably interlocked. Statues are a diversion. Antifa is a diversion. “Riots” are a diversion. “Leftist protestors” are a diversion. Donald Trump’s racist tweets and daily incoherence are a diversion.

It’s the pandemic, stupid.

Nothing gets back to “normal” until we beat this thing. If, instead of raging about statues while standing beneath Mt. Rushmore, the president had made a simple plea for all Americans to wear masks, he would have saved countless lives in coming weeks — and, ironically, likely improved his election chances.

Investment firm Goldman Sachs just released a study showing that a national mask mandate would raise the number of people who wear masks by 15 percent and would lower the infection rate nationwide to .6 percent. This is no bleeding-heart liberal dogma. Goldman Sachs is advocating a mask mandate for purely capitalistic reasons: It would prevent the country from having to shut down the economy again. Goldman Sachs says masks are good for business.

As has been made abundantly clear, there will be no national leadership on the COVID front. States and cities are on their own. You and I and our friends and family are on our own. Mask up. Our health — and our economy — depends on it.

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Editorial Opinion

It’s Still the Economy, Stupid

So, all right, what happened? Hillary Clinton was supposed to win. And we mean that word in its original sense — as a close cousin to the word “assumed.” Everybody so supposed — not just Democrats, but a substantial number of Republicans, as well, including Donald Trump himself, who in his day-after photo op with President Obama in the Oval Office, had that deer-in-the-headlights look that we associate with the rudest of shocks.

Let us posit this as a truism: If you’re the Democratic nominee running for President, you should not only use previous presidents of your party as surrogates on the stump, you should — very clearly and seriously — take their advice on strategy.

In the aftermath of Hillary Clinton’s defeat, it got leaked about that her very husband, former President Bill Clinton, had advised strongly that she hit the rust-belt states of Michigan, Wisconsin, et al. hard in the last days of the campaign, not only with her physical presence but with specific reference to the hardships of economic privation and depressed wages and job opportunities in those states and with even more specific remedies for those circumstances.

To their everlasting discredit, the powers-that-be in her campaign dismissed this advice — presumably as something old-fashioned and left over from Bill Clinton’s own former successes with those themes in those states.

Remember, “It’s the economy, stupid”?

Well, it was the economy, still. Nobody in charge seemed to remember that Secretary Clinton’s Democratic primary opponent, Bernie Sanders, defeated her in those states with those issues. Nobody in charge seemed to imagine that her Republican opponent could defeat her in the same states with the same issues. But he did.

Instead, the Clinton campaign seemed fixated on the concept of Donald Trump as misbehaver and sexual marauder and devoted her late TV advertising almost entirely to that idea — hoping, it would seem, that the suburban professional classes that the campaign was focused on instead would be affronted by evidence of Trump’s boorishness and could thereby be weaned away from their Republican voting habits.

As an example of just how amnesiac the Clinton campaign was, nobody seemed to recall that daily accusations of sexual impropriety, followed up with an actual impeachment, had failed utterly to dent the public popularity of the aforesaid President Bill Clinton in 1998. That was the year, post-Monica Lewinsky, when the Democrats went on, after all the GOP’s fuss and moralistic bluster, to run up numerous successes in the off-year congressional elections.

This was just one mistake by the Hillary Clinton campaign, but it was a fundamental one. Not all the largesse from big-money donors in the world (and her campaign got much of it, vastly more than Trump) could substitute for the kind of focus on working-class economic issues that has guided every victorious Democratic national campaign from FDR on. The section of the voting population that Mitt Romney so arrogantly called “the 47 percent” is still the source of Democratic victories.

There is no “Stronger Together” without this component. There is no Together at all.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Tennessee Democrat and Republican Parties Both Facing Change

CREDIT: Nancy Chase

Even as the nation’s two major political parties, on the eve of their quadrennial confrontation, each struggle on a national scale with the task of redefinition, so do the same two parties in Tennessee.

In the nation at large, Democrats are still (technically) in the act of choosing between two would-be exemplars — one, Hillary Clinton, a seasoned and well-known figure touting the values of diversity and equal opportunity; the other, Bernie Sanders, a self-defined Democratic socialist focusing on the need for a “political revolution” to moderate the economic inequalities of a system rigged to benefit the wealthy.

Here and there, the differences between those two candidates (who, it should be said, have much in common) is seen clearly. In that sense, the Democrats are lucky. The Republicans have, in the course of primary races that were both numerous and confusing, found their choice ready-made — in Donald J. Trump, a wildly successful Manhattan real estate billionaire and a man whose views and attitudes toward most policy matters are, for better or for worse, vague and ever-fluctuating, clearly subordinate to the dictates of an undeniably unique personality.

The two state parties have, both within the last week, just concluded their annual banquets in Tennessee, events which are meant to define them to their respective constituencies. Paradoxically, each of the Tennessee parties veered in a rhetorical direction counter to that of the national parties they represent.

The Democrats held their annual Jackson Day Dinner in Nashville, Saturday before last, and their keynoter, the well-known consultant James Carville, made no mystery about who was likely to emerge from the ongoing Clinton-Sanders contest.

Nancy Chase

Carville at Nashville

Recounting for the party faithful at the state capital’s impressive new Music City Center a public encounter he had just had with a GOP opposite number of sorts, Karl Rove, Carville related how he teased Rove with the statement, “I believe the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party has the experience, the temperament, and the judgment to be president of the United States from Day One” (clearly a description of former First Lady, Senator, and Secretary of State Clinton) and followed that up with a challenge: “Karl, tell us about the Republican nominee.” In Carville’s telling, anyhow, Rove could not respond in kind, but merely sputtered out the familiar attack phrases which Republicans habitually aim at candidate Clinton — FBI investigation, emails, Benghazi, etc.

The Republicans had gotten themselves “stuck” with Trump, a political anomaly, as a direct consequence of their having misled their basic constituency for a generation, Carville said, mentioning such notions as that President Obama was born in Kenya, that the planet Earth dated back only 5,000 years, that there was no such thing as global warming, that there had been weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and that giving millionaires tax cuts would balance the budget.

“When people rise up and start believing all this nuttiness, why are you surprised? Let them believe whatever they want to. And anything Trump says, they believe it because they’ve been conditioned to believe it.”

Carville proclaimed that “our diversity is our strength.” He expressed pride that “my party nominated the first African-American candidate for president and will nominate the first woman.” He followed that with another dig at the GOP: “And no, you don’t get credit for Sarah Palin. Sorry.”

Carville’s de facto celebration of Clinton, his party’s still unchosen but likely nominee, contrasted with the Tennessee Republicans’ mum’s-the-word approach, at their annual Statesman’s Dinner at the selfsame Music City Center, this past Friday, toward Trump, a candidate whose nomination is virtually signed, sealed, and delivered already.  

Tellingly, in view of Carville’s apotheosis of Clinton, the Republicans’ choice of a keynoter was another woman, Governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina, an unmistakably conservative office-holder but one who, in her own way, as the daughter of Indian immigrants, also stands for diversity, and who, in the past year, has made headlines by a) removing the Confederate flag from its former place of honor at her state Capitol building, and b) refusing, so far, to endorse Trump.

And, though he was the elephant in that room as in the nation’s media, Trump was roundly ignored in the evening’s rhetoric. The late U.S. Senator Fred Thompson was honored with due praise, as were the two living GOP Senators, Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker, as was Governor Bill Haslam and the retiring Lieutenant Governor Ron Ramsey, and as were numerous exemplars of the party’s legislative super-majority and command of the state’s congressional delegation.

Though he surely had support here and there in the room, Trump remained at best an X factor, an unknown on the other side of whom, chronologically, were such future-tense bench hopes as Haley.

Though she did not refer to the fact, keynoter Haley was the avowed target, outside the arena, of protesters, garbed in Confederate gray and waving rebel battle flags to demonstrate their outrage at her apostasy. The Republican brass inside surely had to be pleased by this semiotic hint that — on this matter, anyhow — they were on the right side of history.

Whatever its fate in the nation at large (“We’re looking at a 162-year-old political party literally cracking up right in front of us,” Carville said), the GOP seems destined to remain the ruling force in Tennessee for some time to come, though the Democrats had scored a coup of sorts by giving one of their major honors, the Anne Dallas Dudley Political Courage Award, to a couple who had distinguished themselves by fighting hard on behalf of Insure Tennessee, a Medicaid expansion plan proposed by Republican Governor Haslam but so far rejected by his party mates in the General Assembly.

For all their different directions — the Tennessee GOP still hewing to its historic distrust of social programs and ameliorist government in general, their Democratic counterparts continuing to see themselves as tribunes of the powerless — there are points of contact in the political middle. If the GOP members of the Tennessee General Assembly should, post-presidential-election, see fit finally to humor Haslam on the health-care matter, it will be through the medium of a task force appointed by Republican House Speaker Beth Harwell, whose power moves will doubtless fill some of the vacuum left by Ramsey’s departure.

Harwell, who is rumored to have gubernatorial ambitions, may, in fact, become the face of the Tennessee Republican Party in much the way that Tennessee Democratic Party chair Mary Mancini (whose GOP opposite number is Ryan Haynes, a male genotype) has become that of her party.

The Tennessee GOP boasts a fair number of women in office, although, truth is, it is miles behind the Tennessee Democratic Party in forms of diversity having to do with race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. Still, there is a political middle, and, with any luck at all, it may get filled up at some point in the respective reconstructions just now beginning to occur in the two major political parties. 

There are signs of changes in both, locally as well as nationally. The GOP’s dominant business-minded faction is under challenge from the very uprooted populists it has seduced away from the Democrats, while the Clinton/Sanders yin-yang will play out for years — a difficult wrangle but, in the end, a necessary one.