Anti-maskers among Idaho anti-vaxxers, here. Interesting, but not critically so.
Enviro - an oil spill not in major mainstream reporting, but as awful as oil spills are, here.
The item prompting the link over to the NYMag item, here, mostly about Trump's campaign "retooling" with extensive NYMag quoting (later at Crabgrass differing quoting from that lengthy item which is fine and worth reading, for those liking to find time for lengthy analyses); here. Seguing from Trump matters to this ending:
Almost all Democrats I know-- basically I know progressive Democrats-- abhor Biden's record. They're going to mostly hold their noses and vote for him-- a vehicle for saving the country from Trump and Trumpism. Not the #NeverTrumpers. They're enthusiastic. Biden's lifelong fiscal conservatism is just what they want in a president. Just ask Susan Molinari. "When Joe Biden makes a commitment, he always sees it through," the narrator says in this new Lincoln Project ad. Does that mean that we're about to vote someone in who is going to kill Social Security and Medicare?
After that final paragraph, by embedding, linked here via YouTube posting, "Dad."
Watching "Dad" shows what DC hucksters get big bucks to churn out, in length beyond the 30 sec negative "essence of dread" negative stuff run on TV. Three minutes to say, ignore Biden's GOP-lite political career, he's an okay family guy [juxtaposing but not mentioning Trump by name or even direct insinuation]. One advantage of "Dad" on YouTube is the utterly obsequious comment stream the producers of "Dad" likely bought and seeded, or at least encouraged. Seeing obsequiousness up close and unwavering is - an experience which strong-stomached readers are encouraged to try.
VOTE DAD!
That said as the obligatory Trump must go part of the post - on to NYMag/Intelligencer Trumpster analysis, forensically reported, excerpted mid-item here, after Trump booted Brad P in favor of Bill S, with JK a unifying theme:
[...] Stepien kept moving up — George W. Bush in ’04; then to the RNC; Rudy Giuliani in ’08; then, when that didn’t work out, John McCain. In 2009, he ran Chris Christie’s gubernatorial campaign and his reelection after that.
Republicans talk about “the Bob Franks school of politics” — or at least in New Jersey they do. Franks was a congressman, and Stepien had been his driver when he ran, unsuccessfully, for the U.S. Senate in 2000. “Bill Stepien learned about politics from Bob Franks,” one person who worked with Stepien on campaigns in New Jersey told me. “Bob had these rules: ‘Which message to which group of voters gives you 50 percent plus one?’ Bill learned politics that way.”
Stepien, once a part-time Zamboni driver who played forward for the Rutgers Scarlet Knights — “Pretty good on the puck,” said Sean Spiller, now the mayor of Montclair, who remembered winning a championship with Stepien — thought campaigns looked fun, like a sport. A second person who worked with Stepien in New Jersey said the experience taught him an unexpected lesson about how to find the best operatives: “Only hire hockey players, because they beat the crap out of some guy they don’t know just because it’s part of some game they’re playing.”
His beliefs were besides the point: “He didn’t care if every Republican in the state lost — as long as his guy won. He was a Republican by virtue of his environment. He held the right in considerable disdain. I would say he was fairly centrist — but he wasn’t driven by ideology. He never was. Politics was a sport for him. Had his first opportunity been to work for a Democrat, he’d be a Democrat.”
But while replacing Parscale with Stepien has the look of a reboot, at the strategy level it does not seem much has changed or is likely to. Asked how the campaign can formulate a coherent message, given what life is like for most people across the country today, senior adviser Jason Miller said, “It’s very direct: President Trump built the greatest economy in the history of the world, and he’s doing it again.”
(italics added - more looking at that "coherent message" later, but continuing to excerpt):
[...] Asked to describe the way things are different now, campaign officials use strange jargon, referencing “org charts” and “building out middle management” and, above all, “structure.” Structure is the word they use the most. There’s more of it now, or something. This is supposed to be good, though not everyone feels that way. Some veterans of the 2016 race are wistful for what felt, to them, like the beautiful mess that made them who they were, winners against all odds. They didn’t know what they were doing, and there was an honesty to that, since it was kind of the whole pitch to voters.
“We’ve cleaned up — I don’t want to say the mess of — 2016. But we did things on the fly then. If you were like, ‘I wanna take a certain constituency on a bus tour around the country,’ they’d be like, ‘Sure!’ Now, there’s actually a strategy behind it,” a campaign official told me.
Having served as deputy campaign manager under Parscale, Stepien had observed the operation closely, and he had ideas about how to make things slightly better. He moved the countdown clock displaying the number of days until the election in front of the elevators so that it would be the first thing staffers saw when they arrived to work. He decided to give out an Employee of the Week award, something inspired by his political mentor, Mike DuHaime, who’d given out awards to his team when he ran Giuliani’s campaign in 2008. Stepien’s first Employee of the Week received a MAGA hat signed by Donald J. Trump himself. The employee was so moved by the honor that she cried.
With the exception of the time Vice-President Mike Pence came to visit, there had never been a meeting at HQ that included the entire staff — and Stepien noticed this. He is, you could say, the kind of guy who likes meetings. He planned to hold all-hands meetings every week for the rest of the campaign. The first would be the morning after his promotion was announced. Throughout the night, he thought about what he wanted to tell the staff, and he settled on this: Everything each of them was doing every minute of the day should be in the service of winning the vote. They should envision every day from now until Election Day as “a series of individual campaigns” and “to win every single day.” He said he would not tolerate being “outworked” by Biden’s campaign.
----------snip--------
If I just woke you up in the middle of the night and told you a guy who is deeply involved in Bridgegate is now calling himself campaign manager for Donald Trump, you wouldn’t have said, ‘You’re kidding me! I’m shocked. How did that happen?,’ ” Stuart Stevens said with a laugh. You’d have said, Of course.
Stevens is a veteran of Republican presidential campaigns whose latest book, It Was All a Lie, is about his newfound realization — at 67 years old — that his life’s work was a mistake. As he sees it, Trump has a “management philosophy” that has guided him from the Trump Organization to the 2016 campaign to the White House and now to the campaign for reelection. “What Trump does is take people who are mediocre talent at best, who know they could never have the position they have if it were not for Trump, and it creates this instant loyalty to Trump. When you look at Trumpworld, it’s all these people who weren’t involved in presidential races, and it wasn’t because they didn’t want to be; it was because nobody would hire them. It’s not like Steve Bannon woke up one day and said, ‘I think I’d like to get involved in campaigns!’ Or Corey Lewandowski, all of these people. It’s how you end up with Brad Parscale. Top professionals won’t work for you.”
The idea had always been for Bill Stepien to run a presidential race — but it was supposed to be Chris Christie’s. In the three years between Election Night in Asbury Park and Election Night in Trump Tower, however, all did not go as planned for the boss or his broker. It seems rather silly now, like a story about the Gotti family if they lived in Whoville, but the allegation that Christie ordered the closing of access lanes to the George Washington Bridge in order to exact revenge on a Democratic mayor who didn’t endorse him was such big news that it acquired its own gate.
To save himself, Christie fired who he had to — including Stepien, who had referred to the mayor of Fort Lee as “an idiot” in messages obtained by the press, and who most people who knew anything about his position suspected knew about the plot. Christie announced that he was “disturbed by the tone and behavior and attitude of callous indifference” shown by Stepien and that reading the messages “made me lose my confidence in Bill’s judgment.” [...]
Under the belief that his idiot staffers cost him his shot at the White House, Christie “did everything he could” to “salt the earth” for them, ensuring they wouldn’t have political careers after they were fired, according to the second person close to the administration. “I can’t fault the guy for working for Trump. He’s gotta make a living. And it’s ironic, right? He ended up running a presidential campaign.” A senior official in the Trump administration said that when Kushner first tried to hire Stepien as field director during the 2016 Republican primary, Corey Lewandowski, who was then campaign manager, called Christie, who was still running for the nomination himself, and Christie helped Lewandowski convince Trump that Stepien was a bad idea, overruling Kushner. It was only later, when Lewandowski had been fired and Christie had dropped out and endorsed Trump, that Kushner was able to hire Stepien. (Lewandowski denies this happened, and another source involved in the discussions said that Christie never had anything bad to say about Stepien and never tried to prevent him from being hired by any campaign; but a third source with knowledge of the conversations affirmed the senior official’s account was “100 percent” true.)
“When he kicked Bill to the curb and ran everyone else over with the bus, he thought he’d finished Bill,” the first person close to the Christie administration said. “Jared had a huge role in bringing in Bill and trusting Bill for no other reason than he hates Christie too.”
Christie hadn’t fired Kushner or humiliated him by publicizing private details about his sex life — even worse, Christie had humiliated Kushner’s father. As the U.S. Attorney in 2004, Christie went after Charlie Kushner, a powerful real-estate developer and Democratic donor, in an investigation that would tear his family apart. Kushner pleaded guilty to 18 counts of illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering (he’d retaliated against his brother-in-law, who was cooperating with investigators, by hiring a prostitute to seduce him, filming the encounter, then sending the tape to his sister. Pretty intricate and amazing stuff, if you ask me, and Charlie, if you’re reading this, I’d love to take you out for lunch). He was sentenced to two years in prison, of which he served 14 months in Montgomery, Alabama. Jared, then a student at NYU, flew to visit him every weekend, and for years after he got out, Jared reportedly used a wallet his dad had made him while he was inside. “Well, the election is not today!” he said. “We haven’t had our debates and our convention yet. It’s sort of a fantasy guess.”
Seeing a path to Trump’s reelection doesn’t actually require fantasy. If the pandemic subsides, if the debates wound the challenger, if the polling narrows a bit, the hidden Trump voter — if such people exist — and the design of the Electoral College may be enough. If circumstances get slightly less bad, if the president forms a habit of making things worse a little less often, if he gets a little luck just one more time, he could pull this off again. Maybe Kanye West, or doubts about the official results of the election, or ratfucking the Postal Service, or birtherism directed at Kamala Harris is all the campaign strategy Trump needs.
But while Stepien has focused August ad spending in battleground states with early voting, effectively trying to stall the race long enough for the national picture to change, few on the campaign he’s running seem to be thinking in strategic terms at all, never mind enough to generate the kind of miracle the president needs. Instead, they seem to think that if they got lucky the last time, and proved the conventional wisdom wrong, maybe they’ll just happen to get lucky again.
And Trump does believe in luck — of course he does. “The president is superstitious,” one senior White House official told me, explaining why so many characters from 2016 seemed to suddenly come back for the final stretch of 2020. “I think what people miss about him is he’s more patient than he seems.”
*This article appears in the August 17, 2020, issue of New York Magazine. Subscribe Now!
And so ends the excerpt. Nobody's right because everybody's wrong. Back to that italicized "very direct" message bit; in a post trashing critical of a part of the other party's virtual convention, "Michelle Obama, professional spinmeister" - dated August 18th, 2020, one Republican blogger posted:
[...] Another act of division was when he was asked about a police arrest of a college professor. President Obama said “I don’t know what happened. I just know that the police acted stupidly.” Mrs. Obama, does that sound like a man of empathy to you? It doesn’t sound like it to me. It sounds like a man stoking the fires of racial tension.
When it comes to increasing racial tensions, President Obama was skilled at throwing gas on raging racial fires. That’s what he did in Ferguson. He bought the “Hands up, don’t shoot” BS hook, line and sinker. Racial tensions didn’t start during the Trump administration. They started with Cambridge, then got stoked with Ferguson, then Baltimore.
Mrs. Obama said that President Trump is in over his head. That’s an outright lie. Here’s President Trump’s Twitter reply to that statement:
….My Administration and I built the greatest economy in history, of any country, turned it off, saved millions of lives, and now am building an even greater economy than it was before. Jobs are flowing, NASDAQ is already at a record high, the rest to follow. Sit back & watch!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 18, 2020
If those having lost jobs (and healthcare coverage with the job loss) weigh that "great economy" sloganeering, with then 160,000 lives lost and building to greater numbers - three times the death toll in U.S. lives lost in Vietnam - then this born again great rejuvenated economy to evolve and take worry away (with McConnell stalling worker help because other Senate Republicans don't want an "incentive" against getting behind the mule in the morning to plow among workers they see as a low work-ethic work force needing a goad instead of a secure safety net); if that narrative sells, the Republicans could be correct and Trump could win by holding his elderly white and evangelical base, (at least the Fallwell Jr. preach and count proceeds segment), that message could hoodwink enough others to again prevail on electoral college votes.
Likelihood and possibility differ, but Trump did win once against DC and media talking-head punditry and guesses, so never say "never," after that. But the main message of that video segment is you serve the grassroots over the donors, or you lose to the likes of Donald J. Trump.
Biden/Harris doing that? You make that call. November 3, or better, earlier via safe and sane mail-in balloting, the balloting Trump and McConnell Republicans are trying to kill as if a vampire threatening to suck out their lifeblood. Vote early. Pop the popcorn, and watch.
UPDATE: One thing raising curiosity, did the Republican blogger quoted above as against the Michelle Obama speech actually watch it, or did he get talking points down stream from campaign voices who may also have highlighted a view that the Trump tweet was the message, the remainder of the post serving as table setting?
Great economy, flying pigs as never before, etc. fails to ring my bell, but Joe Biden does not do so either. Pop the popcorn. Wait. See. Back in March we have the Congressional Black Caucus backing Biden, yet among black women with grassroots cred, he looked or seems to have looked for and chosen sizzle instead of steak. Harris is a ticket addition. The ticket, however, is Joe Biden; "Dad" for the Lincoln Project Republicans, and they know donor will better than I do. They serve donor will, they know donor will, and the Congressional Black Caucus backed Eliot Engel over the primary winner ousting Engel.
Grassroots matter. More than Kamala does.
But, this, all implications, contradictions and convolutions, might matter too. It is what Biden/Harris and reluctant supporters per the enemy of my enemy thinking may need to vanquish, or at least down size, to dump Trump.
Just remember; 2016, now, 2020; Bernie would have won.
FURTHER: Back to DWT recent posting, last sentence above segues:
Going Forward... What's The Democratic Party Going To Be?
No one knows what's going to happen, but it would be a safe bet that Americans aren't going to have a chance to vote for a real progressive for president in a very long time, probably longer than I'll be a sentient being. Or maybe not. Maybe Biden and the Democrats will screw up so badly that the Democrats lose Congress in 2022 and then the Democrat in the White House in 2024-- whether Biden or Kamala-- loses to a Republican who also screws up. So 2028... I may still be walking around and sentient. My grandmother was at that age.
But... I still feel cheated. I so wanted one damned good great president in my life. Instead they've all be mediocre at best and, more frequently, piles of stinking, rotting garbage. I wanted to see Bernie win so badly. It wasn't in the cards-- the Democratic establishment made certain of that.
Yesterday, Washington Post reporters Robert Costa and Sean Sullivan wrote about an interview they did with Bernie on Sunday. They predicted that Bernie's DNC speech last night "will effectively close an improbable odyssey-- two bids for the White House that together formed the backbone of a new, insurgent liberal movement." Thanks in great part to Bernie, Medicare-for-all, free college tuition, the Green Anew Deal and a chastening of the nation’s financial elite have all come to the fore of a grassroots Democratic Party-- and have pulled even a horribly corrupt status quo establishment slightly to the left and, perhaps put the breaks on a corrosive drift toward more-centrist views that have been been dominant since the Clinton DLC wing of the party managed to take over and change the focus from working class to managerial and donor class.
They quoted Bernie: "Ideas that we raised in health care, in education, in the minimum wage, in climate change, in criminal justice were ideas five years ago that people perceived to be radical and extreme. Today they are mainstream, and today they are actually being implemented by states and communities around the country."
They saw the slot allotted by Biden to AOC as a kind of passing of the torch. That's OK but there's more to it than that. I think I saw just about every Velvet Underground live performance in New York. They were my favorite live band when they were first getting going. There are many claimants to this but I think Michael Stipe first said, "not that many people ever bought that first Velvets album, but everyone who did started a band." And thank God they did. And not that many people saw that first Ramones national tour-- but it was Howie Klein (not the thieves who stole it as their own) who compared them Johnny Appleseed and noted that everyone around the country who went to see them started their own punk band.
AOC isn't the only political heir of Bernie's but one who even Biden was unable to deny at least 60 seconds of speaking time during his convention. But think of all the people Bernie has inspired who are now serving or will soon be serving at every level of government and who are committed to the somewhat revolutionary approach he imbued in a whole generation of Democrats.
[...] "Sanders-style left-wing populism," wrote Costa and Sullivan, "is gaining power throughout Europe and the Americas, at times replacing an older guard of liberals who embraced globalization. Across Western democracies, campaigns rooted in passionate emotion and grievance have won mass followings. 'I’m very proud. I am very proud of the movement that we have built,' Sanders said. 'The younger generation is overwhelmingly progressive, and they want to see their government function in a different way than in the past.' Sanders pointed to Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), two allies who recently won congressional primaries, as evidence of a healthy and competitive left flank inside the Democratic Party."
In the eyes of his core backers, Sanders came agonizingly close to seizing control of the Democratic Party with his strong showings in the initial contests of the 2016 and 2020 campaigns. There were days when they thought he would be unstoppable.
But it didn’t pan out four years ago, as Hillary Clinton scooped up victories and support from superdelegates-- and as Sanders grew furious with the Democratic National Committee. Nor did it work out earlier this year when former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg muddied Sanders’s plans for a clean-cut victory in the Iowa caucuses and a politically hobbled Biden suddenly revived his campaign in South Carolina, in part because of alarm in corners of the party about a Sanders nomination.
Sanders and his supporters are trying to learn from his success during the 2020 primary campaign in courting young voters in Iowa and Latino voters in Nevada-- and from his stumbles, particularly with Black voters who rallied around Biden in March.
Exit polls showed that the struggles Sanders experienced among Black voters four years ago against Clinton largely continued. Sanders’s fervent push to broaden the electorate with new voters was never realized.
Sanders’s supporters argue that campaigns come and go but that ideas move glacially. And history has precedent for movement campaigns having a long-term impact. In 1964, conservative Barry Goldwater lost the presidential election in a landslide. But his campaign laid the ideological groundwork for his supporter Ronald Reagan to win the White House 16 years later.
If the United States eventually moves toward democratic socialism in the coming years, Sanders will deserve significant credit for mounting campaigns that pulled the Democrats to the left, said Abdul El-Sayed, a Michigan-based liberal organizer.
“He didn’t only take on the establishment but the governing consensus in America that markets are the answer,” El-Sayed said. “He drove the conversation that we are all having. He lost two elections, but he won the future in the sense that the party is now a lot browner, blacker and younger and sounds like Bernie Sanders.”
Faiz Shakir, who served as Sanders’s campaign manager in 2020, said the defeats were not rejections of the senator’s ideas but a product of a “party in transition.”
“There is no question the kinetic energy and dynamism in the Democratic Party is with progressives. But the party is in transition,” generationally and politically, Shakir said, “and you’re going to have fits and starts.”
...Biden, who once fashioned his candidacy as a vessel to restore political norms and bolster institutions, has started sketching out a more transformational-style presidency that would seek to marshal a sweeping response to the coronavirus pandemic, a severe economic crisis and racial upheaval.
“What we’re seeing is more than lip service,” said Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), who served as a national co-chair on the Sanders campaign. “The Biden team has been very intentional about listening to not just Bernie Sanders but a lot of his key policy advisers.”
Some Sanders activists have refused to join with the senator in offering the former vice president their unequivocal support, underscoring the importance of Sanders’s pitch for unity on the convention’s opening night.
In a column for the socialist magazine Jacobin, former Sanders adviser David Sirota mocked the task-force rollout as “an SNL skit.”
“They are a mix of party dinosaurs, corporate zombies and some terrific progressive voices,” Sirota wrote of the group members.
Over the weekend, Tlaib said she voted against the Democrats’ platform and cast her delegate ballot for Sanders, expressing outrage about her party’s refusal to upend what she called a “for-profit system that is leaving people to suffer and die just because they cannot afford health care.”
The DWT post ends by posting Bernie's 2020 online convention speech; where unlike many with more pretension having book shelve backgrounds, Bernie has split wood. It is an unconditional endorsement, while noting a divergence of Bernie and Biden on Medicare for All, now vs transitional [i.e. incremental] ways.
And then after so closing the extensively quoted post with that videl, DWT has older content that has not scrolled offline, and you can read it all there.
https://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/