Friends flying to the rescue

Yesterday I got an email from a friend in the Bay Area whom I haven’t seen for at least 22 years.  She and I worked on local, state, and national campaigns, registered voters, and canvassed in San Jose, but we have not kept in touch.  Now she and her daughter are flying to Pennsylvania to help with the Harris campaign.  

She wondered where their skills could be used.  Is Carbon County the best place, or are there counties that are more critical?  I told her I wasn’t at the level in the campaign to answer that question, but I will check on Monday with the Harris organization.  Today everybody was too busy with the rally in Wilkes-Barre to give me an answer.

This level of mutual aid and enthusiasm has not happened since the first Obama campaign in 2008.  That year Linda and I hosted two people from New York for over a month.  You may remember that Obama won that election.  

The Road Home

Jim Harrison’s The Road Home, first published in 1998, is one of those books you want everyone to read.  I first encountered Harrison, who died in 2016, in a story entitled The Woman Lit by Fireflies, an amazing piece of feminist literature by an author who really doesn’t fit the profile.

In The Road Home the narrator, a half-Lakota, half-white ranch kid, is accepted at an art school in Chicago.  I think it was 1903 and the noise of Chicago was quite maddening for one used to the silence of the prairie where you could hear the heart of your horse over its breathing, a far-off meadowlark, a cow lowing in the creekbed a mile away, even a delicate breeze approaching across the sea of grass.

How I wish I could write like that.  My friend Marge has family in the southern Arizona town of Patagonia, where Harrison lived out the last years of his life.  I thought of visiting the town just hoping for a chance to talk to him for maybe 15 minutes.  I wish I had.

When listening to Trump

My friend Bill keeps me informed on some of the current relevant memes.  I don’t usually pass them along, but this one was so apropos to tonight’s Trump appearance that I must repeat it.

If you listen to this man (picture of Trump) without thinking, “What an idiot,” you are an idiot.

We place way too much emphasis on debates

I’ve read the transcript of the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates.  That was an amazing performance, allowing Lincoln to emerge as a front runner for the 1860 presidential campaign, although the Illinois legislature still chose Douglas to the U.S. Senator after the debates were over. That was the last great debate in American politics.

I heard the first Kennedy/Nixon debate on the radio.  I thought Nixon cleaned Kennedy’s clock.  The people who watched it thought Kennedy won because of the way Nixon sweated, not for what he said.  

When Gerald Ford debated Jimmy Carter, Ford got tangled up in the relationship of the satellite nations like Poland to the Soviet Union.  Of course Ford knew the relationship, but he never recovered.

Trump said remarkably stupid things in his debates with Hillary Clinton, but he “appeared” dominant on the debate stage.  People don’t listen.

I’ll admit that Biden’s performance earlier this year rightly caused people to question Biden’s mental acuity, but nobody I knew, (almost all the people I know are intelligent) said “OK, now I’m voting for Trump.”

If you have not made up your mind at this point who you will be voting for in November, you are not a good citizen and you have not done your due diligence.  The debate is important only to people who are either not paying attention or are like the dogs in the movie “Up” who lose their train of thought whenever someone yells “squirrel!”  I’m not watching it.  

Take Trump at his word

“WHEN I WIN those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, which will include long term prison sentences....”

“Please be aware that this legal exposure extends to lawyers, political operatives, donors, illegal voters and corrupt election officials.”

Oh, that’s just Trump, his supporters say.  He won’t really be a dictator, his supporters say.  The only reason he didn’t use federal troops against peaceful demonstrators in his first term was because military officials would not cooperate.  His appointees would not cooperate when he talked about shooting migrants.  He learned from that.  This time he will pick appointees who will do his bidding.  Take him at his word.  I certainly do. 

Is J. D. Vance dumber than Trump?

Today Vance was asked to comment on the latest school shooting.  He replied that some states had strict gun laws and some had lax gun laws, but school shootings occurred in both types of states.  He said there were psychos in every state.  What we needed was to strengthen the security of schools, making it harder for gunmen to act.

First of all, no state can outlaw assault rifles.  The Supreme Court, the NRA, and Republican legislators have seen to that.  Secondly, how would you make a school impregnable to gun violence?  In Georgia it was a student who killed fellow students.  What about the playground, the football field, the field trip?  Who would pay for the cops in every classroom?  I could go on, but this is just stupid.  Unbelievably stupid.  Trump-level stupid.  Maybe worse.

The Hoover Commission and the Musk Commission

In 1947 Harry Truman appointed former President Herbert Hoover to head a commission to recommend administrative changes in the Federal government.  Truman felt the government had expanded rapidly during the Depression and World War II, and there might be ways to consolidate or reorganize some departments and agencies.  Hoover, who may have failed as a President, had previously won acclaim for his European relief work after the First World War.  A number of the Commission’s recommendations were later adopted.

Now Trump said if he is elected he will appoint Elon Musk to head up a commission on Federal efficiency.  This is the same Elon Musk who is blowing up rockets, wrecked Twitter, came up with a self-driving car that crashes, developed the ugliest truck ever seen, and had technical trouble broadcasting an interview with Trump in which both participants made notably stupid statements.  I probably should mention that Musk is incredibly rich, since he doesn’t need to pay his fair share of taxes.

That should be some commission.  Thank goodness Trump won’t be elected.