"What's Project 2025?": The Horseracing Of The 2024 Election

<"Just Say No, 

While You Can"/Take I:

Image Source: Institute For Strategic Dialogue
Amendments: The Reckoner>

Reckoner's Note: Alas, this piece turned out to eerily prescient, and more timely than I could ever have imagined, having been written before the so-called Biden-Trump "debate." However, I really need to address it separately, most likely for July Fourth, because this post is long enough already! Suffice to say, though, it confirms practically every point I made here. And then some. With that cheery preamble, read on!

<i.>

Imagine the scene: you're talking with friends at the library, and inevitably, the discussion swings to the 2024 Presidential race. "So what do you think about the election? How do you think it'll go?"

"Well, start with the so-called 'double haters,'" you answer, "or people who don't like Biden, or Trump." You reel off the usual imponderables: what'll the independents do? Which states seem within each for either candidate? Will the A-word (abortion) carry the same weight as it did in the 2022 midterms.

And so on, and so forth, as you explain. "Of course, whatever Trump's spouting out on the campaign trail is nothing, compared to he's dreaming up for Project 2025..."

Your friend furrows his brow. "What's Project 2025? I haven't heard of it."

"Wow, you mean -- you don't know?" You struggle to contain your amazement. "It's his plan to become President For Life, basically, the all-powerful autocracy that he and his cohorts dream of creating."

Your friend begins scribbling in his notebook. "What are the basics of Project 2025?" he asks.

"Well, start with Schedule F, which he tried to implement in 2020. It's an executive order that he'd use to fire some 50,000 federal employees, and replace them with zealots who'd pledge to do his bidding..."

And off you go to the races, breaking down the most alarming points into bullet points, while your friend mostly just listens. When America's most recognized autocracy expert, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, describes the 2024 election as "an information emergency," I'm sure she's encountering similar scenes, like the one you're describing here. Because it's keeping her up nights, too.

<See You At The (Horse) Races..."

Image Source: Institute For Strategic Dialogue

Amendments: The Reckoner>

<ii.>

Even so, you're not prepared to give your friend too much grief. Sure, the Mainstream Media (MSM) has devoted a fair chunk of column inches to Project 2025, but its attention is largely consumed by the approach that it pursued in 2016, indeed, in every election -- the Baseball Game/Beauty Pageant/Horse Race Model of coverage.

You know how that model runs, if you're paying any kind of attention. It's the model that laser focuses on a few cliched questions: Who's up? Who's down? Who's in, who's out? Who's cool, or uncool? Who's relevant, or irrelevant? What trends are dominating today's news cycle?

It's a dead horse that was already starting to stink when I started my own media career, so long ago. What sounded sober and sensible in a less chaotic era, no longer makes sense nowadays, as we'll see. The existential dread, the audible shudder that so many feel, at seeing Trump, the failed coup leader, sharing face  time with Biden, the incumbent President -- as they did on the debate stage, in Atlanta -- is worlds away from the '90s, when complaints about overly bland, polished, Tweedledee-Tweedledum candidates were all the norm.

We saw ample glimpses of the Horse Race Model's limitations in the 2016 race, when Trump became the first presidential contender to resist releasing his tax returns, as the MSM chased the bright, shiny object of his opponent's emails. We all know why Trump fought so hard to avoid scrutiny, of course, once The New York Times finally, belatedly, ran some sort of investigative series in 2018. 

That series showed the Trump origin story -- the crackerjack negotiator, the eminence grise of American business, so far-sighted, that he could see around corners -- for the PR mirage that it was, amplified and magnified by a fog of pure BS. By then, however, Trump was halfway through his presidency, with all the calamitous implications that it implied. But hey, better late than never, right?

What's particularly galling, too, is how much the Times and its MSM cheerleaders clapped themselves on the back, once its series appeared -- since the source material rested largely on documents supplied by Trump's niece. Obviously, those papers contained facts and figures that required further legwork and follow-up, but it might have been nice if they'd managed it all a bit sooner.

After all, Trump's presentation of himself as a laser-focused, uber-business figure  -- one unsullied by the dirty business of politics -- was the centerpiece of his presidential brand. We'll never know how many people might have had second thoughts, if they'd known otherwise (particularly late deciders, who broke decisively for Trump). But without having those details in front of them, how would they ever had the chance to think twice?

Just ask Atlantic City, whose residents paid dearly for the Trump-built casinos that went bankrupt there -- no mean feat, when the house always wins -- thanks to the political establishment that rubber-stamped it. They, too, bought the Trump origin story.

Unlike their residents, the boodlers can simply move on to another place on the public payroll. That disconnect highlights one major problem with horseracing: there is no cure for buyer's remorse, once the inconvenient part of the story rears up. And regrets are such a bitch, when you can't take them back.

<"See You Down The Memory Hole..."/The Reckoner>

<iii.>

The limits of horseracing don't end there, of course. Boiling races down to numbers and personalities dumbs them down to the point of absurdity, and in that respect, the 2024 election coverage is serving up an unnerving parallel to the 2016 version. Ha, ha, hee, hee, that whacky Biden. Can't put his pants on, and chew gum, at the same time! Listen to him yammering about empathy and decency, when folks can't even afford a hamburger. Hey, that stuff's for losers, right?

Ho, ho, ho, Trumpy Bear's back for sloppy seconds. Sure, he has no filter, and he can't string together a sentence, but c'mon, what did you expect? That's just Trump being Trump. He's hours of endless entertainment! 

Amid all this horseracing, and all its obsession with Biden's age, you'd hardly realize that his Republican rival, Trump -- who kept a book of Hitler's speeches by his bedside, one of the only tomes he's ever read, cover to cover, or so we're told -- is the same man eager to drag us back to the 19th century. That is, after he cranks up his revenge tour first.

Trump and the Republican Party that he's co-opted so completely are screaming the quiet part out aloud, in ever-shriller tones, about trading America's nearly 250-year democratic experiment for a nakedly dictatorial patriarchy, one that vows to make life a hellscape for anyone who isn't white, rich, and right-wing Christian. This time, they swear, those who resist will pay whatever price is needed to tramp them into the dirt.

But you would never know it, judging by the tepid language that MSM outlets like the New York Times use to report it. The Republican political establishment and its shadowy enablers are merely committed "conservatives" repeating "baseless" accusations about stolen elections, whose nominee's never-ending stream of threats and confabulations are dismissed as so much "bluster," even as his acolytes openly discuss about how to impose their Handmaid's Tale homage on the rest of us.

What's the problem? Well, there's a difference between conservatives, generally defined as persons "favoring free enterprise, private ownership, and socially traditionally ideas," per the Oxford English Dictionary, and reactionaries, or those who favor "a return to a previous condition of affairs."  If that's not a succinct description of the January 6, 2021 coup attempt, what is?

By that standard alone, Trump and his acolytes can't ever be considered "conservatives," which makes their plotting against the US government more than merely "baseless." How fitting that both terms emerged during the French Revolution. "Conservative" derives from "conservateur," a term used to identify monarchist parliamentarians who opposed the revolution, while "reactionary" springs from "reactionnaire," and in turn, "reaction," a label generally bestowed on those who favored returning to aristocracy, and opposed any sort of democracy.

One of the essential requirements for a functioning democracy is the willingness to properly describe the people and events that drive it. To continually soft-pedal them does us all a grave disservice, thanks to headlines like this one, from the Associated Press: "Trump Hints At Expanded Role For The Military Within The United States. A Legacy Law Gives Him Few Guardrails."

Or, to put it in plainer English: Trump plans to invoke the Insurrection Act, and send out the military to crush civilian dissenters, should they try to spoil his restoration. Falling back on stock euphemisms fails to convey the horrors of such images, should they ever become realities, which is another limitation of horseracing.

<Even then, they must have known (what we didn't):

Der Spiegel (June 2020 cover)>*

<iv.>

We might pay a lot less attention to all these linguistic gymnastics, without having to account for another occupational hazard of horseracing: the "both-sides-ism" that runs right through the darkest heart of it. MSM thought leaders like Paul Krugman are well-known for their audible shudder about coming across as overly biased, though it's fair to ask, when would the reactionary right ever not accuse of them it? 

In covering campaigns, the traditional journalistic model that Krugman, and the great majority of his peers, has been to quote Candidate A ("I think the Mayor is a crossdressing vandal! I've seen the video nasties he keeps on his shelf at home!"), followed by Candidate B's response ("As Evergreen City's Mayor, it's only fair remind to you that neither crossdressing nor video nasties are illegal, in themselves, and I've never even raised a gardening tool in anger!"). 

Let readers make up their own minds, runs the mantra, and call it a day. We've done our job. But it might fair to ask whether that's still an effective approach, in this age of digitally siloed media, whose viewers can cherry-pick whatever suits their point of view, and ignore whatever doesn't.  Thus, Evergreen City's unfortunate Mayor might never get a real chance to make the case for the defense, or vice versa.

Another fair question to raise is whether all this earnest "both-sides-ism" truly serves the public interest. The desire to avoid the tint of bias at all costs has its comical results -- such as the New York Times's November 2017 feature on an avowed neo-Nazi, "who, just like other humans, eats food and likes Seinfeld," the Columbia Journalism Review noted. "As we wrote at the time, the piece was heavy on banality, but failed to capture the evil that its subject didn’t even try to conceal."

What did the writer hope to convey about his neo-Nazi subject, I wonder? "Hey, I have this thing about the master race rising up -- but Kramer's can collecting still kills me, every single time." Yikes! But even Seinfeld isn't who he claims to be, either, now that his other half (Jessica) has gotten caught funding violent counterprotests at UCLA against pro-Palestinian students. But I digress.

Contrast all this cautious hairsplitting with the European and British press, and you'll find a different model at work. Generally speaking, you'll find a less personality-driven, sensationalistic approach at work, and many writers aren't shy about speaking their minds, when the occasion calls for it. 

Consider how the Guardian's Thomas Frank, for example, immortalized Trump's 2020 loss: "Ding Dong, The Jerk Is Gone. But Read This, Before You Sing The Hallelujah Chorus" (11/7/20), or the question that Al Jazeerah posed, of Britain's next applicant for Prime Minister, Keir Starmer: "Is The UK's Left-Wing Labour Party on a 'Rightward' Path in Election Race?" Obviously, I'm painting in broad brush strokes here -- recall how Jeremy Corbyn's supporters protested the shade thrown their man's way, for instance -- but suffice to say, based on my own experiences in the UK, we could learn a thing or two from our European cousins.

Things have reached the point where it's  difficult to tell the difference from parody websites and their counterparts, as The Big Picture blog points out: "The editorializing and horse-racing of the election, where one side poses an existential threat to our entire democracy, has gotten so bad and so predictable that the parody New York Times Pitchbot account often simply screenshots actual headlines from the paper, saying, 'I can't do better than this.'" Enough said about that one.

<"Just Say No, 

While You Can"/Take II:

Image Source: Institute For Strategic Dialogue
Amendments: The Reckoner>

<v.>

Enough of the complaining. Where, exactly, does all this horseracing leave us? Obviously, in a deeper, darker place than any of us could imagined 30-odd years ago or so, when the right wing noise machine began taking shape. For me, ceding that space -- without a second thought -- is the dumbest thing that the American Left ever did.

It still amazes me how so few on the left -- or their more traditional peers, who allow themselves to wear Birkenstocks, with their suits and ties -- grasped the threat posed by such anger mongers as Fox News, the late Rush Limbaugh, and his current evil twin, Tucker Carlson, to name a few. (The latter duo are the spiritual heirs of Nazi propagandists like Lord Haw-Haw, but that's a discussion for a different day.)

I remember the befuddlement that greeted this new phenomenon, one driven by relentless pugilistic windmilling against some starkly-defined "Other" -- atheists, Democrats, environmentalists, feminists, gays, and so on, Needless to say, the names never changed to protect the innocent, with facts and accuracy -- however Fox and company defined it -- taking a back seat to entertainment.

And, whether progressive or traditional, the prevailing refrain sounded something like this: "Ah, it's just a few whack jobs They only appeal to those who already think that way. Who's ever going to watch this stuff? What harm can they do?"

That question's been answered, many, many times, and we all know how that particular movie played out. Still, the far right instinctively grasped what its opponents couldn't accept, or didn't understand -- that changing perception is the key to harnessing public opinion. After all, look how it's working out for them lately.

As I write, we stand on the verge of putting a convicted criminal, serial fraudster, and sociopath back in charge of the same government that he schemed to overthrow, barely three years ago -- and vows to bend completely to his aggrieved ill will, if he gets the chance. This isn't how democracy is supposed to work. Still, going after Fox News, and its acolytes, is a much bigger job, as the fallout of the Dominion lawsuit demonstrates. What can we do about any of this? 

First, start by supporting outlets, that actually do what big boys like the New York Times, or the Washington Post, used to pride themselves on doing -- catching the bad actors with their pants down. Right now, Pro Publica is doing the most significant investigative reporting anywhere.

Pro Publica's series on the corruption of the Supreme Court's far right majority -- a giant salmon here, a luxury RV there -- has thoroughly blown its self-image as some exalted body of legal grand wizards who only float above the rest of us, as they ponder, and rule. More importantly, though, the series ("Friends of the Court") put names to faces, and hard facts to suspicions, codifying the unease that people had long felt about the institution. 

The court's reputation had already sunk to historic lows, long before the series came out. What "Friends of the Court" revealed, however, is that the institution's supreme lack of transparency -- coupled with a taste for living large, and cozy self-dealing -- was far worse than its critics had ever imagined.

Airing these details is the first step in breaking that tired refrain -- "We can't, we can't, we can't do anything about it" --  and putting the enablers on the defensive, until they finally start to address whatever problem is being highlighted. There's nothing that an empty suit fears most, than seeing their career sidelined, or shut down for good, so let's use it to our advantage -- and use it, more often than we do.

My second and third conclusions coincide with one another. As worthy as alternative outlets like Pro Publica are -- or peers like In These Times, Mother Jones, The New Republic, and so on -- we must also recognize, as long as billionaires like Jeff Bezos own newspapers, their coexistence with such established outlets will always be an uneasy proposition, at best. 

Competition is the essence of creative mojo. Just imagine how the '60s rock revolution would have unfolded, if EMI and Decca -- the Beatles' and the Rolling Stones' respective corporate patrons -- had owned the creative marketplace, and simply rolled out more bands like them, assembly line-style. We need to continue pressing for stronger enforcement of current anti-trust law, and stop tolerating market concentration and monopolization as the price of progress -- as the Biden administration is finally doing, for example, by challenging the merger of Ticketmaster and Live Nation.

We also need to look beyond the virtual walled gardens that mega-bullies like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg want us to inhabit for the rest of our lives. Their business models center on making us so dependent, that we can't ever imagine living without them -- that is, until we do.

A lot of older school technologies -- whether it's paper fanzines and flyers, or cassettes and CDs -- are still worth keeping around, for just that reason. The more of our lives that we can keep out of their grubby little hands, the better. The catastrophic transition from Twitter to X should serve as an eternal reminder that when you're playing in someone's space, it's never really yours -- though it may feel that way, until someone takes it away, for good. 

Does that make me a Luddite? Far from it. Like millions of others, I'm active on sites like Ebay, or Etsy, because of the outreach opportunities that they offer -- but I'm also thinking about the alternatives, so that we don't stay permanently stuck in those uber-platform ruts.

Otherwise, we'll just continue the endless cycle of embracing those hot, new, seeming quick fixes that end up putting us out of business. "That's the way it is" doesn't have to stay frozen in time, as the Dead Kennedys' frontman, Jello Biafra, told Psychology Today: 

“I was married at one point, went to see my wife's sister in New York. It seemed like every third or fourth thing out of her mouth was how much she hated their mother and how angry she was. I thought, you know, this could be me, but it doesn't have to be me. And I'm going to make sure from this point onward, that it's not me.”

Let's keep that spirit in mind as we try and take back our media, which is one of the keys to taking back our democracy. And maybe then, we won't hear the horse race ringing so much in our hardened, jaded ears -- and we can all (finally) get some sleep! -- The Reckoner

Links To Go (Hurry, Hurry,
Before They Fit You For A Bonnet...)

Columbia Journalism Review:
How The Press Covered The Last Four Years Of Trump:
https://www.cjr.org/special_report/coverage-trump-presidency-2020-election.php

Democracy Americana:
What Makes Project 2025 So Dangerous:
https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/what-makes-project-2025-so-dangerous

National Public Radio: The Sunday Story:
Media Failings In Covering Trump:
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1198909715

Psychology Today; Jello Biafra Is A Chip Off The Old Block:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brick-brick/202011/jello-biafra-is-chip-the-old-block

The Big Picture: Biden Gets Tougher:
https://thinkbigpicture.substack.com/p/biden-tough-israel-russia-border

The Big Picture: The Right Has
A Terrifying Second Term Plan Called Project 2025:
https://thinkbigpicture.substack.com/p/project-2025-thomas-zimmer-trump

USA Today: Fact Check:
Image Of Trump Holding Lit Match...:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2024/05/01/image-of-trump-holding-lit-match-is-from-2020/73517702007/

(*See the Der Spiegel link for a more complete explanation of the cover story's title, and how it actually translates.)

No Labels Leaves The Building: What Now, Then, For 2024?

<Mike Luckovich (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
wishes Mitch McConnell a happy retirement,
on his way out of the building...>

<i.>

Slowly but surely, after months of missed deadlines, and postponed reveals, the dream died -- not with a bang, but a whimper, to coin that timeworn T.S. Eliot phrase. On April 4, the forces behind the No Labels curtain finally confirmed what the commentariat had already gathered -- that it wouldn't mount a third party ticket for this year's high stakes Presidential election.

In its public statement, the group blamed a lack of suitable candidates: "No Labels has always said we would only our ballot line to a ticket if we could identify candidates with a credible path to winning the White House. No such candidates emerged, so the responsible course of action for us is to stand down."

Or, to put it another way, nobody wants to end up the punchline of a joke, nor their epitaph to read: "I helped Trump regain the White House." Which is why some two dozen-odd names --- ranging from Trump's last major rival, Nikki Haley, to 2016 retreads like Chris Christie, Never Trumpers like ex-Maryland Governor, Larry Hogan, and the West Virginia Gremlin, Senator Joe Manchin -- turned down the opportunity, it seems.

That left Democratic strategist Doug Gordon to tie a bow on the obvious: "It shouldn't taken 30 people turning them down, and tens of millions of dollars spent, for them to realize what was clear all along, they had no path to winning, and would only play the role of a spoiler." 

The basic premise of No Labels -- a joint Democratic/Republican ticket, primed for that ever-elusive commodity of "common ground" -- sounded breathtakingly simple, and infuriatingly head scratching, at the same time. As I often joked, "Does this mean we'll get that dream pairing of some free market militarist, and vaguely progressive-sounding second banana? What's the appeal?"

How would such an ideological tossed salad would ever work? No Labels never explained. Still, the concept appeared to pose a significant threat to President Biden's re-election hopes, especially among so-called "double haters" -- or voters who can't stomach him, or Trump. The group had gotten on 19 state ballots -- greased by its mysterious patrons behind the curtain, and their apparently bottomless checkbooks -- before it pulled the plug. 

Who were these masked men? Don't ask, don't tell. We'll never know, since anonymity is the coin of dark money politics. Thankfully, No Labels and left the building, and we're all the better off for it. Does this mean we shouldn't worry about other third party efforts? That depends, as we'll see.

<"Give 'Em
What They Want"/
The Reckoner>

Right-wing activist Jack Posobiec 

kicks off this year's

Conservative Political Action Conference>

<ii.>

Although Democrats are breathing audible relief, No Labels's announcement doesn't immediately change the unpleasant optics that dog Biden's re-election efforts. His approval ratings remain well underwater -- on a good day, hovering at just over 40 percent, on a bad day, slightly less -- and concerns persist about his age. We're talking about someone who'll be 86, if he actually finishes out his second term -- a Rubicon that many voters seem leery of crossing.

Younger voters have also soured on Biden -- notably, due to Israel's destructive militaristic orgy against Gaza, and lack of progress on priorities like student loan debt relief. How long they'll hold their grudges remains to be seen, especially if Trump's return shows signs of gaining traction again (and the white Christian nationalist police state he openly mulls about vowing to impose -- just read Project 2025 for those grisly specifics).

But let's put those factors aside, and take the arguments at face value. If Biden's past his sell-by date, isn't it time for a political savior, who can lead us to that shining city on the hill? Someone preferably unsullied by current events, and our tribalized politics, of course, who could ride the disaffected vote to an eleventh hour upset.

Might that figure be Cornel West, the rock star academic who can boil complex ideas into snappy soundbites ("The ruling class can't ride your back, unless it's bent")? Voters who feel the Democratic Party could never be progressive enough, no matter what it does, those disaffected voters may well be inclined to say, "Go West, young man."

Yet West's intoxicating verbal tonic is one that's also long on rhetoric, and silent about how he'd turn any of his priorities -- a $27 per hour minimum wage, a National Jobs Program to ensure full employment, banning corporate stock buybacks, and so on -- into reality. His campaign website presents them as a string of bullet points, and leaves it there, at least for now.

West's dizzying zigzags -- from the People's Party, to Green Party, and back again, to full-on independent -- also hint at a short attention span that would kill him on Capitol Hill, where philosopher-kings are scarcely seen, for a reason. His lack of political  experience also begs the question, after the dumpster fire of the Trump-era presidency, whether we can ever afford the luxury of training someone on the job.

But West's bullet points are positively encyclopedic, compared to the one-paragraph statements that characterize the "Principles" section of Stein's website. Like West -- for whom Stein also served as campaign manager, during his Green Party phase -- she supports the right to a living wage, food, and housing, the Green New Deal, and curtailing American military interventions. Like West, Stein is equally silent about how she'd make any of those things happen.

There's also the small matter of how Democrats might feel about seeing someone whom they blame for costing Hillary Clinton the 2016 election, coming back for an encore. I suspect they won't be so casually dismissive of Stein's impact as they were in 2016. What kind of opposition research fireworks they'll unload against her, I'll leave to your imagination.

<"Labels, Shmabels"/
Take I: The Reckoner>

<iii.>

All right, then. Perhaps Cornel West and Jill Stein are too flawed to be successful. Might RFK Jr. be the political savior we've been seeking? A look at his website offers a more detailed overview than your standard issue white knight provides. He espouses some classic liberal positions, from the $15 per hour minimum wage, to free childcare, and reining in housing costs. His policy page is fairly detailed -- such as proposals to promote homeownership --  and, in some places, downright hyper-specific (for example, the idea of expanding AmeriCorps, which is laudatory in itself).

How Democrats will square those particular circles with Kennedy's vaccine and geopolitical skepticism remains to be seen. RFK Jr. also has little to say on foreign affairs, beyond (emphasis mine) ending "the military adventures and regime-change wars, like the one in Ukraine."  Looking for someone to check  Putin's megalo-tyrannical impulses? Look elsewhere. Otherwise, like most newcomers, he has little to say about foreign policy issues (in fairness, not having been in a position to deal with them).

There's also the small matter of Kennedy's funding, starting with Timothy Mellon -- a billionaire who once stood proudly in Trump's corner, to the tune of $15 million, for various MAGA-related causes. He's since emerged as RFK Jr.'s biggest patron, at $20 million, followed by Gavin de Becker ($10 million), a security consultant for the likes of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

Strangely, though, American Values -- the Kennedy Super PAC, through which his campaign cash gushes -- has returned most of de Becker's money (see link below). But it's well worth asking: does a candidate surrounded (and bankrolled) by the reactionary mega-rich have any right to claim the progressive mantle, and whose interests will he actually represent? 

That's before we get to other small matters, like the January 6, 2021 insurrection. Kennedy's suggestion that the ongoing federal prosecutions of defendants -- the same ones who used batons, bear spray, flagpoles, sticks, and tomahawks that day -- are politically motivated reeks of either jaw-dropping naivete, moral bankruptcy, or sheer stupidity, depending on your mood, or outlook.

Despite his background as an environmental lawyer, Kennedy is also a climate change skeptic, and has shown little appetite for regulations -- although he does support banning liquified natural gas exports. (Biden has paused them.) That desire to "have it both ways" -- coupled with opposition to gun control, Trumpian-style calls for a closed border, and full-throated defense of Israel -- could make Kennedy radioactive to the vast majority of Democratic voters. Time will tell.

<"Labels, Shmabels"/

Take II: The Reckoner>

<iv.>

So, does RFK Jr,'s presence automatically dampen Biden's second term prospects? Not necessarily. First, non-major party candidates typically tend to lose steam as the big day looms closer, and people revisit whatever initial choices they've made.

The classic example is the 1992 election, when Texas billionaire Ross Perot came from nowhere to lead national polls (36%) over Republican President George Bush (30%), and Democratic challenger, BIll Clinton (26%). It was an event that inspired much brow-furrowing and finger-wagging from pundits, as both major parties scrambled to court Perot and his followers.

They needn't have bothered, as Perot finished with 18.9% of the popular vote on Election Day. Although Perot turned in the best showing of any independent candidate since 1912, it failed to win any love from the Electoral College -- because he didn't carry a single state.

Other cases include that of Ralph Nader -- who earned 2.74% of the popular vote in 2000, well short of the 5% he hoped to earn for the Green Party, and claim federal matching funds -- but enough to deny Democrat Al Gore the White House. Or you could point to Libertarian Gary Johnson, who averaged 8 percent throughout the 2016 Presidential race, only to bottom out at 4%. Any number of examples will do.

On this evidence, it's hard to imagine a path to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for any of this year's upstart class, though how deeply RFK Jr. will bite into Biden's margin remains to be seen. Depending on the poll, Kennedy's support ranges from the high single digits (8-9%), to the mid-teens (15%). Some polls show Kennedy taking votes equally from Trump and Biden, which makes sense, since insurgent candidates can often appeal to different voting blocs that would otherwise have little in common. 

Other polls, like one from NBC News (see link below), suggest Trump has more to worry about -- with 15% of his voters choosing RFK Jr. in a five-way matchup. (Just 7% of Biden supporters would back RFK Jr., if they had the same option.) Yet even the inclusions of West and Stein doesn't prevent Biden from coming out on top, though only just barely -- by two points.

The scenario has prompted the punditry to dismiss the NBC poll as an outlier, although others -- notably, Marist, and Quinnipiac  -- have registered similar results. The verbal barrage that Trump has begun to unleash against RFK Jr. as "a Democratic plant," and "a WASTED PROTEST VOTE," suggests that the former President has already reached a different conclusion.

<"That Same Old Broken Record..."/The Reckoner>

<Coda>

So just where does all this insurgent energy leave us? As anxious as ever, basically, since the country is headed towards the Great Old White Guy Grudge March -- the same one that most of us openly dread, and don't want, so the pollsters say. In a different era, Trump and Biden would already be sailing into the sunset, plotting how to manage the dueling narratives of their legacies, and competing storylines.

Yet it's hard to imagine a different outcome in a nation that long ago slid into gerontocracy, whether we look at the average ages in the US House of Representatives (57.9), US Senate (65.3), or US Supreme Court (63). The doddering, tone deaf politicians we mocked during the '70s, when I grew up, are now as common as Elvis stamps -- like Iowa Republican Charles Grassley, re-elected in 2022, at 89. If we want the big names off the stage, it would help to stop enabling their ambitions. If not, look for them to continue dying at their desks, at least figuratively.

Given this unsavory backdrop of dead men and women still walking, it's not hard to understand why the emotional appeal of third parties -- even after the wreckage they left us in 2016 -- has never been higher. Snappish dismissals and stern admonitions will do little to turn that particularly tide, as Hillary Clinton recently demonstrated, by telling disaffected voters, "Get over yourself." It's Biden or Trump, so shut up, and swallow it, right?

The Boomer-era generation that Clinton represents -- the same one that yanked the economic, social and political ladders up behind them, once they'd achieved whatever they'd achieved -- lacks the moral capital to demand such unblinking compliance from the younger generation it's left to sweep up the mess.

However, the twin demons of ego and aggrandizement continue to muddle the success of such a remedy -- since third parties in America have normally served as convenient vehicles for their standard bearers. It's hard to imagine that Cornel West, for instance, really believes he'll occupy 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. But as one of the nation's hottest speakers, the idea of a Presidential run, however improbable, will certainly gin up his ticket sales, and his speaking fees.

And what Stein accomplish in what looks like a far lower-key second run is anyone's guess, though at worst, she might score a a book deal, or maybe a high-profile job at some institution or other. And would RFK Jr. even figure in the running, without his surname, and his family DNA? The question answers itself. 

What's more, this year's insurgent class may not leave any major legacy -- whether it's a new political party, or even an advocacy group to promote their ideas -- once the dust settles from this election. That task will inevitably fall to another upstart candidate to reinvent the wheel all over again, leaving us to bemoan our lot, as we always do: "Why aren't there any real choices this year?"

I have a better idea. Let us stop waiting for some self-styled white knight or social messiah to swoop in at the eleventh hour, whose lofty rhetoric will make our eyes water, and eliminate the need for the heavy lifting that real organizational efforts typically require. Because, make no mistake, the climb has never seemed steeper, because the stakes have never been higher. And there is much work to be done. --The Reckoner

Links To Go:
BBC: Democrats Are Worried:
But Will RFK Jr. Take More Votes From Trump?:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68893186

Rolling Stone: Meet The Big Money Moguls 
Behind RFK Jr.'s Quest To Unseat Biden:
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/rfk-donors-trump-investors-celebs-1234975307/

The Hill: Democrats Score Victory
With No Labels's Decision To Call it Quits:

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4577221-no-labels-joe-biden-donald-trump-independents-larry-hogan/

The Hill: Hillary Clinton "Get Over Yourself" Comment
Threatens To Backfire On Biden:
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4575600-hillary-clinton-get-over-yourself-biden/

NBC News: RFK Candidacy Hurts Trump More Than Biden:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/rfk-jr-candidacy-hurts-trump-biden-nbc-news-poll-finds-rcna148536

The Washington Post:
No Labels Wanted A Centrist Ticket.
Polarization, Trump Stood In The Way:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/04/06/no-labels-trump-biden-election/

Nice Work, If You Can Get It: Team Biden Circles The Wagons

The Shape Of Things To Come?

https://nypost.com/2019/07/05/joe-biden-keeps-making-things-worse-for-himself/

<i.>

One of the oldest, sickest, oft-repeated jokes that America plays on its citizens is the notion that it's some kind of meritocracy. At some point in our lives, we all learned that simply wasn't true, whether that lesson came in junior high -- when we watched the popular kids pick each other for their baseball teams, and leave us standing, way last, in the outfield -- or in high school, where the spoiled jerk who always had a blonde on each arm, and his first car at 16, went on to become a high-profile CFO, courtesy of his family name, and/or connections. (My own favorite anecdote is the star basketball player who earned an ACT composite score that fell 50 percent below the desired minimum, which didn't prevent him from graduating.)

Okay, maybe I'm exaggerating, but not by half. As over the top as the above images seem, I'd argue the need to believe in a meritocracy is an essential ingredient of our social DNA, even if the reality doesn't match up. It's a belief that drives many a public policy debate, like the infamous Clinton-era welfare overhauls of the 1990s -- which essentially arose from the notion that the undeserving had out-hustled and overtaken the truly needy. That the needy who remained on the rolls would now have to live with scaled-down benefits, and no end of restrictions -- like work requirements, for instance -- was incidental to the whole exercise.

Which brings us to Joe Biden's troubled offspring, Hunter, and uncle, James Biden, who've been reaping a lot of negative news this week for the putative Democratic front-runner. That status seems shaky at the moment, though it will depend on how many other shoes start raining down. The 2014 photo that's surfaced of Joe golfing with Hunter and his Ukrainian business partner, presumably, will do little to help the cause.

In one sense, the avalanche of revelations of Hunter Biden's unorthodox business dealings triggered by Trump's forthcoming impeachment proceedings amount to business as usual. This is how Washington works, the talking heads on TV wearily intone. You get along to go along, blah-blah-blah. It's not what you know, blah-blah-blah, it's who you know, blah-blah-blah. No, it's who knows you. And so on, and so forth. Wash, rinse, repeat.

In yet another sense, you can feel a perverse note of empathy for Hunter, who toiled in the shadow of his far more illustrious brother, Beau Biden -- who seemed headed for a glorious political ride, only to have brain cancer cut it brutally short. At one point, Hunter's life seemed to have skidded so far down, that he convinced someone to pull some strings to get him into the U.S. Naval Reserve at 42, well beyond the age that military recruiters typically desire. Yet even with that helping hand, Hunter Biden washed out of the U.S. Navy as quickly as he'd arrived.

Given Hunter's apparent lack of discernible talent for anything in particular, it's not surprising that he determined, early on, to cash in on his family connections. What else could he really offer? It's a similar rationale that the villainous boxing manager, Maish Rennick, voices to his fallen protege, in the climactic scene of Requiem For A Heavyweight: "You're not a winner anymore, Mountain. There's only one thing left. Let's make some money from the losing."

Of course, Hunter came out of his deals slightly better than the banged-up Mountain Rivera, starting right out of law school, when he picked up a $100,000 retainer as a "consultant" to the credit card giant, MBNA, one of many corporate entities located in the Bidens' home state of Delaware. Not all of his ventures succeeded, as you'll see from the National Review timeline below, but nevertheless, it didn't take long for the Bidens' deals to reach the seven-figure-plus range. The deals came rolling in, goosed by foreign countries eager to buy the access they desired, in order to push their own agendas.

<ii.>

Again, it's all part of a larger climate where neoconservative and neoliberal offspring alike float along an oil slick of entitlement, whose skids were arguably greased long ago by the likes of Buckley v. Valeo, the infamous 1976 Supreme Court decision that slammed the brakes on campaign spending limits by countering, "Hey, kids, corporations and dollar bills are people, too." The coup de grace came along in 2010, with the Citizens United ruling, one that opened the floodgates for unlimited campaign spending -- and spectacles like the dark money group that spent $22 million to jam Brett Kavanaugh onto the Supreme Court (including $17 million alone that came from one anonymous donor).

This, of course, is precisely the problem with the Bidens, and for that matter, all who came before them -- the Clintons, the Bushes, and so on, and so forth. Wash, rinse, repeat. In such a climate, it's hardly surprising that Biden's defenders are furiously pumping out any number of shaky defenses, ranging from the classic "ya got nothing on us" bit ("None of the activities were illegal, per se"), to the "matter of degree" line ("Trump's abuses of power are far worse, and far more damaging"), to the "zombie apocalypse" credo ("If Biden falls, we'll get stuck with four more years of Trump"). As any quick glance at the mainstream media will tell you, Biden has plenty of allies, all doggedly pumping out variations on the above themes with the megaphones that their various platforms provide them. Or, as my late father put it, "One crow doesn't peck another."

But I still see too many fatal flaws in this line of thinking. For one thing, it's hard to take Team Biden's messge ("Eat your spinach, vote your head, not your heart, blah-blah-blah") seriously, when it's obvious that his family has never done likewise. For another, voters have wearied of the constant commingling of business, pleasure and policy that characterizes so many neoconservative and neo-liberal side projects. Team Biden is crawling with lobbyists, like his so-called climate adviser, Heather Zichal, who earned $1.1 million from her ties to the liquified natural gas industry, an energy option that -- not coincidentally -- the Obama administration avidly encouraged. With these sorts of characters lurking behind the curtain, how can you seriously expect a Biden Presidency, should one ever materialize, to tackle the global dumpster fire of climate change? If you believe that the link doesn't matter, you're a more optimistic bugger than I, but I digress.

The final irony, though, is that nominating someone like Biden will repeat the error of 2016, when Trump repeatedly called out Hillary Clinton's political and business baggage to his own perverse advantage by saying, "You think I'm so bad? Well, look at her! You don't know who's lurking behind her curtain! At least you know who's lurking behind mine!" This is why simply moaning about Trump's dark, divisive nature, won't stick against him, in and of itself. The people who chose him in 2016 are well aware of his flaws, for the most part, but wanted someone to blow up the system. That tendency is amply documented. Now imagine them looking at someone like Biden, who epitomizes the "swamp creature" that they so despise -- the same kid who always got the pitcher's mound in junior high, the same rich jerk who got the shiny new car and the blondes on each arm. it's not hard to guess how they'll react, and not hard to imagine Trump gleefully rubbing his palms together: "Oh, boy, I get to muddy the waters again! I can't wait!"

Time will tell how this latest mushrooming narrative of scandal plays out, but the war clouds currently swirling above Team Biden remind me of an equally troubled nominee, Warren G. Harding, from the Roaring Twenties. Like Biden, Harding was a terrible public speaker, one whose utterances made little sense in cold print. Like Biden, Harding's 1920 presidential campaign rested largely on the idea that the nation needed to be soothed, not challenged to greater heights. Feral capital pirates and white-sheeted Ku Klux Klanners had nothing to fear from him, because he simply wished they would go away, so he wouldn't have to hold them accountable for their misdeeds.

Unlike Biden -- who's 0 for 2 in the presidential box score -- Harding rode to the White House, flanked by a group of shadowy opportunists -- some on the government payroll, like Interior Secretary Albert B. Fall, others preferring a lower-key role, like the ever-resourceful go-between, Jess Smith -- who wasted no time cashing in their political IOUs, and cranking up the side deals they hoped would make them ever more rich, and ever more powerful. The cascade of scandals took a physical and emotional toll on Harding, who died in 1923. His name remains forever associated with scandal, cronyism and corruption. 

Historians have argued the degree of Harding's competency and culpability for his "Ohio gang"'s misdeeds ever since, though the debate has hardly budged his ranking near the bottom of American presidents, a place that Trump may eventually overtake. Yet even more forgiving biographers, like Robert K. Murray, remain adamant about one thing -- the need to take accountability, once things head south, as he suggests in his 1969 book, The Harding Era 1921-1923: Warren G. Harding And His Administration. 

"In the American political system, there is no such thing as an innocent bystander in the White House," said Murray, in part. "By his inaction, he forfeited whatever chance he had to maintain the integrity of his position and salvage a favorable image for himself and his administration. As it was, the subsequent popular and scholarly negative verdict was inevitable, if not wholly deserved." It's a point that Team Biden and its defenders, such as they are, would do well to ponder, whenever the next shoe happens to drop. Or if they actually make it to the White House.--The Reckoner

Links To Go (Hurry, Hurry,
Before The Bidens Beat You To The Post)

National Review
Hunter Biden: The Most Comprehensive Timeline:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/hunter-biden-comprehensive-timeline/

Post-Bulletin
Normal Is What Got Us Here:
https://www.postbulletin.com/opinion/columnists/normal-is-what-got-us-here/article_3da0a11a-cb37-11e9-99d9-d386e4cc3469.html

Skafish:
Disgracing The Family Name:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=974DvCkUtEQ

Sludge Climate
Biden's Climate Adviser
Earned $1 Million From Natural Gas Company:
https://readsludge.com/2019/05/10/bidens-climate-adviser-earned-1-million-from-natural-gas-company/

Winners & Losers: The Stability Lottery Goes South

<https://www.michiganlottery.com/games/212-lucky-7s-tripler>

Winners and losers which one am I,
Is it the same under the sky?
Black motorcycles and the will to survive
Losers and winners low and high

Iggy Pop, "Winners & Losers"

<i.>

My health insurance experience is over, at least for now. After nearly two years, the state of Michigan has pulled the plug, apparently because I make way too much money for their blood to support it. In simple terms, I exceeded the official income cutoff limits that allowed me to keep my coverage, which officially expired on June 1.

If you saw my tax return from last year, you'd realize that the assumption doesn't hold water. Once my deductions kicked in, I cleared just over $11,000, hardly a superfluous amount by any standard. Like most people right now, I scrimp and skimp wherever I can, however I can, to make the math work out from week to week, to varying degrees  of success. 

But none of these rhetorical talking points can paper over the anxiety I feel about going without insurance, yet again, after a 10-year drought. It's a symptom of how public agencies operate -- once your head finally inches above water, their automatic reflex is to shove it back down, either by cutting back on something (like your food allowance), or yanking it completely (sorry, kid, no more healthcare for now).


But wait, there's a silver lining, I tell myself. I'm safe from those damned work requirements that they're slapping on Medicaid recipients. At least for now.

For all the yammering our political class does about those "bums on welfare," they have yet to get the memo as I've laid it out it here. Why should I have to choose between earning more money, or covering my meds? Why should women have to choose between working some crappy $8-10 an hour job, or risk losing benefits, because they can't afford daycare, or a car that runs?

A couple of years ago, I attended a public forum with our state legislators, where several nursing home operators bemoaned their struggles to find (and keep) aides. They wondered how they'd make any headway in a system that "incentivizes people not to work," as one employer put it. Folks, I told myself, there's an old saying here: You get what you pay for. 

For all too many people, the die was cast long ago. American life increasingly resembles a Stability Lottery. Those who get some high-powered job, and keep it -- in some well-paying sector, like big tech, finance, government, or healthcare -- experience life's richest pageant, with the battleship-sized benefits, cars, and homes to prove it. Hovering just a notch or two under the oft-criticized 1% of our society, these are the fortunate few, whose lives will largely without the peaks and valley that await the rest of us. 

I got a vivid reminder of this reality while embarking on a late night search to see what happened to several high school classmates. Guess what? This one became a doctor, that one became a CFO and visiting professor of accounting. After three or four instances, I got so annoyed, I stopped. I haven't gone to any reunions before, and I sure as hell don't plan on going now.

Oh, yeah, what about the rest? For further reference, crank up "What Do I Get?", via The Buzzcocks, and you'll get the drift quickly enough: "For you things seem to turn out right/I wish they'd only happen to me instead/What do I get, oh-oh, what do I get?/What do I get, oh-oh/What do I get?" 

While Pete Shelley and his merry men were confronting fractured romance here, it's not hard to apply the above lines to the punishment that's constantly dished out to the great majority -- a life battered by benefit cuts, endless outsourcing, flat wages, food insecurity, housing shortages, lack of healthcare, and mind-numbing McJobs that can go belly up any time. No future for you indeed, eh? You didn't win The Stability Lottery, so that's all you get. Your shop didn't come in, simple as that. "Againsters" need not apply.

No Santa Claus no happy elves

In this smoking gun existence

It gets harder to unwind

I'll just eat my breakfast

Iggy Pop, "Winners & Losers"

<ii.>

For the past four months now, I've struggled to put my revulsion over Joe Biden's candidacy into words. Initially, I just wanted to build on the rhetorical groundwork that I've laid out in previous broadsides, like "A Cure For Political Codependency (The Hillary-Bernie Endgame)," and "What Accepting The Lesser Of Two Evils Got Me," hit cut, print, and call it a day.

Ironically, that task is proving more difficult than I'd anticipated, simply because of all the unforced errors that the so-called Democratic frontrunner is already racking up. Whether it's romanticizing the joys of working with hardcore racist boil weevils -- like the late Senators Herman Talmadge, and James Eastland, who called blacks "an inferior race" -- or telling the deep-pocketed donor classes how great they really are, straight after speaking at a poor people's march (!), Biden's reputation as The Gaffe Machine remains proudly and perversely intact. If he didn't exist, comedians would have to invent him ("No one's standard of living will change," indeed).

Naturally, all these foot in mouth disease acrobatics have left Biden's neoliberal backers wringing their hands aloud, and sweating a few more bullets than usual. For those of us who witnessed Biden's  train wreck campaigns of 1988 and 2008, it's par for the course. We nod our heads at one another, and wink: See? Yup. Uh-huh. He just stepped into it again. Deeper this time. As hardened Biden watchers, we form a peculiar brotherhood, indeed. 

Still, what makes great late night comedy fodder isn't so great for the nation. But I've finally figured out what turns my stomach most about Biden, as he sleepwalks from gaffe to gaffe, and that's the brittle defensiveness he often exhibits. We saw that tendency yet again this weekend, when he finally acknowledged that gushing like a teenage boy about rolling up his sleeves with Eastland and Talmadge wasn't the most adept way of pushing out the nostalgic bipartisan narrative that forms the centerpiece of his campaign.

Even so, Biden being Biden, he couldn't apologize without slipping in a belligerent reminder about his civil rights bona fides, that didn't stop President Obama from running with him: "I was vetted by him and selected by him. I will take his judgment of my record, my character, and my ability to handle the job over anyone else's."

As Biden noted, the U.S. Senate that he joined in 1972 looked (and felt) like a different universe. That's a fair point, at first glance. However, in celebrating wastes of sperm and egg like Eastland and Talmadge as Bipartisan Exhibits A and B, Biden left the barn door open for rivals like Kamala Harris to take him down a peg, as she did so effectively during last month's Democratic debate.

For those who want to write in, and issue dire warnings against valuing purity over power, I get it -- so don't bother.  Nobody wants to miss an opportunity to vote against the Grifter In Chief next year. But we shouldn't lose sight of the bigger goals that we're trying to advance. 

As I've already told a few Biden backers, I understand how the political environment doesn't always favor big ideas. Timing is everything: that's why heavy rock bands learned to love touring Europe and Japan during the late '70s, when disco music and rolling mirror balls mesmerized the American masses.

Even so, now that ideas like universal health coverage -- and the potential dismantling of student debt -- are finally back on the table, we shouldn't let up on our demands that the political classes do something to make life better for the majority who sweat and strain at the bit every day. That's why we should pursue a multi-pronged approach at the state, federal and local levels.

Winning the Presidency might feel great, especially after the Great Electoral College Screwover of 2016. However, it will only feel like a consolation prize if the Republicans keep  the U.S. Senate, so that Mitch McConnell can finish his pet project of getting enough right-wing judicial activists in place to transform America into apartheid-era South Africa, where a tyrannical minority can enforce its will indefinitely, unchecked by such nettlesome inconveniences as public pushback.

But I do hope, however faintly, that Biden can actually grow beyond the weary pragmatism that he espouses, between the lines: Hey, kid, it ain't a perfect world. The best we can do is rerun 2008 -- free trade for the masses, "I feel your pain, so here's a plan" for the losers. it's a game of inches. We settle for what we can get. 

Yet this narrative, coupled with the "lesser evil" logic, also makes extreme politics more attractive to people, and hence, more likely to capture their imaginations. That's surely what leaders like Heinrich Brüning discovered during the early 1930s, as Germany's Weimar Republic stumbled into its final death spiral, you can only tell people to keep starving for so long, because their rainbow is just around the corner. And we all know how well that turned out, don't we? --The Reckoner