ELECTION OF 2024: WHAT AMERICA HAS BECOME

If I have been stupid enough to publish occasional social commentary in the past, I surely cannot ignore the recent 2024 Presidential election in the USofA. I refuse to pretend that I have a complete handle on just what the hell is going on in the country of my birth. But I have a few ideas.

* A majority of the voting citizenry of the USofA chose a lying, narcissistic, sexual predator to be the face of their nation. They chose a serial evader of the consequences of his acts to be their Chief Executive. The bankrupter of a casino will lead the American economy. A man who routinely insults the military will be their Commander in Chief. In general, these attributes were not hidden from his supporters. Character didn't matter to them. This is what America has become.

* Obama's election normalized hate. Hate is a stronger emotion in the voting booth than love. 

* Democrats have chosen to take up the causes of marginalized people. I'm not saying that's wrong, but it's a lousy electoral strategy. By definition, marginalized people do not constitute a majority. You can argue that, taken together, they do add up to a majority. The problem with that thinking is that marginalized groups have different, sometimes conflicting concerns. Being pulled in different directions does not lead to coherent electoral strategy. To address that array of concerns, you first have to get elected. And bumper stickers, not manifestos, get you elected. Snow White was a white woman who lived with seven little white men. She was kissed without her consent by a white Prince. Deal with it. Don't make it a campaign issue.

* Progressives want Democrats to double down on the Progressive agenda. But Red states are not Red because Democrats are not sufficiently woke. I fear that the opposite is true. AOC demonstrated her chops by moving to the center early, even if ever so slightly. (Did I really say that?) By the demographics, Democrats have become the party of the elites. And the concerns of people with resources sufficient so that they don't have to worry about the next rent payment or where the next meal is coming from are not the concerns of a majority of the country. It's the economy stupid.

I believe that the Western European model of democratic socialism is the proper governance model for a modern, enlightened state. I also believe that the proper economic model for such a state is properly regulated capitalism. Those two statements are not oxymoronic. Renault-Nissan is the largest automaker in the world, they make excellent cars, and it's 15% owned by the French government. That's a big enough stake to make certain that the corporate types don't screw up. The French, German and Spanish governments combined own just over 25% of Airbus and Airbus is kicking Boeing's butt. So capitalism is alive and functioning reasonably well in Western Europe. But at the same time, Europe has embraced single-payer healthcare and strong quality-of-life guarantees for workers. After 10 years and multiple hospital procedures, both day surgeries and overnights, my wife and I are convinced that French healthcare workers, first and foremost, care about helping us. We are not treated as profit points by anyone in the system.

If that's the type of system that we want for Americans, we need to be as dedicated to a long-term strategy as Republicans have been. We need to vote in every election, from local school boards on up. We need to require schools to teach basics first. When I give the clerk at the counter $1.01 for a $.51 order, there should be no head scratching about the amount of change that I'm due. Critical thinking does not seem to follow if you can't read, rite, and do rithmatic. Our elected officials, whether in the minority or the majority, must be even more ruthless than the Republicans have been since Obama was first elected, ruthless against the opposition, ruthless against distractions within our own party.

BIDEN, HARRIS, TRUMP, OBAMA AND AMERICAN POLITICS 2024

I wouldn't be much of an American who blogs his opinions if I didn't chime in on the events of the past week or two in American politics. FULL DISCLOSURE: I believe Trump to be an existential threat to sanity and civility in public life. His picture appears in the OED in the definition of egotistical narcissist. Anyway, here are my quick takes:

* During the recent televised debate, Biden looked like a tired and deflated old man. Trump presented as a confident and unapologetic liar. In other words, both men came across true to their respective natures. 

* I'm 75 years old. I ain't what I used to be. The excuse that Biden was tired after flights and meetings just doesn't cut it. Presidents are not allowed to fail on the world stage at critical times because they are tired. Yes, we expect too much of the mere humans that we elect to that office. Tough cookies. That's the minimum requirement. When the phone rings at 2am, you'd better damn well be wide awake and ready to eat raw meat.

* Harris was the obvious choice. An open Democrat convention would have been a disaster. Uncontrolled chaos. Everybody who mattered understood that Harris was inevitable except, apparently, for the Obamas. If nothing else, that proves that Obama was never an executive type. A true executive makes reality-based decisions, even if their preference would be a different reality. Harris is the reality. Not acceding to that reality after 48 hours is either pettiness or delusion. Now, today, her election prospects are not an issue. Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party. (By the way, that's not a quote about politics uttered by some wag like Churchill. It was a drill created by a typing instructor a century ago.) EDIT: The endorsement from the Obamas has come. Thank you, Captain Obvious.

* Speaking of Obama, can you tell that I found him a disappointment? In today's world, nuance is not an option. The education system has failed. Analytical thought is missing in action, even on elite college campuses. Netanyahu, for all that I dislike him, was correct in his speech to Congress when he likened Gays for Gaza to Chickens for KFC. We now live in a bumper sticker world in which Obama's careful attempts to walk the lines do not bear electoral fruit. Championing a law called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) cannot compete with chanting Build the Wall. At the other end of the spectrum. the 900 pages of the Affordable Care Act cannot satisfy those who advocate Medicare for All. One can wish for a better world. One can work to create a better world. But in order to do so, it's necessary to navigate the world as it exists with open eyes and effective strategies.

* Trump will get his votes. That can't be helped. The Kool-Aid has been drunk. The election will hinge on the turnout on the Democrat side. If Harris energizes women, people of color, and those whites who have resisted the Kool-Aid, even in states that are trying to make that difficult for them, she wins. Especially in states that are trying to make it difficult. Energy and enthusiasm will decide this election. Harris' task is to create that energy and enthusiasm among her constituency. Or she will lose.

AN AMERICAN EXPAT'S TAKE ON WORLD POLITICS: PART 1 - FRANCE

I enjoy politics. I enjoy reading about politics, talking about politics, writing about politics. And I've been a politician. I was a member of my town council in Pennsylvania for a couple of decades, chairman for a good bit of that time, and I sat on the two-county regional planning commission that covered the Lehigh Valley of eastern Pennsylvania including the cities of Allentown, Bethlehem, and Easton, twice serving as chairman.

This last year or two have been like heroin for a political junkie like me. As an American expat living in the south of France among politically aware expats from around the world, Brexit, Trump, and Macron have been front and center to read about, to talk about, and now to write about. What better time to look back and look forward than at the beginning of a new year?

I don't pretend that these will be detailed analyses. Pick nits if you will. In fact, I invite discussion. Even dissent. My insights are free of charge and worth every penny.

Let's get to it. And let's start in France. Why France? Because of the three countries that I will be discussing, France is the one country that seems to have gotten it right. Who'd have thunk it?

The French hold a series of elections, regional government, Presidential, and National Assembly in that order. Each of the elections may be two-tiered. That is, if the candidate for a particular office does not receive 50%+1 of the vote, a runoff between the two top votegetters is held. Campaigning is strictly controlled. For instance, all campaigning must cease on the Friday before the Sunday voting and the publication of polling in the French press is forbidden on election day.

The regional elections way back in December of 2015 were truly extraordinary from this American's point of view. Why? Because the center-left Socialists and the center-right Republicans cooperated to prevent the anti-European, anti-immigration, far-right National Front from controlling a single one of France's 13 regions. How did they cooperate? The Socialists withdrew candidates with no chance to win in favor of their Republican rival.

OK. Stop. Take a deep breath. And think about that for a minute, you sophisticated American political operatives out there. In places where they had no hope of winning, Socialist candidates not only withdrew their names from consideration. They urged their followers to vote for the conservative Republicans in order to prevent a win by a surging, populist fringe. And it worked. Although the National Front took the most votes overall in the first round of the regional elections, they failed to end up with political control of a single one of the thirteen French regions.

But wait. It gets better.

Having received a record number of votes in the regionals, and with failed/corrupt/uninspiring candidates for President  representing the major political parties, National Front leader Marine Le Pen's followers were charged up. There was a real chance that an anti-immigration, authoritarian, populist/nationalist might be elected President in 2017. (Sound familiar?) Enter Emmanuel Macron. An investment banker who joined the center-left Socialist government in early 2012, Macron worked his way into a Cabinet-level role and managed to institute several business-friendly reforms. But in 2016, he saw his chance, left the Socialist party, and formed En Marche!, the brand new political party that was to be the platform for his election as the youngest French President ever.

As is the case with any political party that is the child of a single politician, En Marche! defies easy categorization. Although supported by prominent centrists and even greens, Macron also committed to various workplace reforms that would eventually send the unions into the streets to protest. In shorthand, I'd say that Macron and therefore En Marche! are generally socially liberal and fiscally conservative. (Understand that by American standards, socially liberal in France is very liberal but fiscally conservative is far to the left of anything true American fiscal conservatives would recognize. My guess is that this sort of political philosophy is shared by a majority of Americans. They just don't have a political party that consistently espouses it.)

Macron proved a cagey politician, became the darling of the media, and eventually led the field in the first phase. He crushed National Front's Le Pen in the runoff. The turnout for the runoff was historically low at about 75%, probably because it was understood that Le Pen had no chance. By the time that the elections for the National Assembly rolled around, the wave was complete. En Marche! won a clear majority of seats in the French legislature without having to form any coalitions.

There are two lessons that I take away from the French elections as an American political observer.

The first is that the French understood in ways that Americans can't seem to wrap their heads around that love of country can and should have primacy over political loyalty, even over political philosophy. 60% of voters in the American 2016 Presidential election voted for a candidate other than Trump. That's a practically unprecedented rejection. Given a turnout below 60%, Trump received the vote of less than 25% of eligible voters. Yet Trump won. Why? Because Americans failed to understand the dangers of a Trump Presidency, underestimated the chances of a Trump victory, and so either stayed at home or voted for a candidate that had no chance of winning. Americans have no basis for pride in their electoral system given that result.

The second takeaway is that the Republican and the Democrat establishments had better keep their eyes open. The Tea Party movement has pulled the Republican Party far to the right. Progressives are similarly convinced that Democrats should move further left. Take heed. A new centrist party in France, less than two years old, swept into power on an irresistible wave fueled by contempt for a corrupt and unresponsive establishment and a desire for a centrist government. If it's true that the majority of Americans are centrist, the two major American political parties are moving in a way that invites a third party to fill the vacuum.

It couldn't happen in America, though. Right?

En Marche!

DEFEATING THE RIGHT - A EUROPEAN LESSON

Third parties have not had much success in the United States lately. Perot threw enough money at the Presidency to make things interesting in 1992. And Nader proved that a cranky gadfly could attract enough votes to be troublesome in 2000, maybe even influencing the result. But in a year when the nominees of both major American political parties were as popular as Aedes mosquitoes, the performance of the Bobbsey Twins (Green Stein and Libertarian Johnson) may have set third party politics back for years to come. They were terrible spokespeople for their causes.

Europeans, on the other hand, are quite familiar with multi-party elections leading to multi-party governments. In Iceland, the party that came in third in the national elections has been asked to form a government because the two parties that received more votes couldn't get it done. And I can't wait to see how Iceland's Pirate Party governs. (You can't make this stuff up.) But when I talk about a lesson that the American Left can learn from the Europeans, shouting Aaaaarh and raising the Skull & Crossbones is not what I had in mind. I had in mind the manner in which the French kept Marine Le Pen's far right National Front out of major regional offices recently.

CAVEAT: Be aware that I'm relatively new to the study of French politics, I'm therefore by no means an ultimate authority, and that I get most of my information from English language sites.

How was the party of the Far Right in France thwarted? The opposition Left quite openly decided to make sacrifices for the sake of the country. Novel concept.

France periodically holds elections that determine the legislative and executive bodies in its thirteen regions. Initial balloting determines which parties reach a threshold that makes them eligible to participate in a runoff. There were three main parties jockeying for power after the first round of voting in the most recent regionals - the Left (Socialist), the Center-Right (Republican), and the Far Right (National Front). In that first round, Marine Le Pen's National Front was a big winner. To be clear, they only received 28% of the total vote, but that was a record for the party and in two regions in particular they were almost certain to win in a three-party race for control.

What did the Socialists do? They decided not to run candidates in the two regions that threatened a National Front victory.

What was the outcome? The Republicans won both regions, the only two regions in which the National Front polled more than 40% of the vote in the runoff, enough to have won if the Socialists had participated.

In other words, the Socialists blocked the Far Right from taking regional power by ceding those regions without a fight to the Republicans, regions in which they would have lost anyway. So instead of five Socialist regions, six Republican regions, and two National Front regions, France now has five Socialist and eight Republican regions. Hardly a big win for the Socialists but an important denial of a power base to the National Front if your politics are left of center.

How does such a strategy convert to the American two party system? Oddly enough, we have a model - the Tea Party and the Republicans. For all of the huffing and puffing and primary challenges pitting the Tea Party against Establishment Republicans, in the vast number of cases once the primaries are over, the Republicans unite. They decide that their internecine squabbles pale beside a possible victory by the Left. On the other hand, it is clear that when Democrats suffer divisive primaries, the losers tend to vote for third parties or stay home. How do we know this? Look at the numbers.

In recent contested Presidential elections - I don't consider Bush v Kerry contested in any real sense - Democrats won by a popular vote margin of from 500,000 to 9,000,000 votes.  The lower winning margins, Gore and Hillary, came in elections during which the Democrats experienced considerable pushback from the Progressive wing of their party - Nader and Sanders. And Gore and Hillary lost in the Electoral College. The circumstances were different but the result was the same. On election day, the bitter battles over policy purity had taken their toll. The Democratic Party did not unite. George W. became President and Trump will become President. And any Democrat who thinks that those results were reasonable and proper for America is a nihilist, not a Democrat.

But winning the popular vote means nothing if you don't win the electoral vote, you say? OK. Take five of the major Rust Belt states, where this year's Presidential election might indeed have been lost by the Democrats. It is true that Republicans gained a few hundred thousand votes over 2012. But it is also true that Democrats lost nearly 1,500,000 votes in those states. Something over 1,000,000 voters who had voted Democratic in 2012 either stayed home or voted third party in just those five states.

Were either Gore or Hillary perfect candidates. Of course not. But might Gore have listened to his intelligence briefings and prevented 9/11? Had 9/11 happened, would Gore have broken the Middle East by taking his eye off Bin Laden and going after Saddam's nonexistent WMDs? Is Trump the President we need to replace Scalia and 100 federal judges, putting any number of our freedoms at risk, the freedoms that those folks who stayed home on election day probably cherish even more than those who voted?

Although both the Socialists and the Republicans will continue to struggle for the hearts and minds of the French electorate, both parties also had the ultimate welfare of their people at heart at election time. Why don't we Democrats?

Can't we all just get along?

OPEN LETTER TO MY REPUBLICAN FRIENDS

Dear Republicans,

Although no longer resident in the United States, my wife and I follow the news closely. We do so by faithfully scanning internet sites that aggregate news and opinion. We believe that this gives us a broad view of current events from a variety of perspectives since Flipboard, for instance, draws from sites as diverse as Fox News and Huffington Post, CNN and Al Jazeera and Business Insider and Forbes. And every November, we vote.

My point? I’m at arm’s length from the hurly-burly of the 24-hour news cycle but I’m still a reasonably knowledgeable news junkie. I am aware of the outlier sites, the ‘alt right’ and ‘progressive’ sites that claim to be presenting the real skinny on current events. I just don’t pay them much mind. Take my opinions for what they are worth but understand that they are the product of serious thought and not from having drunk someone else’s Kool-Aid. 

Trump is my President just as GWB was my President and Obama was yours. I say this even though Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016 both lost the popular vote. I say this not because I think that Trump’s election win was illegitimate. I say this because I am tired of hearing Republicans talking about the will of the people. As of today, 2 million more people voted for Hillary than voted for Trump. The will of the people has been thwarted by a Constitutional compromise reached over 200 years ago for reasons that had nothing to do with protecting the democratic process and a great deal to do with keeping slave-holding states in the union. 

And speaking of losing the popular vote, where is the consistency in claiming that you lost the popular vote due to massive voter fraud, then damning Stein in a series of late night tweets for calling for a recount in the closest battleground states? And speaking of late night tweets, if SNL skits and actors speaking to his Vice President from a Broadway stage enrage Trump, wait until he attends a G12 summit and real heavyweights get on his case. 

But far worse, Trump is blaming the media for ‘inciting’ protest marches. He’s called in media bigwigs to excoriate them. After using the media as a puppet to provide hundreds of millions of dollars of free publicity, the worm turns. And we know what sort of leaders around the world, as their first acts in office, attempt to cow or muzzle a free press.

Trump continues to make it known that he doesn’t want the US to be spending money to address climate change at the same time that he claims to understand the importance of the availability of clean, potable water. It’s hard to reconcile those two positions. How do you protect the southern Florida aquifer from salt water incursion without addressing rising ocean levels? How do you secure potable water for the American Southwest without doing what’s necessary to ameliorate atmospheric heating conditions that have led to severe and persistent drought? And how will Pence, a notorious denier of climate change, effect Trump’s thinking?

And how can you refuse national security briefings and tell Pakistani’s head of state over the phone that he’s a terrific guy? 

So while I am willing to give Trump a chance, I am not encouraged. He has a steep learning curve to climb. He needs to demonstrate the seriousness due the Presidency.

Let’s see if the equity markets move as high as they moved under Obama. Let’s see if the dollar strengthens against the euro even half as much as it did under Obama. Let’s see if the annual deficit is reduced by the same measure and as inexorably as it has been reduced under Obama. Let’s see if he builds a wall and makes Mexico pay for it.

And for all the fear of terrorism on our shores, let’s see if the record under Obama of fewer Americans annually dying from terrorism than dying from having appliances fall on them remains intact.

Or will Trump follow the legacies of his Republican predecessors. GWB was President when the worst recession since the Great Depression began as measured by decline in GDP. Eisenhower was President at the beginning of the second worst. Nixon was President at the beginning of the third worst. Reagan was President at the beginning of the fourth worst. Republicans all. Now Trump…

I’ll be watching. I won’t be the only one.

Affectionately,

Ira