Trump-Biden #2

CNN and PBS both went totally overboard in their incredulity regarding Trump's behavior at this evening's first debate. For heaven's sake, after four years what on earth did they expect? Every time Trump gets in front of a microphone he behaves with in exactly the same way; rude, disparaging, ignoring rules, norms and agreements he's made. This was completely predictable, and CNN's outrage just makes them look like they've been in a cave for the last four years. 

Media people; get it together. Stop pretending the world hasn't changed since Trump; it has. And in all that time, you have't come up with an adequate answer to presenting the news and more importantly the facts. You have a month; it's not to late to do your effing jobs.  

Trump-Biden #1

Biden is getting hosed. It's sad. After 4 years of listening to Trump's BS, Biden still hasn't got a clue how to deal with him. Let's hope his lackluster performance doesn't tank his lead; but I predict it will cost him about 3 points in the polls.Should have been Harris on the top of the ticket. She'd have taken Trump to the cleaners. Sad.

The art of good tragedy

McConnell won't fill RBG's seat on SCOTU before the election but after it. 

If he puts Trump's conservative pick in before the election it will motivate the Dems and increase voter turnout on the left which could deliver them the White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate. That opens the possibility that they could pack the court once in power.   

If he waits till after the election, even if Trump looses, even if the GOP looses its majority in the Senate, he can still get Trump's nominee confirmed before the new Senate is seated. As odious as that would be it's his safest play. It minimizes the chances that he will loose the Senate and so prevents the Dems packing the court were they to win control of both chambers and 1600 Pennsylvania Av.

After RBG

Ruth Bader Ginsberg's passing, while not completely unexpected, sets up yet another bitter partisan struggle.  McConnell refused to hold confirmation hearings for Obama's Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, 10 months before the election, saying: "The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president". 

Ironically, he explained this as simply adhering to the "Biden Rule", a reference to a speech Joe Bide made on the Senate floor in 1992, in which hs argued that Supreme Court confirmations should not take place in the midst of a political campaign season. Now, with just five weeks before the election, McConnell has had an epiphany and sees things quite differently. Hallelujah, and praise the Lord. 

Unfortunately, that creates a real dilemma for the Dems. Consider these scenarios.

1. If Trump were to win the election, the Senate would likely remain Republican, and the timing of the hearings would be moot.  
2. If the GOP retains the Senate, but Trump looses, arguably the most likely scenario, they will certainly try to have his nomination confirmed before Trump leaves office. 
3. And if they loose the Senate (and if that's the case, Trump would almost certainly have lost his reelection bid) there is a good chance the Senate will try to confirm Trump's pick before the new Senate is seated.

All these roads lead, albeit with decreasing certainty, to a 6-3 conservative majority on the Court.   

The dilemma is this: the harder the Dems push to forestall the confirmation until after the inauguration, the more Trump's base will be motivated to get out the vote for the GOP, which makes the lower number scenarios more likely; that is it will reduce the chances of retaking the Senate, and increase the chances  of loosing the White House.  But if they do nothing, McConnell will with 100% certainty confirm Trump's pick. So, dammed if you do, dammed if you don't.   

Political gamble

I'm a fairly cautious person. Most of my life I have avoided risk. I invest conservatively. I have never gambled. I prefer to see a small but relatively sure return on investment than a huge uncertain one.  

That's one of the reasons I find American politics so repugnant. Politicians are asking you to gamble on their tickets. 

Not only only has the frequency of emails asking me to bet on them increased substantially recently, so has the size of the bet. Early on it was $3, $5 then $15. Last week the smallest amount requested rose to $80.  The language also makes it clear that this is a game of chance; Kamala Harris' ask this morning noted that "...the stakes couldn’t be higher."    

The odds look reasonable; Biden-Harris are 7 to 2 odds on. But the prize may be relatively small; if the Dems don't take the Senate, all I get is peace of mind from not having to worry about the orange buffoon on a daily basis, but no real change (and in all likelihood a 6:3 conservative Supreme Court). That's something I suppose.  

To see things actually getting done, the Dems would need to take the Senate too. The odds of that (taking both the White House and the Senate) fall to 5 to 4 odds against (44%). Higher return, but longer odds. 

What a system! 

Doing the job, Trump style

Trump told Bob Woodward the he'd watched Dobbs, Carlson, Hannity, Ingraham, Pirro and Fox and Friends.  Each show is an hour except for the last one which is three, and into which he frequently calls to deliver long rambling monologues often lasting 45 minutes or more.

Now, I had always imagined that CEO's were very busy people, taking meetings with advisors and reports, powerful allies and even adversaries, getting briefed so that they are up to speed, and occasionally thinking about strategy. Not generally high on their list of activities is watching TV.

Trump claimed (and his supporters apparently believed) that he would bring that CEO skill-set / approach / mentality to the White House. But either he checked those attributes at the door, or (more likely) he never had them.  Doing the job, in Trump's White House, appears to involve copious amounts of TV watching (the shows Woodward lists come to between 6 and 9 hours). And worryingly he gets more information from them than he does from his civil service.  No wonder we're so royally screwed.     

Pure speculation

I often wonder, as I'm sure many of us do, how Trump thinks, or perhaps more accurately, how he chooses what to say or do.

Take Bob Woodward's revelations today that Trump knew and understood in February that covid-19 was many times more deadly than the flu and was more easily transmitted.  Yet he repeatedly told the public that is was no more of a problem than the regular flu.

What was the calculation behind his lies - we know they are lies because he made public statements that from his on the record interview with Woodward, we now know he knew were not true?

His explanation is that he didn't want to cause a panic; yet in "not causing a panic" he advocated attitudes and actions that have significantly prolonged and exacerbated the seriousness of the pandemic in the US. Could it be that he was unable to foresee how his statements would alter the public's response (not wearing masks, not social distancing, gathering in large indoor settings) in ways that increased the spread?

Or as Aaron Blake posits, it was that his only goal each day was (is) to manage the next 24 hours in the news cycle? That has a ring of plausibility; his only preoccupation is his ratings and the coverage he gets in the media. That he manages day to day to the exclusion of pretty much everything else, matters that require engagement, concentration and study, things to which he appears complete allergic.

It has been suggested that he is completely incompetent; perhaps another spin is that he's good at one thing only - image management (his own); but unfortunately being president is about more than just that. 

After the fire

The 2020 election will be by all accounts "a big one". Commentators on both sides, not to mention an ex-president and an ex-vice-president and have said so. It's not just voter turnout that makes it big; it is perhaps a turning point for the struggle for what it means to be America, what the country strands for, its fundamental values.

On one side you have the idea of a land of equality of opportunity, a meritocracy, where good ideas and hard work flourish in a capitalist free-market system.  On the other you have fear, division, defending of old money status and privilege, grievance, racism and resentment that the American dream has turned into a nightmare.
  
If Trump wins, a good portion of the country (though quite possibly not a majority) will have chosen door number 2, That path leads to increasing unrest, backsliding to a racially divided past that many will see as intolerable, and where that ends up is anybody's guess, but it won't be pretty.

If America chooses door number 1 and Trump looses, he will likely have to be dragged out of the White House kicking and screaming (recall Julian Assange being removed from the Ecuadorian embassy in London). But while some will see his defeat as a victory for racial justice, a less Utopian future lies ahead. The most optimistic but realistic scenario is that we return to the pre-Trump status quo, which while not great, was nothing like a terrible as Trumpism.   

But even that's unlikely; not all social processes are reversible. The damage done over the last four years will not be washed away. Trust in government and the media have declined and won't easily be restored. The black-blue divide will have deepened and policing will in general be an increasingly difficult problem. The catastrophic damage Trump's four years have wrought will take years, and probably a generation or more to undo. Much like Rome's most decadent Emperors, Trump may be both a symptom of the end of what was a relatively short-lived American 'empire' and the cause of its decline. 

Back to school

The California State University (or rather its Chancellor, Timothy White, and his team) took the decision in May to go completely online for the Fall 2020 with a high likelihood that the System's twenty three campuses will also be online in the spring.

That was simultaneously a bold decision (the CSU was the first major university in the country to make that decision) and at the same time something of a no-brainer. If the virus was under control by the end of the summer, that is, if cases were so few that testing and tracing was logistically feasible, in-person classes might have been possible; but if there was going to a significant chance that the virus was still circulating undetected, then bringing student to campus was always going to be a terrible idea.

Anyone who has to interact with the age demographic that the typical student body comprises could have told you that mask-wearing, no socializing and social distancing were non-starters. While this isn't a critique of all twenty-somethings, it applies to a large enough proportional that a covid hot-spot was all but inevitable: as, indeed, recent events have shown.

The other interesting aspect to this is the apparent greater willingness of elite private institutions to offer in-person classes. While this is not s statistically validated correlation, anecdotal evidence seems to support that notion that well known private schools were more likely to re-open with in-person classes than lesser known public ones. If this is so, what might explain this?

Two things. First is the power of the purse. Well heeled parents can exert considerable pressure on schools and may have used that leverage to sway schools' decision-making. If wealthy two-career families would rather not have their kids at home, just make sure that their university takes them off their hands.

The second may be hubris. Institutions comprised of people who see themselves at the top of their profession may overestimate their ability to deal with a situation that realistically isn't in their wheel-house. But that's not uncommon in top management teams; it's a feature of M&A 'disappointments', so why should the same dynamic not apply here?

Admittedly 20/20 hindsight and confirmation bias may be wt work in my interpretation, but one thing is clear; trusting people to "do the right thing" isn't a always such a great strategy. Perhaps it's time for time senior academic administrators to go back to school?

"You Lie!"

Remember that? How shocked we all were that someone would accuse the president of these United States of lying?

Or the hand ringing that went on for months as to whether or not to use the L-word when describing the "inaccurate" statements made "without evidence" by the current occupant of the White House?

And how concerned we once were that we should not accept the torrent of "untruths" as normal?

Ah, good times!