Eric The Blue

Against strategic voting

You cannot be on the receiving end of a news spot about the presidential primary campaign within the Democratic party without hearing that voters are looking for a candidate who can beat Trump. More than that, it seems: they are looking only for a candidate who can beat Trump. This explains, for example, why according to polls Joe Biden is leading the race despite having run a campaign that might charitably be described as lackluster. Polls of general election matchups show Biden farther ahead of Trump than any other Democratic candidate. Consequently, polls of the Democratic primary show Biden ahead of every other Democratic candidate in the race to be the nominee. Biden sits atop one poll because he sits atop a different poll.

This doesn't seem like a particularly healthy state of affairs. Does it accurately describe the situation? The Democratic candidates have joint press conferences, or "debates," in which they answer questions about issues, and people presumably take account of their answers in deciding for whom to vote. But do they "take account" of the degree to which the candidate's view is in accord with their own, or do they instead assess how the candidate's view will "play" in the general election? I think there is at least a large element of the latter. Elizabeth Warren's campaign stalled when it became associated with "Medicare for All." Maybe she stalled because Democratic primary voters decided her position was "too radical." But maybe she stalled because Democratic primary voters decided she was "too radical" for "swing voters" in the "swing states" of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. 

Every vote now is "strategic." People come to conclusions about for whom to vote only after having come to conclusions about for whom other people will vote. Debbie Democrat reasons that, while she likes Elizabeth Warren, she might vote for Klobuchar or Mayor Pete, because their more moderate views will play in the suburbs of Milwaukee. Being an informed voter involves being up on polling data from the key battlegrounds.

Do Republicans have similar dilemmas? It seems to me that four years ago Trump voters in the Republican primary weren't worrying overmuch about his "electability," a rating area on which he would have scored low. Rather, out of a surfeit of recklessness, or disgust, or resentment, or despair, or something, they said to themselves, "Fuck it, I'm voting for Trump." And it worked out for them! It turned out that he was "electable" because . . . he won the election! In the past, however, Republicans have faced the same kinds of questions that Democratic voters appear to be grappling with now. The Buckley Rule, named for William Buckley, stated that in a Republican primary his publication, National Review, would "support the rightward most viable candidate." This places a considerable burden upon the magazine's editors, as well as on individual voters attempting to adopt the same rule. On the one hand, they have to be lucid enough to come to sound judgments about who's just too nutty to have broad appeal. On  the other hand, they have to be nutty enough themselves to vote for a kook if enough others will, too. I suppose that an alternative to my "fuck-it theory" mentioned above would hold that, living in my liberal bubble, it was I who rated Trump low on electability, and he became the candidate because Republican voters, exercising some version of the Buckley Rule, correctly deemed him viable—too nutty and personally disgusting for effete urban liberals but not for the general population, especially considering the way said population is distributed across the sensors of the electoral college.

Whatever the correct resolution of those competing theories might be, I recommend to my fellow Democrats what I'll call the Fuck-It Rule. At the most, "electability" should be one consideration among others, and definitely not at the head of the list. It seems like an act of keeping faith with democracy and democratic values. Everything depends upon your vote representing your own views. Besides, you're probably a poor judge of who can win. Look who's president! Anyone still standing on our side could win, too. So vote for the one you like best. We're "socialists," I guess—the Social Security Act sure as hell wasn't their idea—but Trump is a low-IQ individual with a penchant for committing high crimes and misdemeanors. We should vote assuming that our nominee is going to be president and that the question therefore is: Which one's best for that big job?

Droppings

1. Someone needs to tell Mayor Pete that the shirt-and-tie-without-a-jacket look has been ruined forever by Jim Jordan. You wouldn't think a gay guy would need a fashion tip from me, but then, I am stuck in a monolingual state. Maybe he was studying while I watched Queer Eye.

2. In Shakespeare's tragedies about good loving gone bad, the force of the tragedy is diminished somewhat by the slender basis for said love. Romeo is just a dopey teenager caught on the rebound. "You woo by the book," complains Juliet, who isn't as stupid as her wooer. She means that Romeo's lines, displaced in time, sound lifted from mediocre rom-coms, and she's right. As for Othello, here's how he describes the provenance of his marriage to Desdemona:

She loved me for the dangers I had passed,
And I loved her that she did pity them.

Who could have guessed that they'd come to grief? As Desdemona's father would tell you, marriages might succeed more frequently if arranged by parents, over the objections of the principals.

3. What do you know, a shooting this morning at a church in Texas. Bloody Mary bars, people—assuming they have them in Texas and they're deemed safe to be open on Sunday, as gun shops presumably are.

4. I wonder whether the Buckeye football coach suffers from innumeracy. Five minutes into the fourth quarter, it makes little sense to take a 2-point lead by kicking an extra point.

5. If Trump's closest advisors would under oath refute the Democrats' theory of the case, he wouldn't be blocking them from testifying. Duh!

Twas the day after Christmas . . . .

The day after Christmas and, while things won't be "back to normal" at our house till school starts up again, at least the Big Holiday is past. The younger one was all whiny about Christmas having been "boring," not up to expectations. Wrapped boxes can contain anything but once opened the possibilities narrow considerably. So Christmas is like aging, get used to it! At supper time, she wouldn't eat, said she was sick, and went to bed at 6:30. Good, twelve hours of relief from your complaints. The older one and I celebrated her absence by watching the Family Feud Marathon on Game Show Network, a recreation that compelled me to answer her questions about the top responses to such polling items as: Name something that married men might have a secret stash of.

Resentment? Nope, didn’t make the list.

I am combating the tendency of social media to make you feel bad about yourself. Congratulations if you and yours lounged about, contemplating the nativity narrative in the Gospel According to Luke before transitioning into family caroling. No matter what you did, Merry Christmas!

At the movies: Bombshell

Saw, with stepkid, at Lagoon Cinema, Bombshell, the title a possible play on words: what the Fox anchorwomen are, "bombshells," or, alternatively, what they report, though it's not really a "bombshell" that Roger Ailes, Bill O'Reilly, et al are turds. At the dramatic center is the perfectly coiffed Megyn Kelly, played by Charlize Theron. Will she do the right thing? 

Sometimes, with regard to people who don't resign their jobs in the Trump White House, the point is made: The pay can't be that good, why don't they just do the right thing? One thing the movie glides over pretty easily is that, for Kelly, the pay was that good. She will keep her mouth shut. "At what price?" asks her husband. "At the price of this apartment we live in," she replies, and she elaborates. That quiets him down. Action x is the "right" thing to do, unless someone pays you enough money not to do x, in which case not doing x is the new "right" thing to do—so obviously true it needs no exposition. The possibility of doing two right things, telling the truth about the turd and moving to a cheaper apartment, doesn't arise, but, in the end, she does tell the truth, which is that Ailes sexually harassed her, too.

There is one scene, in particular, that's hard to watch and makes you hate Roger Ailes, even if you don't really require a special invitation. When, therefore, his downfall comes, it's especially delightful, but back outside walking to your car it feels like kind of a cheap thrill, the way for example the camera zooms in at his moment of disgrace so that you can contemplate the pores in the skin of his fat, sick, disgusting face. He's physically grotesque and at one point Theron's Kelly observes that, probably for this reason, he prefers sex acts that do not require disrobing. Feels like piling on.

Oh god, am I feeling sorry for Roger Ailes?

With Margot Robbie, a composite of all the more anonymous Fox victims and the casualty in the hard-to-watch scene, John Lithgow as Ailes, and Nicole Kidman as Gretchen Carlson, who started it all by suing after she was fired: she got $20 million, so no need for a cheaper apartment. Not Christmas-themed in the least and I liked better our breakfast at Our Kitchen, a hole-in-the-wall on 36th Street just west of Lyndale. According to Rory, the pork sausage patty is to die for, and I can vouch for the cheese omelet, hash browns, and pancakes. I am not one of those who complains about getting "too much" whipped butter.

 

About those evangelicals

You know how, on the radio, there is a delay, so that if something bad happens, like an interviewee lets fly with the f-bomb, remedial action can be taken and the sensibilities of listeners are not offended? For some reason, I never wondered till today whether the same kind of precautionary steps are taken on cable news shows where controversial topics are frequently discussed and the emotions of guests can run high. I don't remember hearing any f-bombs or bleeps. I have heard people say things that they probably regretted—or at least would have regretted, if they were constrained by decency and reason. The people tend to look nice, so I think the make-up room personnel perform admirably, but I have no idea whether any airbrushing ever occurs once they are talking on air.

I wondered today for the first time because I was watching while a guest waded into tender territory, and I thought I could detect her slowing down, like she was asking herself whether it was wise to say  what she was winding up to say, but she was too far into it, so she pushed through to the end, then laughed a little nervously at herself while the more tv-experienced anchor—it was Craig Melvin—regarded her with what looked like a bemused smile. The topic was that Christianity Today editorial that I editorialized about yesterday—it's a subject of interest to me, which is why I had dried my dishwater hands and walked around the corner to watch in the first place. The guest was a young African-American woman with I think religious credentials of some kind, though I was still in the kitchen when she was first introduced. Her point was that evangelicals should worry more about being true to Jesus and less about being true to Trump, who in no way resembles Jesus. I'm paraphrasing, but that's the point she was making, and, as she warmed to her topic, she said something like: You know, Jesus, he kept company with unsavory types, including prostitutes—it was around here that she seemed to slow down a little—but he never, you know . . . paid, never like, paid for sex.

If he did, it was related in the apocrypha to the Apocrypha only. 

So that was a morning brightener. In keeping with my current obsession with this general topic, I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations to try to determine how badly Trump's prospects for reelection would suffer if his support among Christian evangelicals slipped even modestly. Of course, one key input is the percentage of Christian evangelicals in the voting population, and I don't even know what the definition of "Christian evangelical" is, let alone how many of them there are. But according to Pew Research, just over a quarter of voters are white and evangelical, and 81% of them voted for Trump. To keep the fractions round, let's assume that a fifth of voters are white evangelicals and that four-fifths of them voted for Trump, whose victory in the electoral college owes everything to narrow wins in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. His widest margin in those three states was Wisconsin: 0.7%. There were about 2.97 million voters in Wisconsin, and Trump won by 23,000. A fifth of 2.97 million is 594,000, the approximate number of white evangelicals voting in Wisconsin. If they went for Trump by 80% to 20%, his margin within this group was 356,400 (475,200 to 118,800). Let's see what happens if everything stays the same except that he gets 75% of those voters, instead of 80%. And let's for the sake of argument say that the missing 5% do not switch their vote to the Democratic candidate—instead, they vote for someone else, maybe the Libertarian, or just don't vote at all. Trump's margin among white evangelicals in Wisconsin then slips from 356,400 to 326,700, a difference of 29,700. Remember, he carried the state by only 23,000. 

A very rough-and-ready grind of the numbers, to be sure, but I've tried to make assumptions and round numbers with an eye toward understating the effect, so I think it's safe to say that Trump's reelection chances would decline precipitously if there were even a modest exodus of white evangelicals from his base. And it does seem like a somewhat unlikely alliance that might be subject to some fraying, no? 

Christianity Today roasts Trump

Here is a link to the Christianity Today editorial, "Trump Should Be Removed From Office," that has attracted so much attention. Reading through it, I get the impression that the author, Mark Galli, who is the editor of the magazine, gave birth after quite a long period of gestation: like maybe he had formed this opinion a while ago, and had begun writing the editorial in his head, making additions and subtractions (more additions), honing the argument while at the same time, out of prudential calculations, suppressing publication until, finally, his prudence was routed by Trump's conduct and he headed for the birthing room, where he delivered the baby after a brief labor. If that's how it was, he traveled the same road as the Speaker of the House.

Nancy Pelosi's prudential concerns related to the effect of impeachment on the 2020 election. There are signs in the editorial that Christianity Today, and Galli, were thinking about their evangelical readership, which voted overwhelmingly for Trump, still overwhelmingly supports him, and probably does not subscribe to Christianity Today in order to read about politics, unless it's abortion  politics. This likely explains the lingering backward gaze at the Clinton impeachment. The argument is that Christianity Today stood against immorality then and it's time to do it again. Yes, high time, I'd say, considering that the two cases are dissimilar and the current one a hundred times worse. But, speaking as an outsider, sexual extra-curriculars seem to have a strong hold on the evangelical imagination, and Galli would know better than I how to appeal to them. It seems to me that in his brief for impeachment he quite skillfully blends the president's private sins and public corruption. The former may be intended for Christianity Today subscribers, but it's the latter for which Trump is being impeached, and Galli, when he turns his attention in that direction, says much in very few words:

But the facts in this instance are unambiguous: The President of the United States attempted to use his political power to coerce a foreign leader to harass and discredit one of the president's political opponents. This is not only a violation of the Constitution; more importantly, it is profoundly immoral.

That first sentence is an admirably concise statement of the impeachment article pertaining to abuse of power. In the second sentence, he doesn't say what part of the Constitution Trump violated, and I think maybe it would have been better to assert that the president violated his oath of office—he did not "faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States." The clause after the semicolon shows that the author is still, as I say, blending Trump's private and public misconduct.  

I would never have expected to be so favorably impressed by an editorial in Christianity Today. If only a congressional Republican would now surprise me! It's just another Christmas season we're living through, however. Being surprised by McConnell or Graham would be a sign that the end of time was at hand.

Funereal

I read with interest this article, in The New York Review Daily, about the funeral industry. For years I played on a softball team that was sponsored by a funeral parlor. Once, over beers after a game, we went around the table and it turned out that at least half of the ball-playing funeral directors had lost a parent or sibling before they were teenagers. People like to believe they're steering their own ship but they aren't. Impossible to escape the shade cast by early traumas.

Of course these guys I played ball with had been to college and majored in mortuary science. Do you know what class they all had to take, a prerequisite for the rest of the curriculum? Freshman decomposition. Embalming room humor (a cousin of gallows humor).

Another joke among the funeral directors concerned how their business was "recession-proof," a humorous admission that it isn’t subject to the normal economic analysis. Its only customers are in no condition to ask a lot of questions or shop around—indeed, if there is to be a viewing and a burial, there's hardly time for that. Grieving people, even if thrifty by inclination or necessity, tend to part easily with their money. It's simpler just to pay and get through it. There is also an element of shame, or pride. The second most expensive casket is a strong seller. Probably explains why the top of the line one resembles a room at the Ritz. 

The workings of the exalted free market just don't apply to everything. Health care is another—for example, the services provided by the professionals and the medicines they prescribe. Generally, when the price rises, demand drops, but not for funerals, bypass surgery, or insulin. The downward pressure on price exerted by "the invisible hand" is replaced by human decency alone—in other words, there is none. But for whatever reason there is in our country such a strong presumption in favor of The Market that things have to get completely out of hand before "socialists" notice that it's not working. Grandma buys macaroni instead of medicine and dies at 66. Well, at least she doesn't have to pay for the funeral. She can't afford to live and her kids can't afford a funeral, but, by all means, keep the gubbermint out of it!

Politics! Math!

I was out and about yesterday and so am not in position to award the gold medal for most absurd defense of President Trump during the full House's impeachment debate, but while driving I did hear on the car radio one guy quote Jesus on the cross, "Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do," before assuring Democrats that, following Christ's example, he was praying for them in just the same way. I thought this was, you know, over the top by an inch or two, and this morning, trying to track down the identity of the biblical scholar, I kept getting referred by Google to some other representative who had compared the Democrats unfavorably to Pontius Pilate. If Minority Leader McCarthy hadn't been working so hard on his own floor speech, it might have occurred to him to import a Gospel choir to sing, during the interval when representatives were voting electronically to impeach Trump, "Where Were You When They Crucified My Lord?"

I was sitting at the dining room table being perplexed by a math test that Lydia, my 6th grader, had brought home from school. The problem she got wrong is pictured above. Let's see, if Jim had $4  Peter would have $7, then Peter gives Jim three-fourteenths of $7, which is a buck fifty, and they both have $5.50, so that must be the answer, except that if Jim had $8 then Peter had $14, and Peter would then give Jim $3, in which case they'd both have $11, so I guess there are at least two "right" answers, and if there are two maybe there are a billion more! 

Poor Lydia. As she pointed out, "I tried," but she's only in 6th grade and could never have figured out that the correct answer is: "My math teacher might be a little weak at math, maybe he should read up on the New Testament and run for Congress, he's more than smart enough and the salary is $174,000 per year."  

UPDATE: A fellow math geek writes to defend Lydia's teacher, on the theory that the above problem is a kind of trick question, and that the right answer is that Jim could have started with any amount of money—which is indeed the right answer to the problem as it was set out on Lydia's test.

I meant to insult Bible-thumping congressmen, not middle school math teachers, who, being overworked and underpaid, might pull the deficient (or trick) problem from some source available to math teachers. If so, and the source provides answers to its suggested problems, I'd be curious about the solution it gives for the one about Jim and Peter. I told my geeky friend that I think the direction "Show all work" indicates the problem is deficient, not a "trick," but I could be wrong. If instead of a test question this problem had been homework, and Lydia had asked for help, we could have gotten to the bottom of everything by turning in a paper that said:

Jim could have started with any amount of money. Let x stand for however much he had to start, then Peter started with 7x/4 dollars. Subtract from Peter's 7x/4 dollars (3/14)(7x/4) and add to Jim's x dollars the same amount. Peter then has 7x/4 — (3/14)(7x/4) = 7x/4 — 21x/56 = 14x/8 — 3x/8 = 11x/8. And Jim has the same amount: x + (3/14)(7x/4) = x + 21x/56 = x + 3x/8 = 11x/8. 

I think that's a good answer. It's "correct" if it's a "trick" question and, if it's not meant as a trick question, it shows that something's gone wrong. That the fractions are a little unwieldy helps to disguise what I take to be an error. Suppose the problem had been:

Peter has twice as much money as Jim. After he gives a quarter of his money to Jim, they have the same amount. How much did Jim have to start?

Same principle, but it's easier to see that Jim could have started with any amount.

National polls seduce us into thinking it matters what "the nation" thinks

The cable news chatterers are chatting about this Fox News poll, released yesterday, showing that half of all registered voters—exactly 50%—think Trump should be impeached and removed from office. Some say this is bad news for Trump, others say: "Who cares?" I'm afraid I'm with the second group, though not for the reasons touted by chatting representatives of "Who cares."

Well, they are on point, sort of, when they say that impeachment doesn't poll well in The Swing States. I don't know if that's true, but what's true for sure is that no one in the Congress represents "all registered voters." If those in the "this-is-bad-news-for-Trump" camp think public opinion is going to move congressional opinion, they are wrong, wrong, wrong. Members of the House represent 435 distinct districts. Because of the rural-metropolitan divide, augmented by gerrymandering, there are, according to the Cook Partisan Voting Index, 235 districts that at least "lean" Republican, compared to only 192 that at least "lean" Democratic. (Eight are rated "even.") After the "blue wave" of the 2018 midterms, there are 235 Democrats in the House, which means, basically, that there are no Republicans left representing competitive districts. If you are a Republican with a seat in the House of Representatives, you represent a Trump district. What do you care if half of all registered voters think he should be Paul Manafort's roommate? (This is funny because Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign manager, is in prison, as is his former lawyer and "fixer," Michael Cohen; I believe that Michael Flynn, his first National Security Advisor, is still awaiting sentencing.)

Let's see, 235 divided by 435 is about 0.54, so according to Cook 54% of House districts are more Republican than the country as a whole. In the other congressional body, the Senate, wherein Trump will be tried unless Mitch McConnell can devise a work-around, the members represent states, which skew even more crazily toward the Republicans. The "Exhibit A" of the brief in defense of this proposition is the result of the 2016 presidential election, in which Trump carried 30 of the 50 states despite losing the national popular vote by more than 2% (or, in terms of raw votes, by about 2.9 million). So, as of November 2016, at least 60% of the states were more Republican than the country as a whole. That's the macro view. Keeping it local, one might observe that the state I live in, Minnesota, shares a border with three others—North Dakota, South Dakota, and Iowa—that between them have less than 2% of the country's population, but 6% of the seats in the US Senate, and 17.6% of the Senate votes needed to acquit Trump. The six Republicans representing these states have fewer than 5 million constituents, while the two Democratic senators from California have 40 million. 

One of the chatterers says that half of all voters favoring impeachment and removal augurs ill for Trump's reelection. Possibly he has not heard of the electoral college? Trump does not need half of all voters. He does not even need half of the 2-party vote. He needs half of the 2-party vote in 28 states. Wyoming is one. North Dakota is about 4 or 5. Iowa makes 20-something. Almost there.

Did you know that the electoral college is a work of genius, because it forces presidential candidates to "broaden their appeal"?  LOL! 

"Elitist!"

 

I spent some time this morning reading up in Wikipedia on the lives of the politicians serving on the House Judiciary Committee. If your working theory is that their place in the world owes more to their high ambition than to their high merit, you tend not to find a lot to make you reconsider. Most are lawyers. I guess I vaguely knew, but had forgotten, that US News & World Report ranks institutions of higher learning, including law schools. When you read in Wikipedia that, for example, Rep. Guy Reschenthaler, Republican from Pennsylvania, is a graduate of Dusquesne University School of Law, in Pittsburgh, that information is a hyperlink and, clicking it, you are taken to the article on his alma mater, which includes the information that, according to USNWR, it's the 119th best law school in the United States. I'm picking on Reschenthaler not entirely at random: he made a poor impression on me while boasting yesterday that he could, "in a minute," win an acquittal for Trump in a court of law, and that he'd also have no trouble winning a conviction in an obstruction case against Adam Schiff, the Democratic chairman of the Intelligence Committee. 

Sure.

Speaking of people who rub me the wrong way, Jim Jordan's law school is Capital University, in Ohio. Can't tell you exactly where USNWR ranks this school because they simply group 146 through 192 together—I guess maybe there are 192 law schools in the country?—and Capital U's law school is in this undifferentiated bottom group. No wonder Jordan despises "the elites," an imaginary pejorative whose place of honor in the working vocabulary of many Republicans is a whispered admission that the smart and hard working boys and girls aren't buying what they're selling. After all, not everyone can fail to notice that the various defenses of Trump's conduct frequently contradict one another. “Ukraine couldn't have been pressured if it didn't even know the money was being withheld!” And, “Trump was withholding the money until satisfied that the new leader was keeping his promises about fighting corruption!”

But in that case Trump should have announced to Ukraine that the money was being withheld until it displayed satisfactory progress in its anti-corruption campaign. What would be the point of keeping the hold a secret when you are leaning on Ukraine in pursuit of a legitimate end? Not to mention a million other reasons this line of argument is a croc, such as the testimony of Gordon Sondland, Trump's own appointee (and million-dollar donor), who told Schiff's committee that Trump didn't care about an investigation into the alleged corruption of the energy company that Biden's kid worked for: he just wanted an announcement of an investigation televised on CNN—that was enough.

The exasperation displayed by Rep. Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, in the above clip is entirely warranted. According to the Wikipedia article about him, Raskin is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School. The typical Trump voter isn't impressed, but the pathetic and insecure object of their affection cares deeply about this kind of stuff. Had Jim Jordan gone to Harvard, Trump would know and would talk him up more. He’s always yammering about how So-and-So who opposes him is "a low IQ individual," and Michael Cohen, his personal lawyer and fixer who's presently incarcerated, testified to a congressional committee that Trump once directed him to write letters to schools he (Trump) had attended, threatening dire consequences if his grades or SAT scores were ever released. (One such letter may be viewed here.) 

Elizabeth Warren, then and now

I heard this story on the radio Tuesday morning and, tracking down the online version now, it's not less interesting when I'm fully awake.  Who knew that Elizabeth Warren began her adult life as a pro-business conservative? That her views began to change when, while on the faculty at the University of Texas Law School, she commuted to work with a colleague, a standard-issue liberal who argued, over her skepticism, that rate-payers were being ripped off by public utilities? And that the decisive event in her "journey," or conversion narrative, or whatever you want to call it, arose from her interest in bankruptcy law, which caused her to undertake a detailed study of bankruptcy cases across the country, a project she began expecting to find that irresponsible petitioners were gaming the system in order to escape the legitimate claims of their creditors—but found instead, between the lines of colorless court pleadings, evidence of personal catastrophes, a wide array of them, medical calamities leading the way, the troubles of desperate people often deepened by a legal but predatory system of consumer lending?

I didn't know about this aspect of her biography, and I think that I'm a more greedy consumer of news than most. There are vast quantities of political journalism and the value of the preponderant mass of it comes into focus when, very occasionally, one stumbles on something of genuine interest. Warren's biography likely explains her passion on issues relating to consumer protection, since from the time of at least St. Paul the converts to a cause have always been its most ardent defenders.

It happened that, having heard this story on the radio Tuesday morning, I spent most of the day with my 86-year-old dad who was not supposed to be alone for a period of time after a medical procedure. I was surprised how often his phone rang, how short the conversations were, and how rude he was. After about the third one, I asked him about it, and he said: "Ach, these lowlifes, I think they get lists of names with birth dates and call the really old ones to try and rip them off." 

I am watching the impeachment hearings while typing this. Have to say that the witnesses before the Schiff committee—Fiona Hill, Bill Taylor, David Holmes, George Kent, Jennifer Williams, Alexander Vindman, Marie Yovanovitch—are generally more impressive seeming people than a randomly selected member of the House Judiciary Committee. In the federal government hierarchy, it seems the higher you go, the less apt you are to discover competence, intelligence, and a working vocabulary of more than a couple hundred words. At the pinnacle, the Oval Office, where Ivanka Trump presumably advises her father on grave matters of state, you've entered the realm of Theater of the Grotesque.

Books of the Bible: Proverbs

Proverbs; or, the Poor Richard's Almanack of the Old Testament. 

Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy wealthy and wise—Poor Richard

A slothful man will not catch his prey, but the diligent man will get precious wealth—Proverbs 12:27

Though the Book of Proverbs resembles an anthology—an assembly of unconnected sayings—it's possible to detect a prevailing theme, and it's this: the prudent and wise live long and prosper, while reckless fools suffer the opposite fate. One recognizes this theme from, for example, the Deuteronomic historian, who describes a period of national hardship leading to obedience and faith, which begets success and prosperity, the enjoyment of which tends to diminish religious devotion, which is the cause of new misfortunes, then another religious awakening, and on and on, an endless cycle and a "theory of history." But notice that, in the world of Deuteronomy, prosperity or adversity is contingent upon obedience to God's commandments, whereas in Proverbs it's quite a secular brand of conformity that is recommended for advancement. It's not as if I had to hunt around to turn up Proverbs 12:27, "wisdom" one might subscribe to without having any particular view about bondage in Egypt, the exodus, delivery into the promised land, God's covenant with his people. Israel's faith is founded upon God's historical acts, which aren't mentioned in Proverbs. According to the  Deuteronomist, you should behave this way and not that way because the former has been commanded by God, the latter forbidden, and he is watching still, active in history, punishing and rewarding. In the Proverbs, God seems at a remove, on sabbatical, and you should behave this way and not that way only because, presumably, you are a prudent person who wants to enjoy an agreeable life.

The Proverbs are open to the same kind of criticism that was leveled at Ben Franklin, the compiler of Poor Richard's almanac. When a statue honoring Franklin was unveiled, James Russell Lowell wrote:

[W]e shall find out that Franklin was born in Boston . . . and that he moved to Philadelphia because great men were so plenty in Boston that he had no chance . . . and that he discovered the almanac, and that a penny saved is a penny lost, or something of the kind.

Such thin gruel, in other words, that getting the details exactly wrong has no effect. By genre, the Proverbs are, like Job and Ecclesiastes, "wisdom literature," but there the resemblance ends. Here's another representative Proverb (12:21):

No ill befalls the righteous,
but the wicked are filled with trouble.

Isn't it pretty to think so! This is the "wisdom" that is explicitly rejected in those other wisdom books, angrily and defiantly in Job, wearily but firmly in Ecclesiastes. If one were to judge the merits of Old Testament writings by strictly literary standards, the high points would be much of Genesis, the court history in II Samuel, the Book of Jonah, many of the Psalms, and, in the category of wisdom literature, Ecclesiastes and Job. The major prophetic works of Jeremiah and Isaiah, as well as three of the so-called minor prophets—Amos, Micah, and Hosea—command attention also. In comparison to all of these, the Book of Proverbs sounds like Polonius.

So that would be the brief for the prosecution—which I endorse, but not wholly. One occasionally receives, while wading through, a pleasing jolt. The source, when this happens, is often an unexpected turn.

Like a gold ring in a swine's snout
is a beautiful woman without discretion.

The two-part construction is characteristic, but the effect varies considerably. Very often—too often—part two completes the thought of part one in pat and predictable fashion. It seems there are a million like "the wise do x; the foolish, the opposite of x" or "x yields good results; and nothing good comes from x's opposite." So the jaded reader, coming to

A foolish son is ruin to his father

finds his brain filling in line two with

but a wise son elevates the family

or some such ticky-tackiness, and for this reason the reward is all the greater when, in this case, the eye, catching up, corrects the brain's sneering guess with 

and a wife's quarrelling is a continual dripping of rain.

Maybe it's just me, but, among the more vivid and memorable of the Proverbs, it seems an overrepresented subject concerns relations between the sexes. In chapter 30, essentially an appendix in which the sayings drop the two-part parallel construction in favor of more spacious expression, one reads, at verses 18 and 19:

Three things are too wonderful for me;
four I do not understand:
the way of an eagle in the sky,
the way of a serpent on a rock,
the way of a ship on the high seas,
and the way of a man with a maiden.

The Proverbs are frequently quoted by those who wish to endow their prim morality with the authority of Scripture, which I guess is their right, but the tactic may have been anticipated:

Like a lame man's legs, which hang useless,
is a proverb in the mouth of fools. —Proverbs 26:7

"Partisan rancor," then and now

 

Profits at the major cable news outlets get a bump when the partisan rancor attains a new record decibel level, which supplies the incentive for them to crank it up themselves, with the result that The Great Divide they regularly invoke is half their own creation. The other half is mostly junkie pride transferred to public life. Our times are the worst ever for divisiveness! A boast.

Probably not a true one, however. Let's skip things that happened before I was born, like the Civil War. When I was 10, the issues of the day were, at home, the civil rights movement and of course the Vietnam War abroad. People had opinions then too. Sean Hannity is one thing but the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy belong to a different filing system. The campus protests and "take overs" of administration buildings and the shootings at Kent State—not sure what the current analogue would be. Good Nielsen ratings for a shouting fest on CNN doesn't seem up to the same level. People are afraid to bring up Trump at Thanksgiving? Try, "So, whaddya think of this massacre at My Lai?"

When the case is made for the transcendental bitterness of our own times, the focus is often on something that happened when I was 15—Nixon's resignation a few days after Republican leaders in the Congress visited the White House to report on the status of the impeachment articles that had been approved, with the support of several Republican members, by the House Judiciary Committee. The full House's vote to impeach was inevitable, but Nixon must have been hoping that the two-thirds supermajority needed for conviction in the Senate would be too high a bar. After hearing the bad news regarding the certainty of impeachment in the House, he turned to Barry Goldwater, the Republican leader in the Senate, and asked how many Republican votes he could rely on in a Senate trial. Goldwater is said to have replied, "Damn few and not mine." Of course, that is what no Republican today is saying. It would be false to say "damn few" today but, if the sides weren't so dug in, it seems the facts of the case would call forth a few "not mine"s. I guess there are a couple of Republican governors of blue states—Larry Hogan in Maryland, Charlie Baker in Massachusetts—who have somewhat grudgingly allowed that at least the impeachment investigation is justified.

Even the lesson of Watergate, however, might be less that back then some Republicans were willing to oppose Nixon than that the pitched fight of the day dissolved into something less substantial before being resolved by history. Nixon had his defenders, too. The first article of impeachment passed out of the Judiciary Committee by a vote of 27-11, with just six of the 17 committee Republicans joining all 21 Democrats voting Yes. Reading a contemporary account, it's hard to imagine that, in the moment, the Republicans voting No were regarded by many as heroes. Delbert Latta. Joseph Maraziti. David Dennis. Eight others. They aren't regarded as heroes today. The ones still alive can be sure that, like those who predeceased them, the first line in their New York Times obit will relate their vote "supporting President Nixon," and then they'll be forgotten, for which they should probably be grateful. It seems like a fate that more Republicans today would want to avoid, but no, they’re more worried about being "primaried" by a cultist. 

Meanwhile, at least one Republican voting Yes on the Nixon impeachment is enjoying posthumous esteem at YouTube—see video above. It's Rep. Larry Hogan, of Maryland, who—fun fact—is the father of the aforementioned Governor Hogan of Maryland. Larry Hogan Sr was the only Republican member on the House Judiciary Committee to vote in favor of all three articles of impeachment against Nixon. The video begins with him being recognized to speak for fifteen minutes by Rep Peter Rodino, the chairman of the committee.

Jim Dimick, 1928-2019

The youngest is me, summer of 1970, documenting my participation in the Jim Kaat Sports Camp. Of course that's the Twin Hall of Famer to my left. To my right is my camp counselor, whose name I for some reason remember, and not because it was Eldridge Turkenfreiter: Doug Johnson. The tallest, wearing the sweatshirt, is Jim Dimick, who died earlier this week in Northfield, where he had been the head baseball coach at St Olaf College from 1967 to 1994. He also assisted in football and basketball. If I remember right, Doug (my counselor) was the shortstop on St Olaf's baseball team and the quarterback of its football team. He would have been the one handing the ball off to the legendary Ole Gunderson, who, despite the passage of a half century, and only three seasons' worth of games played (freshmen weren't eligible for varsity competition), still holds the school record for career rushing yards.  His son, Shane, was a baseball all-American for the Gophers.

Back to Dimick. I used to go to a lot of high school basketball games in the winter, and once, arriving at Sibley High School well before game time, I idled for awhile in front of the trophy case. I noticed that they had been the baseball champ of their conference almost every season through the first half of the 1960s. All the team photos were there, and I recognized the coach: Jim Dimick. Then, suddenly, no more championship photos after the midpoint of the decade. The school would have needed a new coach, because Dimick moved on to St Olaf in 1967, and that's when the Oles' run of conference baseball championships began—fourteen of them in Dimick's twenty-seven seasons. 

I don't know how he did it. I don't think he was an aggressive recruiter. He knew baseball, for sure, and was also a good and patient teacher, but that wouldn't necessarily distinguish him from a million coaches whose teams won only fifty-five percent of their games. His obituary says he was "called to be a coach," and whatever intangibles that mystical phrase is meant to indicate must have applied in spades. I suppose that whoever wrote the obituary could have said "born to be a coach," which would have left out the undersense of having a Christian vocation, something Dimick claimed to possess. I took a class from him in the Phy Ed department, and he was a kind of clean raconteur, a story to illustrate every point, lots of corn pone, but to dislike him even a cynic in training such as myself would have to have been determined. I remember we had an assignment involving the plan for a baseball practice, and he wrote at the bottom of my paper, "Not enough batting practice!" To defend myself I would have said that, in my experience, if you can't hit you can't hit and no amount of practice is going to help you—probably the kind of can't-do attitude that is a bar to getting better. Dimick's players got better. 

News of the day and the future

The House Intelligence Committee today released its "Trump–Ukraine Impeachment Inquiry Report." It can be read—lots of places, I'm sure, but including at NPR's website, here. Judging just from the Table of Contents, it appears the Committee envisions two Articles of Impeachment, one relating to Trump's solicitation, amplified by a pressure campaign, of Ukraine's help with his 2020 reelection effort, and the other relating to his obstruction of the investigation into this misconduct. It's evident that the committee collected more damning evidence than one would have known about, just from reading newspapers and watching the public hearings, and held it back until now. For example, AT&T must have felt obliged to comply with congressional subpoenas, even if the White House did not, for the Report includes call logs that appear suspicious, or just outright incriminating: certainly they support the Democrats' case for impeachment. Why so many phone contacts between Rudy Giuliani, the president's personal lawyer, and the Office of Management and Budget, which would have overseen the release of congressionally approved foreign aid? Such a simple and obvious question bears on both potential Articles of Impeachment. If there is an innocent explanation for the calls, the Administration would want it to be known, but instead it is blocking the principals—Giuliani, his unknown contact at OMB—from supplying the information Congress is seeking.

Well, as far as how the movie ends, it doesn't really matter what the evidence shows. Our system places the fate of a corrupt president in the hands of his own party, and it's been clear now for awhile that the Republican party is a wholly owned subsidiary of Trump, Inc. What is the prospect of beating him at the polls? I'm more optimistic than my fellow hand-wringers. Trump won in 2016 with 46 percent of the vote, and his approval rating has rarely hit 46 since. I doubt he can win any electoral votes that he lost last time. If he doesn't, then the Democratic candidate needs 38 electoral votes that Clinton lost. The best candidates are:

Pennsylvania (20)
Michigan (16)
Arizona (11)
Wisconsin (10)
Florida (29)
North Carolina (15)

So, the Democrat needs three of them, unless one is Florida, in which case she (or he) needs just one of the other five—though this "two-state solution" is not apt to be realized, since I've listed the six in order of their probable degree of difficulty for a generic Democrat to crack, according to the preponderance of expert opinion (which, however, may not in the end prove expert): still, if Florida is blue on election night, it's very likely that more than just one of the four above it is too. 

Last night, on "one of those shows," A.B Stoddard, a reporter at Real Clear Politics, told Brian Williams that Team Trump has written off Pennsylvania: they don't think they can win it. She also told him that they are investing in Georgia and Texas, the handicapping significance of which I tend to dismiss, since they have so much money that after falling out of a pocket some of it might very well blow into Idaho, too. Moreover, A.B. Stoddard is a reporter, not an oracle. Wringing my hands.

Minnesota! Wisconsin! Iowa!

I knew we might lose to Bucky Badger but am a little surprised that we made them look as if they ought to be in the SEC. Did we ever have a blitz called when they didn't have a screen pass called? If Trump were a Minnesotan he'd demand an inquiry into the obvious cheating.

Having transitioned smoothly into politics, I'll mention that on the news this morning I saw a live clip of Biden's wife speaking with a group of voters in what looked like a church basement, or maybe an elementary school classroom, in Emmetsburg, Iowa. Emmetsburg is in northwestern Iowa roughly equidistant between Des Moines and Sioux Falls, South Dakota. It's population is under 4,000. There was no audio in the clip I saw, just a live video feed, and every person you could see was not only white skinned but white haired. "Dr Jill Biden," as the anchor called her, had walked right up to a man who had obviously just asked her a question. She was looking him full in the face, talking calmly and motioning with her hands as he looked up at her from beneath the bill of a cap that may have been an advertisement for the seed corn company that gave it to him.

I know that a lot of Democrats think it's ridiculous that Iowa and New Hampshire have so much to say about who becomes the party's presidential nominee, but I am a sucker for these Norman Rockwell images coming out of Iowa every four years. I think I'm okay with the guy in the cap getting to vote before me or anyone in California, Texas, or Florida. For one thing, he's paying attention. Also, his peers are mostly Trump voters, but evidently he isn't, so he thinks for himself. Though it's risky to make generalizing guesses, it seems likely that he has some generally conservative views but dislikes Trump and his US representative, the execrable Steve King. He wouldn't vote for either one. If he's considering Biden, it could be that he prefers the more moderate Dems, or maybe he thinks Biden might be the most likely to win the general election. The cynical view is that, being an old white guy, he feels comfortable with other old white guys. This is the reason lots of people think he shouldn't get the first say—but, in that case, it seems worth noting that he might be landing in the same place that, according to polls, most African Americans are landing, or leaning, or something: Biden, tentatively.

Being myself undecided and somewhat practical-minded, it occurs to me to check up on Cap Man's past job performance. Is he in the habit of preferring show horses to work horses, tilting the Democratic race in a direction I can't condone? Here is how Iowa Democrats have voted in their caucuses in the recent past, when there was an actual contest as opposed to a Democratic incumbent running for reelection, as there was in 2012 and 1996:

2016: an essential tie between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. (Clinton "won" by less than a half of one percent; not sure who got more delegates).

2008: Barack Obama beat Clinton by eight points and John Edwards by nine.

2004: John Kerry finished ahead of (in order) Edwards, Howard Dean, and Dick Gephardt.

2000: Al Gore beat Bill Bradley.

1992: Native son Tom Harkin won overwhelmingly. The non-Iowans, including eventual nominee Bill Clinton, were bunched in the single-digits.

1988: Dick Gephardt came in first, ahead of Paul Simon and Michael Dukakis.

1984: Walter Mondale finished far ahead of Gary Hart.

I would have chosen Bradley over Gore—better jump shot—but, all in all, Iowa's Democrats are doing fine by me.