FREEDOM IS NEVER MORE THAN ONE GENERATION AWAY....

In a famous speech delivered after a narrow defeat at the 1976 Republican Convention, Ronald Reagan asked what people might be saying in the year 2076. Few of us could have foreseen the wild ride we are seeing less than 50 years later. 

“Whether they have the freedoms that we have known up until now will depend on what we do here. Will they look back with appreciation and say, "Thank God for those people in 1976 who headed off that loss of freedom? … And if we failed they probably won’t get to read the letter at all because it spoke of individual freedom and they won’t be allowed to talk of that or read of it.”

No matter how glorious and celebrated our country and its history has been, we cannot possibly profess the idealism that used to define America, until somehow we find a way to reconciliation. We are a nation of immigrants that once gained strength through celebrating that very diversity. Now many are fighting to close our borders by separating families. The United States has had to overcome the very fact it’s made of imperfect and flawed humans. But without some deep changes very soon, our house is going to fall into the abyss.

Our toxic political discourse is a direct result of things relatively new to our national life. The day that the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine required broadcasters to air countervailing opinions, the door was opened to biased cable news outlets. Programming starved AM radio broadcasters turned to opinion-driven talk radio. And more fatally we have the incapacity of platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to balance free speech with the enormous damage to trust and truth their revolution has brought.

Our divisive political culture is also a direct function of denial, of some choosing to bury the inconvenient truths of our past and present, while pretending everything is fine as long as their tribe is empowered. But we are miserable to one another over politics, We have allowed our fear, ego, hatred, and greed to get the best of us, under the guise of belonging to a political tribe. An entire industry has sprung up around keeping us laser-focused on our differences and keeping each other in the boxes that we check on a form, that we have lost sight of all the things we have in common and what it means to be one American Family, dysfunctional as it may be.

Without even discussing Tuesday's Presidential Election, it’s obvious the major political party leadership, Republican & Democratic alike, are NOT currently working with a goal of unity and/or finding solutions. Both in their way are serving a corporate-driven agenda that purposefully keeps the US apart. Meanwhile, the mainstream media and more crucially Facebook and Twitter continue to throw kerosene on the fires that are our collective pain and suffering (for profit). But don’t worry, their pharmaceutical advertisers have a cure for your anxiety! It will numb the pain, in fact, it will numb everything and you won’t have to care or feel at all. It’s such a small price to pay for freedom though, right?

There is no one coming to save us from ourselves, so that means we have to save ourselves. Our constitution authorizes only one sovereign, and that role belongs to “We the People”. After the last few years of national life, it’s obvious that If we don’t see love and light in the world of politics, then it is our obligation to fix that. If we don’t see justice, then it is upon us to fight for justice. If we don’t see peace in our streets, then we must individually be an example of peace. It’s time to take our agency back, to assume our individual and collective responsibility for the division. and to realize that we cannot fix the problems of today with the same thinking that was used to create them. It’s also time to expand our emotional intelligence so that we might break the toxic cycles of blame and historical anathemas that have left little room for solutions. 

We owe it to ourselves and those who will inherit the future to create a solid foundation upon which to build a safe home for all Americans regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, political affiliation, religion, ability, and/or socioeconomic status. Though the past four years have certainly strained our nation's credibility in the world, the world is still watching and looking at the United States as the world’s only superpower to provide leadership. But our nation cannot fulfill that role by villainizing all those that are our would be, could be, and should be allies while cozying up to the evil dictators of the earth. 

No matter what mixed emotions I have about the results announced today, it still moved me to see millions more Americans than ever voted before, brave a pandemic to vote and reaffirm our democracy. It’s a tribute to all those that have served and protected our freedoms over the years, and all the brave people who served and protected our health over the course of this year. We have a chance to assure that the answer to Reagan’s question from 1976 looks a lot more optimistic in the next few years than it does right now. Another quote from Reagan should resonate with us if we fail to do so. 

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”

MANY BLESSINGS- NOEL

WHICH SIDE WILL WE CHOOSE?

I've spent over 50 years trying to understand something that is never going to be comprehensible. Of course, there are more modern and less hideous examples of the Holocaust, such as the episodes of ethnic cleansing we've witnessed in places like Rwanda and Bosnia. So to that extent, we do intellectually understand the capacity for evil and atrocities mankind is capable of. 

But its the question of conscience that I've never been able to resolve in my mind. How could an advanced Western nation allow their country to be hijacked by a government that would not only execute crimes against humanity but had no sense of remorse in doing so? How in the hell could a freakish character like Hitler able to pull off injecting so many with the toxins of hate? 

Looking back over 75 years, it's still inconceivable that  a highly educated citizenry believed he was brilliant to be "Der Fuhrer?" How could they accept that he was always right? How could they read drivel like Mein Kampf like it was a Scripture, much less defend the lunacy, and align with it? Those in the Third Reich ended up murdering living, breathing, innocent humans by the millions. It was gradual at the outset but it accelerated rapidly once Hitler was appointed Chancellor in 1932.

It began with words, where a false narrative repeated often enough shifted objective beliefs, then distorted observable realities. The propaganda then shifted to creating a phantom enemy to blame for usually fictional crises like the Reichstag Fire. It was fed by grievances beginning with the myth that Germany had lost World War One because it was "knifed in the back" by some grand conspiracy led by Jewish people. By the 1930s that alleged "cabal" was said to be getting ahead by leeching off of hard-working every day "Good Germans." 

By creating a straw man to blame for everything, the door was opened to the dehumanization of the targets. That stage made it easier for the next progression, which is the commitment to destroy "the others" by any means necessary. That made for this fatal dichotomy, evil under the guise of patriotism, and the preservation of righteousness masquerading as a great crusade to rid their lives of evil, by epitomizing the same. 

Then (as always) came the creation of a heroic larger than life leader and the selling of the savior. The mythology of the indispensable leader, the one person who will fearlessly do what others couldn’t and wouldn’t dare do, leads into a personality cult.  The utter audacity of the messaging, the consistency of the propaganda, caused millions of people to forsake critical thinking and quiet even their own divergent thought. 

The built-in confirmation bias of a state-controlled press, ultimately caused a rush to join the leaders obviously winning team, increasingly populated by those who were dying to breathe in the referred power. Ultimately it caused everyday citizens to assent to despicable things they wouldn’t have ever thought about on their own. Eventually, the sheer numbers of those echoing the party line led to the assumption that everybody else could not possibly be wrong.

Sometimes with the Holocaust so rightfully fixed in our minds, we forget the level of domestic terror that went down in Germany. Gay people, neighborhood oddballs, those with intellectual challenges, even gypsies were targeted. There were crazy and cruel medical experiments in eugenics, and into the effects of varied weapons on the human body. The society was in the throes of terror down to the granular level, with the state's system of block wardens where the "Good Germans" were encouraged to drop a dime on friends, family, and whoever might have pissed somebody off. 

The Holocaust was hideous beyond all telling.  But what is the most awful aspect, is that it should have been stopped.  Hitler was certainly the great catalyst, but there had to have been a widespread predisposition to a hatred that Hitler was allowed to validate.   This era seems increasingly aspect as those who lived through that time pass away. 

From our modern viewpoints, it seems impossible to believe that such a level of mass delusion could ever happen.. It doesn't make sense until you remember successor events and regimes, that have embarked upon ethnic cleansing in places like Bosnia and Rwanda and against the Kurds in Iraq. It is cancer that has never truly receded, and over 80 years later we have seen it happen again and again, but in places under the radar screen of mass consciousness in much of the developed world. 

Now it just may be happening before our eyes. We certainly went through some troubles in the 1960s. In 2020 we see people occupying the highest offices in the land pouring kerosene on the conflagration. The wedge issues of race and class are used to split us apart for political gain as never before, contributed to by some great degree by our nation's foreign adversaries. Though the presence of protests in the streets points to the fact that the American Experiment is not going to go down without a fight, what a horrible thing to see in the "land that we love."  Still, I cannot understand why so many can blow off the blatant racism, be willfully ignorant of what we are seeing, in support of Four More Years of the turmoil's driving force. 

Of course, we cannot just sit by and just let it happen. Joe Biden is an imperfect vessel for us to pour our hopes into this ticket (if elected) to markedly improve things. But the alternative is a binary choice that is the ball game if you care about civil liberties, racial justice, and domestic tranquility. To those who believe we are not looking at the rise of a potential dictatorship with a Donald Trump unfettered by worries about retention, with something in hand that resembles a mandate (plausibly secured by voter suppression and mail snafus), think again. 

No matter how much Americans may seek to deny certain undeniable truths, try to spin it around to fit a narrative that the danger is not as bad as it is, even present a reality with pretzel twisted logic in lieu of facts, there are too many parallels to the 1930s in front of us to ignore. The future is going to written about this time and the history we leave behind the next few weeks. The question for each of us to answer for ourselves is simple, which side will we choose? Either way these days will be remembered. To those tempted to drink from the chalice once more, can you unconditionally say you are not abetting the rise of authoritarian rule if Trump succeeds? Can you look us in the eye without doubt and say that you are not facilitating the rise of a dictator?

 MANY BLESSINGS- NOEL

THE AWFUL GRACE OF GOD

"In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God." - Aeschylus

Over the past few years, I have become more and more conscious of grief. Though I am not yet an AARP member, simple math tells us that once we hit 35, we are entering the time when there are fewer sunrises ahead of us than in the rearview mirror. 

This has not been a very stellar year. It has been a brutal one, for way too many in my orbit. Few days have passed without hearing of another tragedy, whether it has been economic, the result of COVID, or civil unrest.  

Some stories, especially of those fighting COVID-19, have been discussed pretty openly by other writers or on varied social media platforms. Others have been shared at services, among friends and colleagues. Many stories I know of have gone unshared, by those who prefer to keep things close to their hearts, or those who have come to believe grief is best left as a solitary journey. 

There are some things that defy words, and the random selection of tragedy is one of them. There are few more helpless feelings than telling someone widowed in their twenties that the only certainty they will face, is that an elusive day will come where they will learn to live with the loss. There are some events we learn to live with but never quite get over. 

If we live long enough, we will each face grief. There is not a blueprint for how to navigate the corridors of tragedy. No matter how we choose to cope, the cost of longevity is going through the loss of loved ones and the other storms certain to enter into our lives. 

Though there seem to be hotels everywhere, twenty years ago hospitality was a tightly-knit community. Many were touched by 9/11. Some of us knew an affected family, and many of us knew somebody who was one small step removed from the events. Some of the most indelible images were the memorials that sprang up around ground zero. Sadly we have had too many of those displays visiting us much closer to home the past few years. I have had reasons to visit the one by that Safeway in Tucson, and after the Yarnell tragedy, in my old hometown of Prescott, Arizona. 

As I visited each one, I was stunned by the number of remembrances. So very many people were still moved by an incomprehensible event. Each person I spoke with seemed as if they had to try to understand. Though I visited both places alone and anonymously, I could not escape the fact that all were united at that moment by a shared experience of loss. We each sensed something similar and inescapable, that for some reason some very great souls had left us for reasons we could not comprehend.  And of course, we never will. 

We seek to remember those we have lost; often we are compelled to do so. Though a Facebook Memorial Wall varies qualitatively with the content,  it is amazing the moving and sensitive things you read, as people grope to do justice to those lost. You can feel how desperately each misses the person who was being remembered. And though we often may be uncertain of the identity of whose soul is being bared online, and are not attending a funeral for the lost person, we are still part of a group joined together by that very real need to remember. Earl Spencer said at his sister’s funeral "We are all united not only in our desire to pay our respects to Diana but rather in our need to do so.” He was very right. 

 

“When he shall die, Take him and cut him out into little stars, and he shall make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night and pay no worship to the garish sun.” - Robert Kennedy at the 1964 Democratic Convention.

The Atlantic City convention occurred less than a year after President Kennedy's assassination. On its last day, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy introduced a short film in honor of his brother's memory. When RFK appeared on the podium, the hall erupted in 22 minutes of uninterrupted applause, causing him to nearly break into tears. Speaking of his brother's vision for the country, Robert Kennedy quoted from Romeo and Juliet, in the words above. 

As another anniversary of November 22nd, 1963 approaches, there will again be many memories of Dallas. With Trump's release of hundreds of pages of classified documents a few months back, the story seems destined to be around forever. One story about those days was how his brother’s enforcer was almost destroyed by grief. 

It was no small guilt, for he knew that the seeds for Jack Kennedy's murder may have been sown in the issues that crossed his desk. In his memoir, the youngest Kennedy brother wrote of how Kennedy’s feared for Bobby’s sanity and even feared a second tragedy. Video exists of Robert Kennedy's first television appearance after those events on the Jack Paar show.  One could easily tell his pain was still incredibly raw. 

Instead, that great loss caused him to reach out to those around him, those struggling with less publicized grief or suffering hard times each day of their lives. Grief made him change. He was speaking from a perspective illuminated by his life experience and instilled earlier by Catholic social teaching which emphasizes:

"We are a body of souls able to support others, to comfort the suffering, obligated to help each other on our way. In these times where we too often are paralyzed by shades of red and blue, we forget that we are not powerless to truly touch one another’s lives for the better."

Knowing of the fragility of life, he knew we should never let the moment pass us by. He was raised to believe that those to whom much had been given, had an obligation to look out for one another, to give something back to our nation, for all it has given us. Sadly the journey was unfinished, but the solution he found was timeless. His speech in the aftermath of Dr. King's assassination is still considered one of the great extemporaneous remarks of all time. 

He lived the words he heard Cesar Chavez speak as he ended his famous fast in Delano, “When we are really honest with ourselves we must admit that our lives are all that really belong to us. So, it is how we use our lives that determines what kind of men we are. It is my deepest belief that only by giving our lives do we find life.”

When tragedy and setbacks got the best of me, I wrote of my struggles online. I was stunned by the outpouring of support, and by unexpected kindness. In a time when there was nothing but sadness, the words of support from many meant everything to me. I had never dealt with so many different kinds of losses, and I almost lost hope. 

The people who reached out to me were the reason I was able to move on at a time when I wanted to give up. It took a village to lift me up for, in a time when I had an obligation to be strong for others, I was having trouble standing. The great people who did that for me saved me. There is grace present when we band together to watch out for each other. It is something we all need to never forget. 

MANY BLESSINGS- NOEL

SENDING LANGUAGE INTO BATTLE

The sun is setting by the ocean. I am again reading a book of letters varied people have written about events in their life. Some are happy, some are poignant and sad. Few were written with the consciousness that the words would be read a hundred years or more in the future. 

In this day of keyboards, it is doubtful that much of our writing will endure e-mail deletions and crashed hard drives in 100 years. It is equally doubtful that the art of writing in the cursive script has much of a future. 

I often have hoped that inspiration will visit, and I could write something enduring I could capture on a handwritten page. Everybody who writes occasionally hopes that they would leave some lasting thoughts behind.  

Great speeches are like those letters. Our appreciation of public address has also declined, except perhaps for the early years of Barack Obama. The three best speech writers of modern times just happened to have worked for the three best platform speakers in the business. Choosing between Reagan's Peggy Noonan (Challenger Speech) and Ted Kennedy's Robert Shrum is difficult at best. A sizable percentage of scholars vote for JFK's Ted Sorenson.

Bill Clinton's Press Secretary Mike Mc Curry once told Sorenson "Every kid that comes to Washington wants to be you. Just out of the University of Nebraska's law school, Sorensen arrived in Washington, D.C. "unbelievably green," as he later admitted. "I had no legislative experience, no political experience. I'd never written a speech. I'd hardly been out of Nebraska."

Sorensen was soon involved in the authorship of Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize-winning book Profiles in Courage (1955). There is significant evidence Sorenson actually wrote the book. Whether or not those allegations are true, Sorenson always made it a point to assert that since JFK ultimately stood behind the words, he was the true author. But then there were cases in which Kennedy's voice gave out in the 1960 campaign, and Sorenson read his speeches to an audience. Reporters later looked and saw the notebook he used had nothing but blank pages.

Sorenson went on to co-author some of the most memorable presidential speeches of the last century, including Kennedy's inaugural address, the "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, and the American University commencement address on peace. 

Contrast the way the current occupant of the Oval Office addresses the great questions of state with John Kennedy's approach. Be very scared and very sad.

Even after John Kennedy died, Sorensen was always emphatic in terming JFK as the "true author." In his book on Kennedy from 1965, Sorenson explained the rhetorical style of Jack Kennedy. It's still great advice and I'll append it below.

Many remember the story of a politician who resigned as a Cabinet member to return home and run for the US Senate. After he arrived and said a few remarks, he put his paper away and said, "now I have a few words." One senses that Donald Trump believes political speeches are "mere words" and that what he says simply does not have serious implications. When he does employ a speechwriter, it most probably is Stephen Miller, whose appearances on television evoke memories of Hitler's Goebbels. Mr. Miller is a "white nationalist."

Sorensen noted in 2008, "Kennedy's rhetoric when he was president turned out to be a key to his success," he told an interviewer in 2008. "His 'mere words' about Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba helped resolve the worst crisis the world has ever known without the U.S. having to fire a shot."

Interestingly Ted Sorenson also said this in a New York Times piece published on the 1960 campaign two months before his 2010 death, how there existed "far more substance and nuance than in what now passes for political debate in our increasingly commercialized, sound-bite Twitter culture, in which extremist rhetoric requires presidents to respond to outrageous claims." If only he knew what was to come.

FINAL THOUGHTS

The best Nobel Prize acceptance speech was that of William Faulkner in 1949. He was writing at the height of the Atomic Age — another time of threats and dystopian premonitions. We too live in an "Age of Anxiety" a cultural phenomenon alive and well today under different circumstances. Faulkner reflected back them on how soul-killing it is to write from a place of fear rather than a place of hope 

"Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat."

In 1963, President John F. Kennedy summed up Winston Churchill's achievements, saying, "In the dark days and darker nights when England stood alone — and most men save Englishmen despaired of England's life — he mobilized the English language and sent it into battle."

It takes courage to speak out. We are all aware of what it's like to deal with the consequences of having our dreams broken. We also lack the ability to look into tomorrow and know what the outcomes will be. That was what Ronald Reagan wrote of in that incredible last letter that at the end of the day there would always be bright dawn for America. But he also cautioned that what took generations of Americans to build could be lost, if we were not very careful.

Under the Trump era, we have seen the President go after the press as "fake news". In 1938, Winston Churchill said dictators were afraid of the power of words. "A state of society where men may not speak their minds cannot long endure."

Like it or not, we each just may be actors in a great unfolding drama that defines the world over generations. Robert Kennedy once noted, "There are people in every time and every land who want to stop history in its tracks. They fear the future, mistrust the present, and invoke the security of a comfortable past which, in fact, never existed."

A more apt description of our era would be hard to find. Just as all the great demagogues do from Huey Long to Joe McCarthy, Donald Trump has been doing indecent things and lying for years and years. Will history look back at our time and say that we individually chickened out, when our freedom was at maximum peril? People are going to look back at this era and ask what were you doing when all these unjust things came down?

With all the indecency emanating from Donald Trump and his white nationalist base, we must each ask ourselves, what we are doing during this time? To listen to the White House, there are only "alternate facts" and two sides when it comes to the truth. But we all know the reality. And there’s only side: simple and objective truth.

MANY BLESSINGS - NOEL 

PS- For those who might want to raise their voices and mobilize the English Language to oppose Donald or deliver a speech on everything and anything else, here's advice from the best in the business.

"The Kennedy style of speech-writing--our style, I am not reluctant to say, for he never pretended that he had time to prepare first drafts for all his speeches--evolved gradually over the years."   Ted Sorenson

"We were not conscious of following the elaborate techniques later ascribed to these speeches by literary analysts. Neither of us had any special training in composition, linguistics or semantics. Our chief criterion was always audience comprehension and comfort, and this meant: (1) short speeches, short clauses, and short words, wherever possible; (2) a series of points or propositions in numbered or logical sequence wherever appropriate; and (3) the construction of sentences, phrases, and paragraphs in such a manner as to simplify, clarify and emphasize. 

The test of a text was not how it appeared to the eye, but how it sounded to the ear. His best paragraphs, when reading aloud, often had a cadence, not unlike blank verse--indeed at times, keywords would rhyme. He was fond of alliterative sentences, not solely for reasons of rhetoric but to reinforce the audience's recollection of his reasoning. Sentences began, however incorrect some may have regarded it, with "And" or "But" whenever that simplified and shortened the text. His frequent use of dashes was of doubtful grammatical standing--but it simplified the delivery and even the publication of a speech in a manner no comma, parenthesis or semicolon could match.

Words were regarded as tools of precision, to be chosen and applied with a craftsman's care to whatever the situation required. He liked to be exact. But if the situation required a certain vagueness, he would deliberately choose a word of varying interpretations rather than bury his imprecision in ponderous prose.

For he disliked verbosity and pomposity in his own remarks as much as he disliked them in others. He wanted both his message and his language to be plain and unpretentious, but never patronizing. He wanted his major policy statements to be positive, specific, and definite, avoiding the use of "suggest," "perhaps" and "possible alternatives for consideration." At the same time, his emphasis on a course of reason--rejecting the extremes of either side--helped produce the parallel construction and use of contrasts with which he later became identified. He had a weakness for one unnecessary phrase: "The harsh facts of the matter are . . ."--but with few other exceptions his sentences were lean and crisp. . . .

He used little or no slang, dialect, legalistic terms, contractions, clichés, elaborate metaphors, or ornate figures of speech. He refused to be folksy or to include any phrase or image he considered corny, tasteless, or trite. He rarely used words he considered hackneyed: "humble," "dynamic," "glorious." He used none of the customary word fillers (e.g., "And I say to you that is a legitimate question and here is my answer"). And he did not hesitate to depart from strict rules of English usage when he thought adherence to them (e.g., "Our agenda are long") would grate on the listener's ear.

No speech was more than 20 to 30 minutes in duration. They were all too short and too crowded with facts to permit any excess of generalities and sentimentalities. His texts wasted no words and his delivery wasted no time."

(From - Theodore C. Sorensen, Kennedy. Harper & Row, 1965. Reprinted in 2009 as Kennedy: The Classic Biography)

THE CONTESTED CONVENTION (From May 2016)

This was my first abortive journey into the land of speculative punditry in 2016. Goes to show you that even this kid is guilty of the sin of underestimating Donald Trump. As I watched him accepting his second nomination tonight, I thought it would be fun to look back at my errors back then. I was sure wrong. As was everybody else. 

For the first time in weeks, a shaft of light has cut through the darkness of a prospective Donald Trump Presidency. If you had asked a boatload of talking heads a week ago, if there was any chance to stop the carrot-topped, malignant narcissist, from hijacking the Republican nomination...the answer would have been a huge "probably not." Despite the odds, Mitt Romney has tried to stop the manure truck before it crashed. To no avail. This is one great ad though.

Who would have guessed this video of Campaign Manager Corey Lewandowski was going to surface, showing just how "great for women" a Trump Presidency just might be?

Compounding things, there was this first event (EVER) that has brought the opposing sides of the abortion battle together (in universal condemnation) was this now-famous Town Hall moment with Chris Mathews.

Lest we forget, the prospect of Donald's itchy finger on the button has become an area of serious concern amongst anyone who remembers "duck and cover drills" in the days when we really could have been nuked. Today's Politico article captures my thoughts perfectly, " One biographer, familiar with Trump’s primal response to any perceived insult, drew a frightening picture of a quickly escalating set of attacks and responses, with major cities caught in the crossfire."

Before we breathe a sigh of relief that Lying Ted Cruz might head off Donald at the pass by winning the Wisconsin primary, there is that disturbing rumor the #never trump forces must contend with. Not this one in the Enquirer, but the ongoing rumor that Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer. Seriously.   

For those thinking there may be yet a Trump-Cruz deal in the works before July's RNC, Ted's appearance on Kimmel probably precluded that as an option. 

I do feel sorry for Heidi.

With all the dysfunction in the Republican Party, we may be looking at the first truly contested convention since 1976. Like Nixon in 1968, if Trump doesn’t win on the first ballot, he’s not going to make it. Though the delegates to the Convention are bound on the first ballot to vote for the primary or caucus winners, as each ballot ensures more and more delegates are released to vote for whoever they want. and the majority of the 2,472 delegates are going to be selected by their state party. With most party organizations being the last bastion of the same party regulars, the same party establishment, that Trump and Cruz have depleted oxygen running against, there is a YUGE chance both will leave LeBron's arena, without their ring. 

Since the early 1970s, the title of delegate has been largely an honorific. With a contested convention we will find that once the first ballot passes, the nomination will devolve on a group of people that are selected separately from the Presidential primaries and caucuses. Even in the days running up to the convention, there are going to be a few uncommitted delegates roaming around, that are released to vote by the other candidates, though Marco Rubio has said he is going to keep the nearly 200 delegates he won through an initial ballot.  In most states, the potential delegates have not been seated, and will not do so until the cycle of district conventions and state Republican conventions occurs in late spring. (The New York Times has done a great job of explaining those procedures in this article.) 

As the Times details in this chart, the campaigns are going to try very hard to elect their loyalists to each delegate chair, even if Trump has won the first ballot commitment at the polls. So if the first ballot proves inconclusive, there may be a reprise of the "smoke-filled room" of political lore. And if the game turns to the retail wooing of delegates, Trump’s lack of organization might just end his campaign.

In a dynamic where expertise in the arcane world of party by-laws will greatly matter, it will be: Trump just recently hired a strategist to oversee his delegate-selection efforts; Cruz has been working on the process for months. The other is his lack of support from “party elites.” The people who attend state caucuses and conventions are mostly dyed-in-the-wool Republican regulars and insiders, a group that is vigorously opposed to Trump. Furthermore, some delegate slots are automatically given to party leaders and elected officials, another group that strongly opposes Trump, as evident in his lack of endorsements among them.

There are various ways these delegates could cause problems for Trump. The most obvious, as I mentioned, is if the convention goes to a second ballot because no candidate wins a majority on the first. Not all delegates become free instantaneously but most do and left to vote their personal preference, most of them will probably oppose Trump.

Conversely, Trump isn’t totally safe even if he locks up 1,237 delegates by the time the final Republicans vote. The delegates have a lot of power, both on the convention floor and in the various rules and credentials, committees that will begin meeting before the convention officially begins. If they wanted to, the delegates could deploy a “nuclear option” on Trump and vote to unbind themselves on the first ballot, a strategy Ted Kennedy unsuccessfully pursued against Jimmy Carter in 1980.

Although I’d place fairly long odds against this thermonuclear tactic, there’s also the possibility of piecemeal skirmishes for delegates. In South Carolina, for instance, delegates might unbind themselves on the pretext that Trump withdrew his pledge to support the Republican nominee. Remember those chaotic Nevada caucuses that Trump won? They could be the subject of a credentials challenge. 

There could also be disputes over the disposition of delegates from Marco Rubio and other candidates who have dropped out of the race.  A final possibility is “faithless delegates,” where individual delegates simply decline to vote for Trump despite being bound to do so by party rules. It’s not clear whether this is allowed under Republican rules, but and also unclear what enforcement would look like. 

I don’t want to make too much of these “nuclear” possibilities, given that such efforts would be blatantly undemocratic and would risk a huge backlash from Republican voters. Still, even 1,237 delegates aren’t quite a safe number for Trump, especially if he’s just barely above that threshold 

Another possibility is Trump coming up somewhat short of 1,237 delegates, but close enough that he could win on the basis of uncommitted delegates who vote for him on the first ballot. In fact, Trump finishing with something like 1,200 delegates is a strong possibility. The expert panel we convened two weeks ago had Trump finishing at 1,208 delegates, with a lot of uncertainty on either side of that estimate, and he’s run just slightly behind our projected pace since then by getting shut out of delegates in Utah.

Let’s assume that Trump ends with exactly 1,200 delegates after California. He’d then need 37 uncommitted delegates to win on the first ballot. That might not seem like such a tall order — there will be at least 138 uncommitted delegates, according to Daniel Nichanian’s tracking, and Trump would need only 27 percent of those. But most of those delegates4 are chosen at state meetings and conventions, the same events producing unfavorable delegate slates for Trump in Massachusetts and other states.

Alternatively, Trump could try to broker a deal with another candidate — Kasich, for example — to get to 1,237. But that isn’t so easy either; whether Kasich could instruct his delegates to vote for Trump on the first ballot would vary depending on the rules in each state, and some delegates could become unbound instead of having to vote Trump. Trump and Kasich could also try to strike a deal on the second ballot — but by that point, most of their delegates would have become free to vote as they please.

This is not an exhaustive list of complications. We’ll save the discussion about Rule 40 — and why it’s largely toothless — for another time. The basic problem for Trump is that all the rules will be written and interpreted by the delegates, delegates who mostly don’t like Trump. They have a lot of power to wield at their discretion. 

WALKING THROUGH THE MAZE OF GRIEF

“With all he had striven for smashed in a single afternoon, he had an overwhelming sense of the fragility and contingency of life. He had never taken plans very seriously in the past. He could not believe in them at all now…” 

 

– Arthur Schlesinger Jr. on RFK

Words are never adequate to lift the pain people feel at times of loss. As we survey the carnage of our ongoing pandemic, I reread Robert Kennedy’s story, in try to learn again of a way out of the abyss we have collectively experienced. RFK did not have the benefit of his own example to draw upon. But through his life, we can see how his journey can teach us how to survive a disaster and take away a deeper and stronger faith. 

From existentialists like Albert Camus, he found the knowledge we each have an inescapable destiny. He learned we each have a responsibility to define our best selves. From reading Edith Hamilton’s work The Greek Way, he learned of the Greek ethos of man against fate. He came to believe that man, redefines himself by his choices each and every day. In the final analysis, life was a sequence of risks. To leave them unmet through fear was to simply destroy one’s self.

It’s always so very hard to journey through mazes of pain, but each other's stories can bring other sufferers insight and hope. Robert Kennedy became the head of a great political family through an unspeakable tragedy in the glare of the world's attention. Suddenly he was accountable only to himself. Ironically the qualities he had subordinated in the interest of his family, now rose to the surface. His concern, gentleness, idealism, under the alleged “ruthlessness”, rose freely to the surface. He became the person remembered as a champion of compassion today. 

Aeschylus wrote of ‘the antagonism at the heart of the world,’ and that ‘men are not made for safe havens. The fullness of life is in the hazards of life…’  The mysteries of suffering underlie life. RFK’s great speech on the night of Dr. King’s death epitomized his journey after Dallas.  Little did we know what lay ahead two months later. 

“He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.” Robert Kennedy also understood Herodotus: “Brief as life is there never yet was or will be a man who does not wish more than once to die rather than to live.”

Though we search for comfort in other religions or philosophic traditions, that quest does not make us less faithful to our faith. In RFK’s case, Catholic teaching did not provide what he needed. The tragedy of necessity usually has defeated the tragedy of unmet possibilities. It’s the difference between saying, “What a pity it had to be this way,” rather than the more unrealistic, “What a pity it was this way when it might have been otherwise.”

Calamity happens without reason. Some believe there is nothing in the universe that happens without reason.  For others, tragedy seems yet another expression of what a chance event or occurrence can do in the world. For those who believe in a universe infused by a deity with some purpose, tragedy represents dual crises, both philosophical and emotional. In those cases, we are forced to come to terms with death and loss before we can truly resume our own existence.

In our darkest times, we each struggle with a fundamental question. Is there any sense to the universe? Faith claims there is.  Experience brings that terrible doubt. If we live in the belief there is a universe of pattern and purpose,  what purpose can the premature loss of a loved one serve, much less the loss of all our dreams. And we all ask the same questions Robert Kennedy asked after Dallas, “The innocent suffer— how can that be possible and God be just…?”

AFTERWORD

I have lost way more people than a person my age usually does or should. The last time that happened, somebody who I love approached me and said, "I was watching you today. I'm going to give you the same advice I give to my kids when they need it: it's time to remember “Breathe in and Breathe Out.” I didn't ask her to elaborate. I acknowledged the timeliness of her advice. She told me it was the sort of wisdom that comes with age, and she smiled and walked away. My throat tightened and my eyes pooled with tears. So there it was. I'd wondered where it was. 

I had been kidding myself for years that the pain was stashed away in that place we hide "Yesterdays." Actually, it has been laying out there in the open forever. It’s that grieving that happens when grief is no longer the gaping open wound that is impossible to finesse. It happens after you have gotten through the aching, screaming pain, and when the good days seem to finally outnumber the bad once more. It's that stealth-like grief you never see coming and it arrives in ways not always recognizable.

It has happened to me only a few times, and it never coordinates with the times when I am missing someone. I dream of someone lost, in one of those dreams that when you awake, it is as if you’ve lost them all over again.

Though over time, my subconscious has become aware that each person has truly gone, which occasionally and imperfectly allows for an easier time when I wake up. One can learn to live with many things.  Do not believe for a second we should ever be expected to totally "get over" it. Ever. All we can do is use the time left for us to do the best we can in living with it.  

MANY BLESSINGS- NOEL 

 

CAMPAIGNS INC

The State of California has been at the cutting edge in many aspects of the American Experience. That includes the first political consulting firm in the United States in the 1930s. Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter were the husband-and-wife that started Campaigns, Inc. and worked on a variety of political issues, almost always for Republican candidates.

Together, they developed the strategies and tactics still widely used in today's campaigns. Their work would not only revolutionize politics in the last century but also deeply impacts how politics operates today. No single factor has altered the workings of American democracy so much as political consulting, unknown before Campaigns, Inc. 

Whitaker and Baxter virtually created the billion-dollar industry of managers, speechwriters, pollsters, and advertisers who play a role in everything from Presidential campaigns to the candidates for the city council. Between 1933 and 1955, Whitaker and Baxter had little competition, winning seventy out of seventy-five campaigns. The campaigns they ran, shaped the history of California and shapes American politics today.

E.P.I.C

Upton Sinclair's, I, Governor of California, was one of the most fascinating pieces of campaign literature ever written. Sinclair, the author of forty-seven books, including, “The Jungle,” wrote a novel announcing his gubernatorial bid in the form of an alternate history of the future, in which Sinclair is elected governor in 1934, and by 1938 has eradicated poverty. “So far as I know,” the author remarked, “this is the first time a historian has set out to make his history true.” Only sixty-four pages, it sold a hundred and fifty thousand copies in four months.

At the juncture of the 1932 Presidential election, California was a one-party state much as we see today, except almost all of the seats in the state legislature were held by Republicans;, without a single Democratic statewide officeholder. It also was not the Republican Party of today, dominated by conservatism.  There were still strong strains of the Progressive era of the 20th century in it's DNA. But the unemployment rate in the state was also at twenty-nine percent.  The vacuum in the Democratic ranks led logically to the premise of the book becoming reality,   What if Upton Sinclair, a lifelong socialist, ran as a Democrat for governor in 1934?

Sinclair adopted an acronymic campaign slogan, “END POVERTY IN CALIFORNIA” (“It was pointed out that the initials of these words spell ‘EPIC’ ”); picked a campaign emblem - the busy bee (“she not only works hard but has means to defend herself”), and detailed a program of coöperative factories and farms that would actualize his philosophy of “production for use” rather than for-profit; and advocated ending the sales tax while levying a thirty-per-cent income tax on anyone earning more than fifty thousand dollars a year. In August of 1934, Sinclair won the Democratic nomination, with more votes than any primary candidate in California had ever won before.  

After November Sinclair was writing  a nonfiction sequel called “I, Candidate for Governor, and How I Got Licked.”  Sinclair began. “Here is set forth how a scholar went into politics, and what happened to him.” “How I Got Licked” was published in daily installments in fifty newspapers. In it, Sinclair described how, immediately after the Democratic Convention, the Los Angeles Times began running on its front page a box with an Upton Sinclair quotation in it, a practice that the paper continued, every day, for six weeks, until the opening of the polls. “Reading these boxes day after day,” Sinclair wrote, “I made up my mind that the election was lost.”

Sinclair attributed his defeat to what he called the "Lie Factory", which was the true beginning of opposition research. Having found lines Sinclair had written for characters in his novels, Clem and Leone had them planted in the paper as if Sinclair had said them. “They had a staff of political chemists at work, preparing poisons to be let loose in the California atmosphere on every one of a hundred mornings.” Actually,  the company wasn’t called the Lie Factory. It was called Campaigns, Inc and it was a two-person operation. 

The firm was founded in 1933.  Whitaker, thirty-four, had begun as a newspaperman and started working as a reporter at the age of thirteen. By age nineteen, he was the city editor for the Sacramento Union and then as the political writer for the San Francisco Examiner. Friendly and gangly, he had big ears,  smoked,  never stopped talking, and typed with two fingers. He started a newspaper wire service, the Capitol News Bureau, distributing stories to eighty papers. which he then sold to the United Press. 

Three years on, he was hired by Sheridan Downey, a prominent Democrat, to help defeat a referendum sponsored by Pacific Gas and Electric. Downey had also hired Baxter, a twenty-six-year-old widow who had been a writer for the Portland Oregonian, and suggested that she and Whitaker become partners, and they started doing business as Campaigns, Inc. The referendum was defeated. Whitaker separated from his wife. In 1938, he and Baxter married. 

They lived in Marin County, in a house with a heated swimming pool. They began every day with a two-hour breakfast to plan the day. She sometimes called him Clem; he only ever called her Baxter. Campaigns, Inc., specialized in running political campaigns for businesses, especially monopolies like Standard Oil and Pacific Telephone and Telegraph. Their Big Business client base was so impressed that they began to put Campaigns, Inc., on retainer.

California Republicans were horrified at the prospect of Sinclair in the governor’s office.  Whitaker and Baxter were hired only two months prior to the election by George Hatfield, the candidate for lieutenant governor. They were hired to destroy Sinclair. They began by locking themselves in a room for three days with everything he had ever written. “Upton was beaten,” Whitaker later said, “because he had written books.”  

One quote stood out. "The sanctity of marriage. . . . I have had such a belief . . . I have it no longer," was taken from a passage in his 1911 novel, “Love’s Pilgrimage,” in which one character writes a heartbroken letter to a man having an affair with his wife.  “Sure, those quotations were irrelevant,” Baxter later said. “But we had one objective: to keep him from becoming Governor.” Here is another example of their work, some of the first "attack ads" shown in movie theatres courtesy of studio giants such as MGM's Louis B. Mayer and  Irving Thalberg. 

After defeating Sinclair, Whitaker and Baxter added a few more items to their arsenal. Harper’s  reported, “In a typical campaign they employed ten million pamphlets and leaflets; 50,000 letters to ‘key individuals and officers of organizations’; 70,000 inches of advertising in 700 newspapers; 3,000 spot announcements on 109 radio stations; theater slides and trailers in 160 theaters; 1,000 large billboards and 18,000 or 20,000 smaller posters.”) In 1940, they produced materials for the  Wendell Willkie’s presidential campaign, including a speaker’s manual that offered advice about how to handle Democrats in the audience: “rather than refer to the opponent as the ‘Democratic Party’ or ‘New Deal Administration’ refer to the Candidate by name only.”

The film grossed about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year.  For a referendum campaign, Whitaker and Baxter charged between twenty-five thousand and seventy-five thousand dollars, with complete control of the budget for the campaign. Clem and Leone also ran the Clem Whitaker Advertising Agency, which charged a fifteen-per-cent commission from clients for every ad. 

They added a newspaper wire service, the California Feature Service, and sent a political clip sheet every week, to fifteen hundred “thought leaders. ” They also sent cartoons, editorials, and articles to three hundred newspapers. Rural newspapers, desperate for copy,  often printed whatever advertorial copy the California Feature Service sent them.  Those included press releases disguised as editorials endorsing the political positions Campaigns, Inc. was being paid to front. Their trick was to send out clippings so artful that a tired or careless editor would not notice that they were written by paid shills. 

Whitaker and Baxter wrote the rule book that defines campaigns even today.

• Never lobby; woo voters instead.  
• Make it personal: candidates are easier to sell than issues. 
• If your position doesn’t have an opposition, or if your candidate doesn’t have an opponent, invent one.  
• Attack, attack, attack. Whitaker said, “You can’t wage a defensive campaign and win!”
• Never underestimate the opposition. 
• Every campaign needs a theme. Keep it simple. 
• Rhyming’s good. (“For Jimmy and me, vote ‘yes’ on 3.”) 
• Never explain anything. “The more you have to explain,” Whitaker said, “the more difficult it is to win support.” 
• Say the same thing over and over again. “We assume we have to get a voter’s attention seven times to make a sale,” Whitaker said. 
• Subtlety is your enemy. “Words that lean on the mind are no good,” according to Baxter. “They must dent it.” 
• Simplify, simplify, simplify. “A wall goes up,” Whitaker warned, “when you try to make Mr. and Mrs. Average American Citizen work or think.”
• Fan flames. “We need more partisanship in this country,” Whitaker said. 
• Never shy from controversy; instead, win the controversy. 
• “The average American doesn’t want to be educated; he doesn’t want to improve his mind; he doesn’t even want to work, consciously, at being a good citizen,” Whitaker advised. “But there are two ways you can interest him in a campaign and only two that we have ever found successful.” You can put on a fight (“he likes a good hot battle, with no punches, pulled”), or you can put on a show (“he likes the movies; he likes mysteries; he likes fireworks and parades”): “So if you can’t fight, PUT ON A SHOW! And if you put on a good show, Mr. and Mrs. America will turn out to see it.”
• Winner takes all. “If you launch a campaign for a new car, your client doesn’t expect you to lead the field necessarily in the first year, or even the tenth year,” Whitaker once said. “But in politics, they don’t pay off for PLACE OR SHOW! You have to win, if you want to stay in business.”
• 
  

"SOCIALIZED MEDICINE"

In 1944, Earl Warren was elected Governor of California. Troubled after he had won by a negative piece Whitaker and Baxter issued on election-eve without his approval, he fired them. They never got over it. Earl Warren began his political career as a respected conservative and ended it as one of the most hated liberals in American history. What happened to him? One major answer is Whitaker and Baxter.

On retainer by the California Medical Association for twenty-five thousand dollars per annum, Campaign's Inc. set out to kill Warren's plan for health care reform as payback. Whitaker and Baxter took a piece of legislation that most voters supported and caused them to revile it. “You can’t beat something with nothing,” they liked to say. 

So with future echos of the battles against the health care plans launched by the Clinton and Obama administrations, they launched a drive for Californians to buy their own insurance, privately. Voluntary Health Insurance Week, driven by forty thousand inches of advertising in more than four hundred newspapers, was observed in fifty-three of the state’s fifty-eight counties. Whitaker and Baxter sent more than nine thousand doctors out with prepared speeches. They coined a slogan: “Political medicine is bad medicine.”

As early as the New Deal era, Franklin Roosevelt called healthcare reform in the form of government-subsidized medicine. In 1945, Harry Truman took up the fight, also calling on Congress to overhaul the country's healthcare system. The American Medical Association began to fight against the president's proposal. In 1949, the AMA hired Whitaker & Baxter, paying them $350,000 to defeat Truman's healthcare plan. Clem and Leone launched an aggressive media war against the legislation, distributing over 100 million pieces of literature. In just two weeks of the campaign, they spent $1.1 million in advertising calling the president's healthcare plan socialized medicine" using the same allusions to communism that brought down Sinclair. 

The campaign against Harry Truman’s national-health-insurance proposal cost the A.M.A. nearly five million dollars, and over three years. They turned the President’s sensible, popular, and urgently needed legislative reform into a bogeyman so scary that, even today, millions of Americans are still scared. Truman was livid. What in his plan could possibly be construed as “socialized medicine,” he told the press in 1952,  he didn’t know.   That fall, the A.M.A. let Whitaker and Baxter go, explaining that it had decided that keeping the agency on retainer would compromise its nonpartisan tax-exempt status. Whitaker and Baxter were untroubled. They went to work for Eisenhower-Nixon. They did leave anti-health insurance advertising a living legacy. like Trump's "Repeal and Replace" and the Harry and Louise ads of the 1990s. 

"I LIKE IKE

The election of 1952 saw the first use of television in a Presidential campaign. In 1948, less than three percent of American homes had a television, four years later that number was fast approaching fifty percent. Republicans spent $1.5 million on television advertising for Eisenhower, while Democrats spent seventy-seven thousand dollars. On television, spots for Eisenhower—“I Like Ike” and “The Man from Abilene”—whose themes were based on George Gallup’s polling, masqueraded as documentaries. They looked like newsreels.

Like all those candidates to follow, Eisenhower was coached and groomed and polished and made up. In a TV spot called “Eisenhower Answers America,” a young man asks, “General, the Democrats are telling me I never had it so good.” Eisenhower replies, “Can that be true when America is billions in debt when prices have doubled when taxes break our backs, and we are still fighting in Korea? It’s tragic.” Then he looked, straight into the camera. “It’s time for a change.”

LEGACY

By the late 1950s, Whitaker and Baxter had a falling out with then client Governor Goodwin Knight. Though Knight had hired the duo for several of his earlier campaigns, he did not bring them back on for his run for the Senate in 1958. Because of this and Whitaker's failing health, the company began to fade from the political scene. Later in 1958, Whitaker and Baxter sold their company to Clem Whitaker Jr., who would later redirect the business operations into corporate public relations. The duo formed Whitaker and Baxter International, a smaller public relations consulting firm, which they ran from a San Francisco hotel room. 

In 1961, Clem Whitaker died of emphysema. Leone Baxter continued to run Whitaker and Baxter International for many years after his death. She died in Sacramento at the age of 96 in 2001. Baxter rarely gave interviews, making this exception in the nineteen-sixties. 

She was asked, “Do the procedures you designed early in the game and utilized so successfully over the years, Leone, still work today, or have you found it necessary to change them?”

“The basic rules I would say are wholly unchanged,” she said. “The strategies are unchanged.” There was a television, of course. “But I would say that the philosophy of political campaigning hasn’t changed a whit. The tools have changed, the philosophy has not.”

She was also asked, “Does political public relations actually transfer political power into the hands of those who exercise it?”

“It certainly could and has in some instances,” she said, carefully. “In this profession of leading men’s minds, this is the reason I feel it must be in the hands of the most ethical, principled people—people with a real concern for the world around them, for people around them—or else it will erode into the hands of people who have no regard for the world around them. It could be a very, very destructive thing.”  

I wonder what she would think of the politics of today? 

MANY BLESSINGS - NOEL