Corona Jottings: Intermittent Speculations(#21)

What has Trump wrought? But I have spoke With one that saw him die; who did report That very frankly he confessed his treasons, Implor'd your Highness' pardon, and set forth A deep repentance. Nothing in his life Became him like the leaving it. There is no character in Shakespeare that mimics The Donald. He doesn’t have the brains of Iago, the language of anyone who struts upon the stage. And he, of course, is more than a clown. The bard didn’t do, it seems, malignant clowns. (But our modern popular culture seems to love them.) So, the lines from Macbeth don’t exactly fit Trump, though there is a kernel of pertinence there. Nothing in his presidency became him like the leaving of it. Two weeks earlier the mob invaded the Capitol on his behalf, the whole crew wearing disparate costumes, some military, some madcap, some bad-taste-middle-class – sporting feed caps embossed with Make (& Keep) America Great Again, many with patriotic-themed knitted stocking caps, all the usual winter dunce wear – befitting a hodgepodge of various Shakespeare characters tossed about in a Cuisinart. Another white-tribe mob in full fury. An appropriate capstone indeed. After the Capitol riot a silence fell on the presidency, since Trump was deprived of, banned from, Twitter, his primary public voice. The voice he used in private, typing away with his short stubby digits, surrounded by fast food wrappers, whatever leavings that get picked up by White House servants. Trump, himself, during the second candidate debate in 2016, described a guy – an unwitting prophesy on The Donald’s part – “sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds,” as a likely candidate interfering with the election, other than the Russians. The beginning turned into the end. His other, secondary, voice, after Twitter, was that of important personage on the way to the helicopter, disclaiming to the sad minions of the press shouting questions. All this silence was, is, as they say, deafening. Some technically imposed, some self-imposed, Trump revealed what was below the surface during his reign. That he had no public voice to serve him at length. Speeches needed to be written for him. The only form he could manage on his own was rally speak and he never desisted from rallies during his entire presidency. So his post Twitter silence echoes on. Curiously, the only protocol of former presidents he has followed is this after-departure silence. The Democrats can’t let go, though, giving him the benefit of a second impeachment, another first he can brag about. The Republicans still advertise themselves as the worst people in the world and the GOP will never recover, unless, of course, they win both houses of Congress in 2022 and run the government once again. Everything is moving as fast as the Covid virus, except for the immunizing of citizens. It is impossible to remember The Donald’s initial victory without contemplating Hillary’s loss. What a price to pay for her defeat. My problem remains with all the folk who normally would have voted for the Democrat, but couldn’t bring themselves to pull the lever for Hillary. The gamut ran from hatred to boredom, from outrage to ennui. All those ersatz nonvoters had their reasons. So too the ludicrous Third Party candidates. Yes, there were reasons. But all those semi-informed individuals should have had some knowledge of who The Donald was. We all have paid a terrible price for their delicate feelings. Their Hillary-that-bitch disdain. Again, the shock this time around was how popular a complete imbecile can become. Trump has no redeeming social value, but nearly half the country voted for him in 2020. The country has become use to occasional nitwits being elected to the House, but now they are more lethal than ignorant. And though the Biden/Harris administration is barely two weeks old, the Trump virus still spreads, reinfecting those who, one thought, might back off a bit. No no no. There’s no undoing, it seems, the Republicans’ disastrous pact with the Devil. Mitch McConnell still acts as if he is the majority leader and “Chuck” Schumer can’t seem to fully displace him. Democrats fight each other with more relish than they confront the Republican opposition. The same old same old. There is something dispiriting about all the photographs showing Biden sitting at the desk, mask less, and Harris standing in the corner wearing hers, as if she is at his beck and call, the usual lady in waiting. The new administration is in the position of going from too little to too much. But all the antagonisms remain the same. Trump silenced – no Twitter no Trump – is the only thing that seems to be permanently positive. Trump truly was the president without any clothes. But television couldn’t point that out since they had made him a star. A star to whatever percentage of the deluded had watched – and enjoyed – The Apprentice. The profitable media couldn’t and didn’t want to admit that the people had elected a complete idiot President. The last couple of months of his reign some of the press did curtail their self imposed ignorance, meaning they began to point out the depths of his know-nothing-ism. Though the I-Won mantra continued to be aired day after day, hour after hour on most every platform. It is still likely that without the plague year The Donald would have been reelected. That’s another appalling truth this country doesn’t like, or want, to face.

Corona Jottings: Intermittent Speculations (#18)

When I think of old people – now that I have become one – I recall as a youth the various literary puzzles I was presented with in grammar school. They all pointed out that one goes from being a child all the way to the end of one’s life becoming, once again, a child. Shakespeare, Grimm’s fairy tales, literature throughout the ages, many things point to this paradox. As the year tumbles to its end, it’s clear how politics has aged us all and how those, in positions of power, are in the main terribly old, on both sides of the aisle, capping this ignominious year. Death from Covid (like the House of Representatives, the Senate, the Supreme Court) kills off a lot of old folks, with a sprinkle of the young, the middle-aged, here and there. Mitch McConnell, The Donald, the new president-elect, Joe Biden, are all very long in the tooth. Stephen Breyer is the oldest member of the Court at 82, followed by Clarence Thomas at 72. But it has been the method of modern presidents to pick younger justices-to-be, so as to lengthen their stay and influence. RBG, of course, was the oldest, 87, till replaced by the youngest, ACB, 48. Who is likely to be president in 2025? Someone middle age? Or aged? I guess we’ll see. Now we’re in the last gasp of gerontology. Two things, I suppose, have forced these musings. The end of the year and the end of the hideous Trump administration, which, of course, may not yet have done its worst. New Year’s is always represented by an infant with a sash (2021!) and the departing year a unisex crone with a cane. Out with the old, in with the new. Well, with Biden/Harris we have a two-fer. The old and the new, combined. It’s not yet known whether the Senate will flip, but there’s not a lot of confidence expressed on the airways by those in the know, the Democrats, that is. Trump, of course, never disappoints. His kind of intelligence, if he has any, is reflective, meaning he does the opposite of what people with sense want. And, given his history, he has some proof of such behavior’s efficacy. Never concede. Say you won over and over for weeks on end. Some generous portion of the public will believe it if said often enough, broadcast by one and all, over media, in every form. If an individual says such things to his or her small circle of friends s/he will be a candidate for a rest home, or worse. But have the means to say it to everyone, day in and day out, and it becomes something else. Not madness, but food for thought. What’s clear, shown over and over the last four years, is that the responsible folks never wanted to admit how bad things have become, admitting to having a semi-lunatic, or, rather semi-literate know-nothing, as president. Republicans, orchestrated by Mitch McConnell, could do their dark work and it would be worth the embarrassment, especially if the culture had reached the point where the populace no longer could be embarrassed. Speaking of old saws, as I was in the first paragraph, another comes to mind: The Emperor’s New Clothes, by Hans Christian Andersen, producing a slogan which devolved to the emperor without clothes. There never was a universal chorus of disapprobation for The Donald, only, especially early on, scattershot shouts of the fabled child’s insight: No clothes! No clothes! Republicans had too much to lose. Trump knew he just had to reprise his role on The Apprentice. Often, that task turned out to be too difficult. The Legislative Branch continues to be an embarrassment. The two GOP Georgia Senate candidates, Senators Loeffler and Perdue, are poster children advertising the many representatives of no redeeming social value in the Congress. Given their lack of virtue in any area, except economic, they could be a cat and a dog, merely symbolic Republicans to fill their respective seats. Could they have drudged up more shocking examples of the species, corruptable nobodies filling space? And then there is the new Senator from Missouri, Josh Hawley. Hawley and I share a past. We went to the same high school in Kansas City, MO, though decades apart, an all-boys prep school run by the Jesuits. (Hawley's two winning races were against women, not an insignificant fact.) I got a good education there in the early 60s. Its campus is on the state line, moving there the year I graduated, so across the street is Kansas. I don’t think Hawley and I would have been friends. I presume he had friends there, but I’m not sure. Hawley understands the virtue of propinquity. He clerked for John Roberts. He mimicked, in a strange way, Barack Obama’s career: as a youth Hawley won an attorney general race in Missouri – which, as usual, was in the midst of governmental scandals all around – served only a year and then ran for the Senate. He realized that it is easier to win in chaos rather than calm and he faced an 11 person primary, but, like Trump, he survived the clown show. (See above remark about women opponents. Note Trump's opponent the year he won.) Biden, too, survived the Democrat primary, but Hawley had it easier. Like the Catholics Trump has appointed to the Supreme Court, Hawley clings to the faith’s hottest margins. Well, Biden is a Catholic. Catholics everywhere these days. Now, of course, Hawley has volunteered to get as much publicity as possible, posing as a Trump toady, to object during the Electoral College Senate vote count. See Josh run. Obama jumped quickly from one election to another, the Senate to the Presidency. All of this just points to the fact that we aren’t leaving the politics-as-asylum show any time soon. And Trump, for whatever terrible reasons, has abandoned Mar-a-Lago today to return to the White House, forgoing the gaudy New Year’s eve party held there. Happy New Year, though the new year won’t actually start till January 20th.

Cuba and Carnage

I went to Cuba last January and I’ve had a long, sketchy history with the place. In the 1970s I hung out at the Center for Cuban Studies down in the Village, being interested in the woman who ran it. I managed to avoid being blown up by anti-Castro Cubans when they put a bomb outside its door one night I didn’t visit. And I had lunch with a Cuban UN representative at Jean and Leonard Boudin’s home on St. Luke’s Place, complete with armed bodyguards. Leonard was Cuba’s lawyer for a time back then. And, some years later, Cuba played a role in a novel I wrote called Criminal Tendencies.

But, like most Americans, I had never been there, till the Obama administration made travel less onerous, or illegal, and a number of publications began running “People to People” tours. I had never gone on a tour, fully escorted as they say, but I decided, Why not? I booked one sponsored by The Nation, a magazine I had written for over the years, but not lately. I could imagine the demographics: Old lefties wandering among the ruins. I wasn’t disappointed.

A picture was taken of most all of us in front of the U.S. Embassy, which is close by the esplanade, the Malecon, the picturesque road next to the water with a view of Old Havana. Barack Obama was still president, but just barely. Donald Trump was to be inaugurated in a couple of days, right before our departure. Out with old, in with the new. I couldn’t imagine Trump’s speech for the ceremony (and I didn’t hear it), since it seemed impossible for him to sound sincere or eloquent. I heard bits after my return. “American Carnage,” indeed.

Now, it appears, the embassy was the scene of unseen carnage, some sort of sci-fi attack, as it is described, rendering personnel there with hearing loss and other disturbing brain and behavior problems. I seem to have escaped unscathed. But, visiting Cuba was both sad and dispiriting. Our group stayed at a hotel near the Hotel Nacional, the Capri, allegedly the first hotel in Havana built by the Mob in the 1950s, newly reopened after it too was blown up by anti-Castro Cubans in the 1990s. One section, with bright red doors, was not in use, the large casino attached to the high rise. There was a pool and a nice bar on the roof, convivial with happy vacationers. It was all very Las Vegas in the ‘50s, if that’s your taste.

Our days were full of lectures and encounters with the “people,” a number taking place at the Hotel Nacional, just down the street. It is an impressive place, still capturing its aural of by-gone wealth and status, though in the same way as a number of England’s lesser castles display. It, like the rest of the country, has fallen on hard times. Our embargo and sanctions have been very successful, and the Cubans have suffered the blows of the fall of the Soviet Union and the cratering of Venezuela, both implicated mightily in the failing economics of the island. Tourism has taken over as a replacement and we spent a lot of time in new Chinese buses being taken here and there.

Many Cubans announced they want to expand the tourism sector. Given the crowded streets and roaming hordes, I couldn’t see how they could fit any more Chinese buses and ambulating foreigners anywhere. Havana seemed overstuffed. And, it appeared to be falling down. A shocking number of buildings do collapse each week, either 30 or 300, I can’t recall, though either figure is alarming. I wasn’t taking notes. Havana doesn’t resemble Key West, or the American Southwest, or anywhere else I’ve been. It looks, I imagine, like Spain, since Spaniards were its colonizers for centuries. And Old Havana seems to be a calendar of those years, ancient buildings, some semi-restored by those who get remittances from American relatives, others just in the process of falling down, though still occupied. The Lower East Side, where I lived in the late 1960s, was in far better shape back then, long before gentrification. Gentrification is a forlorn dream for Cuba’s glorious old city.

It was all very sad. The Cubans I met all seemed to be pleased with the Americans wandering around. We took a side trip to Vinales, a tobacco growing region’s small village busily building B&Bs. On the way we stopped at a teaching hospital (Latin American Medical School) and listened to a talk by a physician who was the dean of students. They send their graduates to under-served countries around the globe. She was a compelling figure, most likely in her fifties, and Fidel Castro, who had died a few months earlier, almost inadvertently was mentioned and she momentarily choked up, a show of emotion that surprised me. When we reached Vinales, after a tour of a tobacco farm, sitting at a very make-shift cantina, the local guide, responding to a question, also became emotional speaking of Fidel. So, high and low, they really seemed to love the man.

Unlike Vietnam, which, after our barbarous and useless war, has been brought into the American orbit, their former peasant economy being a source of cheap labor for Ralph Lauren, Nike, and other apparel and shoe manufacturers, Cuba remains an outlier and it shows. That’s what happens, I suppose, when you educate a whole population, make them literate and informed. They don’t want to become cheap labor. Though, in Cuba, professors and doctors seem willing to be taxi drivers and bartenders in order to work in the tourist world, where they can get their hands on the more lucrative cash side of the country’s idiotic two-currency system.

It’s sad in Cuba, and doubtless more so, since Hurricane Irma raked the countryside and flooded parts of Havana. More buildings will crumble. And America’s vengeance for losing the country and never killing the Castros (see the recent JFK assassination semi-dump) continues unabated and, post-Obama, redoubled.

The HuffPost version (10/31/2017) can be found here.

"What a Dump!" The Presidency, that is

During the last two or three presidencies (starting with Bill Clinton) there has been talk of the “permanent campaign,” campaigns that never end. Continuous fund-raising, etc. Usually, this sort of talk dies down, especially when it comes to the presidency itself. But, lately, we have crossed over into so many new, unsuspected, realms it is clear that the presidency itself is leading the way without any surcease of campaigning.

The Donald has not stopped his campaigning, because it is the only political experience he has. Never elected to nothing was his calling card and the other suspect preceding presidents (principally Ronald Reagan) had some electoral success in their pasts, besides their celebrity. One needs to go back to the generals to find a novice, Dwight David Eisenhower. Trump has surrounded himself with generals, though that displays his authoritarian impulses, more like the typical Banana Republic administration, where military power props up despots.

As any number of folk have noticed, Trump is, was, more or less, an open book. He hid practically nothing of his inner self during the campaign. The only truth Trump consorts with is Truth in Advertising, meaning most everyone, except for the deluded ( not that a large number – see Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin election margins) knew who they were voting for.

When Trump and Melania first visited the White House, before the Inauguration, hosted by Obama and Michelle, I told anyone who would listen at the time that Trump’s first thought during the tour would have been “What a dump!” I doubt that Melania would have known of Bette Davis’s famous coinage, so she was likely just mildly appalled. No spa! Old plumbing! Even a cursory understanding of The Donald would have prompted this insight. And, recently, not to my dismay, he even said it aloud (“a real dump”), to his golfing buddies. Trump is not a complex personality.

What is surprising to me is that Trump manages to best himself week after week, meaning that he finds a way to be freshly outrageous and inappropriate. (See yesterday’s “impromptu” presser, revealing yet again his shallow understanding of history, much less his racist inclinations.) I was in Cuba at the end of the Obama presidency and the start of the Trump era, so I did not get to hear his Inauguration address. Sitting on the patio of the Hotel Nacional I couldn’t imagine what that speech would be, because Trump seemingly is incapable of eloquence or sincerity. After I returned and heard bits of the “American Carnage” diatribe, I realized his speech writers went the only place they could, to a dark, dangerous place, full of invective and doom.

David Brooks, who has gone on his own strange journey since being hired on by the New York Times, from an early comedic conservative writer to his pompous new-agey book-report fetish columns (Look what I read last week!), wants to wash The Donald out of his hair, but, unfortunately, none of us will be able to do that for another three years. I’ve always held he will be a one-term president, given that the job, the actual work of the presidency, won’t be much fun for him. And, decidedly, it doesn’t look like he’s having much fun.

Yet, behind the gaudy scrim of The Donald himself truly terrible things are happening. Look at his Cabinet of Deplorables, what they are doing to their bailiwicks. Justice, EPA, Education, etc. And Republicans in Congress are getting to play out their repressed economic and social fantasies of the last half of the 20th century, attempting to dismantle all that the Democratic Century (the 20th) had managed to create.

In a review I once wrote of a book (Tip O’Neill and the Democratic Century) that covered the period, I dejectedly prophesied that if progressive people didn’t look out, the 21st would become the Republican Century, and that appears to be the case. At this point, it seems unlikely Democrats will win back the House of Representatives and add to their count in the Senate. What Mitch McConnell did to Obama, making him a seven year president, rather than an eight year president, was an act of racism just as blatant as any that was seen recently in Charlottesville.

And, in permanent campaign mode epitome, President Trump has continued to be the president of only his base, all the rest of the country be damned. And it is apparent he will get away with it, given that barely fifty percent of the country bothers to vote in presidential election years and less in off years. And that circumstance continues to be promoted by state Republicans everywhere, making it more difficult, rather than easier, to vote. The notion of false equivalency has become popular the last few years, but one false equivalency is that this country is run by a two-party system. Democrats and Republicans are not equal. Trump’s win was proof of that, given the third-party candidacies (including Bernie’s) doomed Hillary Clinton.

Looking back on the history of presidential campaigns, Trump’s victory, though shocking, is only the culmination of a trend line that has been trending for a long time. And if he is the nadir, which he may well not be, what will come next? Of the many frightening things to contemplate, add that one to the list.

The HuffPost version (8/16/17) can be found here.

Trump Monkeys

The Trump administration puts to the test the “infinite monkey theorem,” since so many journalists are typing away chronicling the daily saga of the new president. Very little Shakespearean prose has yet resulted, but we have to consider the source. Trump’s address to the “joint session” of Congress produced amazement at the new Trumpian focus, his ability to read – and stick to – the Teleprompter for an hour or so. Two times, though, he did deviate, letting the inner Trump ooze out: claiming some sort of record for applause had been reached and the soul-churning idea that the deceased Seal, William “Ryan” Owens, was looking down at the assembly and smiling. Perhaps Trump was channeling the apostate Mike Pence sitting smiling behind him.

This brings me to the chief spectacle of that night, the sight of the Seal’s widow, sitting, standing, crying, mumbling, suffering. It is cheering that the earliest critics of that display were other military people calling this for what it was: exploitation. Trump, understanding television if nothing else, along with his obsession with ratings, knew he had a winner: Who can not be riveted by the sight of a good-looking woman in extremis?

I tried to imagine which American actress (or British, French, etc.) could have done what the widow was doing so convincingly. What the viewer got to witness was, seemingly, minutes of high-quality grief porn. Always a big draw, though only if the woman involved is attractive. In this case, a willowy blonde in a black dress.

Why did she consent to be used this way? Evidently, she has a military background herself and when the commander in chief asks, she responds. But, she was obviously still traumatized by the recent death of her husband, but Trump knew she would be a good show.

Trump’s treatment of women was already well broadcast during his campaign, but since he assumed the presidency he still is treating women badly. On his inauguration day, pictures showed him neglecting his wife repeatedly, and the largely absent first lady was hauled out finally in Florida on Feb. 18th , ten days post the news of her libel lawsuit against the British tabloid The Daily Mail broke, detailing how it would cut into her future income, to give her brief I-am-not-a-hooker speech. Her remarks began with a recitation of the Lord’s prayer (aka, the Our Father), the protestant version, which no one could accuse her of plagiarizing. Yet another weird spectacle.

(Though it needs to be said that Michelle Obama took a while to get her footing. Back during her first year as FLOTUS, she was stuck hoeing that godforsaken garden built at great cost on the White House lawn. Even I wrote a column back then claiming I would lose my mind if I saw another picture of her holding a yam in her fist.)

But the prize this past week goes to Trump’s tweets on Saturday morning, calling President Obama “sick”, a bad guy, for ”tapp”-ing his phone in Trump Tower. As they say, these tweets dominated the news over the weekend and into this week (below is the last):

“How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy! 7:02 AM - 4 Mar 2017.”

How low can he go? Good question. We’re now back to Trump the unhinged, rather than Trump the presidential, according to the rounded-up usual suspects among commentators. I did like the continuation of Trump’s new evangelical rhetorical streak, given his “very sacred election process” characterization. In the same vein as the dead Seal smiling down at us. See, Mike Pence is exerting influence.

Speaking, as did Trump, of the former president, contrary to the gushing coverage, Obama’s “last” speech as president in Chicago was completely delusional – it can be summed up in this paraphrase: We’re doing swell and the rest of you are screwed. And given his vacation photos and the family’s alleged $65 million book deal, it appears that he is. Obama, ironically, is enjoying the traditional honeymoon period, not Trump the nut.

One reason Trump was apparently comfortable during his speech to Congress was that he was speaking largely to an audience of millionaires. Consult the statistics of the average wealth of the typical Senator or Congress person. It’s somewhat like the crowd at Mar-a-Lago.

But as the news cycle speeds up, the attention span of the audience slows down. Trump monkeys have to keep feeding the beast and can barely stick to a story beyond twenty-four hours. (On to The American Health Care Act! – Trump, I expect, will want to tweet that Obamacare should be renamed The Kenyan Health Care Act.)

We have all lived with “false equivalency” for a few years now and Trump’s “Obama bad” tweets seem to have worked their dark magic and Republicans are already to drag Trump’s wiretapping accusations into their investigations into the Russian campaign hacks. False equivalency rises in committee hearings, costing money, time, and attention. The Swamp needs more muddy waters. It wasn’t enough for Trump’s drained swamp to end up in his cabinet.


The Huffington Post version appeared on March 8, 2017, and can be found here.

Similarities

A small number of commentators have pointed out some similarities between Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. The actor, Chuck Norris, provided “Top 8 Similarities between Trump and Reagan,” and, at the other end of the pundit perspective, Josh Zeitz, attempted to answer the question, “Is Donald Trump Like Ronald Reagan?” Zeitz has taught at Cambridge University and Princeton and Chuck Norris is, well, Chuck Norris. Both published their pieces during the past campaign, Zeitz in March and Norris in July.

One similarity that Norris leaves out is all the race baiting, dog-whistle tactics, that both successful candidates employed, the fact that Reagan held one of his first large campaign events at the Neshoba County Fair, some seven miles from Philadelphia, Mississippi, a town notorious for the killing of three civil rights workers. But race-baiting long has been a staple in American elections and both Trump and Reagan weren’t pioneers in that muddy field.

But what interests me is the flip-side similarities between Reagan and Trump, the 180 degree comparisons. Similar but different. Reagan the optimist, Trump the pessimist, Reagan the civilized, Trump the barbarian, that sort of thing. Ronald Reagan strove to be a picture of decorum, the modest superstar, humble with his successes as well as his failures. His televised apology for lying to Americans during the Iran-Contra scandal is a model of the latter.

Indeed, when Reagan began his campaign in 1980, as I have written before, most of the coverage treated him, if not as a clown, as an amusement. It was only during the summer of that year that reporters realized that he might actually win, given all of Jimmy Carter’s accumulating troubles. Ditto Trump. It wasn’t necessarily Obama’s troubles, but Hillary Clinton’s, that were piling up, thanks to the usual suspects, the Russians, the head of the FBI, etc. But, earlier on, it was the fecklessness of Trump’s primary competitors that let him emerge, and then Hillary became the likely villain and victim. Crooked Hillary.

I had heard from a reliable source in early 2016 that the CIA would not let Trump become president. I wasn’t necessarily picturing drones over the Trump Tower (which, ironically, may now happen, military drones that is), and didn’t take the prediction seriously till the former head of the KGB entered the fray. Putin must have heard the same thing and it became a stimulus, a challenge, to his institutional pride. Hence, all the email hacks.

Some observers wonder why the emails interested journalists so much, whereas all of the Trump scandals - Trump University, charities, foreign entanglements, etc. - didn’t seem to hold the same allure, or promote the same daily coverage. Well, unfortunately, journalists read and send emails all the time, whereas very few, almost none, attend bogus universities, or fly around the world to luxurious hotels and golf resorts. They write what they know.

But, as the old Ted Kennedy joke goes, they’ll drive off that bridge when they come to it.

Two other presidents have the same, numerically, assortment of similarities: Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. I still can’t get over the fact that the last two Democratic presidents who served two terms didn’t have their biological fathers in their lives. That grandparents played a role in their early upbringing. That both are left handed and both made very strategic marriage choices, breaking their earlier - and in Bill Clinton’s case, continuous - dating patterns and history.

And, of course, both saw their two terms as president almost go for naught. Clinton being replaced by his opposite, George W. Bush, the scion of an entitled family, a man reckless and oblivious to the responsibilities of the job. And now Obama, leaving everything at risk to another heir, a ludicrous choice foisted on the American public by less than a hundred thousand disgruntled voters distributed in three states, a man who seems more devoted to his twitter account than the presidency.

Both Clinton and Obama were children of the meritocracy. Bush and Trump not so much. But both Democrats failed, leaving office with their annulled presidencies, insofar as they had eight years to encourage successors and neither seemed to find that important, crucial, to everything they stood for. And it’s small comfort that in both elections that followed their terms the popular vote went to the losers. Another bothersome similarity that could have been predicted.

The Huffington Post version, which ran on December 31, 2016 (uncorrected version), can be found here: Huffington Post version

The Haunting of Hillary

One thing that made the Clintons so mad about the 2008 presidential election is that Hillary would have won in a walk. That knowledge alone can account for Bill Clinton’s anger back in that campaign over the realization that Barack Obama would be getting the nomination. Bill had lashed out at Obama in January 2008 over his superior “anti-war” stand, in opposition to Hillary’s vote for the war in Iraq: “Give me a break. This whole thing is the biggest fairytale I’ve ever seen.”

The same sort of anger by the former president was displayed some ten days before the New York primary when Clinton again lashed out, this time at Black Lives Matter protesters in Philadelphia who yelled that black youth weren’t “super-predators” and Bill shouted back, “You are defending the people who killed the lives you say matter.” That both incidents eight years apart fell into a shadow caused by race may not be coincidental.

Back in 2008, John McCain was a weak candidate made even weaker by his selection of Sarah Palin as half the ticket. Who profited? Of course, Barack Obama, who may have not become the first African-American president without running against such a vulnerable pairing. It was six of one, half-dozen of the other. It would have been either the first woman president or the first black president. How easy an election did it turn out to be for Democrats? Americans elected a black man to the highest office in the land, that’s how easy. This is not hindsight. It was obvious at the time.

Previous to the recent New York primary, which Hillary Clinton won handily, the same 2008 dynamic was at play. And that is why she showed anger against the Sanders campaign, its mucking up of her march to history. Whatever the final act of the Republican implosion theater turns out to be, it will present the American people with an even more damaged alternative than McCain/Palin.

As Donald Trump tries to clean up his act, now cross-dressing as presidential, rational, and contemplative, both Clintons, thanks to their domination of the New York State political apparatus, may step back from and lessen their irrational fears of losing the nomination again. It remains to be seen if Senator Sanders plays along and stems his straight forward attacks against many of Hillary Clinton’s obvious shortcomings. He has saved Republican super PACs millions of dollars in advertising expense by doing their work for them. But, once she is the nominee they will unload their millions in the same sort, and worse, of vilification.

I happened to be in Israel when the news of the Monica Lewinsky scandal first broke in 1998, standing atop storied Masada looking out at the Dead Sea. Some Israelis were joking that it was a Mossad plot, inserting Lewinsky into the White House. When Trump’s campaign first gained steam, I heard from fellow Americans that he must be a Democratic agent, so successfully was he crashing the Republican house of cards.

Both surmises are doubtless equally true, being not true at all, except in effect. If Trump is the GOP nominee and Hillary Clinton the Democratic, she should walk into the office easier than Barack Hussein Obama did.

In 2008, sufficient Americans placed their hope in a young, relatively untested first-term Senator from Illinois, while the Republicans presented their dysfunctional odd couple, McCain/Palin, for the country’s approval. This time around who will they select? Trump/Kasich? Trump/Haley? It is conventional wisdom that vice presidents don’t matter, but this coming election may prove that wrong, for a lot of obvious reasons, balance, gravitas, etc. Nonetheless, the Democrats, barring the fatal unknown, should win, furthering the mixed legacy of the Obama presidency.

Obama, as it turned out, wasn’t too good to be true. That he was - at least he was true to himself. He just turned out to be too good to be as effective as his voters hoped.


The HuffPost version here:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-o/the-haunting-of-hillary_b_9742128.html?utm_hp_ref=bernie-sanders