What Does One Do When The System Pukes Up Two Unfit Candidates To Lead The Country?

The newest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll we were talking about earlier today, shows that Biden is outpolling Señor Trumpanzee by 7 points among registered voters. Many people can't stand either Trump or Biden but the vast, vast majority of them say they will just hold their noses and vote for Biden-- obviously-- to some-- the lesser evil. Of those who have come to the conclusion that neither Trump nor Biden is fit to be president, 60% (presumably supporters of Bernie and Elizabeth Warren) say they will vote for Biden and just a minuscule 10% say they will vote for Trump (presumably #NeverTrump Republicans and supporters of Michael Bloomberg).

In his Atlantic column yesterday, David Frum looked at the two "horrifying" ways Trump is dealing with the pandemic. "If he can’t confine the suffering to his opponents, he is prepared to incite a culture war to distract his supporters." As he points out, Trump is willing to sacrifice our lives for the economy-- and his floundering re-election prospects. By reopening some aspects of the U.S. economy in the next few weeks, which will surely increase infections and deaths, "Trump hopes to goose the stock market and restore jobs. It’s plainly impossible to return to full employment by November 2020, but Trump can hope that the trajectory of the economy will matter more than the economy’s absolute level." What a leader!

Bernie's NY Times OpEd yesterday took a more systemic look at what the pandemic has exposed in our country-- and might not be so quick to jump on Frum's assertion that "it didn't have to be this way." For it to have not been this way, it would have taken a lot more than just Trump being less narcissistic and incompetent and his regime being so dysfunctional. Bernie focussed on the foundations of a crumbling society. "We are the richest country in the history of the world," he wrote, "but at a time of massive income and wealth inequality, that reality means little to half of our people who live paycheck to paycheck, the 40 million living in poverty, the 87 million who are uninsured or underinsured, and the half million who are homeless."

In the midst of the twin crises that we face-- the coronavirus pandemic and the meltdown of our economy-- it’s imperative that we re-examine some of the foundations of American society, understand why they are failing us, and fight for a fairer and more just nation.

The absurdity and cruelty of our employer-based, private health insurance system should now be apparent to all. As tens of millions of Americans are losing their jobs and incomes as a result of the pandemic, many of them are also losing their health insurance. That is what happens when health care is seen as an employee benefit, not a guaranteed right. As we move forward beyond the pandemic, we need to pass legislation that finally guarantees health care to every man, woman and child-- available to people employed or unemployed, at every age.

The pandemic has also made clear the irrationality of the current system. Unbelievably, in the midst of the worst health care crisis in modern history, thousands of medical workers are being laid off and many hospitals and clinics are on the verge of going bankrupt and shutting down. In truth, we don’t have a health care “system.” We have a byzantine network of medical institutions dominated by the profit-making interests of insurance and drug companies. The goal of a new, long-overdue health care system, Medicare for All, must be to provide health care to all, in every region of the county-- not billions in profits for Wall Street and the health care industry.

It is true that the Covid-19 virus strikes anyone, anywhere, regardless of income or social status. Prince Charles of Britain has been diagnosed with Covid-19 and the British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, has just been released from a hospital. Rich people get the virus and rich people die. But it is also true that poor and working-class people are suffering higher rates of sickness and are dying at much higher rates than wealthy people.

This is especially true of the African-American community. This disparity in outcomes from exposure to the virus is a direct reflection not only of a broken and unjust health care system but also an economy that punishes, in terrible ways, the poor and working class of this country.

In addition to millions of lower-income families not having any health insurance, Covid-19 virus is vicious and incredibly opportunistic in attacking people with pre-existing conditions and weakened immune systems. For a wide variety of socio-economic reasons, it is the poor and working class in this country who are exactly in that position as they suffer higher rates of diabetes, drug addiction, obesity, stress, high blood pressure, asthma and heart disease-- and are most vulnerable to the virus. Poor and working-class people have lower life expectancies than rich people in general, and that tragic unfairness remains even truer with regard to this pandemic.

Further, while doctors, governors and mayors tell us that we should isolate ourselves and stay at home, and rich people head off to their second homes in less populated areas, working-class people don’t have those options. When you are living paycheck to paycheck, and you lack paid medical and family leave, staying home is not an option. If you’re going to feed your family and pay the rent, you have to go to work. And, for the working class, that means leaving your home and doing jobs that interact with other people, some of whom are spreading the virus.

If there is any silver lining in the horrible pandemic and economic collapse we’re experiencing, it is that many in our country are now beginning to rethink the basic assumptions underlying the American value system.

"Many?" Not enough... not even among self-defined Democrats. Most Democrats, for example, told pollsters that healthcare was, by far, their top issue for 2020 and most also told pollsters they are enthusiastic about single payer Medicare-for-All. Yet when it came to voting they chose the corpse who threatened to veto Medicare-for-All over the dynamic leader whose campaign was based on it.Which brings us Harvard's newspaper, The Crimson, where Joshua Fang reported how the Harvard for Bernie organization has declined to endorse Status Quo Joe.

Personally, I agree with this tweet from Harvard College Students for Bernie:

Harvard for Bernie’s position mirrors similar stances taken by other progressive groups, including the Democratic Socialists of America and many campus organizations across the country. In nearly identical tweets, those groups reaffirmed their refusal to endorsing Biden.

Where Will Trump Judges Get Their Law Clerks-- From Unaccredited Religious Schools?

Any-- every-- sack of dog poop Trump sends over to Moscow Mitch as a judicial nominee has been rammed through the Senate and confirmed, sometimes with votes from the 2 or 3 Trump-friendly Democrats, Joe Manchin (WV), Doug Jones (AL) and Kyrsten Sinema (AZ). When even these three vote NO, you know the sack of dog poop Moscow Mitch is hawking includes a lot of dog diarrhea. This week's example was Eleni Maria Roumel, whose filibuster was broken and who was then confirmed by the Senate 51-47, even Manchin, Jones and Sinema fighting confirmation. Roumel is another right-wing Federalist Society hack serving as deputy counsel for Pence. And now she's a judge. What's too be done with all these unqualified and extremist judges when Trump is gone?

That's going the haunt the country for at least another couple of decades. Although... former Orlando congressman, Alan Grayson, an attorney by profession and a phenomenal historian by vocation, told me that "The last time that a party tried to pack the judiciary with incompetent hacks this badly was during the John Adams Administration. And the first thing-- literally, the first thing-- that the Jefferson Administration did was to wipe out all the Circuit Courts that Adams had created. A 'lifetime appointment' does not outlast the position to which one is appointed. The other option would be to increase the number of judges, and fill the new slots. Under Newton’s Third Law of Political Motion, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction."

Meanwhile, the Boston Globe's Deirdre Ferandes reported Thursday night that Harvard Law graduates are almost entirely avoiding taking positions in their offices. "Used to be," she wrote, "that the promise of earning a sterling line on a resume and connections to stars of the legal profession was enough to lure Harvard law students to federal clerkships. But recently, when Harvard Law School was urging its students to apply to work for one of President Trump’s newly appointed judges, it felt the need to offer further incentives: 'Next to Lake Tahoe and great skiing!' the job alert read. But that apparently wasn’t enough. Two days later, in mid-December, the law school again nudged its students to apply for clerkships with federal judges, noting that some judges, including two Trump appointees, had received no Harvard applications-- calling them 'wasted opportunities.'"

As Trump reshapes the federal judiciary with staunch conservatives and controversial picks, some Harvard Law School students appear to be thinking twice about applying for clerk jobs with them, and passing up what are generally considered plum positions.

“Five or 10 years ago, people would be in a rush to apply,” said Emma Janger, 26, a third-year law student at Harvard and the cofounder of the People’s Parity Project, a law student activist group focused on combating harassment and discrimination. Janger said students will generally clerk for judges whose legal expertise and experience they respect-- even if they disagree politically. But some recent appointees have been outspoken opponents of gay rights, antiabortion stalwarts, and deemed “not qualified” by the American Bar Association, she said.

“It doesn’t need to be 100 percent ideological alignment,” Janger said, but some students oppose the idea of working for judges with such strident views and want more out of their clerkship than to burnish their resume.

“Students recognize that prestige isn’t all that they are leaving law school with. There are other values that are more important,” she said.

But some legal scholars worry that the reluctance of students at one of the nation’s premier law schools to clerk for Trump-appointed judges, first reported by Bloomberg Law, could further polarize the legal profession and do the country more harm than good.

The expectation is that judges and their clerks will act and make decisions based on the law, not in the interest of ideology or political party, said Charles Fried, a Harvard constitutional law professor and former solicitor general in the Reagan administration.

“If the only people who will clerk for a Trump-nominated judge are the people who voted for Trump, it will drive things to further extremes,” Fried said. “It’s odd and self-defeating.”

Judges without strong experience who may be too ideologically driven need smart law clerks who will offer different perspectives, he said.

For law students, clerking for a federal or even state judge has traditionally been a way to fast-track their careers and boost their salaries. Nearly 90 of Harvard’s 570 graduates in 2018 had federal clerkships. Students apply months or even years ahead for the competitive, one-year positions.

But in December, after the Senate confirmed several new judges, Harvard indicated that some of them, including Douglas Cole in Ohio, Sarah Pitlyk in Missouri, Patrick Bumatay in California, and Lawrence VanDyke in Nevada, were still seeking clerk applications from the university. John Wiley, a California state court judge appointed by that state’s Democrats, was also looking for clerks, Harvard officials told students.

VanDyke and Bumatay were appointed to the Ninth Circuit, which handles cases in the busy western United States, and clerkships there are considered among the most prestigious.

“Any Harvard applicants are likely to get serious consideration,” the university’s internal career blog for students and alumni noted.

Harvard Law School officials declined to comment on whether fewer students were applying for clerk positions with recent Trump appointees or whether other factors could be involved.

“We work to share available clerkship opportunities with our students, confident they will apply for the ones that best suit their interests and needs,” said Mark Weber, assistant dean for career services at Harvard Law School in a statement. “We understand that different judges appeal to different applicants for different reasons.”

But as more Trump judges take the bench-- he has already overseen the confirmation of 50 appellate court judges, more than any president in recent memory at this point in his term-- law school students who are gay or have had abortions may have serious conflicts working with judges who have been vocally opposed to those issues, Leah Litman, a law professor at the University of Michigan who previously clerked for Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, wrote recently in a blog post.

Harvard students are in a much more fortunate position than students at lower-ranked law schools who may not be able to pick and choose their clerkships, she wrote.

“If some students are exercising that privilege to stand up for themselves or others, they should be applauded, not chastised,” Litman wrote.

Many of Trump’s nominations have ties to the Federalist Society, the influential conservative legal group

VanDyke and Pitlyk have also received rare “non-qualified” ratings from the bar association.

After interviewing dozens of people, the bar association wrote in a letter to the Senate that VanDyke, a Harvard Law School graduate and an editor of the Harvard Law Review, was “arrogant, lazy, an ideologue, and lacking in knowledge of the day-to-day practice including procedural rules.” The group also said some of those interviewed raised concerns about whether VanDyke would be fair to gays and lesbians.

In a tearful confirmation hearing, VanDyke said he believed that all people were “created in the image of God, and they should all be treated with dignity and respect.”

The bar association criticized Pitlyk’s lack of trial experience, and reproductive rights advocates blasted her stands against surrogacy and in favor of treating embryos as humans.

Nancy Gertner, a retired Massachusetts federal judge who teaches at Harvard, said neither the president nor students should have narrow slates of judges that they are willing to consider.

“You can’t be in a position to say there has to be an orthodoxy to become a judge or work for a judge,” Gertner said.

But deciding who to clerk for is a complicated decision, she added.

Judges and their clerks develop close working relationships, said Gertner, who attends reunions with some of her clerks and gets notified when they have children.

Eli Nachmany, a first year Harvard law student who worked on the Trump campaign and in the administration, said he too is more likely to want to work with a judge who shares his philosophy. Fortunately, many of those judges were nominated by Trump, have been approved by the Senate, and are now on the bench, he said.

“If certain students want to cut their nose to spite their face and take a pass on these eminently qualified, highly distinguished jurists, that just means more clerkship opportunities for other students who appreciate the opportunity to work for and learn from the judges in question,” Nachmany said.

After Alan Grayson graduated from Harvard Law, and before he ever thought of running for Congress, he wound up working with Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and, somewhat incongruously, Antonin Scalia, when they were both on the DC Circuit just before they were appointed to the Supreme Court. Grayson felt he was a professional who had a job to do-- writing opinions for the judges (and, in Scalia's case, orders)-- no matter what their ideology. He once mentioned to me that on his last day, Scalia told him that in the future Alan would be a conservative. Alan laughed and asked him why he thought so. "Oh, you'll be fat and happy someday." Alan hasn't gained much weight and he's still as ardently progressive as he ever was. RIP, Antonin Scalia-- wrong... as usual.

Trump May Be Playing Us, But Johnny Depp Is Playing A Trumpanzee

When Trump flunked out of Fordam his notoriously racist father tried buying him entree into Harvard. Harvard's admission's office laughed (as did Princeton's and Yale's). University of Pennsylvania had a kind of "trade school" program in real estate at Wharton that-- for the right price-- they would allow the young Tumpanzee to attend. So, technically, Trump can claim he went to an Ivy League school. Technically.

Harvard just rejected Trump again. The Harvard Republican Club-- the oldest college Republicans’ club in the U.S.-- has endorsed every single GOP nominee for the last 128 years. That tradition, which started with Benjamin Harrison and included some real stinkers, from Taft, Coolidge, Hoover, Landon and Willkie to Nixon (3 times!), Goldwater, Dole, and the Bushes-- just went up in flames as the club voted to not endorse The Donald. "Trump," wrote the Executive Board, "holds views that are antithetical to our values not only as Republicans, but as Americans. The rhetoric he espouses-- from racist slander to misogynistic taunts-- is not consistent with our conservative principles, and his repeated mocking of the disabled and belittling of the sacrifices made by prisoners of war, Gold Star families, and Purple Heart recipients is not only bad politics, but absurdly cruel." But they were just getting started. There were plenty of more reasons to make an exception of the Trumpanzee.

If enacted, Donald Trump’s platform would endanger our security both at home and abroad. Domestically, his protectionist trade policies and draconian immigration restrictions would enlarge our federal deficit, raise prices for consumers, and throw our economy back into recession. Trump’s global outlook, steeped in isolationism, is considerably out-of-step with the traditional Republican stance as well. The flippancy with which he is willing to abdicate the United States’ responsibility to lead is alarming. Calling for the US’ withdrawal from NATO and actively endorsing nuclear proliferation, Donald Trump’s foreign policy would wreak havoc on the established world order which has held aggressive foreign powers in check since World War II.

Perhaps most importantly, however, Donald Trump simply does not possess the temperament and character necessary to lead the United States through an increasingly perilous world. The last week should have made obvious to all what has been obvious to most for more than a year. In response to any slight-- perceived or real-- Donald Trump lashes out viciously and irresponsibly. In Trump’s eyes, disagreement with his actions or his policies warrants incessant name calling and derision: stupid, lying, fat, ugly, weak, failing, idiot-- and that’s just his “fellow” Republicans.

He isn’t eschewing political correctness. He is eschewing basic human decency.

Donald Trump, despite spending more than a year on the campaign trail, has either refused or been unable to educate himself on issues that matter most to Americans like us. He speaks only in platitudes, about greatness, success, and winning. Time and time again, Trump has demonstrated his complete lack of knowledge on critical matters, meandering from position to position over the course of the election. When confronted about these frequent reversals, Trump lies in a manner more brazen and shameless than anything politics has ever seen.

Millions of people across the country are feeling despondent. Their hours have been cut, wages slashed, jobs even shipped overseas. But Donald Trump doesn’t have a plan to fix that. He has a plan to exploit that.

Donald Trump is a threat to the survival of the Republic. His authoritarian tendencies and flirtations with fascism are unparalleled in the history of our democracy. He hopes to divide us by race, by class, and by religion, instilling enough fear and anxiety to propel himself to the White House. He is looking to to pit neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend, American against American. We will not stand for this vitriolic rhetoric that is poisoning our country and our children.

...This fall, we will instead focus our efforts on reclaiming the Republican Party from those who have done it considerable harm, campaigning for candidates who will uphold the conservative principles that have defined the Republican Party for generations. We will work to ensure both chambers of Congress remain in Republican hands, continuing to protect against executive overreach regardless of who wins the election this November.

We call on our party’s elected leaders to renounce their support of Donald Trump, and urge our fellow College Republicans to join us in condemning and withholding their endorsement from this dangerous man. The conservative movement in America should not and will not go quietly into the night.

A longtime student of American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville once said, “America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.”

De Tocqueville believed in the United States. Americans are a decent people. We work hard, protect our own, and look out for one another in times of need, regardless of the color of our skin, the God we worship, or our party registration. Donald Trump may not believe in that America, but we do. And that America will never cease to be great.

Friday, writing at Salon, Chauncey DeVega likened the Trumpanzee campaign to an especially gruesome car wreck. "The American corporate news media-- and many among the public, on both the left and the right-- are participating in an act of political rubbernecking. They are transfixed by the skid marks on the road and the broken bodies lying nearby. Liberal schadenfreude is also compelling; the apparent implosion of the Republican Party under the boot heel of Donald Trump is transfixing."

The headlines provide ample evidence of these raw pleasures. They read, “Donald Trump is destroying the Republican Party,” “Republicans are Plotting an Intervention,” “Is Donald Trump throwing his campaign?” and that he is causing a “freak-out” by pushing the GOP to its “breaking point.”

...Trump is a reality TV show celebrity. The “reality” in “reality TV” is itself a lie. Trump knew that he could play on emotion and his status as a “successful” celebrity to win voters. In all, he is a fantasy projection and avatar, a professional wrestling political performance artist.

Media scholar Neil Postman’s warnings about the perils of distraction, entertain, politics, and spectacle have also been shown to be prescient in terms of explaining the allure of Donald Trump. Writing at CNN, Will Bunch explains:

The amazing part is that way back in 1985-- the year Stern conquered the New York airwaves and a brash young Trump was best known for breaking apart the upstart USFL football league-- one prophet predicted today’s political crisis. That prophet’s name was Neil Postman, a New York University professor and media critic. His landmark book Amusing Ourselves to Death predicted that schlock entertainment values would eventually strangle American democracy like a cluster of poison ivy.

Postman’s thesis was that the ominous warnings of an Orwellian future, complete with totalitarian censorship, had badly missed the mark. “Censorship, after all, is the tribute tyrants pay to an assumption that the public knows the difference between serious discourse and entertainment-- and cares,” the media theorist wrote. “How delighted would all the kings, czars and fuhrers of the past and commissars of the present be to know that censorship is not a necessity when all political discourse takes the form of a jest.”

It’s unlikely that Trump has ever read Amusing Ourselves to Death, [Trumpanzees don't read books] but his ascent would not have surprised Postman (who died in 2002).

The pollsters and statisticians are predicting that Trump will lose the election to Hillary Clinton. But of course, this hinges on how one defines “lose.” Donald Trump will likely find a way to financially profit from his political adventure, his supporters are giving him millions of dollars, his narcissism has been further expanded and fueled, and if this was all just an elaborate hustle, Trump has, in many ways, lost nothing and gained much.

But this is a bizarre political year where the normal rules have apparently been suspended. Rationality must sometimes surrender to emotion. Trump’s supporters do not care about his policy expertise or knowledge. They love Trump because he makes politics “fun” with his attacks on “political correctness,” incitements to violence, and professional wrestling style carnival barker speeches. In the era of the 24/7 cable news cycle, a public with a profoundly limited attention span-- and where they receive immediate pleasure and dopamine hits from the distractions provided by their cell phones and “likes” on social media which they, in turn, use to drown out the anxieties of living in a culture of cruelty and under the neoliberal nightmare-- I worry that a type of political decision-making predicated on “fun” is not an outlier.

If the American people in this moment of populist upset and rage want “fun” they will not choose the boring competence of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party. Donald Trump is the most entertaining thing in American politics today. Both the corporate news media and many millions of the American people know this to be true.

As the old saying goes, the big story is not when the plane lands safely but when it crashes. As such, political rubbernecking is great sport and entertainment.

Donald Trump is exploiting this fact to the maximum.

That said, I want to implore you to go back to the top of this post and watch the movie I embedded, the Funny or Die film Donald Trump's The Art of the Deal: The Movie, directed by Ron Howard and starring Johnny Depp as the Trumpanzee. It was released in February. How did you miss it?

"There are a number of people who will never forgive [Barack Obama] for being half-black" (the late Stanley Hoffmann)

Plus some thoughts on Zbig Brzezinski, Henry the K,
the brothers Kennedy, and some fellow Frenchies


Harvard Prof. Stanley Hoffmann speaking on European-American relations at the Salzburg Global Seminar in 1984

by Ken

The New York Review of Books is remembering a frequent contributor, the late Stanley Hoffmann, longtime professor of international relations at Harvard. who died on September 13, with online publication of a "conversation" drawn from a never-published December 2011 interview with Michal Matlak ("a PhD student in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and a regular contributor to the Polish magazine Liberal Culture").

I've plucked out a few excerpts from those excerpts.


A COUPLE OF HARVARD DEPARTMENTAL COLLEAGUES:
ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI AND HENRY KISSINGER

About Brzezinski, and the radical change he underwent, Hoffmann recalled:

He was always fascinated by and worried about the Soviet Union and nothing else. I liked him very much. But then he was a great supporter of the Vietnam War which I thought was a disaster and unwinnable. Now he has completely changed. I don’t think he remembers that he was such a supporter of the war. I was quite surprised at a conference which took place in Berlin about ten years ago to hear Zbig explaining that what the US did in Vietnam was a form of colonialism. He would never have said that earlier. In other words he was wise enough to change his mind. We are exactly the same age.

Zbig is a complicated guy. There was this permanent battle that went on between Zbig, representing the hard line on Russia, and Cyrus Vance, who wanted more accommodation, more flexibility. And the relations between the two of them were just awful. The story of my department was, for years, the battle between Zbigniew and Henry Kissinger. The difference has been that Kissinger never took Zbigniew seriously, and Zbigniew could not tolerate Henry, because Henry was there always before Zbig in occupying the high positions.

As for Henry the K, Hoffmann said: "I could write a book on Henry, which I will not. Everything is very complicated with Mr. Kissinger."

He did comment on something Kissinger "was very good at":

There was very recently, in The New York Times, a long front-page review by him of a new and very long biography of George Kennan. And what I found remarkable about Henry’s article was that it said nothing. I went through all of it and you don’t know at the end what he really thought. And he was very good at that.

ABOUT THE BROTHERS KENNEDY

After some conversation about "politicians who are able to combine moral ends with Realpolitik, Hoffmann was asked about another possible "successful idealist."

You knew John F. Kennedy. Did he belong to the same group of successful idealists?

Although I knew Kennedy a little, I did not like him, for purely personal reasons. He was very much an opportunist, very intelligent. I knew all three of the Kennedys. The youngest one, Teddy, who died about three years ago, was my student. He was not a genius, but he was a good person. He spent much of his time as a member of the Senate helping people get visas to the United States. He saved people. And he never really thought much about himself, because he didn’t think he was quite smart enough to reach the heights. But I liked him. The other two, Bobby and John Kennedy, struck me as hard-nosed, calculating machines.

So you don’t see in their politics a strong connection to human rights?

I think that the one who developed [this connection]—just before he was murdered—was Bobby Kennedy. He started as an aide of [Republican Senator Joe] McCarthy, so he travelled a great deal, so to speak. John F. Kennedy, I couldn’t quite figure him out. In any case his assassination was a disaster, because his successor, LBJ, did some very good things in some areas relating to human rights, but foreign policy was not his domain. But who are we to pass judgment on everybody?

"FOR THE TIME BEING AMERICA IS UNGOVERNABLE"

About President Obama, Hoffmann expressed admiration for his two books, saying, "He writes well and he is a very good speaker."

[Y]ou have lots of people, including Newt Gingrich and some others, who still wonder whether Obama is really an American. It requires a certain amount of chutzpah for somebody like Obama to be president because he knows there are a number of people who will never forgive him for being half-black. And for the time being America is ungovernable. The Constitution—and all the additions that have been grafted on it—make effective government almost impossible. For almost every important measure you need a 60 percent majority in the Senate. It is almost impossible to get this. So nothing works.

AS YOU CAN NO DOUBT GUESS FROM THE NAME --

Stanley Hoffmann was by birth French. (He had vivid memories of the Nazi occupation of his homeland.) And he had interesting things to say about Europe generally, and in particular about several of his countrymen, including --

• Mitterrand, about whom he wrote a book, and whom he described as "not an admirable politician," "highly intelligent, but also a narcissist."

• De Gaulle, of whom he said, "I have learned more about politics by studying de Gaulle than by studying Mitterand." He admired De Gaulle's being "very flexible when it came to the personalities with whom he worked." "[A]fter the liberation, some of the people who were most useful to France were not politicians or ex-politicians; they were business people, technicians, civil servants, who were totally indifferent to the battles between socialists and Christian democrats."

#

If You Were Just Elected To Congress, Would You Want To Go To 4 Days Of Harvard Seminars... Or A Heritage Brainwashing Session?

Several friends of mine in Congress have complained that the "bipartisan" Harvard seminars for congressmembers-elect are part of the Conservative Consensus regime that rules Washington. One Congressman who went several years ago when he was elected told me this morning that the foreign policy part of it was a cross between the worst neo-liberal adages and plain old right-wing imperialism presented as conventional wisdom. "They have Condoleeza Rice lecturing at this thing, if you want some idea of how clueless the program has become," one progressive told me. "They present her as though she were some kind of a serious intellectual and expert"... [instead of as] "a political hack and possible war criminal."

"The idea that this is somehow some kind of 'liberal' endeavor is just ridiculous," another Congressman told me. But it isn't ridiculous to the far right. They started boycotting it several years ago and putting together a rival shindig hosted by the Heritage Foundation. The Harvard program, which started in 1972, responded by turning sharply right. Harvard describes the lectures as "The Program for Newly-Elected Members of Congress" and claims it "introduces new legislators to the skills mastered by high-level officials who have met the challenges of governing and getting things done in Washington. It gives new Members access to the most respected thinkers and practitioners in the public policy arena. And it affords new Representatives a priceless opportunity to become acquainted with their colleagues, on both sides of the aisle, in a relaxed setting away from the pressures of Capitol Hill... It provides intensive seminars on major public policy issues such as foreign policy, health care and the Federal budget, led by prominent scholars and practitioners representing viewpoints from across the political spectrum. It also offers an unmatched set of workshops to help new Representatives make the most of their first weeks and months on Capitol Hill. These workshops focus on the "how" of getting things done in Washington, and are led by current and former senior officials from Congress, the White House, cabinet departments, regulatory agencies, and the national media." Among past lecturers, they brag, were Eric Cantor, Elaine Chao. Larry Summers, George Will, Condoleeza Rice and the Heritage Foundation's own Stuart Butler.

The program begins with a dinner this evening and runs through December 14. The schedule looks like a real sleeper. And in Republican-World? Norm Ornstein, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, says in 1994, "with the Gingrich revolution-- the first Republican House in 40 years, a new Republican Senate-- we saw a very different orientation. The Heritage Foundation said no more of these namby-pamby orientations. We want one of our own." The conservative think tank scheduled its briefings at the same time as Harvard’s and most of the GOP freshmen attended the Heritage sessions. Ornstein says from that time on, orientations were political and ideological-- part of a larger move, he says, that made politics not just partisan, but tribal. "Whatever they want, we don’t want. And if we mix with them, we may get their cooties." With it's new, DeMint-led sharper edge one can only imagine what they would be offering for newly-elected congressmembers a seminar on what women want by GOP experts Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock? "What To Do With The Damned Mexicans" by Steve King and Tom Tancredo? "How To Deal With Teh Gay" by Aaron Schock and Lindsay Graham? "Don't Let Them Steal 'Lunatic' From Us" by-- who else?-- Louie Gohmert?

Somewhere, Eliot Spitzer may be chuckling as Dems succeed in taking control of the New York State Senate -- more or less

The 2007-8 New York State Senate in all its, er, glory

by Ken

As Howie noted yesterday ("Democrats Kicked Ass In the State Legislative Races Around The Country Last Night"), the New York State Senate flipped Tuesday to Democratic control, for only the second time since before World War II -- and not often before then. (Contrary to Howie's recollection, though, it's not the first time in his lifetime. But that's another story, which we'll come back to.)

I guess this is big news.

It's certainly something that was a high priority for former Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who saw gaining a Democratic majority in the Senate as a crucial element in his plan to overhaul state government and enact his ambitious legislative program. Alas, Governor Spitzer has departed the halls of government in Albany, taking with him both his overhaul and his program. If Gov. David Paterson has plans of either kind, I haven't heard about them. I'm guessing the governor is going to have his hands full scraping together enough money to pay for whatever remains of state government in the wake of the Wall Street "misfortunes."

(Both New York City and New York State are dangerously dependent on tax revenues generated by a healthy financial sector. Even now NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg -- fresh from bullying the City Council, for his and their benefit, into relaxing our term-limits law, which had been approved twice by city voters -- is sharpening his budget ax.)

And everyone around me keeps assuring me what big news this is. On The Albany Project, my esteemed colleague Phillip Anderson has a "State Senate Reaction Roundup," of which this from the Long Island newspaper Newsday is representative:

With the loss of the Senate, Republicans no longer have a seat at the power table where deals are struck between the governor and lawmakers. With Democratic control, the Island also lost its second majority leader ever, Dean Skelos of Rockville Centre.

Skelos attributed the state Senate loss to "a large landslide by Obama."

"We'll be back," he said. "In two years, the dynamics of the city and the state will be different, and once that is out of the way we'll be able to come back."

To which Phillip comments, "Not likely, Dean."

In part the hopes of the hopeful are based on the legislature's historical near-total dysfunction. Why, the New York State Legislature would need a total sweeping remake and upgrade to raise it to the level of "dysfunctional." Basically, our 62 senators and 150 assemblymen spend all that time hanging around Albany -- which they probably consider hardship enough to entitle them to the gigantic sums it costs us taxpayers for their upkeep -- simply waiting to be told by their leaders how to vote.

New York State is governed by our famous "three men in a room": the governor, the Senate majority leader, and the Assembly speaker. Meaning that, as long as the parties in power maintain control, there's not a lot for the "opposition" to do. Okay, there's nothing for the minorities (currently the Senate Democrats and the Assembly Republicans) to do. Head counts come into play only when the majority leaders can't command their caucuses, as has been happening more often in recent years.

Well, "control" in general may be the wrong word to apply to the legislature's heaving and thrashing, which has increasingly amounted to total breakdown, except as regards the lining of members' personal pockets. Most notably, for years the legislature was ritually unable to perform its basic function of adopting a budget anywhere near the April 1 statutory deadline.

During these decades of the legislature's de facto split between the parties, it has obviously always been the case that the governor -- of whichever party -- has one house controlled by his own party and one controlled by the opposition. Worse, their independent power dynamics have meant that governors often found it easier to deal with the opposition legislative leader. Governor Spitzer, for example, didn't last in office long enough to find out whether he could find a way to coexist with Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver of Manhattan, who has been in the job since 1994 and doesn't yield easily to mere governors.

NOW, HOWEVER, ALL OF THAT HAS CHANGED!

Come January, thanks to Tuesday's voting, just as Governor Spitzer dared to dream, the three men in the famous room will be of the same party, and voters will finally be in a position to demand results. Or so the theory goes, anyway.

As of now, the Democrats will have only a 32-30 majority. An additional Republican seat, that of Queens Sen. Frank Padavan, is, surprisingly, in jeopardy. We may not know that outcome for weeks, but already there's a bloc of four conservative New York City Democrats declaring itself "independent," and threatening not to vote to elevate current Senate Minority Leader Malcolm Smith of Queens to be the new majority leader, apparently to prevent being railroaded into supporting Commie crap like marriage equality. [By the way, if you would like to know the "meaning" of those numbered elements in the New York State Senate Seal, visit here.]

There's a possibility that the rebels may vote with the Republicans to keep Majority Leader Skelos on the job. Even assuming Senator Smith succeeds in getting the Senate organized and himself installed as majority leader, it seems clear that he's not going to have an easy time holding his caucus together. Would it be unkind to suggest that all those years of minority-status futility haven't necessarily uniformly improved the quality of the Democratic members? Okay, forget "unkind." Would it be unfair?

As if that wasn't messy enough, the current legislature is actually being called into session again, later this month, to deal with the financial crisis. It all sounds to me like a recipe for confusion, if not chaos.

UPDATE: "GANG OF FOUR" HUDDLE WITH GOP SENATE LEADERS

The AP's Michael Gormley reports that the so-called "Gang of Four" met yesterday with leaders of the outgoing Senate GOP majority "to discuss how the four might serve the GOP and what’s in it for them should they defect, according to [Republican and Democratic] officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because leaders wouldn’t confirm the talks."

The four independent-minded Democrats -- often called the “Gang of Four” -- historically have not been afraid to break ranks and support Republicans. They also have clashed at times with Sen. Malcolm Smith of Queens, the presumptive next majority leader, and reportedly refused to attend a Democratic conference Wednesday called by Smith.

The senators are Ruben Diaz Sr. and Pedro Espada Jr., both of the Bronx; Carl Kruger of Brooklyn; and Hiram Monserrate of Queens. . . .

On the table at Wednesday’s meeting was a possible power-sharing agreement by Democrats and Republicans or a kind of hostile takeover of the Senate by Republicans using the swing Democrats to maintain control of the Senate when a majority leader is elected in January.

If Republicans kept majority power, they could then reward the four Democratic defectors with lucrative committee chairmanships.

Republicans said no deals were struck in the meetings. . . .

Meanwhile, Democrats privately said that Democratic Gov. David Paterson has intervened. They say he struck at least a tentative deal with enough of the so-called "Gang of Four" Democrats to preserve the Democratic majority for at least a year under Smith. The Democratic mavericks, however, would be free to vote their conscience on specific bills even if that is contrary to the Democratic line.

NOW, ABOUT THAT LAST TIME THAT
THE DEMS CONTROLLED THE NYS SENATE

I'm shocked that Howie doesn't remember it, because it happened during our senior year at James Madison High School in Brooklyn.

In the LBJ landslide election of 1964, the Democrats captured control of both the Assembly and the Senate, but promptly split down the middle between factions loyal to NYC Mayor Robert Wagner and to Sen. Robert Kennedy. The struggle continued for more than a month, and was resolved only through pressure from Republican Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, whose legislative plans were thwarted by the absence of a functioning legislature. (In those years, the way the legislature worked was, basically, that it was eventually strong-armed into giving Governor Rockefeller what he wanted.) A peeved Governor Rockefeller -- and the governor was not a person whom the people around him enjoyed seeing peeved -- prevailed on the Republican leaders in both houses to vote with the Wagner factions for the Democrats who had been minority leaders in the two houses, Sen. Joseph Zaretzki of Manhattan (the last Democratic Senate majority leader until, presumably, Senate Smith takes over in January) and Assemblyman Anthony Travia of Brooklyn. [Sorry, but I couldn't find a picture of Senator Zaretzki.]

Assembly Speaker Travia lasted only a few years in the job before slipping into a judgeship. Senate Majority Leader Zaretzki's reign was even shorter, not quite 11 months. Because of federal voting-rights concerns over reapportionment of the legislature, the 1964 elections covered only one year. And when new elections were held in 1965, for another one-year term, the Republicans regained control of the Senate.

That redistricting squabble, which as noted had required judicial intervention, actually laid the groundwork for the Republicans' subsequent four-decade control of the State Senate and the Democrats' simultaneous monopoly control of the Assembly. When it came time to redistrict again following the 1970 census, given that any plan required the approval of both houses, rather than cede control to the courts again the legislative leaders agreed in effect to split the place down the middle. District lines would be redrawn to more or less ensure Republican control of the Senate and Democratic control of the Assembly.

The agreement held through the reapportionments following the censuses of 1980, 1990, and 2000, and even included an unofficial agreement that the parties wouldn't challenge each other's incumbents. It didn't begin to fray until the state Republican Party itself did. Democrats saw Republican seats that looked ripe for the plucking, and Governor Spitzer used strategic government appointments to open up additional GOP seats, in addition to making clear that he planned to contest any seats he thought could be captured.

PERSONAL POSTSCRIPT

I confess that I depended heavily on reference sources to refresh my memory of details of the 1964-65 struggle for control of the legislature. But I well remember the intoxicating craziness of the time. We were in the thick of it, in fact, the day I schlepped into Manhattan from Brooklyn in a near-blizzard for my alum interview at the Harvard Club, required for my Harvard application.

Even back in those prehistoric times it was common to have one's college interview during a visit to the campus. However, I had a very strict senior English teacher who sternly disapproved of our taking school time off for frivolities like campus visits, and on-campus interviews couldn't be arranged on weekends. So I had to do the alum interview, and I lucked into the near-blizzard, tracking snow and slush into the sacred confines of the Harvard Club.

And I wound up having a grand time. I yammered on about the delicious crisis of our state government, and my interviewer seemed quite charmed. Before I headed back out into the snowstorm, he confided that while of course he couldn't speak officially, he thought my admission chances were excellent.

For the record, he was wrong.

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