I'm mostly taking today off, so this won't be a column about politics. It won't even be a full column, for that matter.

I'm taking the time off in order to get caught up on a few projects around the house, if truth be told. That's right -- I will be laboring on Labor Day. Now, I do realize that delving into the mysteries of under-sink plumbing and towel rack maintenance don't really qualify for the intended purpose of the holiday, so I decided to write this to comment about how important laborers are to the country right now.

It took a pandemic for many people to even notice how essential some jobs are. Who among us ever gave a single thought for the workers who produce toilet paper before this year? And yet suddenly they were at the forefront of the fight against the coronavirus (mostly due to rampant panic-buying for no particular reason). The only times I've ever stood in a long line at 6:00 A.M. previously, it was to buy concert tickets when they went on sale. Doing so to get the limited number of toilet paper packages the grocery store released each day was indeed a novel experience, that's for sure.

Continue Reading »

It has been three weeks since we've done this, since for the past two Fridays we were still writing up our notes on the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. Now that all that hoopla is over, we can return once again to our usual Friday Talking Points format.

We're not even going to try to cover all three of those weeks today, since that would be a monumental task. So much happens so fast these days that it is almost impossible to keep up. And no, this is not just hyperbole -- while reading a little history of political haircuts (after Nancy Pelosi's now-infamous visit to a salon), we came across the following extraordinary reminder of the way things used to be in the political world:

Continue Reading »

Tomorrow, two months before the third of November, the general election for president will already have begun. North Carolina will begin absentee voting, with all the other states to follow in the coming days and weeks. How it will all play out is anyone's guess, at this point.

When I say that, I'm not talking so much about the result of the election as the mechanics of voting this year. In normal times, both parties would now be urging their base to vote early, whether in person (at an early-voting polling site) or by absentee/mail-in ballot. This is called "banking votes," because once those votes are turned in it doesn't matter what else happens in the campaign, the vote is "safe in the bank" for one candidate or the other. This helps dampen the effect of any last-minute surprises (October or otherwise) on the actual vote count.

Continue Reading »

This year's presidential campaign, like just about every other aspect of American life during the coronavirus pandemic, is going to be different than any we've seen before. How different is still an open question, because nobody really knows where the country will be in a month or two. Perhaps the pandemic will significantly abate. Conversely, it could get far worse with the advent of the yearly flu season. Either one would affect how the two candidates campaign. But there is one thing that appears pretty obvious at this point -- the first presidential debate is going to be absolutely critical.

Today, the moderators for all four debates (three presidential, one vice-presidential) were announced. Surprisingly, after what we saw during the Democratic primary debates, there will only be one lone moderator for each debate. This is a good thing, in my opinion, because at times the "tag-team moderation" format can get pretty chaotic. One strong moderator will avoid this altogether. But the best news to me is that the first debate will be moderated by Fox News host Chris Wallace.

Continue Reading »

President Donald Trump began his political career with a baseless conspiracy theory: Barack Obama was not born in the United States, therefore he was not eligible to be president. This theory is false in two significant ways: (1) even if, just for the sake of argument, Barack Obama had been born in Kenya, he still would have been eligible to be president (see: Ted Cruz, George Romney, John McCain); and (2) Barack Obama was indeed born in Hawai'i, just after it became a state. But all of that didn't matter to Trump, who became the most prominent "birther" around, long before he began his run for the presidency. But just because he now is president, his penchant for looney-tunes conspiracy theories has not abated one bit. In the past two days, he's floated out another whopper, about a planeload of thugs which flew either into or out of Washington to disrupt the Republican National Convention.

As usual, Trump has zero evidence to support his looney-tunes story. He either read something like it on the internet or talked to someone else who read it on the internet. That's it. That's the whole story, plain and simple. But that hasn't stopped Trump from talking about it twice now in the past two days.

Continue Reading »

Today, I am going to let Joe Biden speak for himself. In past election cycles, I have printed transcripts of speeches from Democratic candidates, but I don't believe I've ever done so during the general election.

I felt it was worth it today, because I just read the speech Joe Biden just gave in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This is the kickoff to the traditional general election season, and Biden makes his case in such strong and forceful language that, rather than just running excerpts and commenting on them, I felt the entire speech deserved to be presented. It really is that good.

Continue Reading »

Is it over yet?

No, really, this has to be it... it's gotta be over now... right?

Not unlike experiencing the end of The Lord Of The Rings for the first time, last night I watched President Donald Trump give the longest convention acceptance speech in modern history (with the only possible other contender being Trump's 2016 speech) while continually wondering (from about ten past the hour onwards) when he would begin to wrap it up. Several times I was convinced he had done so... but then he just kept on talking. I mean, Frodo's safely back in the Shire, so it's got to be the end, right?

Continue Reading »

Last night, while watching the continuing study in contradiction that is the Republican National Convention, I had to wonder at several points who, exactly, is president right now? After all, the campaign for Donald Trump seems to be operating from the point of view that if only Trump were president then he could solve America's massive current problems. On subject after subject, we were told that things out there are really, really scary and that the only response to this dystopian world was to elect a savior who would deliver us from all the frightfulness.

This would be a fine message for a challenger to get elected as an outsider, as Trump indeed did in 2016. But it also ignores completely that the world we find ourselves in right now is one where Donald Trump has been president for three and a half years. It's the mother of all disconnects, really.

Continue Reading »

When reading other reviews of the Republican National Convention today, many seemed to me to be making the mistake of proclaiming: "Trump is preaching to the choir, he's only interested in firing up his base." There is indeed a lot of this sort of thing, but there is also a sustained effort at pandering to distinct voter demographics where Trump is either performing weakly or worse. The two efforts -- fire up the base and reach out to possible "persuadable" voters -- set up another disjointed disconnect of epic proportions, to be sure, but as Trump says, it is what it is.

Continue Reading »

Republicans promised they'd put on an uplifting convention. To say they failed to reach this goal on their first night is a vast understatement. What we got instead was fear, on steroids.

Granted, their job was a tough one from the get-go. During the Democratic convention, there was a mix of (as Joe Biden framed it) the light and the dark. But the Democrats' message was pretty clear: we're in a dark period right now, and we can move towards the light with the repudiation of Donald Trump and all his enablers. The Republican message was the opposite, which is a pretty hard case to make, considering the current state of affairs. According to the Republicans, everything is just peachy right now, but if Biden wins, things will become apocalyptically bad overnight. There's just one problem with this formulation, however, and that is that we are hardly experiencing Utopia right now, as the COVID-19 deaths climb towards 180,000, unemployment is still in double digits -- higher than at any point during the Great Recession -- and the economy looks like it is now stalling due to the Republicans refusing to pass another pandemic stimulus bill. In other words, the American public is fully capable of looking around at their own lives and seeing that Utopia is far from what they're experiencing right now.

Continue Reading »