RR Memory Bank (Late October 2020)

We weren't scared enough at Halloween four years ago.

I began my newsletter in March 2020, just as the Covid pandemic was beginning. I started out writing far more regularly than today, often putting something out three to five times a week. It kept me sane. From time to time, I’m planning to continue to post some previous chronicles from that election year (mistakes and all intact), as a reminder of what it felt like to me at the time.

Here are three posts, edited to avoid excessive length, that capture my thoughts on the last three days of October, 2020. I was wrong about some things, but I’m struck by how much the themes I highlighted then, alas, are still with us today.

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Oct. 29

Dear Friends,

How did Donald Trump get a reputation among voters (and even with many political pundits and journalists who don’t actually cover economic issues) as being good for the economy?

It’s no mystery; he happened to be occupying the White House at a time when the gains of nearly a decade of modest but steady growth finally brought unemployment to a low enough level that wages were rising pretty much across the board, particularly among lower income Americans. (“Full employment” has been a Democratic policy goal since the days of Harry Truman; Republicans have always been uneasy about it because it strengthens the bargaining power of workers against business.)

His one policy initiative -- a tax cut for corporations and the wealthy -- failed in its stated objective of boosting business investment. It was helpful that he had no inhibitions about borrowing in the markets for government bonds to pay for his giveaway to the rich (but Republicans have never been averse to deficits for that purpose). And he was lucky to have a Federal Reserve chairman, Jerome Powell, who realized his mistake in raising interest rates to try to crush an imaginary threat of inflation, and reversed course before it was too late.

But then the coronavirus hit, and those Americans who could retreated into the safety of their homes to ride out the pandemic.

Which is why Trump’s argument that the election is a “choice between a Trump boom and a Biden lockdown” is such a bitter joke. For one thing, there was never a Trump boom; for another it has been clear from the start of the pandemic, as public health officials have been saying all year (echoed by Biden from as early as January), that the only way to restore the economy to health is to get the virus under control. On that one task where they might have made a difference, Donald Trump and Mike Pence have failed utterly. . .

As the pandemic flares again in much of the country, most economists agree this much is clear: The main thing holding back the economy is not formal restrictions. It is people’s continued fear of the virus itself. . .

In Politico, the skilled political journalist Tim Alberta is candid enough to admit that he was deeply wrong about Biden.

The reasons I expected Biden to get mauled by the likes of Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg are exactly the reasons he outlasted them all.

The reasons I wondered how he would fare against Donald Trump are exactly the reasons he outperformed the president in each of their two debates.

Biden is slow. He is steady. He is unspectacular. In other words, he is what much of the electorate seems to want.

On Thursday night [at the final debate], two years after he stepped to that lectern in Lansing [where Alberta watched a disastrous early Biden primary campaign stop], Biden climbed down tiredly from the stage in Nashville. Over the previous 90 minutes, he had put the finishing touches on a campaign that was crafted in defiance of every expectation placed upon him and his party since Trump took office. I would call Biden’s performance in the final debate an exclamation mark—except there is nothing exclamatory about his candidacy. He has run, objectively speaking, one of the most monotonous and predictable and uneventful campaigns for president in recent memory. And it has been nothing short of superb. Now, with Biden on the brink of a historic victory, it’s worth understanding what has been right about his campaign—not simply what has been wrong with Trump’s. . .

More than ever, we need our journalists to rise to the challenge, too. The last four years suggest that some will -- but that many will fall short, too. The coverage of the Trump presidency itself  is Exhibit A, as Jon Allsop and Pete Vernon lay out in a long, insightful report in the Columbia Journalism Review that sums up their regular, almost daily, commentary of media coverage of the Trump era.

For his part, Trump has ruthlessly gamed old-school journalists’ commitment to covering “both sides” of the story, winning more than equal time for his lies, as well as “he said, she said” fig leaves for his obscene behavior. 

Since 2017, we have, between us, observed these failures in real time—tracking the coverage of almost every day of Trump’s presidency for CJR’s daily newsletter, The Media Today. (Pete wrote the newsletter until October 2018, when Jon took over; our colleagues Nausicaa Renner and then Mathew Ingram wrote it once a week throughout, mostly on the intersection of journalism and tech.) With the election approaching, we looked back at every one of our newsletters to remind ourselves of the debates, narratives, and missteps that have defined the Trump presidency. 

Our observations, while rooted in the record we kept over time, are inevitably impressionistic. We’ve seen much outstanding political reporting—the New York Times on Trump’s taxes; the Washington Post unmasking a Project Veritas sting; the great beat reporting that helped bring down Tom Price, Scott Pruitt, and Ryan Zinke—and astute, clear-eyed columns and essays (“The first white president”; “The cruelty is the point”) that stand as exceptions to the general malign trends that are our focus here. (Nor, at the other extreme, are we much concerned with the right-wing mediasphere: a crucial story of the Trump presidency that has been well-documented elsewhere.)

Nonetheless, the act of bringing together our daily doses of media criticism paints a clear picture of an industry whose basic practices and rhythms have conspired, time and again, to downplay demagoguery, let Trump and his defenders off the hook, and drain resources and attention from crucial longer-term storylines. Much has changed since Inauguration Day, both in the news and the media’s approach to covering it. But in other ways, many of them profoundly important and consequential, the press has simply not learned its lesson.

For all the news media’s shortcomings, though, anyone who has been paying attention to the kinds of reporting I’ve been highlighting in my chronicles here cannot have failed to get a “clear picture” of the Trump presidency. 

Oct. 30

Dear Friends,

I may or may not complete this note before 8:30 a.m., when the Commerce Department will release its initial estimate of the economy’s most recent performance this summer. It’s going to be a recond setting number (likely to be reported as a quarterly gain of more than 30 percent) but the economy is still staggering and activity is well below where it was at the beginning of the year, before the pandemic hit. Trump will tout the number as a great success. A lot of smart economics reporters will be busy today explaining why he’s wrong. 

Here’s Ben Casselman, in the New York Times, writing in advance of the report. 

The United States almost certainly just experienced its fastest three months of economic growth on record. That doesn’t mean the economy is strong. . .

In other words: Even after the record-setting rebound in the third quarter, the economy is still in a hole as large as the worst point of many past recessions.

The GDP report is one of the last bits of news that might still influence a few remaining undecided voters. There aren’t many “undecided” voters left, but, even with the turnout expected to break a record dating back to the dawn of the 20th century, there will still be tens of millions of Americans who won’t vote at all. 

Turning those non-voters into voters won’t be easy, as the brilliant NYT campaign reporter Astead Herndon explains in a report from Georgia, where Republicans have been highly successful in the past in suppressing the vote. 

As Democrats eye Georgia for possible gains this November — the first step toward a larger goal of remaking their path to victory in statewide races throughout the South — high turnout will be the name of the game, and that means persuading nonvoters to become voters. . .

But experts who study nonvoting populations and the failed Democratic campaigns of recent years warn that the work of changing electorates is hard and complicated. There is no such thing, they say, as an inevitable demographic destiny.

We’ve got a bizarre voting system, unlike that of any other democracy. Writing in The Guardian, Bob Carr, a former former minister of Australia, contrasts the United States with his own country and others.

Astonishingly, the US is still settling rules for an election due within days. And a national election is being conducted with a patchwork of state laws and regulations. Further, elected state officials – Republican or Democrat office holders – are making decisions about who goes on the roll, how many voting machines go where and how long postal votes will be counted.

And all subject to appeal to an acutely partisan court.

This is American exceptionalism. It confirms the proposition that the US is simply not a democracy, not in the sense western Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Canada are democracies.

Let’s hope we fix at least part of what is broken before the next election, but in the meantime we’re going to the polls, as Donald Rumsfeld might put it, with the system we have. The Washington Post opinion section has put together an excellent Q&A on what to expect in the days ahead. I’m going to cite just a couple of examples from their report, which is worth reading in full.

But if waiting is driving you crazy, you’re not alone. This guide will walk you through what we do know about how the election is going to proceed; what to watch out for as Election Day approaches; and what to look for on election night, and perhaps beyond, as news outlets try to process the results — and the candidates and their surrogates try to spin them.

What’s the earliest the race could be over?

In theory, within a few hours. If Biden wins in blowout in Florida, Trump has very few paths to victory. Similarly, if Biden or Trump is getting a great result in fast-reporting states such as Colorado, there is a pretty good chance the candidate who is performing strongly there is winning across the board.

Networks might not want to officially “call” the race in that case. But viewers could make some strong inferences about who is likely to win.

What’s the worst-case scenario for the latest we could know who won?

If the vote is close in key states, the election could take weeks or months to be decided and the whole mess could end up in court or Congress.

Still, remember: A delay in finding out the results doesn’t mean the election is illegitimate, just that in a year as strange as this one, it takes time to do things right. Some swing states, such as Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, aren’t used to getting a lot of mail-in ballots. If the race is close, we could be waiting weeks for them to receive and count all their votes.

The 2020 election is also fertile ground for protracted legal battles; in fact, those fights are already underway. More than 200 lawsuits have been filed over mail voting, and disputes over voting procedures and recounts could end up in court after the election.

Court battles may not end up delaying the count. But if we’re talking about worst-case scenarios, these legal maneuvers are definitely worth mentioning, as is the prospect of a battle in Congress over competing delegations of presidential electors.

I missed highlighting Heather Cox Richardson’s letter from yesterday, where she laid out an excellent short treatise on the 20th century history of socialism and fascism. I found it surprisingly encouraging. [Oops, I’m not so encouraged these days and either is Richardson.]

Fascism is a far-right political ideology born in the early twentieth century. At its heart is the idea of a strong nation, whose people are welded into a unit by militarism abroad and the suppression of opposition at home. While socialism starts from the premise that all members of society are equal, fascists believe that some people are better than others, and those elites should direct all aspects of society. To promote efficiency, fascists believe, business and government should work together to direct production and labor. To make people loyal to the state, fascists promote the idea of a domestic enemy that threatens the country and which therefore must be vanquished to make the nation great. The idea of a hierarchy of men leads to the defense of a dictatorial leader who comes to embody the nation. . .

But for all that, Trump is an aspiring oligarch, rather than a fascist. He has no driving ideology except money and sees the country as a piggy bank rather than as a juggernaut for national greatness. Still, that his drive for power comes from a different place than fascism makes it no less dangerous to our democracy.

Oct. 31

Friends,

There’s no observer of American politics I admire more than Ron Brownstein, who I first met when we were colleagues at the Los Angeles Times in the late 1980s. There’s a lot of talk about the campaigns’ closing arguments; Ron’s final pre-election essay in The Atlantic is his closing argument for the themes he has been laying out for months, if not years. I’m going to offer a few quotes, but you really should read the whole thing.

If Joe Biden beats Donald Trump decisively next week, this election may be remembered as a hinge point in American history: the moment when a clear majority of voters acknowledged that there’s no turning back from America’s transformation into a nation of kaleidoscopic diversity, a future that doesn’t rely on a backward-facing promise to make America great again. But that doesn’t mean the voters who embody the nation’s future are guaranteed a lasting victory over those who feel threatened by it.

With Biden embracing America’s evolution and Trump appealing unrestrainedly to the white voters most fearful of it, the 2020 campaign marks a new peak in the most powerful trend shaping politics in this century. Over the past two decades, and especially since Barack Obama’s election in 2008, voters have re-sorted among the parties and thus reconfigured the central fault line between them. Today Republicans and Democrats are divided less by class or region than by attitudes toward the propulsive demographic, cultural, and economic shifts remaking 21st-century America. On one side, Republicans now mobilize what I’ve called a “coalition of restoration”; on the other, Democrats assemble a “coalition of transformation.” . . .

Without discounting the possibility of an upset, Tuesday’s results are likely to demonstrate that the Democrats’ coalition of transformation is now larger—even much larger—than the Republicans’ coalition of restoration. With Trump solidifying the GOP’s transformation into a “white-identity party … a nationalist party, not unlike parties you see in Europe, … you see the Democratic Party becoming the party of literally everyone else,” as the longtime Republican political consultant Michael Madrid, a co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, told me. . . .

And yet even a decisive Democratic win would not guarantee that the party can actually implement its policy agenda. As if laying sandbags against the coming demographic wave, Republicans have erected a series of defenses that could allow them to impede their rivals—even if demographic and social change combine to more clearly stamp Democrats as the nation’s majority party in the years ahead. And that could make the 2020s the most turbulent decade for America since the 1850s, when a very similar dynamic unfolded.

The Senate and the Supreme Court, just as they did in the decade before the Civil War, stand in the way of the Democratic agenda, which is a lot more far-reaching than you might think. If Biden wins and the Democrats take the Senate, there will be plenty more to say about that. But in the meantime, Saahil Desai, writing in The Atlantic, has a delightful, illuminating profile of Jared Bernstein, a friend and helpful source to dozens of economic and political journalists, who is likely to have a major role in shaping Biden’s economic policy. 

Not long after the 2008 election, Jared Bernstein caught a predawn Amtrak train to Wilmington, Delaware, and then schlepped several miles to Joe Biden’s house for a job interview. As Biden walked him into the kitchen, Bernstein spotted a brand-new espresso machine, the kind you might hear squealing away at an overpriced coffee shop. “Want a cup?” Biden asked Bernstein. He reached into a cabinet just above the espresso machine and took out a jar of instant coffee.

“To this day, I think he was testing me,” Bernstein told me. “If I had said, I’m not going to drink that, I probably wouldn’t have got the job.”

Biden’s pointedly lowbrow tastes are part of the case that Bernstein, a labor economist, has been making on behalf of the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee. You might think that Biden is some flavorless, middle-of-the-road Democrat, but Bernstein insists that the former vice president is really a populist rabble-rouser with a proven left-wing streak—just like him. “Sometimes people say, Biden’s a moderate,” he said. “But I don’t know any moderates who have been that closely linked to the labor movement for their whole political career.” . . .

Bernstein would like everyone to please chill out. He’s not convinced by lefties’ collective panic that a Democratic White House would shut them out yet again. “It’s crystal clear to me that Biden sees a need for a staff of economists and policy thinkers who are willing to go outside the traditional box,” he told me. . .

It’s not just spin. Even if Biden hires all the Obamanauts whom the left most loathes, his administration won’t be a repeat of Obama’s. This isn’t your grandfather’s Democratic Party, and it’s not even your cool aunt’s. The $15 minimum wage, once the “go big or go home” lefty ask, is now so widely supported within the party that Democrats hardly if ever bicker over it. A Millennial socialist is such a political rock star that she’s known by a three-letter acronym. Even [Larry] Summers is arguing that the decline of labor unions is a major cause of the country’s economic malaise. “One thing that progressives sometimes miss is just how much the party itself has moved to the left,” Bernstein said. “On issues of minimum wage, health care, budget deficits, [and] trade policy, progressives—and I put myself in that category—have done admirable work to move the party towards us.” . . .

And sometimes, people in Washington surprise you. Lefties were furious when Obama named a Goldman Sachs veteran, Gary Gensler, to a top post. He ended up hammering big banks. Sheila Bair, a lifelong Republican appointed by George W. Bush, was such a tough Wall Street regulator that even the most ardent lefties want her in a Biden administration. Bair and Gensler earned respect from the left not because they buy Kirkland Signature or dine at Applebee’s, but because they enacted policies that benefit working people. The same test will apply to Biden: He will need to do more than drink regular joe to prove he’s an ally of Regular Joes.

Speaking of which, I had to know: Was the instant coffee any good?

“It was the worst cup of coffee I’ve had in my adult life,” Bernstein said.

In journalism, one example is an anecdote, two show you’ve done some extra reporting, three are enough for a trend. So to give this note a trend (since I don’t really have one today), I’m going to cite one more piece from The Atlantic. It’s by Tom Nichols, a Republican who became a leading Never-Trumper.

I am not confidently predicting victory. I am too scarred by the horrific outcome of the 2016 election to count any chickens, no matter how alive and clucking they might seem. But win or lose, our goal will become something else. When my friends—including the few I have left among the conservatives—ask what the Never Trumpers will do now, I say with all honesty that I am not sure.

What I do know is that, regardless of what any one of us does individually, two aspects of the Never Trump movement will outlast Trump. First, we will always be able to say that when Trump and his thugs took over the Republican Party and then the elected branches of the United States government, we did not cut and run. We stood and fought.

Second, these four years have confirmed to us that Trump’s moral corruption of the Republican Party is total, from top to bottom. Our current alliances with our liberal friends may not be a permanent realignment. But I don’t believe that those of us who opposed Trump will declare that bygones are bygones with conservatives who supported him and go back to partisanship as usual.

At 538, Nathaniel Rakich and Elena Mejia have a very helpful guide to what to watch for as results roll in next week that will help determine who will be in charge of the redistricting this time.

Most of the attention on the 2020 election is focused on who will sit in the White House for the next four years. But the 2020 election could also help decide who controls the House of Representatives for the next decade.

This is the last election before data from the census is released, so whoever emerges from this year holding power on the state level will have the power to redraw their state’s congressional maps — and maybe even give their side an unfair advantage in future elections. (Although this is not true everywhere, as some states have independent or bipartisan commissions draw their maps.)

Under this best-case scenario for Republicans, they would have redistricting control over 188 seats in total (43 percent) — almost as many as after 2010. But with the possibility of another blue wave election on the horizon, Democrats can probably prevent that from happening. In the best-case Democratic scenario, the party would gain control over drawing 77 more seats and would share redistricting control over the other 55 with Republicans. That would give them redistricting control over 124 seats in total (29 percent) — slightly more than Republicans.

Finally, it’s Halloween, so I’m afraid I’m going to have to leave you with at least one horror to contemplate. My choice is police dogs, which are the focus of a special report by the invaluable Marshall Project, in collaboration with AL.com, IndyStar and the Invisible Institute. 

Dogs have served as instruments of violence in incidents dating back to the days of slavery, and as recently as the Black Lives Matter protests. In a year-long investigation, we talked to the people who train the dogs, the police officers who use them, and the victims who have been mauled by them. We watched dozens of videos of dog bites, from police body cameras and bystanders’ cell phones. We learned a lot about the dogs, which have names like Drogo, Missile, Vader, Storm and Rambo.

There are no national standards for police dog training, yet dogs are responsible for sending thousands of Americans to hospital emergency rooms every year. Few ever get justice.

Take care,

Tom