"For better or worse, campaigns are no longer restricted to the year of the election and they aren’t made in the context of a media environment. They are about creating the media environment itself."
PoliticsNC founder Thomas Mills has deep institutional knowledge of the workings of both the national and the North Carolina Democratic parties. Plus he's a wise head, a strategist with foxhole experience, so I tend to pay attention to his misgivings and his proposed remedies.
"Our two party system is struggling. We may have outgrown it as a country, but changing it is more difficult than reforming it. Democrats are operating under control of a political elite that knows how government and governing work, but excludes or alienates too many people from the process. Republicans have become a party of people who either want to plunder the system or burn it down. Their elites have surrendered power to the mob. One of the parties needs to fix itself."
Ouch. If "knowing how government and governing work" equals "educated"-- in that the very fact of education itself puts you in a higher class of society that knows stuff -- and if your experience with "educated elites" has revealed any level of social snobbery, then, yes, Democratic political elites are to blame and maybe the whole Democratic enterprise is doomed. Unless we can visit again our Christian humility.
Without any hesitation or doubt, I can accept that I'm not only a "political elite" but also an educated political elite, and I certainly admit that our local demographic of high educational attainment makes a huge difference in how we run campaigns. Also agreed -- that highly educated people sometimes don't know how to talk to other people, that we've lost touch with roots, that we're grown way too addicted to the same money that corrupts everyone eventually -- dependence on the big-rollers. Going gussied up in the circles where elites go to ingratiate themselves is not a good look for a party that claims allegiance to "the people." It's a behavioral problem. And it's a fact.
Mills wants Democrats to relearn honesty (which also implies authenticity):
"Democrats should have surrogates going on Joe Rogan’s show to talk about the H-1B visa dispute, making sure people understand the contempt that Trump’s billionaire buddies have for working Americans. They should recruit people from outside politics to deliver the messages on social media and podcasts. And they need to deploy Pete Buttigieg. Hell, give him his own podcast. The legacy media is no longer reaching enough Americans to shape elections and Democrats should quit relying on it to inform the public.
I'm too old and worn-out now to be in that vanguard. Intelligence and education are two separate and different things. Some of the smartest I've known have been relatively un- or under-educated, and some of the dumbest people on the planet are "academics." I'd recommend that educated progressives stop making fun of grammatical flubs, stop defining and denigrating their supposed enemies as yahoos, stop acting like snobs and know-it-alls and try to reclaim the humility we learned about in Sunday School.
Mills's Substack column, PoliticsNC, is well worth subscribing to.
After today, no matter what happens, #democratsneed to shred their messaging memos, stare into the abyss of the American id, and start over from scratch.
--Twitter post by @bullydoc, 3:07 pm Nov. 8th
Those of us who have been organizing and strategizing on the county level for over 30 years know from stupid. The fact that no one in the high-up offices pays us any attention is generally a blessing, leaving us alone to practice the right way what we've learned the hard way, but being ignored is also a burden when you can't get the mailing lists you need because someone at the state party is guarding data like it's the Crown Jewels.
It's also bad when the state and national Party apparatuses, or individual candidate campaigns with lots of money for high-dollar consultants, set their messaging around polling that's just plain off its rocker -- as some of that pollingwas leading up to last Tuesday. We all gotta stop listening to talking heads, even those doom-scrollers among us like me.
Timidity, being afraid to say outright what you believe, has taken over in much of the Democratic Party of the Old South. Shyness about ideals has been building actually for decades, and I'll tell you who hates it the most -- Gen Z and the Millennials, the very young voters that the state Party should be talking to all the time, registering them every year and not just in election years, getting them out to vote in municipals as aggressively as we do for even-year general elections.
Patting the youth vote on its head via social media for the two months before a big election doesn't cut it. Because "Twitter ain't real," as the youngest member of the Boone Town Council argued on this site following last May's primary. Having big Twitter followings or Facebook likes or cute TikToks doesn't mean you've earned any votes.
Twitter ain't real and neither, for that matter, is any social media if Democratic candidates are relying on it exclusively as an easy button-pushing excuse for not getting their effing boots on the actual effing ground. Why was turnout in North Carolina so down this year? Why especially was the Gen Z vote, so startling in other states, not spectacular in North Carolina? Social media is not voter engagement. It is too often an excuse not to do the actual hard work of voter engagement.
We need a statewide summit of Party activists and operatives -- please gawd, no candidates! -- to hash it out and suggest what "starting over from scratch" might look like, and then we need some Party leadership to put those goals into action.
Don’t make this election about Trump, but draw a sharp contrast with Trumpism.
--Advice of Democratic political consultants for 2022 Congressional candidates, reported by the WashPost
I think that advice is pretty good.
I try not to focus on Trump at all on this site (though I lapse sometimes, like when I got recently fascinated by the theory of Trump and "the Drunken Fist"), but "Trumpism" became a search label on WataugaWatch before 2020 and has racked up many pings in 2021 and 2022. The Trumpists are raging. They're mad. They smell blood (which may turn out to be turtle poo), and they have plans for you. Especially you. They aren't afraid to say what some people consider outrageous things because they're just being themselves, finally released from the bindings of political correctness.
Women, they have further plans for you. And you, the young and the restless, and you, Black and brown people, and newcomers to these shores from non-European nations. They have plans for all of you (and their Christian nationalist branch has definite plans for public schools and public libraries and the regulation of private behavior.
"The Purge," 2013, Universal Picts.
Gosh. The Trump GOP has created a brand -- "We stand for cruelty and force" -- that just might scorch them.
What does it mean, after all, that Trumpists love a purge? They run off their best talent, censor them, vote them out in nasty primaries. Because those people do not kiss the ring. Those interior eliminations by the Republicans themselves become ultra mean because that's the way their leader behaves. That's his identity, and now it's become the identity of an entire political party. Hey candidates: do your best Trump, talk tough, spout conspiracy theories and rabid ideas, make your nonsense sound unassailable, and push extreme laws that strip, say, women of equal citizenship in the name of religion.
Today it's as though Liz Cheney got denounced to the Congregation of the Holy Office (Inquisition) and was quickly condemned to an auto-da-fe ("act of faith") when the Pope Hisself marked her for death, and the Republican voters cult-like piled up the dry wood for her immolation. She's being (by all reliable reports) burned at the stake today, an actually thoughtful, knowledgeable, philosophically consistent member of Congress whose integrity cannot be abided by Trump or by his Trumpists.
Because counter-reformation Christians considered it an "act of faith" to burn certain people at the stake, the above is a contemporary illustration of an Auto-da-fe in Valladolid, Spain, May 21, 1559
“I think this is much bigger than Trump. This is about a radical MAGA Republican Party that wants to take away your rights, your benefits, your freedoms,” DCCC Chairman Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.) said. That's it, that's the message and the issue that can energize the Democratic base and draw the Unaffiliated.
More than two weeks ago, after the Kansas vote affirming abortion rights, I let my inner Little-Mary-Sunshine loose (I'm always the eternal optimist, often cock-eyed too) and expressed impatience with the opinions of professional yakkers and political handicappers that the Democrats were absolutely doomed by a coming Red Wave in 2022:
I'm coming to resent the poor-mouthing I hear from some Democratic activists. Maybe we lose the Democratic House and the Democratic Senate, and maybe we don't. You cherry-pick your intimations of doom, and I'll cherry-pick ... my cherries. The prediction that 2022 is going to rival 2010 for the Democrats has become conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom is a ass and a idiot (to paraphrase Mr. Bumble).
So it pleasures me to note that the professional yakkers (especially) are beginning to express doubt that the Democrats are going down hard. The Sunday morning shows today had examples of it, and then I happened on Amy Walter's "Summer Breeze" essay on the Cook Political Report. Maybe the winds are blowing the other way now, not that Democrats can really avoid at least some losses in the House. Walter quotes her colleague David Wasserman's analysis: "... the better-than-expected showings by Democratic candidates in NE-01 and MN-01 House specials mean 'we're no longer living in a political environment as pro-GOP as November 2021'."
Other tangible signs:
At the start of the summer, Republicans had a 2 point advantage on the generic congressional ballot. Today, the two parties are basically tied (Democrats up 0.1 in the FiveThirtyEight average).
...polling taken this month and last by Monmouth found a 'generic Democrat' running anywhere from 11 to 14 points better among independent voters than Biden's job approval ratings with these same voters. For example, the most recent Monmouth poll found a Democrat pulling 47 percent of the vote from independent voters — which is 14 points higher than Biden's anemic 33 percent job approval rating with these voters. A late July Quinnipiac poll, which found Republicans ahead by just one point on the generic ballot question (44 to 43 percent), also found Democrats doing 12 points better among independents than Biden's anemic 23 percent.
It's that turn among independent voters that's most significant for us in North Carolina, where by last count the Unaffiliated population of voters has overtaken both the Democrats and the Republicans. It's the unaffiliated who hold our fate in their hands, and don't they see Trump and Trumpists for what they are?
A couple of days ago, Alexander H. Jones over at PoliticsNC published a column titled "Is a Red Wave On the Way? Maybe Not," both exhibiting the fracturing of the convention wisdom while still wearing the mask of tragedy: ":...the Democratic party looks as if it may well have the power to blunt Republican momentum and sustain a smaller blow to their majorities than almost everyone in the political class had confidently predicted...."
Still gonna take a hit, sez Jones, especially to its majority in the US House, but "a smaller blow." I both like that and resist its ingrained down-at-the-mouth bracing for disaster. But then, I work campaigns as well as write about them, and I demand hope to carry on.
You betcha, the American Rescue Plan, passed without a single Republican vote, is going to be a potent campaign issue in 2022.
President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are launching a victory tour of battleground states this week (no stops yet announced in North Carolina), and a 60-second ad, "Help Is Here," will begin airing on TV. (Can't share the ad here, but you can see it in the News and Observer article -- scroll down.)
Republicans have never had a problem bragging about their smallest butt-scratches (and they even, as we know, will brag about what the other side did that they want to take credit for), so I'm happy to see the Democrats willing to toot these horns.
When Democrats conduct an autopsy of a bad election, there's every possibility that they'll open the chest cavity last.
News arrives this morning that some four Democratic "interest groups" -- Third Way, End Citizens United, the Latino Victory Fund, and Collective PAC -- have "quietly launched" a review and numerical analysis of why Democrats did so poorly down-ballot in 2020. How poorly, you ask? In North Carolina, Democrats lost ground in the NC House and Senate, failing to take the majority in either chamber, and they couldn't take any Council of State seats they didn't already hold (though they came close across the board). Nationally, Democrats lost 14 seats in the US House, a dozen of which had only just been won in 2018. My eyes water at those statistics.
Third Way, a conservative Democratic interest group and a part of the quartet investigating these losses, wants the word "socialism" banned from the vocabulary and expunged from Democratic DNA. They'll also target the "Defund Police" motto as a culprit for causing the shakes among rural and exurban voters. Maybe they're right. I don't know, but I squint hard at solutions that seem philosophically allied most strongly with Wall Street self-interest.
The NYTimes article notes this: "The review is probing tactical and strategic choices across the map, including Democratic messaging on the economy and the coronavirus pandemic, as well as organizational decisions like eschewing in-person canvassing." I highlight that last phrase because I blame the absence of a ground game across much of North Carolina as a contributing factor to our losses. A major contributing factor. The excuse, naturally -- and it's a valid if convenient excuse -- was COVID fear, but some county parties managed canvassing anyway with masking and social distancing. (Not naming any counties, but I live in one of them.)
Maybe I believe too much in the "Trump effect," especially as it influenced the turnout in North Carolina, but the surge in Republican numbers in non-metropolitan counties last fall might focus the apocalyptic mind. I hate to say it, and I hope I'm wrong for the long run, but the man Trump is almost a supernatural force for disaffected citizens who often don't even vote but who hate pretty much everyone in government but especially Democrats who love "multiculturalism" more than them. The economic radicalism of Bernie Sanders gets to many of those folks in ways the Third Way Democrats might want to notice. In fact, for many white rural Trump voters, they thought Trump was going to bring that same economic radicalism to benefit them personally, but low-information voters never caught on to the fraud.
Trump intends to provide the magic going forward, you bet. But he himself won't be on the ballot again before 2024 -- if then -- and it remains to be seen if he can pump up the vote for others, including for his own unqualified carpet-bagging daughter-in-law.
I'm about to do what I'm never supposed to do -- get into pointless speculation about our future in politics, the Democratic tribes and their respective throw-weights, if Joe Biden and Kamala Harris actually win today. (What else am I supposed to do on Election Day, when I've already voted and I'm no good on the phone? What else can I do, other than, say, replay compulsively Carly Simon singing "The River Runs"?)
The spaghetti fights that are coming! I'm not thinking of the armed Trumpists. They're someone else's problem. (The internal struggle for control of the Republican Party, if Trump loses, may resemble The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I'll have tourniquets and/or popcorn handy.) No, I'm thinking of the over-caffeinated and not at all demure Democratic activists from left and middle who are going to duke it out over the direction of the Party -- not to mention exert excruciating pressure on the Biden presidency and the presidential initiatives of the Biden/Harris administration.
I'm rumored to be a "progressive Democrat." A Bernie Sanders partisan. A dangerous liberal. Like Trump's working-class white men, my resentments are class based. If it hadn't been for a good education in a little podunk high school in West Texas, followed by more education at a West Texas Baptist college and then even more education at a Mormon-dominated university in Utah, I probably would have grown up stuck like amber on my tenant farmer rung, ambitious without wherewithal, angry and bitter about others moving on up. My resentment might have coagulated into reactionary politics. Saw it happen to plenty of others.
"Think you're better'n me?" Trump's fan boys want to punch out educated people, media elites, scientists, and professors. 'Cause I am one of those educated people, I deserve punching-out because I've got it good, or at least better, and I'm probably a snob and a gun-control opportunist and an abortion-on-demand destroyer of traditional values. Some of that's true -- not the gun control part (I was actually the author once of a famous bumpersticker: "Democrats Arm Yourselves"), and I ain't no goddamn snob just because I have a vocabulary and read books. I won't apologize for my education, which is actually -- and ironically -- responsible for the loss of my religion. We had a saying at Wayland Baptist College that it produced either preachers or atheists. You got one guess.
But I still identify with my lower- and working-class roots. It's just that I pick Wall Street to hate. I pick smug rich people and bullies and people who cut me off in traffic. I say sometimes that I can't understand the enthusiasm for Trump among rural and working-class folks. But I do understand it. Trump's core base have every reason in the world to hate and cuss someone, anyone, the easy targets supplied by their leader for the supposed "level playing ground" which actually slants like a bitch. They just mistakenly blame their failure to rise on what they see as the privileging of racial minorities, the tyranny of science and Democratic governors, rather than the privileging of the already rich by an economic system whose dogma is: If you ain't got property, you ain't shit.
I want both the progressives and the moderates of my Party, going forward, to be strategic and practical. They won't be. My side will push too hard and at the wrong pressure points. The moderate/conservative, establishment side, which controls the wheels and cogs, will shut down dissent and breed more dissent. Crockery will get broken. Some people will leave the house and slam the door behind them. There could be a third party, or multiple third parties, and I might have trouble resisting the urge to join one. The tectonic plates will shift and buildings will crumble. I'm too old and tired for that additional chaos.
But the Party has got to be bold in standing for the working class against the forces that keep them subservient (and ignorant!). The Party's got to respect their religion and their traditionalism and actually help nurture its future, without simultaneously allowing church to dominate state. Bring broadband to everyone. Is that a middle way or a progressive way? Regulate assault weapons and atomic bombs but leave the household arsenals alone. Decriminalize a lot of petty offenses that catch up the most vulnerable and the most uneducated. Do not be jerks. Stop insulting and stereotyping those who are less. Stop the pity, too, because pity always runs downhill.
Bonus version:
And another, because that song needs -- demands -- a choir of young people:
In the US Congress, HR1 is a bill number traditionally reserved by the majority for its most important legislation, the bill that will shape a new era under whichever ruling party. The Democrats in the US House unveiled their HR1 yesterday, "To expand Americans' access to the ballot box, reduce the influence of big money in politics, and strengthen ethics rules for public servants."
Commentators are calling it "sweeping legislation," not only in the sense of wideness of impact but in the sense of sweeping out the accumulated political corruption of a system geared to those with money (and hence, influence). "Sweeping" doesn't strike me as nearly strong enough. HR1 takes a sledgehammer to public corruption, the evils of gerrymandering, the selling of political favors, and all attempts to suppress voter rights.
When passed, this law will mandate independent redistricting commissions for all the states. It will establish automatic voter registration (which comes as a birthright), and it will end the continued disenfranchisement of felons after they've served their time.
Overwhelming majorities of Americans -- including most of those Twitterman voters -- were and still are pretty unhappy with the way our political system is working and think the whole system is rigged against them. They ain't wrong. HR1 intends to change that by mandating more transparency for the campaign finance system -- no more big-dollar anonymity -- and empowering everyday Americans "with a powerful new system that rewards and amplifies small donors" -- a public financing system that would make a 6-to-1 Federal match on small donations. That might make politicians visit living rooms in their district more frequently and private country clubs less often.
HR1 would make sure that public servants actually serve the public, not use their office for personal gain. That means strengthening ethics across all three branches of government, ending the revolving door in Washington, and reining in lobbyists. Hurray!
Mitch McConnell has already announced that HR1 will get no hearing whatsoever in the Senate. No surprise. And of course Twitterman would never sign such a law, since self-enrichment is his entire reason for breathing. But at least the new Democratic Congress has laid down a marker for where we must go to preserve some semblance of our democracy. And there's another election coming in less than two years.
On Tuesday, the ground moved. (And you picked a hell of a time to go on the road and offline, Williamson!)
So ... catching up with the new landscape:
1.Virginia. The wealthy suburbs -- all those commuting soccer moms and commuting executive-potential dads, right? They turned to Democrats and turned away from Republicans in such surprising droves that polling was totally flummoxed. Who knew those people (the Republican Lite) were going to vote at all? They often don't vote in off-years, but this year they couldn't wait, and it was going to be bad for Republicans. Those people in the suburbs in Virginia and elsewhere, according to Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin -- who've got money and who may be registered Independents but who've been voting Republican for years out of a multitude of motives -- those are the voters to watch. They like Trump not. It was the Virginia suburbs that gave Democrat Ralph Northam his 9-point victory for governor last night.
Not just the governor -- and maybe not even most importantly the governor, but also a surge for Democrats down the ballot, especially the House of Delegates. Winning Democratic candidates included a woman who immigrated from Peru, a female refugee from Vietnam, an openly gay woman, and a transgender woman. Many of the ousted Republicans were white men who had held office for years. The transgender woman, Danica Roem, beat a 25-year Republican veteran who called himself the Chief Homophobe in Virginia.
At one point yesterday it still seemed that Democrats might have taken control of the House of Delegates, which has been Republican for eons. Democrats needed 17 pick-ups to take the majority, and so far they apparently have at least 15, with re-counts going on in several other close races. The consensus now is that probably, after the recounts, Republicans will retain control by a hairsbreadth, 51-49. Worst case scenario for Democrats: Republicans had a near-death experience, and Northam's vetoes will be upheld.
Virginia was gerrymandered, much like North Carolina was, to make the Republican majority virtually unassailable, but Democrats stormed the citadel, and all things are possible for she who trusts in the Lord.
2. Washington state. Via a special election, Democrats took majority control of the Washington state Senate. Chris Vance, a former chairman of the Washington State Republican Party, blamed Trump: “Among college-educated suburbanites, he is a pariah.”
3. Pennsylvania. "Pushing the message that a vote for them was a vote against President Trump, Delaware County Democrats out-polled Republicans in a County Council election for the first time in history, winning both seats up for grabs in an ultra-tight race." Delaware County was said to be under the thumb of "a fearsome Republican machine." (Philadelphia Inquirer) Machine broke, boss.
4. Georgia. Georgia Democrats captured two state House seats where they previously had not even fielded candidates, while also snatching a State Senate seat in Buckhead, an upscale area of Atlanta. See ... suburbs. I think we're seeing a trend line.
5. New Jersey. Democrat Phil Murphy will follow Christie into the Governor's Mansion. Murphy "carried the densely populated New York and Philadelphia suburbs by staggering margins, including counties that broke for Gov. Chris Christie eight years ago." (NYTimes)
In an upset, Ashley Bennett defeated Republican John Carman for a seat on the Atlantic County board. Carman had cracked wise during the Women’s March in Washington on January 21, posting a meme on Facebook -- a picture of a harried young woman, cooking over a stove, with the text asking, "Will she be home [from the March] in time to cook dinner?" Ashley Bennett, who whipped Carman's butt, saw that Facebook post, was outraged, and decided to run. She won, and she's a first-time candidate, a hospital employee, and black.
New Jersey Democrats also took back Atlantic City and broke Republican hold on Parsippany, "the sort of suburb where the Trump backlash has brought Democrats from the fringe to contention" (Dave Weigel).
6. Montana. In Helena, Wilmot Collins, a refugee from Liberia, became the first black mayor. He's a Democrat.
9. Maine. Maine voters overwhelming approved an expansion of Medicaid "in a sharp rebuke of Republican governor and early Trump supporter Paul LePage, who vetoed the legislation no less than five times." (LePage plays a real gargoyle. He vowed yesterday to continue blocking the expansion.)
10. North Carolina. Fayetteville voters flipped their mayor from Republican to Democrat, and Charlotte now has its first black woman mayor.
"In the Apex Town Council contest, former Pat McCrory spokesman and HB2 defender Graham Wilson, finished dead last of five candidates. Fellow Republican David Hooks finished fourth. The three victors—Nicole Dozier, Brent Gantt, and Audra Killingsworth, were all endorsed by the Wake Dems. Maybe Paul Stam’s clout in his hometown is waning." (Jeffrey C. Billman The Weekly Independent)
People ask what happened in the Boone Town Council races. This happened:
1. Crack Down on the Abuse of Economic and Political Power
"The extensive concentration of power in the hands of a few corporations hurts wages, undermines job growth, and threatens to squeeze out small businesses, suppliers, and new, innovative competitors."
2. Crack Down on Higher Prices for Practically Everything
"Over the last thirty years, courts and permissive regulators have allowed large companies to get
larger, resulting in higher prices and limited consumer choice in daily expenses such as travel,
cable, and food and beverages. And because concentrated market power leads to concentrated
political power, these companies deploy armies of lobbyists to increase their stranglehold on
Washington."
3. Limit Large Mergers that Unfairly Consolidate Corporate Power
"Currently, it is too easy for companies to unfairly harm competition by merging, and unfairly squeezing competitors, workers, customers, and suppliers."
The concentration of economic power has caused higher prices, lower pay, the squeezing out of competition, and increasing inequality. Look what's happened since the corporate tail started wagging the government dog:
Airlines: Despite a rapid decline in the cost of fuel, ticket prices continue to rise while the quality
of service declines.
Cable/Telecom: Access to cable and internet services is critical for American consumers,
workers, and small businesses to communicate and compete in today’s economy. Yet today, the
market for those services is so concentrated that consumers rarely have any meaningful choice of
provider, and prices are high enough to be prohibitive for many. In over 50 million households,
Americans have no choice at all for internet provider; they are forced to pay the exorbitant price
their single carrier requires, if they get service at all. Beer:As of 2016, five breweries controlled over 50 percent of global beer production
compared to ten companies in 2004. Although there is a burgeoning craft brewery industry, these
small businesses are under threat from large legacy brewers that are acquiring their craft
competitors or trying to block craft brewers’ access to the marketplace. That is especially true in North Carolina. Food Prices Generally:You get your food from farmers. Farmers grow your food from seeds. The consolidation of six agricultural giants is set to threaten the safety of food and
agriculture in America. The merger of Dow with DuPont, Monsanto with Bayer AG, and
Syngenta with ChemChina, will result in the control of more than 61 percent of commercial seed
sales and 80 percent of the U.S. corn seed market. These mergers take place as countless farmers
in rural America struggle to adapt to a declining farm economy. This corporate takeover of the
farm industry will not only hurt small-town, family operated farms, who will have to pay more
for seeds, but it will also raise food prices – vastly limiting consumer choice.
Eyeglasses:The current average price of eyeglasses is now at $400. With more than 200 million Americans affected by vision loss, eyeglass
affordability has become a critical consumer issue that affects the entire nation.
Eyeglasses are a necessity for many Americans, but due to consolidation and concentration in the
supply chain, they are increasingly difficult to afford. We the voters can do something about this lopsided abuse of power. We can. We must. Hattip: "A Better Deal"
Reading the Sunday morning papers -- because garden work is out of the question ... it's raining (yay!) -- we respect the Grand Confluence of causes and effects. We especially respect the writing of people with smarts, who also respect language and logic, and who obviously don't have gardens to distract them.
Take Erick Erickson, who published an editorial this morning in the WashPost. Erickson is the former editor-in-chief at conservative blog Red State and was a "never Trumper." Okay. I'm listening, Mr. Erickson:
The president exudes incompetence and instability. Divulging classified information to the Russians through bragging; undermining his staff’s defense of his conduct through inane tweets; even reportedly asking the FBI director to suspend an investigation of a former adviser — all these strike me not so much as malicious but as the ignorant actions of an overwhelmed man. Republicans excuse this behavior as Trump being Trump, but that will only embolden voters who seek greater accountability to choose further change over stability. The sad reality is that the greatest defense of the president available at this point is one his team could never give on the record: He is an idiot who does not know any better.
Idiot.
For very current meanings, the go-to Urban Dictionary defines idiot severally. Here's one: "Someone who has a wish to shoot someone, but is pointing his gun the wrong way."
The Urban Dictionary -- I visit there often! -- also offers this definition: Idiot is "an epithet that describes anyone but you. It is a statistical certainty that there is someone out there in the planet who considers you an idiot. That person doesn't matter, of course -- he's an idiot."
The English word idiot came into the language from France, probably along with the Norman Conquest. Before France had the word, the Romans used it freely (in Latin, natch! which supplied the vocabularies for French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian). The Romans had themselves borrowed the word from the more sophisticated Greeks, who used idiotes as a snub analogous to "rube." "Ignorant dude." An idiot was an ignorant "layman" whose ignorance might prove damaging.
In other words, idiot played to class and social position. You can imagine a Roman estate administrator using the word to describe the newest shipment of slaves, sent out by the Senator from Rome to work the estate. It was a slur denoting your place in the pecking order, your relative class, and still is.
Urban Dictionary definition of class?"That thing that sluts don't have."
Class is more than money. And Trump doesn't have it.
2. Democratic Prospects
Jonathan Martin reports in today's WashPost on grassroots Democratic congressional candidates in this year's special House elections, "Outside Washington's Blazing Inferno, Democrats Seek an Agenda." The short story: Democrats out in the country, as opposed to the national party in Washington, DeeCee, have it going on, while the national party hasn't yet recovered from Clinton's defeat: "For all the misfortunes facing their foe in the White House, Democrats have yet to devise a coherent message on the policies that President Trump used to draw working-class voters to his campaign."
It ain't really about Trump -- the winning of by-elections by Democrats this year and next -- since Trump is an idiot about public policy or how the government works. It's about the problems people face in Watauga County, N.C., and Briscoe County, Tex., and Cache County, Utah, and how those problems are not being fixed in any helpful way by the ruling Republicans. None of those issues generally include the word "Russia."
Luckily, I'm not running for office. I can obsess where I please.
J.W. Williamson was the founding editor in 1972 of the Appalachian Journal: A Regional Studies Review, which he edited until July of 2000. He has taught college classes in Appalachian history, cultural politics, and literature, and he has lectured widely on the pop-culture history of "Appalachia" in the American consciousness. His books include Interviewing Appalachia, Southern Mountaineers in Silent Films, and Hillbillyland: What the Mountains Did to the Movies and What the Movies Did to the Mountains. He has won the Thomas Wolfe Award given by the Western North Carolina Historical Society, the Laurel Leaves Award given by the Appalachian Consortium, a special Weatherford Award given by Berea College, and the Cratis Williams-James Brown Award given by the Appalachian Studies Association.
The views expressed on WataugaWatch are solely those of J.W. Williamson or individual contributors and are not necessarily shared nor endorsed by the Watauga County Democratic Party nor by any other adults of sound mind in this or any other universe.
