So Trump Enters the Big Show

Wikimedia.com, from
flckr user Gage Skidmore.
Hillary Clinton.

Compare the speeches: Clearly the one who was more presidential got the most votes.

But sadly, she didn’t win. Hillary Clinton delivered a good concession speech. She offered to aid President-elect Trump. And she avoided much of the bitter rancor that has lit up the social media universe in the wake of Tuesday’s Trump victory.

I applaud her for that. I understand the fear, anger and frustration of the many who are worried about fundamental human rights and healthcare as the Republicans are champing at the bit to repeal the Affordable Care Act and name near Neanderthals to the federal bench, and I share the sense that difficult times are ahead.

But I won’t raise my middle finger at America nor declare the electorate fatally mentally challenged. I think we—the collective we, I voted for Hillary—are in for a boatload of buyer’s remorse soon. But Clinton is right. Trump now gets to enter the world stage for the biggest act of his Reality TV career.

The depressing truth, to me, is that I think Trump treated the campaign as a Reality TV show. He Tweeted and said provocative, outrageous, misogynist, bigoted things and then denied them—just to draw attention, like a compelling but slightly evil camper on “Survivor.” He never carried much of a narrative thread—that is, he never had a coherent policy position that allowed his voters to support something of substance. And the Trump Reality TV campaign worked. American went for the “as-seen-on-TV” candidate.

The odd thing, of course, is that in fact the plurality of votes when to Hillary Clinton. More Americans chose her than chose Donald Trump, but under our odd, anachronistic electoral system, Trump won.

Trump was right. The system is rigged. And the media were part of it. He was just wrong—it was the Reality TV star who benefitted from the biases and unfairness built into the system.

Now Trump gets to try to govern. I doubt he has any idea what he’s in for. The Republicans have two years before mid-term elections to not mess it up, and I don’t have high hopes.

“I will be president for all Americans,” Trump said. After that hopeful line, the Trump victory speech was pretty terrible. He said the uniting line, his best line, in the first few seconds, but then the speech became rather like the most boring of Academy Awards acceptance speech. “I’d like to thank, Rudy Giuliani, who was always lurking in the background of my campaign like some vampire.” I may be slightly paraphrasing.

Same site, same user, Donald Trump.

The Trump speech was a missed opportunity. He gets lost in the thanks and didn’t do much to calm the fears of the national that he now will lead. There was no articulate or memorable line from the new boss of the free world. I guess I should just be glad he managed to stay on script, even if it was a bland, poor script.

Anyway, other random media-related thoughts sparked by this improbable election:

• The walled garden is a thing. Our First Amendment was written to foster the “marketplace of ideas,” but that, sadly, is now closed and America has moved into gated idea suburbs, where we echo only the like-minded. I recognize that cutting off people from your Facebook feed who irritate you is OK—Facebook is your own personal place to be in contact with who you want; it’s a cocktail party where you don’t’ have to say in an unpleasant conversation—but the immediate instinct of some Clinton voters to shut off all contact with anybody who voted for Trump still bugs me. And many of us experience ideas and news through links that are posted on our badly named Facebook “news” feed. We, the liberals of this cold new world, are almost as bad as the conservatives in wanting to shut out the other. It’s official now. The Marketplace of Ideas is an empty Main Street with tumbleweeds, and we’re all off in our own, competing, realities. Truth doesn’t grapple with Falsehood. They both stay at their own private barbecues, no strangers invited.

• The news media isn’t much of a thing. It’s always irritated me that we tended to misuse the word “media,” an elegant Latin plural, as a singular word anyway—and yes, I know that I did it in this point. That was deliberate. There never was one mainstream media, and with the alt-right nuts now firmly in control of the top of our politics, a reality-based media almost seems passé. I don’t mean to write as if that’s a good reality—in fact, I think it’s the great tragedy of our times—but it doesn’t matter much, anymore, what facts “The New York Times” or “Washington Post” or “The Gazette” reports. We’re in a post-news, post-fact world. I don’t want to give up on journalism or journalists, and I hope we find a niche that works, but I think the harsh reality is just a lesson from this election.

• Our democracy isn’t a democracy. One person’s vote is not equal to the vote of any other person. The system, as Trump charges, is indeed rigged; he was just dishonest about who benefited from the rigging. The GOP engineered a Gerrymander takeover of Congress in the last two Census cycles. Since Citizens United put government up for sale, voters sensed there was something wrong and wanted to toss a brick through the window. But, handing the reigns of undisputed power to the party that carefully crafted the building to its advantage doesn’t seem to me like it will lead to meaningful reform. The people have spoken, but their voices were inarticulate, muted and warped.

And, in this year of magical thinking, I’m not sure of the way forward.

Trump won’t deliver on many of his empty campaign promises, because they were fantasies from the Trump TV show to begin with. Mexico won’t pay for a wall. The wall itself won’t mean much if it is built—in 2,000 miles, there will be some weak points, and airplanes and boats will bypass it entirely. Clinton may be endlessly investigated, but she never came close to an indictable crime in many, heavily investigated, decades of public service. She won’t be locked up. American manufacturing jobs are part of a global economy that doesn’t care who POTUS is, and those jobs won’t come flowing back because The Donald orders it to be so. The rural, uneducated white voters who handed the keys of the White House to a New York billionaire are, I think, in for years of disappointments.

Well, life goes on, even if it feels like it has careened into a scary place. Yet, if the shoe were on the other foot, if Clinton’s electoral fortunes reflected her plurality because her voters had been spread out more in the states like Iowa that gets its votes magnified, I think we Clinton supporters would be rightly indignant at Trump supporters who were too quick to grab their muskets or claim it’s the end of America.

Remember when the scandal was that Trump would only accept the election results if he won? He won. He accepts the results.

So does Hillary Clinton.

We can cry, scream, rend our garments, gird our loins for the long fight, etc. But, Clinton liberals, the vote has happened. If we would have expected DJT to concede had he lost, we should be a bit consistent and accept, unhappily, that he won.

And yes, I would reform the system so that he wouldn’t’ win again under the same circumstances—we do need boatloads of election reform—but Trump’s win was “clean” in the sense that it did fit the twisted, insane rules we live under.

No, I don’t mean we have to sing “Kumbaya” or forget our deep divisions or not be on alert for the tragic coming attempts to take away fundamental rights form the vulnerable among us.

But calm down. If need be—and I think need will be—we can beat him in a landslide next time.

Trump? Media Creature Squirms in Media Spotlight

Flag I fly on my front porch. I want America first, too, Donald. It's also my flag.

Much has been written by wiser people about Donald Trump’s surprising rise to presumptive GOP nominee.

It’s been an event I’ve watched with more than a touch of trepidation. Trump seems clearly to be one of the most ill-informed, inexperienced, walking-talking disasters to ever run for president. The established political rules, such as they are, are clearly off in this election cycle, and that creates a clear sense of unease in the media.

Leave behind the trope about the “liberal media,” which was always a bit too simplistic anyway, and is less true in a media landscape where the Wall Street Journal and Fox News are wildly popular. The media indeed have some biases built into them, but the political one isn’t necessarily the most important.

The media in America are creatures of large corporations that are both hated and loved by their employees. Two competing biases can be seen in the media—that business is evil (perhaps reflecting the actual experience of severely underpaid and insecure media employees), and that the only viable, “correct” form of economics is free-market capitalism.

That second economic bias reflects a strong pro status-quo bias in American media that is not always recognized. And some of what is happening in the media now is status-quo panic.

Let me join in. EEEEEK!

Whatever else you can say about Donald Trump, he clearly is not status quo—but not in some coherent, offers-a-clear-alternative, way. Trump is the inarticulate rage candidate, the burn-the-house-down candidate. And while I can understand the impetus for that feeling, its irrational expression doesn’t say anything positive about the body politics’ ability to think clearly.

Take facts, for example. Although people diss Hillary Clinton as being a habitual liar, on political issues and claims, it’s clearly Trump who is the champion liar, and the competition isn’t very close. See the Politifact ratings of both. For Donald Trump, 77 percent of his statements are rated mostly false, false or pants-on-fire lies. For Hillary Clinton, 73 percent of her statements are rated half true, mostly true and true. When Trump talks, you know he lies because his lips are moving. When Hillary Clinton talks, you can easily disagree with her policy positions, but she is usually citing facts, not wild conspiracy theories or internet hoaxes.

I am a bit worried about a Hillary Clinton presidency. The Bill Clinton years, fondly remembered as they are, also featured a dark underside, a Machiavellian political machine that Hillary was a key part of. Its return to power doesn’t fill me with glee. But Clinton, flawed as she is, is not Trump. And Trump is a genuinely dangerous character, a man whose thin skin and shoot-from-the-hip style would be disastrous if he is elected. Clinton may not be the fairy princess, but she does understand government and is a cautious, wily politician. As a president, we’re far better off with a cautious, wily politician than an ignorant egomaniac.

I know, that’s opinion, not fact, but I’m being honest about where I stand.

Trump promotes a false “Americanism” that isn’t really very American at all. And he is partly a media-created creature—a reality TV star whose political rise has been largely fueled by his greatest talent, which is to draw attention to himself. He may be a policy idiot, but he’s a self-aggrandizing genius. He’s a salesman who knows how to suck all of the media oxygen away from anybody else.

And, as the raucous, entertaining and rather scary primary campaigns are now ending, I’m worried that Trump’s media savvy might continue to make up for his total political incompetence. It feels as if a vast portion of the electorate lives in their own internet gated communities, where opposing views and facts are not welcome.

Still, I do take comfort that the future seems so hard to see. When, in May, Trump became the presumptive winner, my sense was that a terrorist attack and/or a Brexit vote to exit the EU would tip the general election in Trump’s favor. Well, thank goodness for the mouth of Trump. He has shown an amazing propensity to do what Democrats usually do—snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

In the wake of Orlando, a terror attack that highlights fears and thus plays to Trump, his self-congratulatory and inarticulate Tweets made him look looney.

In the 1980 election, the rise of Ronald Reagan was foreshadowed by the 1979 rise of Margaret Thatcher in the UK. But in 2016, when old people in the UK voted that young people deserved no sensible European future, and Brexit passed by a narrow margin, fate would have it that Trump was on hand to ignorantly and ignominiously gloat.

In Scotland for the opening of a Trump golf course, he lavishly praised the Brexit vote, seemingly unaware that he was in one of four countries that make up the UK--and in Scotland, the vote was a landslide victory for the EU so large that the Scottish independence movement is suddenly viable again.

And Trump's Brexit Tweet unleashed a Twitter storm. Nobody holds a candle to the Scots when it comes to name calling. Here is a Facebook graphic someone prepared of the Trump descriptions from anti-Trump Tweets that greeted the Donald's Tweet on the Brexit vote.

Not very PC, and not very good as political debate, either--but rather entertaining.

My worry has been that events would play into Trump’s hands. The fall election will probably be close, because the U.S. is a politically divided country and there are two wildly unpopular candidates chosen by our major parties.

Will Trump win? The Brexit vote suggests that a democracy can easily be hijacked by emotion and xenophobia. Perhaps, like the 1979 Thatcher election preceded the 1980 Reagan election, it could happen again.

Happily, there are reasons to think it may not:

• The U.S. electorate is way more diverse than the UK electorate. They are 87 percent white. We’re not. As a white male, I say, hallelujah. Our diversity may save us.
• The Brexit vote was on one issue. Immigration may be our Brexit issue—but it’s not quite as clear how it plays. It’s ironic that the Brits, who 100 years ago ruled a quarter of the world, want to turn away from that world. The U.S. has long been a land of immigrants who are hostile to newer immigrants, but it’s unclear how those competing cultural strains will play out. Important as immigration will be, it’s not the only issue in our election.
• Trump continues to be Trump. The bombastic Donald played well in the primaries, but so far has been a disaster in the general election campaign. Trump's over-active mouth and bad Twitter habits may yet lose the election for him.

Of course, I won’t take too much comfort from the final point. It’s too many months until the fall election, and Trump’s early summer lunacy will be forgotten. Hillary Clinton is savvy, but not always sensitive to her own shortcomings—Democrats have time to revert to form and blow it.

Anyway, has the media itself learned much? I am not sure. In the wake of Orlando and Brexit, the crazy stuff Trump said dominated the news cycles. What did Hillary think? Her post-Orlando speech was way more substantive and intelligent than anything Trump said—and didn’t echo in our current infotainment media environment.

The basic reason for a First Amendment to include freedom of speech and of the press is to promote a marketplace of ideas. I’m afraid that marketplace has degenerated into a carnival of flashy colors, sound and clowns who draw attention away from ideas and instead direct us to our basest fears.

Perhaps I’m wrong. I hope so. I do take comfort in the fact that I’ve been mostly wrong so far in this volatile year. I voted for Sanders in the January Iowa caucuses—I didn’t exactly pick the primary campaign winner. I thought Cruz would probably be the Republican nominee—and it says something when Crazy Ted was the “rational” Republican choice. So perhaps my fears of a close election and a Trump victory are overblown.

I can only hope so. “President Trump” are words I hope I never hear. “President Clinton.” No, those words don’t make me wildly ecstatic. But they don’t convince me that the body politic and the media have gone crazy, either.

Seeking the Best & Worst TV Political Ads

I am exploring a new theory for the 2016 presidential elections, and I want your thoughts on it. I think TV ads may have peaked.

Since 1952, for two generations, TV has been the main arena of competition between presidential candidates, and we've seen and heard some historic things in that time period:  a girl plucking daisies before a mushroom cloud in 1964; a promise from Nixon to find an “honorable end” to the war in Vietnam in a commercial that ended with a soldier who had “love” stenciled on his helmet in 1968; Willie Horton in 1988; even Rick Perry wearing the Brokeback Mountain jacket in his disastrous and hilariously parodied 2012 “Strong” commercial.

NPR reported this year that television ad spending in the 2016 race should top $4 billion. But even as the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision opened the floodgates for cash to pour into presidential politics, the 2016 races feels different to me.

Mike Huckabee—where is your “Chuck Norris” ad now? In this presidential election cycle, if you don’t live in Iowa, you might not already be inundated with candidate and PAC TV ads, but trust me, they are out there. Yet, in all the odd twists and turns of this very strange campaign (don’t look to me for an explanation why a blowhard billionaire with a tenuous hold on reality leads the polls in one of our major parties—I too am stumped by Trump), I don’t think that there has been a breakthrough TV ad message.

Indeed, some of the commercials I've seen are frankly just entertaining because they are so silly.

Take for example, this PAC ad endorsing Bobby Jindal. It’s not really loaded with much content except “Bobby is coming up in the polls,” but the meteoric rise it trumpets and praises is all the way to 6 percent. Right after this ad started airing, Jindal disappeared from the race completely. I guess he was rising so face he just raptured out of here.

Hillary, a hard-nosed politician and policy wonk of long standing, is toting a softer, "vote for grandma" message in this commercial:

Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, wants you to know that the economy is rigged in this ad. It takes a socialist to change America, I suppose, except I am not sure Middle America will ever vote for a socialist, even if he’s got a catchy slogan like “Feel the Bern.” We've certainly changed the tone of our campaigns since “I Like Ike.”

Jeb, whose poll numbers remain stubbornly low but who has the cash to keep running for some time anyway, actually takes a jab at Trump in this online ad—which I have not seen on Iowa TV, but wonder if I will should Trump’s numbers stay up:

Anyway, as noted, despite a record amount of cash pouring into the coffers of Iowa television stations, I am not sure advertising as yet has moved the needle this year. The mood of the electorate is very down, as world events prove too chilling. As a nation, we seem to be losing the middle.

I don’t want us to descend into multiple warring political factions, and I suppose the roughness of the current political rhetoric might be too easy to be alarmed at. But, how odd it is to feel nostalgic for 2012, when this was one of the hard-hitting ads of the campaign season:

To be fair, I'm not sure all of the ads I'm showing have aired on TV. I saw then on the Internet. Iowans, which have you seen on your home screen? Anyway, I want your help, legions of the Internet. What are your favorite or least favorite ads of the 2016 presidential race so far, and why? Please embed a link with your comment, so we can all share the fun.