How the Clintons helped pave the way for Trump

I never thought I’d look back fondly on the days when a political campaign could be crippled by the public’s reaction to a snowflake that looked like a teardrop.

We used to have so little tolerance for anything that even hinted of scandal in our public servants that even the slightest (perceived) imperfection could disqualify them.

In 1971, Edmund Muskie was the Democratic frontrunner for the presidency until his reaction to a published letter attacking his wife tested his composure. He appeared to wipe away a tear at a news conference, and that was all it took to send him on a downward trajectory in the polls. Muskie himself said he was wiping away a melting snowflake that landed on his face, but it didn’t matter. He was done as a viable candidate. Just like that.

In 1987, Douglas Ginsburg withdrew his name from consideration for the U.S. Supreme Court after it was revealed that he’d used marijuana “on a few occasions.” Around the same time, Gary Hart went from early favorite to also-ran in the Democratic presidential race based on accusations of an extramarital affair. Both he and the woman in question, Donna Rice, denied (and continue to deny) the accusations, but that didn’t matter. Hart was finished.

Compare Hart’s alleged dalliance with the numerous accusations against Bill Clinton, who became president a few years later – including one that involved a White House intern and a blue dress. Clinton survived in what may have been the turning point in the public’s perception of political faux pas.

What changed?

Instead of going on the defensive, Clinton acted as though he was the victim of some affront, declaring forcefully that he “did not have sex with that woman,” while his wife, Hillary Clinton, proclaimed that her husband was the victim of a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” Republican lawmkers’ insistence on pursuing impeachment charges, when it was already clear that the Democrat-majority Senate would never convict Clinton, only added to the impression that they were out to get him.

The great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president. - Hillary Clinton

Suddenly, the Clintons, not Lewinsky, were the aggrieved parties. Never mind that Clinton’s actions were, at best, highly inappropriate and, at worst, a flagrant abuse of power. But those actions became obscured by the Republicans’ determination to make him pay, come hell or high water, for their own political purposes.

To this day, supporters of the Clintons routinely answer any criticism against them by maintaining it’s all merely part of a Republican strategy to discredit them. Of course, Republicans do want to discredit them – often with accusations so blatantly partisan that they border on the ridiculous to most objective observers.

But the flipside of the coin is this: The public has become numb to serious accusations against the Clintons that don’t stem from Republican sources at all. Is Bernie Sanders, a self-described socialist, really at tool of the Republican party? It’s hard to argue that. Yet his campaign’s charges that the Democratic National Committee sought to tilt the playing field in Clinton’s favor are hard to deny in the face of recently released emails.

What it comes down to is this: The public is so fatigued at wading through the he said/she said morass of accusation, denial, conspiracy theory and high dudgeon that they’ve thrown up their hands and stopped paying attention. They don’t want presidents to do … that … with White House interns, but they don’t want interminable impeachment hearings that distract Congress from addressing the issues facing the nation, either.

The Bengazi hearings proved the Republicans hadn’t learned their lesson from the impeachment debacle. The biggest winner was Hillary Clinton, who wound up looking like the victim of a ridiculously expensive partisan witch hunt.

He’s not a war hero. He (John McCain) was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured. - Donald Trump

Which brings us to Donald Trump, who, if anything, has upped the ante to unprecedented levels. He can insult a former POW (John McCain), claiming he wasn’t a real hero. He can falsely accuse Barack Obama of being a noncitizen. He can make crude and demeaning comments about women, do the same thing about immigrants and falsely claim that thousands of American Muslims cheered the collapse of the World Trade Center.

And nobody cares. They don’t care about his bankruptcies, Trump University or, really, anything else he does.

They don’t care because they’re tired of the blame game that’s been going on between the Clintons and Republicans for decades now. Some even call Trump “refreshing” because he “tells it like it is” and doesn’t lock everything up so tightly no one can tell what’s real and what’s not. They’re so sick of pervasive secrecy on the one hand and the endless investigations on the other that Trump seems like a breath of fresh air ... no matter what he actually says.

The irony is that the Clintons – along with congressional Republicans – paved the way for Trump’s success by making it possible to do or say virtually anything with impunity, because so many people stopped caring.

Just eight years ago, our presidential ballot presented us with the choice between a law professor and a war hero. Today, we have a matchup between a pair of candidates who behave very much like Huey Long and Richard Nixon, the two most unpopular candidates in modern history.

What I wouldn’t give for a wayward snowflake now.

The price of violence — and our only alternative

Guns don’t solve problems. People do. Or we can when we look past our anger, our fear, our prejudice.

Fists don’t solve problems, either. Neither do knives, threats or bullying. This should all seem so very obvious, but we’re losing track of the obvious in a maze of blame and accusation that we’ll never escape if we don’t reverse course soon.

We want easy solutions that aren’t solutions at all. Most often, they only make the problems worse.

Afraid of someone? Shoot him. Easy. Problem eliminated. Right? Except now, all of that person’s friends view you as the problem and probably want to eliminate you. They have guns, too. They can get those easily enough. But more importantly, they have something you gave them: a reason to hate you.

To solve a problem, we must first understand it. But that’s too much work; we want the easy way out. Just exterminate it – or the people we believe caused it – and the repercussions be damned. Understanding is hard because it requires that we educate ourselves, that we try to see things from other people’s perspective even though we may not have experienced their pain, their challenges, their hardships.

They may even tell us, “You can’t understand. You haven’t been what we’ve been through.” But that doesn’t excuse us from trying. At best, we’ll surprise them. At worst, we’ll learn something that will increase our level of knowledge – and more knowledge is always better than less. We won’t be able to solve the problem right away, but we’ll be closer.

If we pull the trigger or dismiss another person’s pain, we’ll be further away. We’ll be promoting the opposite of knowledge, which is ignorance, because those we’ve silenced will never be able to help us understand. Those whose pain we’ve dismissed feel as though they haven’t been heard. And they’ll not only stop trying to help us understand, they’ll stop trying to understand us. And then where will we be? On opposite ends of an armed standoff, trying to blow each other’s brains out rather than using those brains as the best weapons we have against the fear and hurt that divide us.

The alternative

There is another way, if we have the courage and the patience to pursue it.

It’s hard.

When we try to understand, things get complicated, and we don’t like complicated. It’s frustrating dealing with problems you can’t solve right away, with people who don’t trust you, with bureaucracies, playing fields that are anything but level and people who are hell-bent on protecting – and exploiting – their advantages. There’s prejudice and there’s bitterness. But none of that goes away by pulling a trigger or responding with some shallow platitude and going on our merry way.

People who are hurting are hurting for a reason. We can try to shield our tender sensibilities from the hurt by placing a bandage over our own eyes, but that doesn’t make the hurt go away. It only sends a message to those who have been hurt that we don’t care.

The unheard scream, “We matter!” not because they believe others matter less, but because they feel their pain is being ignored or dismissed as unimportant.

Yes, everyone matters. But when you’re hurting and it seems like no one cares, you don’t feel like you do. Then you have two choices. You can surrender to the judgment of others and believe that you really are unimportant. Or you can reject that and say, “I do matter.” And you can take that self-worth and use it as motivation to speak a little louder, try a little harder to be heard. Until someone starts to listen, tries to understand and maybe even helps you change things for the better. Or at least stops hurting you. At least that.

Those who haven’t been heard and those who don’t want to hear have this in common: They lash out. The only way to stop this is to start hearing one another. Hearing leads to understanding, which, in time, can lead to trust.

Building trust is, by its nature, a long and tortuous process that can, tragically, be upended by the frustration and impatience that leads us to pull triggers, call each other names and stop listening. When we do, we put everything right back at square one. Because that’s the reality of this: Not only does the “quick fix” never fix anything, it destroys the entire process of seeking understanding and, ultimately, of building trust.

And it destroys lives along the way.

We have to stop shooting people. But more than that, we must stop thinking we can eliminate problems we don’t understand by invoking brute force or wishing them away. By calling names or building walls. The only way to achieve our goals is by building understanding that leads, ultimately, to trust. That’s hard work; there will be miscommunication and hurt feelings along the way. But obstacles and detours shouldn’t deter us from keeping to the path.

There are no shortcuts.

NBA Finals 2016: When destiny jumped the tracks

Don’t believe the headlines. LeBron James did not win the 2016 NBA Finals all by himself ("King James dethrones Warriors," as one media outlet put it). He wasn’t even the difference for Cleveland, whose fans are basking in a long-overdue championship glow today.

That honor goes to Kyrie Irving.

We shouldn’t have believed the headlines about the Golden State Warriors, either. This was supposed to be a team of destiny, the team that would change the face of professional basketball as we know it.

In the end, it was the 2007 New England Patriots all over again.

THE ASTERISK

This year’s Warriors will go down in history not as a champion but an aberration, a regular-season asterisk next to a postseason disappointment. The 2015-16 Warriors will forever be remembered as the little engine that couldn’t, a team that should have won the title – and easily – but nearly got derailed in the semis and ran off the rails completely in the Finals.

How does this feel to the Warriors? Ask the ’07 Patriots, who were 18-0 before losing to a vastly inferior New York Giants team in the 2008 Super Bowl. Or ask George Foreman, undefeated and billed as “indestructible” when Muhammad Ali KO’d him in Zaire.

Both the Patriots and Foreman rebounded, but in different ways. The Pats have been back to the Super Bowl twice, winning once, in 2015. Foreman was so shaken by his loss to Ali that he took a year off, then retired for good another year later when Jimmy Young beat him on a decision in 1977. Foreman stayed out of the ring for a decade before launching a comeback that resulted him recapturing the heavyweight title with a stunning knockout of Michael Moorer at nearly 46 years of age.

Foreman was never again “indestructible,” and the Patriots have never again been undefeated heading into the Super Bowl. They both missed a chance at history that never came around again. The same is likely true of the Warriors, who can’t be expected to win 74 games next year or the year after that or the year after that.

WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN

They’ll have to live with the emptiness of this year’s “what if,” just as Patriots have to live with that lost opportunity against the Giants, and Foreman struggled to come to grips with what he behind left in the ring against Ali. Both the Pats and Big George went on to distinguish themselves in different ways, though: the Patriots by winning their fourth Super Bowl of the century in 2015 – more than any other team so far – and Foreman by becoming the oldest man ever to win the NBA title.

Will the Warriors bounce back to similar greatness? Only time will tell. But in the meantime, they’ve been given the bitterest of pills to swallow: a might-have-been glory that never was and the irony that last year’s excellent championship team turned out to be better than this year’s “team for the ages.”

In part, that’s because Stephen Curry’s shooting touch largely failed him in the Finals, as did Klay Thompson’s. Draymond Green played up to his usual standards but missed a game because of a suspension, and 7-foot center Andrew Bogut was lost in Game 5 to a knee injury, leaving the Warriors totally reliant on their small-ball lineup and without anyone to counter Tristan Thompson or James in the paint.

Anderson Varejão, the former Cavalier who picked up many of the minutes Bogut would have played, was ineffective to the point of being a liability. It was during his time on the court in Game 7 that the momentum swung from the Warriors, who kept trying to feed him the ball (with disastrous results) to Cleveland.

THE DIFFERENCE

The Warriors didn’t just lose the series, the Cavaliers won it, and they deserve all the credit in the world for coming back from a 3-1 series deficit, something no other team had ever accomplished in the Finals. But while James got almost all the credit in the next day’s headlines, he wasn’t the one who made the difference.

Yes, his play was outstanding, and there’s no way the Cavaliers would have won without him. But he actually played better in last year’s loss to the Warriors, when he averaged 35.8 points, 13.3 rebounds and 8.8 assists. His numbers this year: 29.7, 11.3 and 8.9.

No, the difference wasn’t James, it was guard Kyrie Irving, who played just one game in last year’s Finals before being injured but averaged 27.1 points while starting all seven games this year, including 41 points on 17 of 24 shooting in the pivotal Game 5 and the three-point shot that won the decisive Game 7.

Take Irving out of the equation, and the result would have been the same as last year, even with Curry’s and Klay Thompson’s shooting woes. Put Irving back in last year’s lineup, and – if he’d have played like this – the Warriors could easily have lost.

But those are just more “what ifs” and “if onlys.”

The Cavaliers had to live with their own “if onlys” for this past year, but to be honest, they were never a team of destiny, an other-worldly entity that was supposed to transform the game of basketball. This year’s Warriors were both those things … until suddenly they weren’t. And win or lose next year, they’ll have to live with that for a very long time.

Welcome to Political Babylon

We, the people of Political Babylon ...

I’m taking a timeout from talking about presidential candidates online. That’s not to say I’ll never do so, but I’m going to try to refrain – and here’s why.

It’s not that I don’t care about the election or have a preference. I have a strong preference and, yes, I do care. What I don’t care for is how this election has started to look like everything that’s wrong with organized religion.

It’s not the candidates but their supporters who have led me to this conclusion, just as it isn’t any deity that makes me wary of religious fervor. It’s the us-vs.-them fanaticism that drives people to turn against one another and feel as though it’s acceptable – even noble – to become backbiters, kitchen sink dumpers and even suicide bombers.

All for the sake of some cult of personality; for the privilege of following some Pied Piper.

The way people hurl abuse at one another in the name of one candidate or another is nauseating. It’s gotten to the point where one can’t make a reasoned observation about any candidate without one of his/her supporters shouting the political equivalent of “Blasphemy!” or “Heresy!” Facebook and Twitter have become venues for verbally re-enacting the Spanish Inquisition using less physical implements of torture: bullying, accusation, name-calling and the full gamut of fallacious arguments.

People defend “their” candidates like they’re Jesus, Gandhi and Martin Luther King all rolled into one.

They’re not.

Partisans and true believers go around throwing money into campaign war chests as though they're making offerings at some sacred temple. They refuse to risk upsetting any of the money-changers’ tables for fear one might topple over on their candidate and he/she will lose the advantage. The end justifies the means. Sure it does. Keep telling yourself that as your credibility disappears down the toilet. Do you even care?

Nearly everyone decries the tenor of the candidates’ rhetoric as unbecoming of a president. Well, look in the mirror. How's your rhetoric sounded lately? These politicians are putting on a show you’re paying to see, so kindly stop paying for it or stop complaining.

We the voters have personalized these candidates to such an extent we've adopted them as symbols of our own psychosis. In psychological terms, there's more projection going on here than you'll find at a 20-screen multiplex, and the image on the screen is just as two-dimensional.

No, I’m not joining the chorus of “let’s get along for the sake of party unity.” Party unity be damned. It’s just an excuse for people to act like one party or the other (or the two-party system) is “the one true church” and everyone else needs to be excommunicated. Whatever happened to voting your conscience? Whatever happened to staying civil for civility's sake? That concept seems to have disappeared down the toilet as well.

In the meantime, we’ve stopped talking about the issues. We’re so busy defending “our son of a bitch” because he’s our son of a bitch, it's as if we’ve forgotten why we started supporting him (or her) in the first place. This is what happens with personality cults: They become all about the person, while the issues are neglected and forgotten. The result is paralysis at best, demagoguery and despotism at worst. We get what we pay for with our 30-second attention spans.

Wonder why we tolerate people who flip-flop on the issues - who obfuscate, lie and spin everything under the sun? Then read that last paragraph again. We care more about party affiliation, name recognition and our own projections in this theater of the absurd than we do about the plot lines, the substance, the issues.

It’s what we want. It’s what we allow. If we don't have a Pied Piper, but we'll create one to follow. If we believe hard enough, these candidates will be everything we want them to be, right?

Be careful what you wish for, because the reflection in that mirror ain’t pretty. If we really want a candidate who looks just like our own psychoses, it won’t be long before we come to regret it. Then we’ll blame our savior: We’ll sacrifice him or her on the altar of our own denial, and we’ll start the ugly cycle all over again.

Welcome to Political Babylon. 

Meet Isis: Cat, companion and the truest of friends

Allow me to introduce you to Isis. Not the goddess (although she sometimes behaves like one) and certainly not the terrorist group.

Isis is a cat. My cat. And I’m her human.

As I write this, Isis is in severe kidney failure. She’s only nine years old, and she doesn’t deserve that. She deserves so much more.

I met Isis at a PetSmart store on one of those days when they bring in shelter pets and hope someone bonds with them. Isis was there, with her brother, who was running all over the cage, playful as can be. Isis wasn’t having any of that. She just casually came up and said “hello” to me, nudging her head up against the cage when I put my hand down to pet her. Right away, we were comfortable with each other.

I had a name picked out for her right away. I was going to call her Frejya, after the Norse goddess, because her crystal blue eyes and glistening white and grey coat, with a hint of tan, reminded me of a book I’d read by Elizabeth H. Boyer from the early ’80s. I’d read it a long time ago, and if I remember correctly, one of the characters was a woman or goddess who’d been magically transformed into a cat.

But then I was informed that she already had a name: Isis. I liked that, too, and I figured that, since she already had it, I wasn’t going to take it away from her. Isis she would remain.

Isis came along at just the right time, and she’s been there during the hardest time of my life. Since I’ve known her, I’ve been through a divorce, been laid off from my job of fourteen years and watched my father’s health gradually decline.

Isis was there for me the whole time, and along with my mother and my wife, Samaire, hers has been the most comforting presence I’ve ever known.

She nearly always came when I called her name, and even today, in her weakened state, she still does. Sometimes, she lies down at the foot of the bed, and the moment I say her name, she’ll turn around and look at me, then get up and walk like some miniature white tiger on padded paws right up to me and curl up next to me, purring.

When everything was going wrong and I was struggling with depression, I imagined she was that white tiger, and that she was there to protect me when I no longer had the hope or energy to fight myself.

Now, I have to protect her. She spent the past week in the animal hospital on IV fluids and she seemed to perk up a little, but at the end of that time, she still was barely eating and her kidney numbers weren’t much better. The vet said he recommended euthanizing her.

Samaire said she didn’t think we should, and I realized she was right. I wouldn’t make that kind of decision for a family member who walks on two legs. How could I do that for my beloved white tiger just because she walks on four?

Besides, I want more time with her – even if it’s only a little bit. I’m typing through tears here, and I don’t cry very often. Not to complain, but I’ve been through a lot, and I’ve learned to deal with loss and numb myself to pain pretty effectively. But not this kind of loss. Not this kind of pain.

All the talk of rainbow bridges and “better places” doesn’t mean a thing when you face the prospect of losing someone you love deeply and someone who has loved you so unconditionally for so long.

Right now, Isis still isn’t eating on her own, but she will swallow (grudgingly) the food we put in her mouth, and we’re giving her subcutaneous fluids to keep her hydrated. I’m spending as much time curled up in bed beside her as I can because, to me, every moment now is precious.

I wanted to introduce you to Isis, because I may not have many more chances to do so, and because everyone should get the chance to know someone this special. An unfailing friend. A white tiger. Someone you know without a shadow of a doubt really loves you.

That’s who Isis is to me and, whatever happens, it’s who she’ll always be.  

Bernie Sanders no slave to the McGovern Effect

Some Democrats are still scared of George McGovern. They look at Bernie Sanders, and they see someone “too far to the left” to win the general election.

That’s the conventional political wisdom. But keep in mind that this same “conventional wisdom” all but guaranteed that Hillary Clinton would be the nominee in 2008 and dismissed the notion of Donald Trump being anything but a flash in the pan this year.

Even Nate Silver’s analytics-driven FiveThirtyEight was flat wrong (along with a lot of other pundits) in predicting that Clinton would win this year’s Michigan primary handily – probably the most badly bungled prediction since “Dewey defeats Truman.”

Political punditry isn’t exact, and it’s not a science.

Sometimes, it’s nothing more than spin: advocacy disguised as analysis.

Other times, the pundits are so full of themselves they believe their own “infallibility” hype. They get cocky, and they get it wrong.

And often, they’re wrong about the future because they’re wrong about the past. Certain assumptions are just repeated ad nauseam on cable TV until they become a sort of political gospel.

This is where the McGovern Effect comes in.

Ever since the Democrats nominated “peace candidate” George McGovern in 1972 – only to watch Tricky Dick Nixon annihilate him in the General Election – they’ve been deathly afraid of history repeating itself.

Nominate someone too far to the left, and it’ll be another massacre. So the conventional wisdom says. Just look at liberal Mike Dukakis, who failed to work any Massachusetts miracles against George Bush I.

It’s the gospel truth.

And because a lot Democrats today have accepted that gospel, they look at Bernie Sanders and see George McGovern staring back at them. They look in the other direction, at Hillary Clinton, and they see a last name that’s shared by a relatively moderate two-term Democratic president.

No brainer, right?

Go with what works.

Except they’re so worried about history repeating itself that they’re ignoring a more recent, more telling precedent. All they have to do is look across the aisle.

Reagan's revolution

Four years after McGovern lost in that landslide, a Republican challenged the incumbent president from the right and nearly beat him. That challenger was, of course, Ronald Reagan – who scared establishment Republicans out of their wits. He was too conservative, they thought. They remembered what had happened to Barry Goldwater in ’64 when he won the nomination from the far right: LBJ had destroyed him in the general election, just as Nixon later buried McGovern.

The GOP establishment breathed a sigh of relief when they saw incumbent Gerald Ford hang on by the skin of his teeth to defeat Reagan … only to watch him lose to Jimmy Carter in the general election.

We all know what happened four years later: Reagan won the nomination on his second try and defeated Carter for the presidency.

Historically speaking, Sanders resembles Reagan a lot more than he does McGovern. Or Goldwater. Or Dukakis.

For one thing, like Reagan, he’s generating the kind of excitement his primary opponent can’t match. Hillary Clinton is about as exciting as Gerald Ford was – without the clumsiness but with a whole lot more political baggage. Would Reagan have carried enough enthusiasm into the general election to beat Carter in ’76? We’ll never know. But we do know he beat him four years later.

By then, Ford was out of politics and Carter was a wounded president, crippled by a sluggish economy and the Iran hostage crisis.

That made him vulnerable – in much the same way the Republicans are vulnerable this year. Will the Republican nominee be Donald Trump or Ted Cruz? It hardly matters. In either case, the Democrats will face someone with the kind of anemic approval ratings that resemble Carter’s a lot more than Nixon’s.

The opposition

This is where the McGovern Effect breaks down even more.

In Nixon, McGovern faced an incumbent who was highly popular at the time among everyone except the far left. Naturally, the far left voted for McGovern, and everyone else chose Nixon.

The same held true for Goldwater and Dukakis, both of whom were victims of strong opposition far more than their own ideology. Goldwater was up against the heir to a charismatic president whose death was still being mourned a year after his assassination. And Dukakis’ opponent, the first George Bush, was Reagan’s chosen successor. Kennedy and Reagan: the two most iconic presidents of the second half of the 20th century.

Somehow, the names Trump and Cruz just don’t have the same gravitas.

On top of this, Sanders also has an advantage in social media that McGovern could never have conceived of.

Does this mean Sanders’ nascent revolution is destined to repeat the Reagan revolution’s electoral success?

I’m not going there.

What I will say is that anyone who dismisses Sanders as a viable Democratic candidate based on the McGovern Effect is ignoring some powerful evidence that points in the opposite direction.

“Destiny” and “inevitability” are the language of pundits who crow about their predictions and then end up eating it. The crow, that is.

A sparrow might just tell another story.

We’ll have to wait and see.