A Belated Ode To Fritz Mondale

I have a confession of sorts to make.

I don't know if it means anything to anyone but, if you've been reading TRH for a while, you've probably gotten the impression that I've always been a knee-jerk, very-left-of-center Democrat.  And, if that's the case, I can't say that I blame you.  Today, especially in the age of Trump, that's definitely the case.  But, in no small part, that's because it is the age of Trump.  In truth, if I had a default position, which could only exist in a perfect world, I would probably still be leaning to the left, but I'd also be more willing to listen to the other side.  Once upon a time, they were worth listening to, because they trafficked less in personalities and more in issues.

In fact, back in the 1970s, my first meaningful decade of political engagement, I started out as a McGovern Democrat, and, after that particular debacle, became more of a middle-of-the-road Democrat, one who wanted to change the world for the better without scaring people who disagreed with me to death.  Also, during this period, I made the mistake of becoming an evangelical Christian, a topic I've touched on lightly in previous posts, and may discuss more extensively in the near future.  I mention it here mainly to help explain why, because of those two traits, Jimmy Carter appealed to me a great deal.

And so did his running mate, Walter Mondale.

Like Hubert Humphrey, his fellow Minnesotan and mentor, Mondale seemed like someone who was focused on results, and not on grandstanding.  Like Carter, Mondale seemed to understand that politics, like football, is a game of inches, and that victory goes to those who stay the course long enough to put together enough inches.  And, like both of them, Mondale understood that politics was meant for those who cared more about public service than power.

And that's why I was elated by the narrow victory Carter and Mondale eked out in the 1976 presidential election.  And why I was bitterly disappointed by their defeat four years later, a defeat to which the defection of many fashionably liberal Democratic voters to John Anderson's independent candidacy contributed mightily.  Spoiler?  What's their to spoil?  That's what Anderson asked voters, and a large chunk of votes that Carter and Mondale should have gotten gravitated to Anderson's doomed crusade.  Instead, four decades of steadily regressive policies and politics have pushed the American experiment to the brink of extinction.  The sad irony of this catastrophe is that, as conservatism began to successfully undo much of the New Frontier and even the New Deal, many of those same fashionably liberal voters would have killed to have even some of the Carter-Mondale proposals turned into reality.

So, as the 1980s began, I felt very much like a voter without a political home.  I still cared deeply about politics.  I still believed in the power of the political process to make other people's lives better.  And I still believed that left-of-center approaches to political issues were the better way of achieving the results.  But I also believed in the need to take small steps and, where possible, to do so in concert with a broad coalition.

The Democratic Party, however, didn't agree with me.  Its leadership managed to learn exactly the wrong lesson from the 1980 debacle.  The departure of so many liberal voters to the doomed Anderson campaign led those in charge of the party to decide that Carter-style centrism threatened its future success.  At the same time, the success of conservative Democrats in winning back seats in the House of Representatives in 1982 convinced those conservatives that the party needed to keep up with the rightward lurch that Reaganomics had given the nation.  And thus it was that the coalition of Blue Dogs and coastal liberals Carter and Mondale had managed to assemble fell apart, and the Democratic Party assumed its familiar posture:  disarray.

By this time, my own life was in a similar posture of disarray.  I was unemployed, and forced to move back from New York, a city I loved, to my parents' home in Maryland, a state that at the very least had blueness going for it, among other things.  Professionally, personally, and even spiritually, my life had completely run aground, and my interest in politics was at an all time low.  Not long after, however, I entered graduate school, and returned to some semblance of a normal life.  

And, as I did, and began to pay attention to the 1984 presidential campaign, I began to notice that, as Mondale's own campaign for the White House moved forward toward the nomination, he began to move away from the moderate politics he had embraced for most of his career, trying to appeal to pure liberals at the expense of the less-than-perfectly liberal.  My guess is that he concluded that this was the only way he could even come close to holding the party together for the fall election.  To put it mildly, it didn't work:  the Democratic Electoral College total went from 49 in 1980 to 13 in 1984.  Mondale had rolled the dice toward the left--and lost.  With that loss, America began its deepening slide into the morass of right-wing ideology.

For my part, I can't say that I helped.  In my own way, I wasn't much better than the Anderson liberals I castigated for abandoning Carter in 1980.  I could not, would not, under any circumstances, vote for Reagan, but I succumbed to a purity test of my own.  I could not, and did not, vote for a party with no ability to put the brakes on its liberal tendencies even when those tendencies might benefit from a good set of breaks.  So, for the one and only time in my life, I did not vote for a Democrat in a presidential race.  I wrote in a Republican:  Mark Hatfield, a liberal Senator from Oregon who was, like me, an evangelical.  I did so knowing that I was throwing my vote away, but I didn't care; at that point, I felt the need to inflict my own purity test on the outcome.

It was not too many years later that I realized that, like the Anderson Democrats, I had in fact betrayed the sort of tactical moderation I thought I was advocating with my write-in vote.  Had I voted for Mondale, it would have had no effect on the outcome.  But I knew that a lot of moderate Democrats voted for Reagan because they somehow saw him as less extreme than what Mondale was offering, even if that was more a question of voting for style rather than substance.  Rather than throwing away my vote, or sitting the election out, what I should have been doing was reminding everyone that, even though Mondale's rhetoric may have moved toward the left, he had not fundamentally changed in temperament or tactics, that he was still the same game-of-inches guy that Carter had felt comfortable with.  

Putting it simply, I should have forgot about looking for perfection in the highly imperfect world of politics, and thought tactically.  I didn't.  Many of us didn't.  And all of us were the losers for it.

And, frankly, Mondale deserved better.  We all deserved better.  He was a decent human being, who genuinely believed in public service and in the possibility of building a better world.  That Reagan defeated him, and launched our current descent into madness in the process, only underscores the tragedy of his defeat, and the losses that every American has endured as a result.

And so, I began to refine my political thinking.  My goals, as a result, are still idealistic, but my thoughts about how to advance those goals are far more tactical in nature.  Indeed, this is why I have moved much further to the left, almost to the point I occupied in my McGovern days.  I have done this not because I feel it is absolutely necessary to move the country that far in that direction, but because I see this as the only way to counter-act the most egregious effects of the Reagan era.  We may not need perfect liberalism, but we definitely need a great big whopping dose of it.  Maybe, just maybe, if we're lucky, we'll need to put the brakes on liberalism.  But we're nowhere near close to being at that point.

You don't need me to give you a list of Mondale's accomplishments.  You can get that out of his New York Times obituary, which, whether you lived through his career or not, is well worth perusing.  I will take a little space here to emphasize two major contributions to the office of the Presidency that outlasted him and benefited all of us:  the partnership he created with Carter that gave future Vice Presidents a meaningful role in the government, and his selection of Geraldine Ferraro as his 1984 running mate.  Both of these accomplishments are reflected today in the presence of Kamala Harris as the nation's second-in-command.

And, despite losing to a candidate who was falsely being lionized by conservative evangelicals as the one true Christian running for the Oval Office, Mondale, the son of a preacher, consistently demonstrated the one character trait that matters more in the practice of Christianity, perhaps in the practice of any faith, than any other:  humility.  There could be no greater illustration of that humility, in the service of a moment that would be sheer agony for many a lesser politician, than the grace and humor that he demonstrated on January 6, 1981, when, as Vice President, he announced the results of the Electoral College vote in the 1980 election--in effect, presiding over his own bitter defeat.  On the day after his birthday, no less.

And yet, in the process, finding humor in doing so.  The response was a bipartisan standing ovation from a joint session of both houses of Congress.  You need only compare that January 6 to the horror show we all watched on that date this year to see how much our politics, and we as a people, have lost in the past 40 years.

Despite the lesson that I learned from my failure to support him in 1984, I still feel a deep sense of regret that I didn't vote for him.  It didn't change the outcome.  It didn't affect him personally; we never met, so he had no idea of what I was doing in the voting booth.  And, in spite of the mistakes I made, and that all of us have made, we are still striving together toward a more perfect Union, still overcoming tremendous obstacles, still working toward a reckoning with our deepest sins, still trying to find enough divine grace to bless not only each other, but the whole word.

But Fritz Mondale, a man who embodied the best of what this nation has to offer, and a man who absolutely deserved my pulling the lever for him back in that lonely voting both in College Park, Maryland, deserved better from me.  He deserved better from all of us.  For that matter, all of us deserved better.

So here it is, Fritz.  Here's my vote for you.  Even if it's too late to shape an election, I know it's not to late to set the record straight on who you were, and how you will be remembered.

Rest in power, sir.

Fight Or Flight Against Fascism In Georgia (And Elsewhere)?

It says a great deal, and none of it good, that a seemingly innocent phrase like "voting reform" has become a mask for behavior that is less about voting, and even less about reform, than it is a last gasp of a political party that has morphed not just into a personality cult, but one that has no greater or even other purpose in life than white male power--and power for its own sake, and not for any greater good.  

Nevertheless, this is where we are today in the U.S..  At the mercy of politicians, and their fellow travellers in white maleness, who have concluded that their only hope to remain relevant is to take away from their opponents the power to govern by way of the ballot box.  The power for which thousands of us, over centuries, have suffered and died for, in order to create a more perfect Union.  Union, and unity, are not what gets them out of bed every morning.  Victory is.  Victory, by any means necessary.

The last time the Republican Party lost control of both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, they conducted a postmortem that was referred to as an "autopsy," one that lend them, at least on paper, to conclude that they needed to adapt to the reality of a more diverse country, and stop the wink-and-nod form of Ku Klux Klan politics that it had been practicing since 1972.  For a few months, they went through the motions of heeding the postmortem's message.

But, when you've been living for decades on the political equivalent of crack cocaine, it's hard to go cold turkey, especially when something happens to convince you that you don't need rehab after all.  It didn't take long for the Tea Party, and its take-the-country-back anger, and Donald Trump with his "questions" about Barack Obama's birth certificate, to take control of our country's agenda, and lead us down the road that has lead to pandemic, poverty, police violence, and a planet on fire.

And how have they responded to that?  Now that the lethality of their politics has been so exposed to the American people that even voters in Arizona and Georgia gave up on them last year, how do they plan to get on the comeback trail?

Stop people they don't like from voting, that's how.  And do it, or at least try, on a massive scale.  Even as I type this, state legislatures across the county are now considering no fewer than 300 bills designed to restrict, by one means or another, the right of the people to exercise the franchise and have a say in their own governance.

The right of certain people, that is.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Georgia, where the 2020 election outcome gave Democrats control of the Senate, and made Joe Biden the first Democratic Presidential candidate in nearly 30 years to carry the state.  And, like the coward he undoubtedly is, Trump has rhetorically pushed back against this result by pretending (even after three audits of the votes) that this outcome is based on fraud.  These allegations, in fact, are the plutonium that led the Republican state legislature and governor to enact a so-called "reform" of Georgia's laws, to "protect" the right to vote in the state.

No one, absolutely no one, should take Trump's allegations of fraud seriously.  The political supplicants in Georgia who helped enact this sham of a bill are, of course, publicly relying on these allegations, because they come from Trump, who has become the personality at the center of a party that is now, operationally, a personality cult.  But there was no fraud in Georgia's election results.

Have some doubts about that?  Just listen to Georgia's governor, the one who ran for the office while he was Georgia's secretary of state, with the power to manipulate the outcome of the election, a power he didn't hesitate to use.  He's admitted it on tape.

And, if you doubt that Trump is at the root of the whole "fraud" charade, take a look at this.

And the content of the bill?  A hodgepodge of restrictions that range from the merely obvious to the outrageously arbitrary.

Most of the bill's defenders in the right-wing media corner focus on the former.  What's the big deal about making it harder for people to vote?  Stacey Abrams even advocated shortening the period for early voting, as a Georgia state legislator.  And voter ID?  Who doesn't want this?  Why isn't this related to stopping voter fraud.  Shouldn't we all want this?

Abrams' "advocacy" seems to have been governed more by short-term budgetary considerations than any philosophical aversion to limiting the number of days for early voting.  This is one of the problems with advancing the hypocrisy argument against your philosophical opponents; if you are advancing it, you'd better make sure the facts line up with your accusation.  Unless Rich Lowry has some sort of inside information showing that white voters in Georgia primarily vote during early voting--and that Abrams knew this--he would due well to take his flights of op-ed fantasy elsewhere.

In fact, early voting benefits those who have difficulty finding time off from other responsibilities to vote--those who are, disproportionally, women and people of color.  This is beyond dispute, and the so-called "reformers" know it.  Which is why they mix limits on early voting days with limits on the number of polling places, artificially lengthening lines at the polls and making it harder for those whose children or jobs will not allow them to wait.  This is also why they restrict, as the new Georgia bill does, the ability of individuals to provide water to voters waiting in line.  This is not fraud prevention; this is naked harassment.  The same can be said about the bill's restrictions on absentee ballots and drop-boxes.

As for voter ID restrictions, also a feature of the Georgia bill, despite the seeming reasonableness of such restrictions, they have a history of being used for discriminatory purposes, which the ACLU has neatly summed up here.  Perhaps the most important part of this summary, something that could be said about all of these "reforms," is the observation that they are a solution in search of a problem.  Voter fraud is rare.  The only numerous aspect of it is the accusations of it--which almost always seems to come from Republicans.

And the problems with the bill's provisions don't end there.  Its cutbacks on mail voting and dropboxes force a reliance on electronic voting databases which, as we've already seen, are vulnerable to hacking even under the best of circumstances.  And note the fact that the voting period for special elections has bet reduced by more than half.  This is particularly relevant in understanding the basic motivation behind the bill, because the original length of this period was dictated by the desire to make sure that as many white people as possible got to the polls.  The Senate special elections last fall showed them how badly that strategy can backfire on them with a more racially diversified electorate.  The strategy is now being changed, because the underlying racism behind it hasn't changed.  

Ultimately, the best evidence for that proposition is also the single worst feature of the new Georgia law:  the fact that it takes ultimate control of the administration of state elections out of the hands of non-partisan local boards of elections, and gives it to the highly partisan state legislature and governor.  If the current governor and legislature thought that there was any chance, even a microscopic one, that they would be replaced by Democrats at some point, this provision would never see the light of day.  They know, and will nevertheless not tell you, that this is being done because it gives the Republican Party in Georgia not only the power to manipulate election results in any manner that suits them, but the power to conceal that manipulation as well.

This illustrates why, in the hands of Republicans, the word "reform" can only be viewed as Orwellian in nature.  Their "reforms" are not for the purpose of creating a better world for everyone; they exist soley as tools to perpetuate their own power, and solely for the purpose of ensuring that anyone they don't like, for any reason, has absolutely no power at all.  They can talk about so-called "cancel culture" until they are green-eggs-and-ham in the face.  But they are its greatest proponents, and the greatest practitioners of using political power to advance it.

So, what to do in opposition to it?  Fight or flight?  Boycott, or stand our ground?

On a personal level, I have very mixed feelings about boycotts, because they can, if not properly targeted at the people whose actions are being protested, end up creating a lot of collateral damage.  Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, historically speaking, probably conducted the most effective boycotts in no small part because the targets of their boycotts, primarily government officials, were the people they wanted to challenge.  In contrast, the economic boycotts that are currently being urged against Georgia-based corporations, such as Coca-Cola and Delta, have the potential to harm the day-to-day well being of the people whose political interests are supposed to benefit from the boycott in the first place.  Abrams herself, whose activism and organizing was the key to the Democrats' recent success in Georgia, has made it clear that she is no fan of boycotts, and for precisely the reason that I just cited.

On the other hand, these corporations, and others, like Major League Baseball, have consumer bases that are not merely local, but national and international as well, and it's clearly in their capitalistic self-interest to consistently act in ways that reflects the value of consumers.  It's easy to lose sight of the fact that contemporary marketing is not, strictly speaking, a matter of making a lawyerly case for product or service benefits ("So-and-so cleans better than Brand X") as it is about making more personal associations between what is being sold and the people doing the buying.

And large corporations, in part by virtue of their size and global reach, have multiple constituencies to respect and accommodate.  In the case of Major League Baseball, and its decision to move this year's All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver, I suspect that it was motivated as much as anything by a desire to protect its players from constantly being bombarded with questions about whether or not they would participate in a boycott of the game, as well as protecting itself from the scenario where the game itself might be boycotted by both players and sponsors, decisions that they could do little if anything to prevent.  In the end, its decision was made to remove itself from the ongoing debate, as much as it was to reflect the values the sport is supposed to emulate.

What this reinforces is a simple reality about contemporary America, and a harsh one for those who celebrate white supremacy, and white male supremacy in particular, as the basis for the nation's existence and greatness.  Manipulating the machinery of elections, whether by voting restrictions, gerrymandering, unlimited corporate fundraising, or any other means, as a last resort for maintaining the political power of a minority, is a doomed strategy, and will become even more so in the coming years as the minority in question--uneducated white men--continues to shrink in size.

If nothing else, this should serve as a well-earned comeuppance for Mitch McCONnell, whose longtime advocacy of treating corporations and people equally when it comes to allowing unlimited campaign contributions from both sources.  This embodies the pernicious combination of two lies:  that corporations are people, and that money can be considered political speech that merits the First Amendment's protection (whether or not in the form of a bribe).  In response to the relocation of the All-Star Game, and other corporate criticisms of the new Georgia voting law, McCONnell once again illustrated his willingness to speak profusely, if not effectively, out of both sides of his mouth.  In the view of the minority leader of the World's Greatest Deliberative Body, money is speech, but speech is not speech.  Once again, we need Orwell to come back from the dead and say, "Hold my beer."

Someone needs to step in and tell Mitch that it's not working.  Boy, is it not working.  If anything, it looks like it's going to cost his party money.  Which means its going to cost it votes.  Too bad (not really).

In the end, if Georgia Democrats and their political allies can find the right mix of boycotting and direct action via organizing--and they'll need our help with both--the efforts of Republicans in the state and in other states will produce the political outcome that they, and their opponents deserve.  Fight or flight?  It's a false choice.  We need to do both.  And, for those of you who haven't started already, you need to get started right now.