Month: November 2016

IN SEARCH OF A NEW MILLENNIAL FEMINISM

I still can’t get the image out of my head. Newspapers keep using the picture in their serialized election retrospectives: shocked and distraught young women crying their eyes out under the glass ceiling of a New York hotel ballroom, Hillary Clinton’s election night headquarters. Like Sherlock Holmes’ dog that didn’t bark, this was the glass ceiling that didn’t shatter. They had gathered there, giddy and hopeful, ready to watch up close the election of America’s first woman president. It wasn’t just a loss for them; it was a dream rudely interrupted and demolished by a larger-than-life symbol of every sexist, misogynistic pig of a white male they had ever known, heard or read about.

I want to believe that those millennial women will embrace that moment of pain and anguish, and use it as a catalyst for a new wave of feminism. Thanks to trails blazed by their mothers and grandmothers, the world is a far less foreboding place to women in their 20s and 30s. Doors once closed are now open. Rampant sexism, although far from dead and buried, is no longer baked into our social norms. This generation of women never experienced the hopeless cruelty of systemic oppression that spurred giants like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Eleanor Smeal, and countless others, to devote their lives to fighting for change. When things are just a little bad, most of us suck it up and soldier on.

It’s about to get much more than just a little bad. That’s not just because the glass ceiling didn’t break on November 8. America’s president-in-waiting is the embodiment of almost everything the baby boomer feminists fought against: degradation, sexual harassment, verbose inequality. It’s all crawling out from behind its rock in full daylight now. Progress comes through an accumulation of baby steps; regression through a gigantic leap backwards. The leap back has begun. To me, that’s what the tears streaming down the faces of those young Clinton supporters were all about. The fulcrum of change suddenly reversed course, and the ride back is going to be anything but pretty.

This is about so much more than the country’s failure to elect a woman president. Women are ridiculously outnumbered in the Congress ( only 19% are women), state legislatures (24%), governors’ offices(12%) and in the upper echelons of academia (26% of college presidents are women) and corporate America (4% of Fortune 500 CEOs are women). Those numbers not only measure an agonizingly slow march to equality, they tell an even bleaker and pervasive story.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter, formerly on the faculty at both Yale and Harvard Law School, conducted extensive studies in the 1970s on the effects of the underrepresentation of women on organizational effectiveness. Kanter found that when women were the few among the many men in a work group, their participation and effectiveness were significantly diminished simply by virtue of being outnumbered. This phenomenon held, she found, in any situation where those from a demographically identifiable group were the “few among the many” from the majority group. Simply being a “token,” Kanter discovered, meant reduced participation, status and ability to shape the group’s outcome.

I did a mini-replication of Kanter’s study 35 years ago. I tracked a number of small task groups, some dominated by men, some by women and others with a relatively equal balance. I measured the amount of time each participant spoke, interrupted others, offered solutions, among other indices of participation. In the groups dominated by one gender, those in the minority greatly limited their participation and the overall effectiveness of the group process was severely limited. In the balanced groups, however, there was a more equalized level of participation along with a desire to reach consensus and, as a result, a higher level of effectiveness.

The lesson from the research is simple: the country is losing out by continuing to have decision making bodies that don’t look anything like the rest of the country. The damage from a Congress that is 81% male isn’t just the lack of opportunity for more women to serve. The real blow comes from the kind of laws that flow out of a legislative body that resembles an Elks Club.

It’s not too hard to imagine what lies ahead for us right now. Funding for women’s health, always a battle in “good times” is in for a severe blow. Mike Pence and his ilk are already salivating about defunding Planned Parenthood. Another faction would love to put the screws to what they see as the Justice Departments’ overzealous use of Title IX to combat sex discrimination on college campuses. With Jeff Sessions as attorney general, that’s an objective easily met. Donald Trump says he will see that Row v. Wade will be overturned as soon as he puts his stamp on the Supreme Court. As a frightening foreshadow of what’s to come, a Tennessee woman is now facing criminal charges for attempting to abort her pregnancy with a coat hanger.

Still, I really do believe the sun will shine again, that we will manage to reverse the backwards retreat and start moving upward and forward, toward an America that prides itself in the values of diversity, equality and justice for all. Getting there means that those millennial tears from election night must be turned into action steps. The boomer feminists were a great opening act. But it’s your time and your move now. Don’t let those tears be in vain.

TO RECOUNT, PERCHANCE TO DREAM

I admit being a wee bit intrigued by the straw-grasping prospect of a presidential election recount. Green Party candidate, Jill Stein, has raised more than $5 million to finance a re-tabulation of votes in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. The margins were thin in all three states, and there have been unconfirmed reports there of hacking or machine malfunction. Should this Hail Mary pass reach the end zone, reversing the outcome in those states, Hillary Clinton would take 46 electoral college votes from Donald Trump and become the 45th president of the United States.

Needless to say, in a week filled with a parade of wingnuts anointed for key cabinet and White House positions, this recount talk has been a soothing salve for us liberals. We had already fastened our Time Machine seatbelts in preparation for the flight back to the 1950s. Now we can at least squint through the aircraft window and, if we pretend hard enough, almost see a secretary of state who is neither Rudy Giuliani nor Mitt Romney. It proves the old adage that when you desperately want to give up on reality, you will happily settle for a good fantasy.

We have all used these fleeting and illusive what-if moments to breathe new life into different scenarios that seemed to have suddenly died very late on that very dark night of November 8. Some have chosen to fix their imaginary sights on a rock solid liberal Supreme Court majority. Others let themselves see possible health care fixes, instead of an end to coverage for millions of Americans. As a recovering journalist, I’ve carved out a considerably different niche, one that is totally delicious to contemplate.

My fantasy is nothing less than a complete and total reversal of all those deeply analytical, thumb-sucking, ponderous think pieces cranked out by news outlets over the past three weeks. You know, the ones that attempted to explain, in 10,000 words or less, precisely how it was that a racist, crotch grabbing buffoon, with no government experience or aptitude, became the leader of the free world. I’m talking about this kind of stuff:

“Democrats Embrace of Neoliberalism Won it for Trump.”

“Election of Trump is Stunning Repudiation of Establishment.”

“Failed Polls Question the Profession of Prognostication.”

“Clinton’s Loss is Nail in the Coffin of Center-Left Politics.”

So now comes the juicy part, the joyous fantasy: Clinton wins in the electoral college through the recount, complimenting her popular vote advantage. Now what do we want to say to the opus writers? Well, let’s cue the audio from the third debate and isolate those rich, snide Trumpian tones: “Wrong, Wrong, Wrong.”

Better yet, flash way back to SNL’s Emily Litella: “Never mind!”

This would be so much better than the classic “Dewy Defeats Truman” headline in the 1948 Chicago Tribune. That was simply the wrong outcome. Here we’re dealing with deep existential analysis about who we are as a nation, all based on facts that just turned into a bunch of hooey and are no longer in evidence. Reverse three states and, presto, neoliberalism saves the day for Clinton, Trump’s loss validates the establishment and the pollsters and Clinton breathe new life into center-left politics.

How wonderful would that be? The best part is that it might well persuade serious newsroom types not to pound out those definitive post-election what-does-it-all-mean pieces hours after the polls close. When I wrote about politics, back in the pre-digital Gutenberg days, the ritual was to work up an analysis for the Sunday paper following a Tuesday election. That gave us a few days to think things out and, more importantly, to talk with political types after they had a chance to process the election results.

Now, of course, the deep, navel gazing begins around noon on election day, as soon as the first exit poll numbers come in and are chewed up and spit out by the talking heads on cable news and other soldiers of information and misinformation in the Twittersphere, blogosphere and wherever else our clicks and eyeballs may take us. Sadly, the poor legacy media tries to keep up, rather than sticking to its brand of waiting to make sure it gets it right.

And so it was, at 3 a.m., November 9, that a group of New York Times political reporters recorded a podcast aimed at answering the question, “How Did We Get This Wrong?” One of them said the media’s inability to sense the magnitude of pro-Trump sentiment was “a failure of expertise on the order of the fall of the Soviet Union or the Vietnam War.” Another Times staffer, less than an hour after Trump appeared to have amassed more than 270 electoral votes, offered this instant analysis: “Fundamentally Clinton, as it turns out, was the worst candidate Democrats could have run. Had almost any other major Democratic candidate been the nominee, they would have beaten Donald Trump.” So many conclusions with minimal facts and so little sleep.

At this point, Clinton’s lead in the popular vote surpasses 2 million and continues to grow, giving her a margin of about 1.5% over Trump, not too far from most of the pre-election polls. If you added to that the fantasy scenario of her winning a recount in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, what would we have? I say that would really and truly be a “failure of expertise on the order of the fall of the Soviet Union or the Vietnam War.”

And, oh, what a sweet failure it would be!

OVER THE RIVER AND THROUGH THE POLITICAL DIVIDE — HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

There has been an abundance of trepidation about Thanksgiving this year. The fear and trembling is over the prospect of bringing Trump and Clinton voters to the same family table just 16 days after the Election from Hell. The New York Times and the Washington Post ran long trend articles about family holiday plans shattering to pieces in the wake of a divisive election. They quoted psychotherapists worried about their patients’ ability to talk turkey and politics with loved ones who voted differently.

Poor Thanksgiving. It hasn’t been under such an ominous cloud since the great Cranberry Cancer Scare of 1959. One woman, a distraught Hillary backer with two pro-Trump brothers was beside herself. “Thanksgiving,” she said, “has always been a time for people with shared values to join together in a celebration of peace and love.”

Really? She hasn’t been at my Thanksgiving dinners. Let’s not mistake a Norman Rockwell painting for the real thing. After all, this holiday got its start in 1621 when the Indians and the white immigrant pilgrims who were trying to steal their land decided to chill for a day and break bread together. According to the history books, it was a bountiful gathering and a good time was had by all. But the next day they went right back to fighting over property rights, a work still in progress 395 years later. (See Standing Rock Sioux v. Dakota Access Pipeline.)

Yet, the original Thanksgiving taught us a remarkably helpful lesson in conflict management. It demonstrated the value of engaging with people whose thoughts, interests or backgrounds are different than our own. It is a lesson well worth heeding today, now more than ever.

I can’t remember a time since the civil rights and Vietnam War struggles of the 1960s when this nation has been more splintered and on edge. Gallup released a poll today showing that 77% of Americans see the country as deeply divided on “the most important values.” That’s the most division Gallup ever measured since it started polling on the question. People were also asked whether they thought Donald Trump would unite or further divide us. Not surprisingly, we are split on that issue as well, with 45% saying he will unite us and 49% predicting more division.

This chasm has been building for some time and runs deep into the country’s psyche. There is no quick fix and it certainly doesn’t need to be relitigated before the pumpkin pie is served. On the other hand, a nation hurting from division will not heal in separation. At some point, we have to start listening to each other. Really listening, not just talking and shouting and interrupting. Hearing each other is the first step toward looking for common ground.

For those of us on the losing end of this election, that’s a tall order. It probably means enduring a smirking gloat and fist pump from a pro-Trump cousin or uncle. A couple of deep breaths will help. So will the silent recollection of two consecutive Obama victories when you all somehow made it through dinner without acts of violence. We have four long, rough years ahead of us in this tug-of-war over America’s values. It just seems so incredibly sad to start the journey by avoiding family members who didn’t vote the way we did. If there was enough love and connection to establish a Thanksgiving ritual together, there ought to be a way to enjoy another joyous meal in that company, regardless of the Electoral College vote count.

If we can’t bridge this political divide in our families, we’re going to have a real tough time pulling this country back together. I’m not sure just when it was that we started to segregate ourselves by thoughts and beliefs. It’s happened with cable news, and political websites and social media. As the Washington Post noted recently, it has happened with D.C. bars and restaurants. Bipartisan social gatherings were once commonplace among the city’s politicos, but now they tend to drink and dine by party affiliation. Nobody is listening to the other side, and the outcome has been legislative intransigence.

So why not start small this Thanksgiving? Don’t cancel plans to feast in a mixed partisan gathering. Let us all gather together, the elites and the deplorables, with good cheer and low expectations, with a vow to listen more and proselytize less. And if all that fails, turn on the football game.

Happy Thanksgiving!

WHERE HAS ALL THE REAL NEWS GONE?

As if we didn’t have enough to feel crappy about on this first Trump Nation Thanksgiving, it now appears that fake news is in and real news is on its way out. Given the populace’s disgust and disdain for the news media, there may not be a lot of tears shed over this development. But there should be. The newspaper industry has been suffering an agonizingly slow death for more than a decade while its chieftains search for an elusive cure, one that would somehow monetize the real news it’s been giving away for next to nothing. So now, insult joins injury, like a bad Monty Python sketch, as a swarm of mischievous entrepreneurs rake in the dough by making stuff up and calling it news.

Let’s sort this out. As the digital world took off 20 years ago, newspaper companies rushed to put their content online. They had a “Field of Dreams” business model: if we build it, the money will come. They’ve been waiting for Godot ever since. The problem is two-fold. First, newspaper online advertising produces a small fraction of what the print product brought in. Secondly, Google and other search engines swooped up the free news content and fed it to readers with lucrative targeted ads. A search on duck hunting will take you to a newspaper story on the sport, along with ads for shotgun shells and decoys. Google gets the ad revenue and the newspaper that produced the story gets zilch.

As a result of all that, both circulation and advertising for the print product has been in freefall. At least 15 newspapers have closed. Many others killed off the print version and publish only online. More than 20,000 journalism jobs have been eliminated. Nineteen newspapers pulled their journalists from covering the federal government. The number of full time newspaper reporters assigned to cover state government fell by 35%. The retrenchment strategy, of course, has had predictable results. With less news and dumbed down content, even more subscribers and advertisers flee.

Meanwhile, teenagers in Macedonia are raking in $3,000 a day by cranking out totally made up stories on old laptops in their parents’ basements. And they are a mere drop in the bucket when it comes to the burgeoning fake news industry. Gone are the days when only the wealthiest of families – the Hearsts, the Sulzbergers, the Bancrofts, the Grahams – could afford to publish a newspaper. It can now be done without money or real news. One of those Macedonian kids, for example, cobbled together a website in less than an hour and published a fake pre-election story about Hillary Clinton endorsing Donald Trump. He then shared it on Facebook. According to BuzzFeed, it generated 480,000 clicks in a one-week period. Those clicks turn into dollar signs thanks to online advertising networks such as Google AdSense.

To throw some perspective on this 480,000-clicks-in-a-week fake news, BuzzFeed also reports that the New York Times real story on Trump declaring a $916 million loss on his 1995 income taxes generated a mere 175,000 Facebook interactions over a one-month period. Making this phenomena even more absurd is the fact that fake news played a very real role in the campaign. The Washington Post reported last week that some of the campaign issues were the invention of Paul Horner, a passionate Trump detractor who makes his living from click bait advertising fed by his totally fabricated news stories. For example, Horner’s fake blurb about a Trump protester being paid $3,500 by the Clinton campaign went viral on social media, bringing in a nice piece of change for him. It also became a talking point for the Trump campaign which retweeted Horner’s post and blasted Clinton for hiring protesters which, of course, never happened. Despite feeling crestfallen to think his antics might have helped elect Trump, Horner has not abandoned his lucrative career. His “breaking news” about President Obama issuing an executive order for the running of a new election gathered 250,000 Facebook shares in one week.

Back in the real news world, major publishers are bracing for yet another massive round of job cuts. The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, USA Today and its national string of Gannett-owned dailies will eliminate hundreds of very real journalism jobs. That would be a travesty at any point in time. Right now, it is a national tragedy because we are about to inaugurate a president who has a pathologically adverse relationship with the truth. It will take much more than a bunch of Macedonian kids and their laptops to protect our democracy. We need real journalism. And we need it now.

TRUMP NATION ONE WEEK LATER

It’s been a week now since our election earthquake, and true to seismic form, our life has become one aftershock after another. White nationalists, formerly known as bigots, are crawling out of the shadows of the netherworld en route to the West Wing. Muslims, Latinos, blacks and Jews are being brazenly attacked by emboldened racists, freed from their closets by their victorious shake-things-up change candidate. Meanwhile, many on the left are feeling shockwaves from President Obama’s seemingly sanguine acceptance of his successor.

Nobody escaped the severity of these aftershocks, not even the quake’s walking epicenter himself, President-elect Donald J. Trump. According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump left his White House meeting with Obama Friday totally stunned over the depth and breadth of the job he just won. Apparently, it has now dawned on him that this presidency gig may take more than a few 3 a.m. tweets to pull off. Obama has agreed to spend more time mentoring Trump before the inauguration. The president also told reporters he believes The Donald will soften many of his more provocative campaign promises.

The president’s subdued reaction to the guy he once called a “carnival barker,” has riled progressives and prompted a Washington Post think piece to speculate that Obama is still working his way through the denial stage of the grieving process. I think there may be a better explanation: after an eight-year search, Obama finally found a Republican in Washington who will listen to him. As a longtime advocate for special needs students, I wholeheartedly salute this tutoring project.

Unfortunately, I suspect that most of Obama’s lessons will be geared toward procedural matters, maybe with a shot or two at trying to nudge his student’s policy positions slightly forward from deep right field. What Trump desperately needs help with is that other part of the presidency, the one that aims to reach people’s hearts and pull the country together in times of severe distress. You know what I’m talking about. It’s what Obama did after the Charleston church shooting; what George W. Bush did after 9/11; what Bill Clinton did after the Oklahoma City bombing and, what all presidents have done on so many difficult occasions.

No, there has been no terrorist attack, no mass shooting. But large portions of this country are hurting right now. Given his campaign’s vitriol and rhetoric directed at various ethnic and underrepresented groups, the fear and trembling of living in Trump Nation has been rampant everyplace, from elementary schools to college campuses and beyond. For some time now, at least in most communities, overt racism has been a cultural taboo. People have been fired for using the N word. Those who openly attack others based on race, religion, national origin, sexual orientation or gender identity are quickly called on it and ostracized. It’s what most of us call civility and decency. Sadly, there is a faction of Trump voters who see it as a state of political correctness that just died in the electoral college. Unleashed since the election, this cabal has spread its hate and ugliness throughout the land. For example:

In Delaware, a black woman was accosted by four white male Trump supporters boasting how they “no longer have to deal with n*****s.” She said one asked her, “how scared are you, you black bitch? I should just kill you right now, you’re a waste of air.”

In San Jose, a Muslim student said she was attacked from behind in a parking garage by a man who pulled at her hijab and choked her.

In Texas, fliers depicting men in camouflage, wielding guns and an American flag, were distributed throughout Texas State University. Here’s what they said: “Now that our man Trump is elected, (it is) time to organize tar and feather vigilante squads and go arrest and torture those deviant university leaders spouting off that diversity garbage.”

In Maryland, a sign advertising Spanish services at an Episcopal church in Silver Spring was ripped and vandalized with the words, TRUMP NATION WHITES ONLY.”

In a “60 Minutes” interview, Lesley Stahl asked Trump to respond to reports of racist attacks by his supporters. He seemed stunned by the news. Asked by Stahl what he would say to his supporters doing things like that, Trump said, “I would say don’t do it, that’s terrible, because I’m going to bring this country together.” Pressed by Stahl for an even stronger response, Trump tried to crank it up a notch, like he was in a role playing exercise: “I am so saddened to hear that. And I say, ‘Stop it.’ If it—if it helps. I will say this, and I will say right to the cameras: ‘Stop it.’”

Therein lies the problem in elevating to the presidency a man whose only notion of leadership is making decisions and barking orders. Even a city council member in the smallest of towns has a better instinctive feel for reaching out to people and appealing to their better angels. Trump has never had to do anything like that before. He doesn’t know where to begin. He is a fish out of water. What makes it even more sad is that it is in his own interest to reach out to America right now, to condemn the attacks and the racism, to apologize for any hurt he caused in an overzealous campaign moment. No, such an approach wouldn’t change the minds of the never-Trump voters, but it would mitigate his negatives a bit, soften his tone, make him seem a little more human, a little more caring. It’s the thing good leaders do. Unfortunately, it is simply not in his wheelhouse. And that’s one more thing we’re just going to have to get used to here in Trump Nation.

THE ELECTION IS OVER BUT THE REAL FIGHT HAS JUST BEGUN

If there is any certainty in these hazy, wobbly, loopy post-election days, it is this: not only has the Campaign from Hell not ended, it has only just begun. Yes, the electoral maps have been colored adnauseam, and with far too much red. Hillary conceded. Donald accepted. Michelle went high and shared low tea with Melania. But this battle for the heart and soul of America is no more resolved than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It may never end.

Early on that post-election morning of despair, when visualizing the word “President” in front of “Trump” induced projectile vomiting and sudden support for the physician-assisted suicide movement, I frantically searched for something good about this train wreck. Whenever anything bad happened to me as a child, my mother told me to look for the good. It struck me, even when I was 10, as a dubious proposition, something they must teach in mom school. But I was desperate now and would grasp any ray of sunshine I could find. All I came up with was that those annoying daily fund raising emails and phone calls would stop now that the election was over. WRONG!

The first one came from an outfit called “Courageous Resistance,” along with a logo of a black bear and a gold star and, of course, an Armageddon-like plea for cash to stop this “hateful demagogue (who) has risen to power in the United States.” Then came Democracy for America, citing the Trump administration’s threat to our values and ideals, with a red “DONATE” button to click that would conveniently bill the same credit card I used to contribute to the Clinton campaign. They called it a “seamless transition,” clearly the only one of its kind to emerge from this fiasco. I heard from the American Civil Liberties Union, the AFL-CIO, Move On.org, Our Revolution.com, the conservationists, abortion rights advocates, gun control supporters, two LGBT groups and a guy named Marcus who asked if I would install a button on my webpage so folks could donate to a Trump impeachment fund. Clearly Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’ Five Stages of Grief have expanded to include a sixth: fundraising.

Yet, once I shook off my initial cynicism over this solicitation inundation, it occurred to me that, just maybe, my mother was right: there is a silver lining in this tragedy. No, it doesn’t lie in emptying out my bank account for progressive fundraisers. Those donation requests, however, combined to offer an important and powerfully hopeful reminder that our democracy is more than one election. It’s a continual, fluid process and, as such, subject to being shaped by mass movements of agitation, resistance and, yes, sometimes revolution.

That’s not to deny the darkness of this moment. For many of us, no political moment has ever been this bad. A disgustingly divisive, hateful, hurtful, bigoted, bloviated buffoon is about to be sworn in as the 45th president of the United States. What we have to remember, once the tears dry and the self-flagellation wanes, is that this is only a moment. There are new moments coming every day and we have the ability and the power to affect their outcome. To be sure, there will be significant losses in the days ahead. We who care about those in the shadows, and yearn for more diversity and a redistribution of wealth and power, were dealt a really lousy hand last Tuesday. But that doesn’t mean we throw in the cards and call it a night. The challenge is finding the best way to play the hand we were dealt. The groups I heard from are doing just that. They are gearing up to fight in every way they can, just like the protesters who’ve taken to the streets every night since the election.

It’s easy in our malaise to reject such responses as foolish and ineffective, retreating instead into a cocoon of despair. There may be some emotional comfort there, but it is a venue that offers nothing to protect the values we care about. Look, there are really only two givens for Donald Trump right now. One is that he symbolizes everything we despise. The other is, as the Washington Post’s Dan Balz wrote today, this complete uncertainty over what Trump will do as president. It is impossible to predict the future moves of a pathological narcissist, with no semblance of a genuine political philosophy. Less than 48 hours after he won, Trump started backing off some of his campaign promises. Hillary voters aren’t the only ones feeling anxiety.

This election was one of those rare occurrences that instantly guaranteed a dramatic sea change in the course of our nation’s history. In terms of its role as a change agent, It was on a par with Pearl Harbor, President Kennedy’s assassination and 9/11. As with those other seminal events, all we know immediately is that profound change is coming. Just exactly what it will be depends entirely on how everything plays out. Therein lie the moments we can affect, the ones that offer genuine opportunity to make a difference, to write the rest of the story. The immediate thinking in November of 1963 was that hopes for meaningful civil rights reform died along with Kennedy. Yet, thanks to relentless agitation, street protests and the cunning tenacity of a newly installed southern president, a landmark civil rights law was passed nine months later. Nobody in Dallas on November 22, 1963 would have predicted that outcome.

Of course, the partisan politics of that analogy doesn’t hold. Donald Trump is no Lyndon Johnson. The movement politics, however, does follow. It means building a campaign with the embers of our election loss to salvage as much as possible in the not-yet-defined skirmishes we know are coming. Remember Mitch McConnell’s election night pledge of 2008? His number one legislative objective was to deny President Obama a second term? With an effective mass movement built on the visceral passions of the voting majority, we ought to be able reach much higher than that and find effective ways to mitigate as much Trump damage as possible during the years ahead. I think I have just persuaded myself to go back to some of the fund raising emails and make a donation or two. Four years is a long time to go just being sad and angry.

THE MOURNING AFTER BLUES: WHAT NOW?

It’s mourning in America.

After the tumultuous darkness of election night gave way to the light of another day, I reluctantly awoke to a foreboding sense of loss. It wasn’t just that my candidate was defeated and the other one won. That’s what happens in elections, and I am a seasoned veteran at losing them. No, this time was different. This time it was about values, about who we are as a country. This time it was about America’s soul. This time it was about what is in our hearts. To me, the pain of this new day comes from the victory of hate over love, walls over bridges, exclusion over diversity, autocracy over working together.

At least that’s how it looked and felt to me. I readily admit, however, that people voting differently than I did were not all intentionally pulling a lever for hate, disharmony and exclusion. Many of them were voting against a rigged system they saw as beyond dysfunction, one that left them behind, one that is owned and controlled by a moneyed elite that cares nothing about their lives and what has become of them. In other words, many of those in yesterday’s “silent majority” voted out of a world view that was not that different from the one shared by those of us in the minority. We differed on the solution, not on the problem.

I’m still too stunned and broken over this election to even begin to think about how this badly battered and bruised nation can effectively come together in a meaningful way, one that reverses course and helps people build better lives with a more even distribution of opportunities. It has been said the longest journey begins with a single step. I think that step needs to start with how we treat each other. This campaign seemed to boil with an anger unlike any other. It split families, divided friends and damaged relationships. We can – and should – choose to do some repair work for at least two reasons. The obvious one is that relationships are important, regardless of the political divide. Secondly, as noted earlier, there is more common ground than there might appear between our two camps. If we really want meaningful change in how this country is governed, we need to listen to each other again.

In that spirit, and in the unlikely event that any of my Republican friends are reading this, please accept my sincere congratulations on your candidate’s victory. I do have a number of conservative Facebook friends and, to the best of my knowledge, none of them unfriended me during this campaign, nor did I let any of them go. I feel good about that. Respectful disagreement is an essential element in constructive relationships. That’s pretty easy to do in the abstract. We can disagree over tax policy or foreign relations and still have an enjoyable dinner conversation.

But as soon as Donald Trump entered the picture, things got pretty hot and heavy, and it’s been downhill ever since. Of course most candidates have their passionate followers and detractors. That was certainly true of both Hillary Clinton and President Obama. But Trump was a whole different deal, largely because of the sharply conflicting roles assigned to him by his followers and opponents. Many of us could not understand how any rational person would support someone who bragged about forcibly groping women, repeatedly made racist comments and seemed to be utterly unprepared for the presidency. His supporters, on the other hand, saw his candidacy in an entirely different light. To them, Trump’s total otherness, including his bombastic buffoonery, was just what they were looking for in order to turn the entire messed up system on its head. One of the more telling exit polls showed that a quarter of Trump voters said he was not qualified to be president. In fact, as much as they detested Clinton, these Trumpians saw her as more qualified. The point is they were not shopping for a qualified candidate to just keep on keeping on. They wanted everything shook up. While I obviously disagree with that methodology, I do understand it. As much as I came to abhor Trump as a person and a candidate, there is both rationale and precedent for their approach. It’s actually a radical leftist organizing tactic: don’t fix problems in a broken government, make it worse so that it can be replaced with a new system. The big difference, of course, is the Trump folks have no system ready for substitution; they just know that the one we have now must be blown up.

Therein lies an opportunity. Our current government is pretty badly broken. The distribution of wealth and power is way out of whack. People are hurting and there is no sign of help on the way. It does not take great clairvoyant powers to foresee an eventual disillusion with Trump on the part of at least some of his supporters, particularly those waiting for “terrific jobs” and a “fantastic life.” Those goals are consistent with the progressive agenda and only a unified and organized electorate can eventually deliver the votes to make it happen. These folks should not be left behind. It will get worse before it can get better, but our focus has to be on making sure it gets better. We must look past the differences between them and us so we can see the similarities.

As the late great poet, Maya Angelou, wrote:

“I note the obvious differences
between each sort and type,
but we are more alike, my friends,
than we are unalike.”

And as that other late great poet, Joe Hill, wrote:

“Don’t mourn, organize!”

FBI, PIGS AND LIES, OH MY!

There is an old crusty political tale that I first heard more than 40 years ago while covering one of Walter Mondale’s senate campaigns in Minnesota. It may well have been apocryphal, except for the fact it was about Lyndon Johnson, whose biography is far more colorful than most fiction. Here’s Mondale’s story: “Lyndon was in a tight race for Congress and he called his staff together and told them to leak word that his opponent fucks pigs. ‘But, sir, we don’t know that to be true,’ complained a staffer. ‘Okay,’ said Johnson, ‘then, let’s get out a report that he doesn’t fuck pigs. Either way, voters will associate him with pig fucking.’”

That story immediately came to mind this morning as I grabbed the Washington Post off the front step and glanced at the banner headline: “FBI won’t pursue charges against Clinton”. In the Lyndon Johnson’s Texas School of Campaign Pragmatics, there is no difference between “FBI may pursue charges against Clinton” and “FBI won’t pursue charges against Clinton”. Forget about the choice of a modal verb – may or won’t – all that matters are the words “FBI”, “charges” and “Clinton”. Either way, it’s still pig fucking.

So can we now please place a moratorium on any more nauseating stories or op-ed pieces about how much integrity James Comey has, or how he was caught in an untenable position? None of it survives a basic smell test. Based on his own account, the head of the FBI, in a letter to Congressional leaders, publically announced 11 days before the election that the agency was going to investigate emails it had never seen that might, once they were seen, implicate Hillary Clinton in criminal activity. Then, 36 hours before the polls open, Congress’ favorite pen pal strikes again, plagiarizing by paraphrase Gertrude Stein’s declaration that “there is no there there.” Lo and behold, Director Comey announces that criminal charges will not be pursued against the Democratic presidential nominee. And so voters trot off to the polls associating Clinton with dishonesty, corruption and criminal charges.

Sadly and completely unjustifiably, that false narrative feeds Hillary Clinton’s single largest negative character trait with voters. In the major polls released this weekend, Clinton significantly topped Trump in all aspects of the presidency, save for one: trustworthiness. By sizable margins, voters prefer her over him when it comes to personality and temperament, general qualifications, moral character and someone who has an understanding of “problems of people like you.” But when asked which candidate is the most honest and trustworthy, Trump beats Clinton by 44 to 40.

Of course winning a contest where only 44 percent of the people rate you as honest is not exactly something for Trump to slap in his trophy case, perhaps where the Emmy Award he never won would have gone. It is, however, a significant measure of one of the many perception-to-reality gaps in this despicable campaign. Construing the facts in the most unfavorable light from Clinton’s perspective, she was guilty of carelessness and bad judgment in using her private email server while in the State Department and, true to form from a lifetime of right wing persecution, she was slow to own up to the mistake. But none of that even begins to rise to the level of the kind of throw-her-in-jail frenzy Trump and his disciples whip up at their rallies.

Therein lies one of the biggest paradoxes of this campaign. Hillary Clinton loses the honesty vote to Trump only on the basis that he has repeatedly, in a thoroughly dishonest manner, characterized his opponent as corrupt, even threatening to throw her in jail if he is elected. He has never once laid out a set of specific facts constituting evidence of corruption. That’s not the way this guy rolls. He simply constructs his own reality out of thin air. As Lyndon Johnson knew so well, if you say false stuff enough, people begin to believe it. One of the amazing facts of this election season has been that the candidate seen as the most honest is the one who fact checkers say tells the truth only 9 percent of the time, a record low never before seen or approached in the history of political fact checking. Unfortunately, Trump’s campaign of lies had way too many enablers and co-conspirators, including parts of the news media and, of course, James Comey.

The only mitigation in the FBI Director’s deplorable and grossly negligent conduct may come from the fact that this campaign has been conducted so deep inside Lewis Carroll’s rabbit hole that it may well make no discernable difference in the election’s outcome. So far, most polling activity has given credence to that proposition. If, on the other hand, the final results repudiate the pollsters and Clinton loses, Comey needs to be severely punished for his sins. Forcing him to serve four years in a Trump administration ought to be enough to make him deeply regret his inexcusable misdeeds and wish like hell he had become a Texas pig farmer.

WORKING THROUGH THE PAIN OF A HORRENDOUS CAMPAIGN

Pain has been my constant companion these past several months. Like all long-term relationships, it’s had its ups and downs, and now seems to have settled in – for better or worse – as a member of the family. No, this isn’t just about my recent surgeries. I’m also addressing a much greater source of pain: the 2016 presidential election.

There are remarkable similarities and distinctions between the two, the burning and stabbing at the nerve center of my most recent surgical site, and the foreboding fear and angst invoked by a dystopian political campaign of Trumpian proportions. Experiencing both simultaneously was an opportunity for introspective reflection on how the mind processes and copes with negative stimuli. I know that sounds, alternatively, like a bad grad school dissertation subject or a prisoner of war tactic banned by the Geneva Convention. Bear with me. A point will soon emerge.

As frequent visitors to this space know, I’ve spent some time in a medical odyssey of broken ribs and reoccurring tumors large enough to qualify for their own zip codes (here and here). My daily challenge has entailed searches for pain reduction by finding just the right way to sit. A large pillow to the left of me, a smaller one to the right, another behind my back, adjusted ever so slowly and slightly so as to find just the right combination to take me to that wonderful sweet spot, a euphoric moment in time when there is . . . absolutely . . . no . . . pain. It sometimes takes hours for me to get to that place, but once I’ve landed? There is no greater glory to be found. This is pain’s hidden blessing, the bliss that plays the yin to pain’s yang. People sit in chairs every day and feel nothing at all. But when pain has gripped your entire being, clogged all of your senses and shut out the world, only to suddenly disappear once you have arranged your body and pillows in just right way, well, that’s a high unmatched by any opioid. If you don’t believe me, here’s a little experiment you can try at home: Lift one end of a large couch three to five inches from the floor. Place one foot under the couch and drop it. Quickly lift the couch off your foot. Bask now in the momentary delight of instant pain relief!

So picture me, perfectly contorted in my reclining office chair, bathing in the nirvana of painlessness. Careful not to do anything that would unblock my nerve receptors, I slowly extend my right hand to the cordless mouse and double click on Politico’s Playbook. Another woman told her story of being forcibly groped by Donald Trump, who just issued a denial on the basis that she was too unattractive to grope. The crowd cheered and chanted – what else? – “Lock Her Up!” I quickly manage another mouse click to the Washington Post. There’s a picture of a white biker at a Trump rally waving a confederate flag in one hand and, in the other, a sign that says “Blacks for Trump.” Another mouse click to the Real Clear Politics polling site. The average of national tracking polls is within the margin of error.

Through it all, my physical pain remains at bay, but I am overcome now with an entirely different form of trauma, a deeper and darker sense of angst, an existential foreboding that somehow manages to shake the very foundation of. . .well, everything. Never in our lifetime, or before, have we come so close to having as our president a racist, misogynistic autocrat morally and intellectually incapable of leading. This is a much different kind of pain and there aren’t enough pillows or positions to manage it. Earlier this fall, there was some momentary relief in rapid mouse clicking, landing on a really good poll or a story or two about Republicans repudiating their candidate or a particularly poignant rebuke of the latest Trump atrocity. As a last resort, there are always those left-of-center sites like Talking Points, Daily Kos and Teegan that offer some momentary solace, but that’s more by way of escape, denial or support, than meaningful, lasting relief.

Some pain simply demands that it be felt in all of its agony. Dodging or denying it only makes things worse. Trump pain is that kind of pain. His campaign has done exactly what his true believers wanted it to do. They really don’t care what kind of a beast he is. They are disgusted with the status quo and they want Trump to “shake things up.” And that he has done. He has shaken this country and our lives to the rafters. He has shredded the basic values many of us hold dear: democracy, civility, decency, respect, justice, dignity, inclusion and diversity. This is pain that we can’t avoid or turn our backs on.

The challenge will be how to constructively work through that pain after Tuesday’s election. If Trump wins, we must be ready to find effective ways to fight for the values he’s stomped on. If Hillary Clinton wins, we will have dodged a bullet but the pain will linger and the gun will remain loaded. She is the first presidential candidate in history to attract impeachment talk before election day. The biggest challenge, and one of the most important, will be to do what we should have done long ago – reach out to many of those ardent Trumpians, people who have been ignored, neglected or left behind, and pull them into a real movement that addresses their needs without destroying the fabric of this country. That’s a tall order, but it’s the only way of overcoming a deeply embedded pain.

HEY WIKILEAKS: YOUR CREDIBILITY IS LEAKING!

When – and if – the dust settles from this hallucinogenic presidential election, serious news outlets need to rethink the journalistic value of Wikileaks. Once viewed as a noble whistleblower, a digital version of Watergate’s Deep Throat, this unseemly outfit has become an ugly goiter on the body politic.

Founded by Julian Assange in 2006, the organization was devoted to “combating secrecy”, largely by procuring leaked, hacked or otherwise purloined information that shed light on the shadows of unsavory government operations. In 2010, for example, Wikileaks released thousands of classified documents that raised serious questions about the manner in which the United States conducted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was praised by the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) as a “new breed of media that offers important opportunities” for news organizations. That was then. Now is a whole different deal.

Right wing websites have been ablaze this week (here, here and here) with Assange’s promises that his next batch of Hillary Clinton emails will lead to her arrest, just in time for the election. He made that boast from his perch in the Ecuadorian Embassy where he’s got a bed-and-asylum deal protecting him from a Swedish rape charge. Heralding Hillary’s arrest, of course, was the promised capstone of Wikileaks’ summer and fall project: the serialized release of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton’s campaign staff. There seems to be a rare consensus among U.S. intelligence operatives that Russia was responsible for the email hacking. Predictably, Assange would not reveal his source. You cannot, after all, combat secrecy without keeping some secrets. But what he did share with us, through an interview last July with a British television host, was that he absolutely opposes Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and views her as a “personal foe.” He told the interviewer that he would rather see Donald Trump elected.

So let’s review: an avowed political partisan with an ax to grind is dodging rape charges while systematically releasing his political opponent’s private emails that were likely hacked by Russian spies. Compared to the pedestrian position paper stuff I covered as a political reporter in the 1970s, this all seems rather otherworldly. Of course it is a much different world than the Carter v. Ford days of 1976. With the Wide World Web, you don’t have to go to Alice’s Restaurant to get what you want. A flick of the keyboard connects you to endless verbiage on how the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings and the Moon Landing were both staged for political purposes.

The difference here, however, is that serious, responsible media institutions have, with seemingly little forethought, bestowed the banner of credibility on Wikileaks. On a daily basis, the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Politico have been doling out the hacked emails despite an absence of authenticity and, with a few notable exceptions, any meaningful news value. The thinking seems to be that the emails are news simply because they are out there. I don’t seem to remember that standard from journalism school, but I was young then and skipped class a lot.

There is a compelling need for news organizations to step back and seriously think out how they should responsibly treat Wikileaks in the future. It seems abundantly clear that it has changed significantly since the days when the IFJ characterized it as a serious new media outlet. Even without the Russian connection and Julian Assange’s political vendetta, there remains the question of whether responsible news organizations should routinely make public the content of private communication that is otherwise void of substantive value. The vast majority of the published emails rose only to the level of what we baby boomers remember from the ancient days of party line telephones, where you could occasionally hear a neighbor say something that you weren’t supposed to hear.

For political junkies, it’s fun and amusing to read how Clinton campaign director John Podesta totally trashed some party functionary. But the news value is limited. It doesn’t begin to compare to Edward Snowden’s releases concerning the National Security Agency’s secret access to the emails and phone calls of U.S. citizens. Having spent a good chunk of my life in and around newsrooms, large and small, I can tell you that a collection of hacked emails from those places would make fascinating reading. Reporters and their editors are pretty creative when it comes to trashing each other and their rivals.

As the renowned linguist, Deborah Tannen, recently observed in a Washington Post op-ed, we all communicate with at least two voices, public and private. For the sake of civility and relationship preservation, we vent and carry on something fierce about friends, family and coworkers when talking or emailing with a trusted few, and then clean up our acts for broader exposure. If the only value in publishing hacked emails is to destroy that construct, then I think it best to let those who really want to wallow in that kind of muck go directly to the Wikileaks site. Fascination is an insufficient standard for news value. Millions of people are fascinated by pornography, but they don’t get there through the Washington Post or the New York Times.

The only thing about political journalism that hasn’t changed over the years is the relationship between partisan sources and reporters – the users and the used. It is, at once, symbiotic and codependent. It works best when both parties fully comprehend their roles and motives, when journalists weigh and evaluate not just the information given to them but also the sources who provided it. The problem with Wikileaks is that it was once considered a serious news outlet in its own right. That is obviously no longer the case. It is as partisan as those it hacks, and should be treated accordingly.