Tag: Donald Trump

THE ILLUSIVE SEARCH FOR TRUTH IN A TRUMP WHITE HOUSE

We’re not even 100 hours into the Trump presidency and he has uttered a string of foolish, sophomoric lies on mostly trivial subjects, ones that, oddly and pathologically, matter only to him. In other words, whoever had January 21 or 22 in the pool on when this guy would start acting presidential lost. And the rest of the month is not looking any more promising.

Among this weekend’s presidential proclamations:

• There were 1.5 million people at his inauguration, the largest inaugural crowd ever. There were actually about 250,000 people there, dwarfing the 2009 Obama inauguration which drew 1.8 million. The new president’s fabrication became an instant meme; even the Jumbotron at a Dallas hockey game got into the act by flashing, “Tonight’s Attendance: 1.5 Million!”
• After a few rain drops fell at the start of his speech, President Trump said “God looked down and he said we’re not going to let it rain on your speech. The truth is it stopped immediately.” (This was, by the way, the first recorded report of God ever referring to Himself with a plural pronoun.) According to the Washington Post and the National Weather Service, the rain continued during the first several minutes of Trump’s speech.
• The President reported that as soon as he finished his speech, there was a pounding downpour. That simply did not happen according to weather authorities.
• President Trump told career intelligence staffers at the Central Intelligence Agency Saturday that the news media totally fabricated a report that he had been critical of their work. Days earlier, Trump’s own tweets had compared CIA employees to Nazis and made fun of them for having been wrong about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

This singularly bizarre presidential behavior on Trump’s part should come as no surprise, although it will for anyone who held out hope that, somehow, the oath of office would transform him from a narcissistic combatant into a more serious statesperson. After all, against all odds and predictions, Trump now holds the most important job in the free world. Why is he still acting like an insecure adolescent, obsessed with constantly proving himself? The answer would fill a PhD dissertation, and I’m sure several are already in progress.

Unfortunately, unless his staff finds a way of reigning him in, – and prospects for that are extremely low – we will have to adjust to a new normal: a president totally lacking in basic leadership skills. Google the subject and you will immediately find thousands of treatises on the necessity of leaders establishing credibility and being selective in picking their battles (here, here and here). That is foreign terrain to our new president. The size of the inauguration crowd does not matter one iota. If 12 people or 12 million people had showed up, his presidential powers remain the same. Spending the first 50 hours of his presidency in a urination contest over crowd sizes and weather reports makes no strategic sense, particularly when the news media has hard evidence of his falsehoods.

The problem, of course, goes well beyond the immediate issue of crowd counts and weather patterns. What happens when the president’s words really matter? What if he’s talking about the number of American casualties in battle? Or the substance of a trade agreement? Or how many people are without health insurance? Trump’s disregard for the truth is pathological, meaning he lies constantly, whether he needs to or not. The New York Times reported a story from Trump butler Anthony Senecal, who said the president once told someone that the nursery tiles at Mar-a-Lago were made by Walt Disney. Senecal told Trump that was not true. His boss’ response? “Who cares?”

Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard University psychologist, wrote a fascinating book explaining the cognitive process that causes some people to, in effect, create a false reality and believe it is true. In his book, “Stumbling on Happiness,” Gilbert laid out such a thought process. A person knowingly exaggerates an observation to match a fantasy or an expectation. Most people, he said, then differentiate between the fantasy and the actual situation. But some, Gilbert writes, repeat the exaggeration so often that they come to believe it.

Mix that scenario with what Trump, in his autobiography, “The Art of the Deal,” called “truthful hyperbole,” and you have a recipe for converting the imagination into reality. Here is what Trump wrote in that book: “People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration—and a very effective form of promotion.” 

Its innocence, however, quickly dissipates when you lose the ability to distinguish reality from fantasy, particularly when your job description includes access to the nuclear codes. Hang onto your seats. This is going to be a long, bumpy ride.

PUSSIES, POETRY AND A BLANK FROM THE PAST

There is a fascinating fracas in the heartland. It’s stirring the nostalgic juices of all of us ink-stained geezers, who periodically look up from our laptops and long for that rancid smell of crusty old newsrooms, complete with pica poles, glue pots and hungover editors in green shaded visors, an unfiltered cigarette hanging from their lips. From a production standpoint, today’s journalism is barely recognizable to anyone who got their first byline in the ‘60s or ‘70s. The printed page is on a death watch. Digital rules. Video trumps words. Content is designed for a smart phone screen. Nobody yells “Stop the presses!” anymore.

But just when you’ve accepted the fact that this vintage newspaper culture is confined to “The Front Page”, now in a limited Broadway engagement starring Nathan Lane, along comes a throwback to the days of old. It brought back so many memories, only 37 years of twelve-stepping kept me from reaching for a back-pocket flask to toast the moment.

This wonderful oldie-but-goodie appeared in a recent Minneapolis Star-Tribune story about the censorship of a poem titled “A Prayer for P–––––s.” That is exactly the way the newspaper identified the title. Millennials reading that story may have thought it was a word game. The censored poem’s title was a Prayer for a seven letter word starting with “p” and ending with “s”. Hmm. Prayer for Papists? Prayer for Pasties? How about, with apologies to those with allergies, Prayer for Peanuts? No? Then, maybe Prayer for Piggies, Pouters, Psychos or Pushers? Or even Prayer for Pundits, Punters, Pygmies or Phonics?

Of course, those of us old enough to remember the golden days of print journalism knew in a nostalgic instant that the alliterated prayer could only be for. . . drumroll please. . .ready? PUSSIES! The censored poem was “A Prayer for Pussies.” The blanks were a throwback to an era when newspapers strove to protect pure and innocent eyes. Newsrooms were odd places back then. Profanities, dirty words and foul language were part of the constant banter, but there was a sacredness about the printed word and editors made sure that the bad ones never ended up in their paper. Granted, it was news when a senator told a colleague to perform an anatomically challenging act on himself. In print, it came out as “Go f––k yourself.”

Enough of memory lane, let’s get back to pussies. A well-known Minnesota writer and artist, Junauda Petrus, was commissioned by the City of Minneapolis to write a poem to be encircled around one of 12 globe-shaped metal lanterns as part of the redesign of a downtown mall. Seizing on the uniqueness of this political moment, Petrus converted the presidential campaign’s infamous Donald Trump-Billy Bush exchange into an artfully crafted ode to the power of womanhood. She called it “A Prayer for Pussies,” figuring that a country that just elected a president who boasted about grabbing them couldn’t possibly object to praying for them.

Alas, she was wrong. Minneapolis officials decided that, as progressive as their city might be, hanging a “Prayer for Pussies” lantern in front of Macy’s Department Store might be pushing the envelope just a tad. Petrus’ poem was rejected and the resulting censorship flap was the entire basis for the Star-Tribune story. Unfortunately for readers, the piece looked like a Wheel of Fortune game board, waiting for Vanna White to start turning letters. The reporter did a solid job of telling both sides, but the nostalgic ‘60s edits were tantamount to an endorsement of the city’s censorship decision. Take a look, for example, at this otherwise pithy quote from the poet, comparing her art to Trump’s, eh, “locker room” behavior: “If he can feel bold to not only say the word ‘p––––,’ but make it a philosophy to grab for women, I can fricking write a poem that is adding sacredness and having love around the idea of praying for p–––––s.”

It’s 2017, people. The word pussy isn’t going to hurt anyone. A news story based entirely on a controversy over the use of a word needs to spell it out. Without blanks. Still, the flap was amusing and it took me back to my very early years as a reporter on a small town newspaper. During a heated council meeting, a colorful local mayor called the police chief a “goddamn suck hole.” The chief sued the mayor for slander. After lengthy litigation, a judge dismissed the suit on the basis that the term “goddamn suck hole” was so lacking in substantive meaning that it could not rise to the level of slander because nobody knew what it was.

Through it all, the newspaper referred to the alleged slanderous term as “g–––––n s––– h–––.” Many readers actually cut the articles out of the paper, filled in the blanks and mailed them in. Most of them got it wrong. The top vote getter was “goddamn shit head,” which, had it been uttered by the mayor, would have presented the court a more difficult set of facts. Other readers, baffled by all the blanks, called the newspaper and demanded to know the censored term. As a result, a young newsroom receptionist sat for weeks at her desk, telephone in hand, repeating over and over, “goddamn suck hole.” It was a strange ethical system: you could say it, but you couldn’t print it, even though a judge found that it had no meaning.

Of course, we now have an even stranger ethical system. For the next four years, the band will be playing Hail to the Chief for a man who grabs women by their pussies, while a poet who wants to pray for them is forever banned. As we used to say back in the day, that is really f––––d up.

POST ELECTION BLUES? YOU’LL FIND NO ESCAPE IN FLORIDA

Having just returned from a protracted stay in Florida, I’m still trying to untangle the state’s incongruous dualism. There is nothing more radiant than ocean waves glistening under a January sun. Yet, you don’t have to venture far from the beach to find a sea of tacky souvenir shops offering, in almost parody fashion, blow-up sea urchins and plastic alligator heads that glow in the dark. They can be ignored if you try hard enough, focusing instead on the elegant palm trees and luscious greenery adorning Florida’s highways and byways. Then again, such aesthetic vegetation is interspersed with gigantic billboards, split evenly between adult sex shops and personal injury lawyers. Florida folks are pragmatic. If a marital aid breaks at an inopportune time, they know who to call for punitive damages.

And then there’s politics. Florida and its 29 electoral votes have long been the southern belle of presidential elections, drawing more attention than any state below the Mason-Dixon line, and most of them above it. Its hanging chads took center stage in the 2000 legal battle that ended with the U.S. Supreme Court decision handing the presidency to George W. Bush. President Obama carried the state in 2008 and 2012. Two of the supporting actors in last year’s Republican primary drama – Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio – are Floridians. But Donald Trump beat them both and went on to capture the state’s electoral prize in November. With that sometimes-you-win-and-sometimes-you-lose background, you’d think Florida voters would be in a Que Sera, Sera kind of place over the pending Trump inauguration.

That’s decidedly not the case. The most dramatic evidence of the deep personal tension felt by many Floridian liberals came in an unlikely venue. Micanopy is a small, beautifully peaceful, antediluvian town a few miles south of Gainesville. Its main drag is filled with shops selling crafts, antiques and home furnishings. We spent an hour in one of those stores and drew an occasional glance from the owner, who undoubtedly marked us as out-of-towners. She approached us after the other customers had left and asked where we were from. Upon learning that we lived a few miles outside of Washington, D.C., she withdrew into a brief and pensive silence. After mentally calculating the political demographics, she took a chance.

“I just don’t know what to do,” she told us. “This whole thing with Trump. I’ve never been so scared.” My wife, Melissa, and I nodded and smiled, much to the store owner’s relief.
“Oh, thank God,” she said, “I figured you were safe. You just never know. So many customers are for Trump. It’s just awful. I can’t let on and I don’t even want to talk to them. I’ve never been through anything like this. My candidates have lost in the past and life goes on. But this time is different. I am scared of this guy. Some of his supporters scare me even more. The day after the election, I thought I would close the shop and sell the business so I wouldn’t have to deal with them. But it’s been my life. I don’t know what to do.”

It’s not just a Florida thing. New York City is offering employees counseling services and other support for dealing with Trump’s election. Therapists throughout the nation have reported an overwhelming caseload of patients needing help with their anxiety and depression over the incoming Trump administration. Staffers at the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline say they have been swamped with calls from people in deep distress with feelings of hopelessness and betrayal over the election.

It’s a safe bet that this level of angst has to do with more than differences of opinion over tax policy or climate change. By campaigning against what he called “political correctness,” Trump, intentionally or unintentionally, validated the misogyny, racism and homophobia that progressives have been fighting for decades. For people affected by identity politics, this is deeply personal.

A man who sexually assaulted women and made disparaging comments based on race, religion and nationality will become president of the United States by the end of the week. A bully who delights in punching below his weight and demeaning anyone who gets in his way will soon be the leader of the free world.

Those of us who are bothered by our new reality have been counseled by Trump voters to “get over it and move on.” They are half right. We will never – and should never – get over the fact that our new president is the antithesis of the character and values we struggled to instill in our children: kindness, inclusiveness, fairness, decency and honesty. He is who he is. We need to accept that and move on. As of 12:01 p.m. Friday, we’re playing for keeps. It’s no longer about obnoxious early-morning tweets or a Fox news soundbite. Now it’s about policies and programs, legislation and executive orders. We who believe that America’s greatness lies in its diversity, including all of those struggling in the shadows, need to focus on keeping our dream alive.

Yes, this week’s inauguration represents one of the finest attributes of America’s unique democracy: the peaceful transfer of power based on the will of the electorate. Yet, another equally powerful piece of our system is one that allows citizens to rise up in agitation and peaceful protest when leaders betray the values and principles that made our country great. That’s why Saturday’s Women’s March on Washington is just as important to this inauguration as Friday’s swearing in.

Although our candidate lost, her campaign theme continues to thrive. Starting with Saturday’s march, and continuing every day for the next four years, we are, indeed, Stronger Together.

LET’S GUARANTEE AN ANNUAL INCOME FOR EVERY AMERICAN

Here is a radical notion that deserves serious attention: guarantee every adult citizen an annual income for life. This socialist-sounding plan has not exactly received a Palm Sunday reception from the mainstream political class. There are encouraging signs, however, that it will eventually reach the table of public policy, as soon as we admit that there is no magic bullet of a jobs program that will cure the cancer of income disparity.

As noted here earlier this week, our country’s employment problem is chronic and structural. It’s not about a lack of jobs; it’s about jobs that don’t pay enough to support the middle class. That’s why, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, nearly half of recent college graduates are underemployed in jobs not requiring a degree and not paying much above minimum wage. A jobs program will do little to resolve this dilemma. Technology now allows companies to produce products and services with far fewer workers than in the past. Since capitalism is all about maximizing return on investment, this trend is not only unstoppable, it’s growth is a certainty.

The basic concept of a guaranteed annual income, or GAI, is simple. People would get a monthly allotment from the federal government, just like Social Security except that the payments start at 21 instead of 62. Like any public policy, the meat and the meaning of the program lie in the details. For example, some conservatives, including the American Enterprise Institute’s Charles Murray, have proposed replacing entitlements like Social Security and Medicare with a GAI starting on a citizen’s 21st birthday. Murray’s proposal, recently laid out in the Wall Street Journal, would give everyone $13,000 a year. They could earn up to $30,000 annually without a reduction in their GAI payments. That benefit would then be incrementally reduced until it reached $6,500 a year at the point of someone having an annual pay rate of $60,000 or more. Murray’s scheme would also eliminate every current social welfare program, including food stamps, housing subsidies and Medicaid, in exchange for lifetime cash payments.

As you might have guessed, the math of Murray’s plan is not all that progressive. The trade-off for a GAI, namely the elimination of every entitlement and welfare program, is a net loss for the middle class. A good counterproposal from the left might be to keep all current programs in place and give everyone making less than $60,000 a year an annual payment of, say, $30,000. And then look for middle ground. The significance of Murry’s piece in the Journal is that a leading thinker on the right acknowledged a truth still denied by most elected leaders, namely that our world has changed so much because of technology that we can no longer cling to the work ethic that has driven economic thought for the past 200 years. Wrote Murray, ”. . .it will need to be possible, within a few decades, for a life well lived in the U.S. not to involve a job as traditionally defined.”

That is precisely the lens we need to be looking through in search of a long-term solution to our employment problem. The concept of a GAI is not new. It was a popular issue in the early 1970s, supported by Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern and, to a limited extent the guy who beat him, Richard Nixon. The hurdle it could never clear was that such payments would be an incentive not to work and, therefore, an impairment to the country’s productivity. We are in a different place now. Productivity can be achieved by robots and software programs. Why not raise taxes on the billionaire investors profiting from this new paradigm and return a dividend of sorts in the form of a GAI to the folks adversely impacted by the change?

As radical as it may sound, it is not terribly different in form or substance from the ad hoc corporate socialism doled out under our current system. Existing federal welfare payments are making it possible for large corporations to employ low wage workers with no benefits. In just one example, identified by Forbes, Walmart employees receive $6.2 billion a year in federal public assistance through food stamps, Medicaid and subsidized housing. This is precisely the same policy transaction incorporated in the GAI; low-paid workers subsidized through federal funds. It’s a win for the worker, the employer and the economy.

It’s also the same concept used by Donald Trump and Mike Pence in persuading Indiana’s Carrier Corporation not to move 800 jobs to Mexico. In exchange for keeping those jobs in Indiana, Carrier got $7 million in tax credits and other incentives, another form of a government employment subsidy, and quite an expensive one at that. The epilogue of that story, by the way, shows how badly we need a comprehensive solution to this problem. Part of the agreement was that Carrier would invest another $16 million in its Indiana plant, supposedly earnest money showing its commitment to American jobs. A few days ago, company executives said a portion of that investment will be used to automate the plant so that more jobs can be eliminated.

Structural problems need structural solutions, not sloppy patchwork fixes. It’s time for policy makers to accept the fact that employment alone is no longer a sufficient engine to drive our economy. It’s also time for all of us to rethink just what it means to lead a good life, recognizing that self-worth is not tied to a paycheck. The most direct route to that destination is a guaranteed annual income.

THE EMPLOYMENT PROBLEM: IT’S ABOUT THE PAY, NOT THE NUMBER OF JOBS

My New Year’s wish for serious policy makers is that they abandon the illusion that the economic problems of the middle class can be fixed by the right jobs program. The simple truth is that technology has wiped out millions of good-paying jobs, and millions more are on the chopping block. Most are not coming back, and those that do will be at a much lower pay rate. The result has been a severe widening of the income gap between workers and investors, between capital and labor. In the space that follows, I will outline the current employment problem and show how it resulted from deep structural economic changes, as opposed to cyclical alterations that might well be modified by a federal job creation effort. Later this week, I will take up the matter of what to do about it.

Our elected leaders are still in deep denial over the seismic structural shift that has profoundly altered the nature of employment in this country. In their view, the job market took a severe jolt from the 2008 recession and a couple bad trade agreements. They see that unemployment is down now and pretend that everything will be fine once we bring those lost jobs back to our shores. As hopeful as the premise is, there is absolutely no evidence to support it.

The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that manufacturing output is now close to the prerecession level, but 1.5 million factory jobs appear to be lost for good. Compounding the problem is the fact that a large number of the jobs that did come back pay significantly less than they once did. As the Journal put it, automation technology now allows manufacturers to “function, and even thrive with fewer employees than ever before.”

Here is just one example of how this playing out, as reported by the Los Angeles Times: A Michigan company called Ranir moved its electric toothbrush manufacturing plant to China. A few years later, in an attempt to lower labor costs even further, it retuned one-fifth of that production to Grand Rapids. This is precisely the kind of move that Donald Trump has made the cornerstone of his job creation pledge in his effort to make America Great Again. In fact, Ranir is cranking out 13,000 American made toothbrush heads a day for Wal-Mart and other retailers. The work, however, entails only four actual humans whose jobs involve monitoring the computers that control the robots that are doing the actual work. This is the new industrial food chain: from well-paid American workers, to low-paid Chinese workers, to no-pay robots. Clearly, the days of $25-an-hour manufacturing jobs as a mainstay of our economy have ended. The plants may return from off-shore, but the jobs aren’t coming with them.

The nation’s 1.7 million truck drivers, many making $70,000 a year or more with full medical benefits, will likely be the next large group to be replaced by technology. In another decade, perhaps sooner, the trucking industry is banking on having employee-free fleets of driverless vehicles. High on the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ list of jobs endangered by technology is that of mail carrier, once a highly sought lifetime guarantee of economic security. Also vulnerable, says the BLS, are radio announcers and disc jockeys who are being replaced by automated playlists. Same goes for newspaper reporters, a job class already reduced by more than 30% due to the product’s digital platform. The BLS sees further reductions as a result of the ability of computers to generate stories, a process currently in limited use by the Associated Press. Even insurance underwriters are going the way of the dinosaur, replaced by software programs. These, and many more good middle class jobs like them, are heading for extinction, with no apparent successor in sight.

What does that mean for our economy? Try wrapping your head around this statistic: The average annual pre-tax salary for the bottom half of American workers (by income) is $16,197. That’s only $1,000 a year above what a teenager working 40 hours a week at McDonalds makes, based on the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. In other words, our problem is not an absence of jobs; it’s the lack of jobs that pay well. Unrestrained, free market capitalism has run amok. Corporations are making gigantic profits with minimal labor costs, thanks to mechanized, non-human production.

Statistically, we are now approaching full employment. Yet, the average worker on the bottom half of the income range is paid close to the poverty level, an amount almost identical to what it was 40 years ago. Meanwhile, those in the top 10% of that pay range saw their income increase by 231% over the same period. There isn’t a jobs program proposed by Donald Trump or anyone else that even pretends to close that gap. On Wednesday, I will discuss a potential solution for this dilemma. Please stay tuned.

WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE OVER RUSSIA’S THEFT OF OUR ELECTION?

The biggest guessing game in Washington right now is what it will take for the Democrats to throw a major league temper tantrum over the antics of the incoming administration. How about a conclusion by the CIA and FBI that Russian espionage helped elect Donald Trump? Wait, that actually happened, didn’t it? It was easy to miss because the reaction from the loyal opposition was more of a whimper than a wail.

House Democratic leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., normally no shrinking violet when it comes to pitched rhetoric, responded to the bombshell with these uncharacteristically modulated sentences: “This is not (about) overturning this election. This is about making sure it doesn’t happen again.”

In the Senate, incoming Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, said the unanimous consensus by the country’s top intelligence agencies that Russia interfered in the election to help Trump win was “simultaneously stunning and not surprising.” He and Pelosi then pushed for a bipartisan congressional investigation. Watergate and 9/11 eventually had their investigations, but they were preceded by well-deserved rhetorical flourishes aimed at setting a moral tone for the country.

Obviously, such an inquiry is necessary. But from the standpoint of leveraging power and public opinion in dealing with Team Trump, particularly as a minority party, it is far from sufficient. I’ve never been an advocate of frivolously jumping into battles. Anger is not a strategy, but used sparingly and selectively, it can be an effective tactic, particularly when laced with a dose or two of righteous indignation. Given the enormity of evil associated with Russian spies pressing their fingers on the scales of our democracy, it’s hard to think of a better time to let loose with that tactic. As Rabbi Hillel so wisely and rhetorically asked, “If not now, when?”

Now is the time for Democratic leaders to fan out to the networks and cable shows, talking points in hand. Now is the time for them to scream from the rooftops about an election that was stolen from the American people. Now is the time to avoid mincing words. It’s time to call Donald Trump out as Vladimir Putin’s puppet, the candidate backed by the Kremlin’s finest chicanery. Now is the time to take to the streets, not because we don’t like Donald Trump, but because his election was rigged by the Russians and, therefore lacks legitimacy.

One of the first things I learned as a union negotiator is that if your side is suffering a power deficit, as ours always did, you have to find a way to create power. Right now, through a confluence of circumstances, Democrats, who are sorely lacking in political power, have an opportunity to gain leverage. But they have to rise above their post-election shell shock and timidity. Russian spies helped elect Donald Trump, for God’s sake. Why tiptoe around it? If nothing else, a strong offense could pull Trump off his transition game, sending him into late night Twitter defense, a play that brings a cringe to even his most ardent supporters. Better yet, it could build enough steam for the Senate to torpedo the confirmation of Putin’s buddy, Rex Tillerson for Secretary of State.

There is power in the moral high ground. It captures peoples’ hearts and minds, rallying them to a noble cause. No, it is not likely to stop a Trump presidency. But it can alter the narrative. And as we learned from this election, the right narrative delivers power. Instead of the outsider riding into Washington on his white horse to shake everything up, we can make it about Russian skullduggery producing a U.S. president who had 2.8 million fewer votes than Putin’s nemesis, Hillary Clinton. To those who say, “Get over it. Trump won; he is our president,” a reminder is in order. Barack Obama won in 2008 and 2012, by much wider electoral vote margins and without interference from a foreign adversary. Yet, the legitimacy of his presidency was challenged by Republicans from Day 1, all on the basis of utter balderdash. Every blatantly false claim imaginable – from being a Muslim to his birth in Kenya – was used to challenge the authenticity of the country’s first black president.

Although despicable, the Republican strategy was effective. It weakened his administration, particularly in the early years. Democrats may be hesitant to follow that path because it left such a stench in the political atmosphere. But there is one huge difference between then and now, namely a genuine, real life, honest-to-God basis to challenge the legitimacy of the 45th president.

FBI Director James Comey, a Republican and obviously no friend of Hillary Clinton, today joined the CIA and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper in declaring that Russia’s interference in the election was done to help Trump win. Couple those findings with Putin’s autocratic history as a dictator who has had his political opponents imprisoned and murdered, and you have a compellingly strong basis upon which to challenge the legitimacy of this president.

Unfortunately, the Democratic response has been limited to meekly calling for an investigation, as if we were dealing with some sort of bureaucratic screw up, as opposed to one of the most extraordinary events in our political history. The party’s leaders are understandably in a bit of post-election disarray right now. For the sake of the country, they need to quickly get past it. And then work up some passionate outrage over Russia’s theft of our election.

TRUMP DROPS A DIME ON CHRISTIE TO PROTECT THE RUSSIANS

In trying to defend the Russians against accusations of hacking the Democrats’ emails, Donald Trump first suggested that the culprit could be a 400-pound guy “sitting on his bed.” Now he says it might have “been a guy in New Jersey.” Put the clues together, people. Trump is clearly fingering Chris Christie. There just aren’t that many 400-pound New Jersey Republicans with a propensity for dirty tricks. (See Bridgegate.)

Pity the poor governor from the Garden State. Once the GOP’s king of the hill, before being vanquished by the president-elect, Christie spent all fall clinging to Trump like a hostage to his captor. He was rewarded for his blind subservience by the then-dubious distinction of heading up Trump’s transition team. Of course that was back when not even The Donald thought he would ever have anything to actually transition to. Within days of his unanticipated victory, Christie was summarily transitioned out. He has now been reduced to playing Trump’s imaginary foil in his unwavering and unnerving defense of Vladimir Putin. Poor Chris Christie. He was, for one brief shining moment, a credible presidential candidate. Now, to Trump, he’s a just a fat guy sitting on his bed in New Jersey, tying up bridge traffic and hacking John Podesta’s emails.

Fantasy? Sure, but it’s not all that far outside the realm of our new normal. Is it just me, or does our new normal really resemble a bad dream sequence, or maybe an old “Twilight Zone” episode? The first half of the weekend was devoted to an esoteric battle between the CIA and the FBI over whether Russia interfered with our presidential election in order to help Trump win or just to mess with us. The second half was filled with Trump defending the Putin crowd from any wrongdoing and preparing to nominate as secretary of state an oil company executive with close ties to Russia.

I keep having flashbacks to my elementary school years. At precisely 1 p.m. central time on the first Wednesday of every month, an air raid siren went off and we had to crawl under our desks until it stopped. This was how we prepared for a Russian attack. It was traumatic for me. I was too big to fit under my desk, so I sort of curled up next to it, certain that I would be the first to die when the bombs started dropping. Fast forward 60 years: these sneaky Russians have moved on from bombing elementary schools to screwing with our elections.

I get the fact that the cold war is over, but Putin’s regime has been a stubbornly unpleasant thorn in our side for years. The Washington Post’s incredible reporting Friday that the CIA has evidence of Russia’s interference in our presidential election was blockbuster stuff. It was almost enough for me to crawl under my desk. I could fit there now but am way too old and arthritic to get up again.

There was a time, not all that long ago, when credible reports of Russian election tampering would have triggered a strong, swift bipartisan response on the part of our country’s political players. And the Republicans would have been out front banging the war drums. Yet it took Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell more than 48 hours to issue this remarkably tepid statement: “The Russians are not our friends.” His initial reaction to the Post’s report was to express doubt over the accuracy of the CIA’s findings, echoing with subdued language the more verbosely articulated sentiment of President-elect Trump who called the claim of Russian interference “ridiculous.” By this morning, however, McConnell reversed course and supported the call for a congressional investigation.

Of course, long-time Republican Russian critics like Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham were not swayed by Trump’s affinity for Putin. Both were quick to criticize Russian interference and call for a thorough investigation. Neocon hawk and former UN Ambassador John Bolton would have ordinarily joined that chorus. However, he is now looking for a top state department job in the new administration. He told Fox News that he thinks the Russian election flap may be a “false flag” planted by the Obama Administration in order to rile the Russians. That motion appeared to die for lack of a second.

That pretty much leaves Trump and his hangers-on sticking with the Russia-can-do-no-evil position. Putin is one of the few players on the world stage never to get so much as a vindictive late night tweet from the incoming president. Trump is fond of recalling how Putin once described him as brilliant. If that’s all it takes to influence this administration, O.J. Simpson should get himself a thesaurus of superlatives and a pardon application. And when he’s done, he should pass them both on to poor old Chris Christie.

PROTECTING WORKERS FROM A NEW FOXX IN THE HOUSE OF LABOR

In keeping with what headline writers are calling our new “post-factual” world, Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-NC, the incoming chair of the House labor committee told Reuters this week that unions are no longer needed because there are so many laws in place to protect workers. Her assertion approximates the level of accuracy in the absurd and discredited claim that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex slave ring out of a D.C. pizza joint.

The way things are going right now, it would not be a surprise if some disgruntled worker marched into the district with an AK-47, demanding that Fox’s committee enforce his right to a dental plan and paid vacation. The truth of the matter is that those rights don’t exist without a union contract. As they used to say in this town during the days of civility, the Distinguished Committee Chair from the Great State of North Carolina is badly mistaken.

The United States has always taken a minimalist approach with respect to protective labor legislation, giving wide berth to market forces (also known as managerial discretion) and collective bargaining in determining an employer’s workplace practices. Since union penetration in the private sector is hovering between six and seven percent, that means the vast majority of the country’s workers are pretty much at their bosses’ mercy when it comes to pay, working conditions and job security.

Yes, there are some minimal guarantees and protections imposed by law, but they are a drop in the bucket compared to what most other industrialized countries have done to protect workers. For example, the last major piece of protective labor legislation in the United States was the Family and Medical Leave Act. Adopted in 1993, it required employers to give their workers up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave a year to care for sick family members or themselves. Most other countries mandate more than 12 weeks of fully paid leave for the same purpose.

Throughout Europe, employees are protected by law from unfair discharges. A worker is able to contest a firing before a government tribunal or an appointed neutral third party. Discharged European employees are entitled to severance pay by law. The United States is the only country adhering to the common law principle of “employment at will,” meaning that, absent a union contract or a claim of discrimination, workers can be fired for any reason or for no reason. There is no law mandating severance pay.

The new House labor chair certainly can’t be talking about pay when suggesting that legal protections for workers have eliminated a need for unions. The current federal minimum wage is an utterly unlivable $7.25 an hour. The battle for a $15 an hour minimum has been spearheaded by organized labor and has had success in a limited number of very progressive blue states and municipalities. Ironically, two days after Rep. Foxx talked about the abundance of legal protections for workers, President-elect Donald Trump nominated as his labor secretary a fast food company CEO opposed to increasing the minimum wage.

As the head of the Carl’s Jr hamburger chain, Labor Secretary-to-be Andy Puzder found himself on the receiving end of countless DOL complaints over the firm’s alleged failure to comply with the country’s exceedingly low standards on pay and work hours. This is not a guy who is apt to obliterate the need for unions by forcing companies to treat their workers fairly. He has already indicated he wants nothing to do with the Obama labor department’s move to nearly double the wage threshold for overtime eligibility. A new rule was set to take effect Dec. 1 requiring employers to pay time-and-a-half for more than 40 hours in a week to nearly everyone making under $47,476 a year. That would have meant a raise for more than 4.2 million employees. However, the rule change was held up by a last-minute injunction from a federal judge in Texas. Nobody expects the Trump administration to pursue an appeal.

On the other end of the spectrum from those forced to work more than 40 hours a week is a growing contingency of part-time workers who toil below the safety net of most government regulations. A recent study showed that the number of people involuntarily working part time because they could find no other work has increased by 44.6 percent since the pre-recession level of 2007. In most cases, this means lower pay, no benefits and a constantly shifting work schedule that makes it almost impossible for these employees to hold a second part-time job to make ends meet. With the exception of a few cities like Seattle and San Francisco, no government entity has seriously attempted to protect these folks.

Despite the false campaign-induced hopes of many in the beleaguered working class, it is abundantly clear that the Trump-Puzder-Foxx team is not about to enact new protections for workers. Instead, they will attempt to weaken or eliminate the few that are now in place. That means, with all due respect to Congresswoman Foxx, the only real protections for employees will be those they and their unions manage to negotiate. With this corporate crowd in charge, the need for labor unions and collective bargaining has never been stronger.

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!