The Zeitgeist

Donald and Melania Trump voting in New York on November 8, 2016

Trump Win Proves the Election and System isn’t “Rigged”

Note: This appeared originally on The Huffington Post on November 9, 2016

The election wasn’t rigged.

Confounding the pollsters, the pundits, the media and conventional wisdom, Donald J. Trump, entertainer, entrepreneur and real estate developer was elected as the next President of the United States.

Improbably, a billionaire became the voice of the common man having run a populist campaign pledging to give voice to the ignored, the dispossessed and disenfranchised – those left behind in the high tech revolution, those passed over in the massive cultural changes of the past dozen years, those who felt palpable insecurity with the evaporation of much manufacturing, the explosion in health care costs and those who tired of accommodation and appeasement of violent Islamic extremists.

Trump put together a victory without the benefit of carrying the Northeast or the West Coast – the Trump win was a win for the “Flyover States,” as the middle of the country is sometimes derisively dismissed by the coastal elites. It was also a win for Texas and Dixie – the South rose up to repudiate an increasingly liberal and progressive vision of America as embodied by eight years of President Obama. Even Florida narrowly slipped out of the Democrats’ grasp. This is the first presidential election in perhaps a century that was accomplished without winning New York, Illinois or California.

The Trump win can be compared in to Richard Nixon’s in 1969 when Spiro Agnew’s “Silent Majority,” the everyday folks ignored by the media ushered in GOP rule as a reset to America’s “cultural revolution” of the 1960s. Trump’s victory also has echoes of Andrew Jackson – a sometimes vulgar and coarse blunt-speaking, hard-charging guy who eventually also overcame the disgust of the entrenched elites of his day and the dynastic entitlements of the Adams (John and John Quincey) family.

A majority of American voters were just not that into Hillary. Never an especially likeable figure and never an especially good retail politician, Hillary oozed aristocratic entitlement and fixed, smoke-filled room inevitability, which is why Obama was able to beat her in 2008 and why Bernie Sanders came awfully close in this primary season. That it was “her time” and “her turn” didn’t resonate with most folks.

In a sense it really was FBI Director James Comey who put Trump over the top. With his campaign swooning in the polls just two weeks ago, Comey’s letter to Congress about Huma Abedin’s laptop and more Clinton emails was the tipping point for many Americans. No matter that just before balloting Mr. Comey cleared Hillary yet again, the sense of many people was that Hillary was slippery, untrustworthy and dishonest. That Trump was able to maintain two weeks of self-discipline, stay on message and not go off the cliff on irrational Twitterized tangents made a big difference for many undecided voters.

Finally, the Trump victory also shows that the path for Republican majorities is in part paved with stifling discourse about people’s bodies and people’s bedrooms. Trump was heavily reticent on abortion and highly tolerant of the LBGT community, two areas of often strident posturing by GOP candidates in the past. People just want more tolerance and want candidates focused on big picture issues, not what goes on in their boudoirs.

Mr. Trump gets a solid GOP majority in the House and a secure one in the Senate along with winning The White House. A big mandate to roll-back much of the past eight years. Now all the kids have to play well together to get things done for the American people and we all have to hope and pray that Trump is capable of rising to the august office of the presidency so his late parents, his family, the GOP and the American people will be proud to have elected him.

The Zeitgeist

Inside the Basket of Undecidables: Millions of Americans Choosing “None of the Above.”

Note: This appeared originally on The Huffington Post on October 26, 2016

About a dozen Uber drivers in Florida and New York have told me they’re not planning on voting for a presidential candidate and neither are most of their friends and family. Ditto with the ladies at the dry cleaners. Most of the personal trainers at my gym either aren’t planning to vote at all or not vote for President. Many of the checkout people at the supermarket? Not interested. Then there are my business and professional colleagues who have been wringing their hands so hard that it’s amazing they can still use their fingers. Anecdotal to be sure, but everywhere I go, people from all walks of life, of all genders and ages tell me they hate the choices for President and aren’t planning on voting for either Mr. Trump or Mrs. Clinton.

Most people who tell me they are planning to vote for a presidential candidate are so markedly unenthusiastic you’d think they were being forced to swallow some horrible tasting cough medicine. Never in my lifetime (and I’m 57) have I ever seen so much ambivalence less than two weeks before a presidential election.

There is a huge “basket of undecidables” – people who either can’t choose or are determined not to choose a presidential candidate. A significant percentage of the everyday folks I talk to are planning to vote for Senatorial, Congressional and other races, just not for President. And I make it my business to ask folks about the election to see what people are thinking.

What so many Americans are thinking is that they’re being asked to choose between the lesser of two evils and the problem is that the lesser of two evils is still evil. A lot of folks actually feel that President Obama looks good by comparison to who’s running now, thereby conclusively proving Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.

The first Billboard number one single of the 21^st Century was Shaggy’s “It Wasn’t Me,” (2000) wherein the Jamaican pop-reggae singer relates how when caught by his girlfriend in flagrante delicto with another woman decides to outrageously, vociferously and repeatedly deny everything by saying “it wasn’t me,” despite clear visual evidence to the contrary. (https://youtu.be/Qv5fqunQ_4I). That’s how a lot of the Undecidables feel about Hillary Clinton. A lot of prevarication. A lot of shenanigans with missing emails, personal servers and bald-faced denials in the face of Wikileaks visual proof. Many of these people are former Bernie Sanders supporters who also are uncomfortable with the millions she and her husband made to essentially peddle influence and access along with her close ties to the Top 1 Percent.

Then there is Donald Trump. For fans of Citizen Kane, Orson Welles’ seminal take on plutocratic excess, one can’t help but recall that when the character Charles Foster Kane (while running for Governor) was caught having an affair he opted not to do the honorable thing and withdraw from the race but tough it out even with the specter of horrible defeat looming before his eyes. A newspaper magnate, he has front pages prepared with the huge headline “Fraud at the Polls” if he didn’t win. Trump’s railing about the election being “rigged” while having no shame whatsoever about his verbal and physical treatment of women is life imitating art incarnate.

Trump also has that “Il Duce” thing going on. Ron Chernow in his bestselling biography “Alexander Hamilton” asserts that “Hamilton’s besetting fear was that American democracy would be spoiled by demagogues who would mouth popular shibboleths to conceal their despotism.” At the Constitutional Convention held during the summer of 1787 in Philadelphia Hamilton said that “demagogues are not always inconsiderable persons. Patricians are frequently demagogues.”

The clergyman at the house of worship I attend gave a sermon a few months back asserting that often “societies get the leaders they deserve.” The choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump says something about America in 2016. In many quarters the qualities of both honor and shame have disappeared in equal measure. The very fabric of our civil society seems to be unraveling before our very eyes and this is why so many people who yearn for a time when things were better, when America was better and who want America to be better (not necessarily “great”) again have found a comfortable spot in the Basket of Undecidables and are proudly supporting “Nobody in 2016.”

My prediction is for low voter turnout at the top of the ballot as a protest “none of the above” non-vote on November 8^th to send a signal to our country’s political leaders that today’s choices are unacceptable.

The Zeitgeist

The Race for President: I’m With No One.

Stuck in the Middle with You, Wondering What It is I Should Do.

This column appeared originally on The Huffington Post on August 1, 2016 and in several newsppaers around the country that week.

After having watched both the Republican and Democratic National Conventions I’m solidly convinced that the political world has been sent to a paradoxical dimension not tethered to any of the familiar signposts of the past 80-plus years.

Just as the Internet and mobile devices have disrupted traditional media, traditional shopping and even traditional dating and social mores, the brave new world created by technology seems to be having a tsunami effect on every aspect of American life up to and including presidential politics.

Millions are reached with withering tweets in nanoseconds that obviate the impact of hour-long speeches and lengthy policy analyses. Tens of millions of dollars are raised from millions of donors almost in real time with the touch of fingers on a mobile screen that obviates the need for big money from big donors. And we are now in the midst of a presidential campaign that would have been unimaginable even four years ago.

Hillary Clinton gave the speech of her life on Thursday night, July 28^th to end the Democratic Convention. Up until that speech I harbored a solid and visceral hatred for this woman. Now, thanks to her oratory I now only have a solid ambivalence – which is progress because there are millions of Americans out there just like me.

The gradual transformation from hate to ambivalence is possible partly because the Republican standard-bearer is so utterly repugnant to me in just about every which way. Donald Trump does not represent my morals or mores. His predilection for Don Rickles-esque insult and endless pejorative politics is repugnant to my sense of civility and decency. (And, please, I don’t mean to insult Mr. Rickles who does put-downs in jest, not with intent as does Mr. Trump). He attacks people’s wives. His business practices don’t jibe with caring for the working man. His impulsive temperament and thin skin and his complete inability to accept criticism scare me witless. He’s the first Republican since 1940 to run on an isolationist platform. He wants to eviscerate global free trade which could cause a worldwide recession and who knows how much military tension, especially with China.

He wants to undermine NATO and he’s an enabler of Vladimir Putin’s adventurism and he goes on “ABC This Week” with George Stephanopoulos on Sunday, July 31^st and lies about his Putin relationship, contradicting a half dozen video clips from the past three years of him saying the opposite. He wants to raise taxes. He has no plan to cut the deficit. He actually takes the National Enquirer seriously. Hardly anyone of any consequence in the GOP backs him. Still.

Hillary Clinton also makes me queasy. I don’t like her poor judgment with her emails while Secretary of State. I don’t like that she lied for a full year about the emails. I really don’t like that she went on “Fox News Sunday” with Chris Wallace on July 31^st and lied about it again, to the point that The Washington Post gave her performance “Four Pinocchios.” I don’t like what she and Debbie Wasserman-Shultz did to Berne Sanders and that Hillary hired Wasserman-Shultz immediately on her resignation as Chair of the DNC.

I don’t like that she and her husband knowingly raised tens of millions for their foundation from foreign interests while she was Secretary of State and the lush speaking fees they both got personally over the past eight years. I can only imagine how much fruit will be shaken from the trees by Bill if Hillary is elected President. I don’t like that the worldwide radical Islamist terror epidemic is given low priority by the Democrats; that she was part and parcel of the massive pressure on Israel which went so far as to interfere in Israel’s elections on behalf of Benjamin Netanyahu’s opponents. I don’t feel the Iran nuclear deal will keep the world safe because the Iranians have been flouting their violations of the agreement in the world’s face day in and day out. She also fails to take the federal deficit seriously. It’s blossomed to $19 trillion and growing.

She absolutely came across as more human and less power-hungry in her acceptance speech and made some good points but like many Americans I don’t completely trust her and the sound of her voice is like nails on a chalkboard, so the likeability factor is sorely lacking. That she is the pro-NATO anti-Putin candidate as a Democrat is the world put upside down.

I’d probably have voted for Bernie Sanders had he won the Democratic nomination even though I disagree with most of his policies, primarily because he’s likeable because of his honesty, integrity and consistency. (For me and millions of Americans character does matter).

So, like many Americans, right now I’m at “none of the above,” meaning I can’t vote for Trump and I’m not ready to vote for Hillary. This will be a wild ride over the next three months leading up until Election Day. It may be that voter turnout in November will be very low owing to so many Americans’ discomfort with either candidate and many will just sit on their hands and stay home. Right now, many of us are in limbo with nowhere to go – so I’m stuck like so many folks I know in the void for the first time since I started voting in 1980.