Iowa Is Just the Latest Chapter in a Rolling Democratic Calamity

By Frank Rich, New York Magazine

08 February 20

 

ost weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. Today, the fallout from the Iowa caucus delay, Trump’s post-impeachment presidency, and the rule change that allows Michael Bloomberg into the next Democratic debate.

One of the big hopes of the Iowa caucus was for it to bring clarity to a divided campaign season. Instead, it brought what one former Iowa party chairman has called “a systemwide disaster,” with results still delayed as of this morning. How does this affect the Democratic primary going forward?

The Iowa debacle was not just a gift to Donald Trump but to Vladimir Putin, whose army of Vichy Republicans and social-media bots can now blame Russia’s 2020 election interference on the Democrats as well as Ukraine. And for those who are thinking, oh, this is a one-off disaster that is contained in Iowa that will soon be forgotten, I say, think again. Iowa is but the latest chapter in a rolling Democratic calamity.

Before we get to the broader problem, let’s not absolve the state that sent Joni Ernst to Washington after she ran campaign ads showcasing her agrarian expertise at castrating hogs. And while I as much as anyone enjoy the unintended camp of those massive butter sculptures at the state fair, let’s not forget that the state’s main contribution to civic discourse is its quadrennial hawking of the benefits of ethanol and whose most prized political institution, the Des Moines Register poll, also botched its count this year. Iowa’s signature cultural representation is The Music Man, in which a fast-talking con man bamboozles an entire town without breaking a sweat.

But at least The Music Man has a happy ending. What makes yesterday’s disaster even more depressing is that it is entirely consistent with a national Democratic primary process that, as I have been arguing for months, has been botched from the start. While we may never have trusted numbers for yesterday’s caucuses — or know which of the promised “three sets of numbers” (if any) we should care about — we do have the hard ratings numbers for the televised debates. Voters started tuning out in droves after having had their fill of overpopulated and undernourished formats too often hijacked by the also-rans. Then there is the unreformed primary calendar itself. It remains a mystery that a party which prides itself on offering an alternative to the old white GOP still kicks off its race for the presidency in a state whose electorate is nearly all white. None of the three states next to come — New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina — is demographically representative of America either. Yet for all the Democrats’ rightful rage about minority vote suppression and the anti-democratic tilt toward rural red states in the Senate and Electoral College, they failed to bring meaningful change to their own blatantly anti-democratic electoral process.

The last time the Democrats ran against a criminally corrupt president, the yet-to-be-impeached Richard Nixon, was in 1972. What people most recall about that Democratic Waterloo is how divided the Democrats were and how easily their standard-bearer, George McGovern, could be caricatured as a lefty flake. But what is at least as resonant now is just how plain incompetent the party was in that election year. McGovern’s biggest chance to win over the nation, his convention acceptance speech, was seen by almost no one because Democratic bungling assured that it didn’t air until nearly 3 a.m. His vice-presidential nominee, Thomas Eagleton, was replaced less than three weeks later, after it was belatedly discovered he had been treated for mental illness. It was all downhill from there. The Republican ticket won 49 out of 50 states, four and a half months after the Watergate break-in.

It was in the early going of the 20th century that the homespun American sage Will Rogers famously said, “I don’t belong to any organized political party, I’m a Democrat.” Does anyone remember when that line was still funny?

Republicans have voted to block witnesses from testifying in the Senate impeachment trial, leading to an all-but-certain acquittal for Trump this week. Will the impeachment end up changing anything about the Trump presidency?

For sure. As everyone has said, the ease with which Trump and Mitch McConnell were able to execute a sham trial and acquittal in the Senate will now supercharge Trump’s authoritarian crime spree. As Adam Schiff has repeatedly stated, more past transgressions will keep coming out, but we may not be able to keep track of them as the new outrages mount. They will all be enabled by a collaborationist cadre that includes not just outright thugs like William Barr and Mike Pompeo but supposed “wise men” like Lamar Alexander, the senator who found Trump’s Ukraine shakedown “inappropriate” but not worthy of a trial with evidence and witnesses, let alone illegal.

My guess is that most Americans had not heard of this soon-to-retire Tennessee senator until last week, so let’s take a moment to remember his failed presidential run of 1996. His gimmick was to wear a plaid flannel shirt on the campaign trail to advertise his down-home folksiness — a fraudulent pose that was unmasked when he could not answer a question about the price of milk. When campaigning for the Republican Iowa caucuses 24 Februaries ago, he joined virtually every other GOP presidential contender (the sole exception was Richard Lugar) in endorsing a C-Span–televised, gay-bashing, religious-right rally in Des Moines that vowed to “send this evil lifestyle back to Satan where it came from!” Then and now, Alexander epitomizes the kind of spineless cipher who has passed for a “moderate” Republican over the quarter-century that led the party into the cult of Donald Trump.

The Democratic National Committee unexpectedly changed the qualification requirements for its next debate, making it more likely that Michael Bloomberg will join the other candidates onstage for the first time. Last December, the DNC declined to make changes that would have helped Cory Booker and Julián Castro — is it a mistake to make these changes now?

I think we can assume as a rule of thumb that every DNC decision is a mistake. They wouldn’t be in this mess had they not started with debate rules, impenetrable to most voters, that benefited a deep-pocketed clown like Tom Steyer while penalizing Booker and Castro. At this point, the Democrats need all the resources they can muster, and a new cast member like Bloomberg, an enigma or curiosity to many voters beyond the New York area, might coax voters into taking another look at the surviving field and actually tune in. Perhaps the DNC might further drum up attention by branding the subsequent debates as “The Last Debates.” There’s no law requiring Trump to show up to face his Democratic adversary onstage in the fall — not that a law would matter to him anyway. More emboldened than ever post-impeachment, he might well blow off the debates entirely and offer counterprogramming of his own on Fox state television.

When It Comes to Climate Hypocrisy, Canada's Leaders Have Reached a New Low

By Bill McKibben, Guardian UK

08 February 20

A territory that has 0.5% of the Earth’s population plans to use up nearly a third of the planet’s remaining carbon budget

mericans elected Donald Trump, who insisted climate change was a hoax – so it’s no surprise that since taking office he’s been all-in for the fossil fuel industry. There’s no sense despairing; the energy is better spent fighting to remove him from office.

Canada, on the other hand, elected a government that believes the climate crisis is real and dangerous – and with good reason, since the nation’s Arctic territories give it a front-row seat to the fastest warming on Earth. Yet the country’s leaders seem likely in the next few weeks to approve a vast new tar sands mine which will pour carbon into the atmosphere through the 2060s. They know – yet they can’t bring themselves to act on the knowledge. Now that is cause for despair.

The Teck mine would be the biggest tar sands mine yet: 113 square miles of petroleum mining, located just 16 miles from the border of Wood Buffalo national park. A federal panel approved the mine despite conceding that it would likely be harmful to the environment and to the land culture of Indigenous people. These giant tar sands mines (easily visible on Google Earth) are already among the biggest scars humans have ever carved on the planet’s surface. But Canadian authorities ruled that the mine was nonetheless in the “public interest”.

Here’s how Justin Trudeau, recently re-elected as Canada’s prime minister, put it in a speech to cheering Texas oilmen a couple of years ago: “No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and leave them there.” That is to say, Canada, which is 0.5% of the planet’s population, plans to use up nearly a third of the planet’s remaining carbon budget. Ottawa hides all this behind a series of pledges about “net-zero emissions by 2050” and so on, but they are empty promises. In the here-and-now they can’t rein themselves in. There’s oil in the ground and it must come out.

This is painfully hard to watch because it comes as the planet has supposedly reached a turning point. A series of remarkable young people (including Canadians such as Autumn Peltier) have captured the imagination of people around the world; scientists have issued ever sterner warnings; and the images of climate destruction show up in every newspaper. Canadians can see the Australian blazes on television; they should bring back memories of the devastating forest fires that forced the evacuation of Fort McMurray, in the heart of the tar sands complex, less than four years ago.

The only rational response would be to immediately stop the expansion of new fossil fuel projects. It’s true that we can’t get off oil and gas immediately; for the moment, oil wells continue to pump. But the Teck Frontier proposal is predicated on the idea that we’ll still need vast quantities of oil in 2066, when Greta Thunberg is about to hit retirement age. If an alcoholic assured you he was taking his condition very seriously, but also laying in a 40-year store of bourbon, you’d be entitled to doubt his sincerity, or at least to note his confusion. Oil has addled the Canadian ability to do basic math: more does not equal less, and 2066 is not any time soon. An emergency means you act now.

In fairness, Canada has company here. For every territory making a sincere effort to kick fossil fuels (California, Scotland) there are other capitals just as paralyzed as Ottawa. Australia’s fires creep ever closer to the seat of government in Canberra, yet the prime minister, Scott Morrison, can’t seem to imagine any future for his nation other than mining more coal. Australia and Canada are both rich nations, their people highly educated, but they seem unable to control the zombie momentum of fossil fuels.

There’s obviously something hideous about watching the Trumps and the Putins of the world gleefully shred our future. But it’s disturbing in a different way to watch leaders pretend to care – a kind of gaslighting that can reduce you to numb nihilism. Trudeau, for all his charms, doesn’t get to have it both ways: if you can’t bring yourself to stop a brand-new tar sands mine then you’re not a climate leader.