SOTU: A Surreal, Angry Spectacle

By Heather Digby Parton, Salon

05 February 20

The speech was mostly wooden, hateful Trump boilerplate — plus a brilliant reality-TV moment for the MAGA tribe

eirdly enough, Tuesday night wasn't the first time a president delivered a State of the Union address in the middle of his impeachment trial. Back in 1999, Bill Clinton delivered one in the same circumstances. It's hard to believe the timing would work out almost exactly the same way but it did.

Clinton was skilled at giving State of the Union speeches under stressful situations. In 1994 he gave the speech without a Teleprompter for several minutes and nobody knew the difference. In 1997, it was broadcast on a split screen with the verdict in the O.J. Simpson civil case. In 1998, his speech came just two weeks after the revelations about his affair with Monica Lewinsky and was good enough that many people believe it may have saved his presidency. Still, the speech during his impeachment must have been very tough. Historian Douglas Brinkley said at the time:

This is a stage performance of Clinton at his best. We watch in wonderment this flawed, failed President who has so much talent, so much intelligence, but whose Achilles' heel has been so destructive for him.

Clinton's performances always seemed to be him walking the high wire while we all held our breath waiting for him to fall, relieved when he somehow made it to safety. He was an adept survivor but he was grievously scarred by his self-inflicted wounds. Trump too is a survivor — but he is more of a carnival act, putting on one spectacle after another, distracting and misdirecting, leaving everyone dizzy and overwhelmed

Coming as it did while the whole country awaits the preordained verdict to come in the Senate, and in the midst of a wild electoral debacle for the Democrats in Iowa, Trump's speech was even more surreal because, unlike Clinton, he is running for re-election. And although I would never have believed it was possible at the time, the level of polarization today is much worse than it was during the Clinton era. Despite the blatantly partisan, political nature of that impeachment, based as it was on charges of lying about an inappropriate personal matter, the two party leaders in the Senate had worked together to lay out a process. While the outcome was also predetermined then, there were some party crossovers in the final vote.

The anger and aggression is much more intense this time, even though there's almost no chance that any Republicans will vote to convict Trump. And while Clinton was remorseful for his behavior, publicly apologizing to the nation for putting it through the whole ordeal, Trump is clearly furious and reportedly plotting his revenge,

Democrats are in no mood to compromise either. It is a pitched battle at this point, and that was obvious when all the members of Congress were forced to be in the same room together, with the president they either love or hate standing before them to give his big speech.

Trump was clearly on edge. When Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi held out her hand to shake his before he took the podium, he refused to take it, signaling that there would be no more nods to decorum than absolutely necessary. In what was a first as far as anyone can remember, the Republicans chanted "Four more years" from the floor as he began to speak. Their enthusiasm only got more hysterical as the evening wore on.

Trump delivered the speech in his usual wooden style when he's reading someone else's words on the Teleprompter. He bragged for at least a half an hour about his alleged accomplishments, ungraciously stating as usual that he had succeeded where all his predecessors had failed. And there were some reality-show moments. He announced that he was giving a little girl in the audience a voucher for the school of her choice and acknowledged a 100-year-old Tuskegee airman along with his 13-year-old great-grandson, who aspires to join the Space Force. He really went for the bathos and pathos by surprising a military wife with her husband who had been deployed overseas. Everyone, Republicans and Democrats alike, applauded as expected for these calculated moments of Oprah-like sentimentality.

Many of the "real folks" he acknowledged in the audience were people of color and part of his speech seemed geared to giving the false impression that he is particularly devoted to raising up minorities with appeals to school choice and criminal justice reform. This was likely one of his consultants' ideas, perhaps with the aim of peeling off a few African American men from the Democrats, but mostly in an attempt to lure back some of the formerly devoted white women in the suburbs who find him to be reprehensible.

That might have been successful except for the fact that while he eschewed the usual puerile insults and crude mockery, he then went on to deliver his customary hard-right, red-meat rally speech, in slightly more flowery language.

He hit all the high points, from religious freedom (except for Muslims, of course) his silly border wall, abortion, judges, school choice and one that I think we're going to hear a lot more about: socialism.

Freedom unites the soul? What?

But the real gift to the MAGA base was a brilliant reality-TV moment, one designed to fill their hearts with joy and make every liberal in America's head explode. There is no one Trump could have brought into the Capitol who could possibly have been more offensive to Democrats everywhere than Rush Limbaugh. He is among the top five people in the country responsible for the utter degradation of American politics over the past 30 years. Trump would not be president were it not for the odious path Limbaugh laid out. So naturally, when he found out that Limbaugh had been diagnosed with cancer, he invited him to a joint session of Congress as his special guest.

Trump extolled Limbaugh's virtues as Republicans ecstatically cheered, then announced that he was presenting him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and instructed First Lady Melania to put it around his neck right then and there. The moment was oddly redolent of Trump's old beauty-pageant days with Limbaugh playing the role of the surprised winner:

He wasn't actually surprised. It had been announced earlier. But that's reality TV for you.

It appears that Nancy Pelosi knows how to do reality show politics as well.

She was asked on her way out why she did it and she replied, "Because it was a manifesto of mistruths."

Trump must be steaming. She stole the show.

How Bernie's Iowa Campaign Organized Immigrant Workers at the Factory Gates

By Meagan Day, Jacobin

05 February 20

The first caucus-goers in Iowa yesterday were immigrant workers at a meat processing plant — and they all voted for Bernie Sanders. Here’s how they were organized, and why it shows once again that Bernie’s campaign is like nothing we’ve seen before.

t the time of this writing, we are still awaiting results — and a lot of answers — from the shambolic Iowa caucus. But two things we already know: Bernie Sanders appears to have come out on top, and we’ve never seen a presidential campaign like his before in American politics.

On Monday at noon, Iowa’s first caucus-goers filtered into a union hall in Ottumwa. Fourteen of them were there to caucus for Bernie Sanders, almost all immigrants, primarily from Ethiopia but also from Honduras and Macedonia. They were workers at JBS Pork, the largest employer in Wapello County.

Two-and-a-half thousand workers are employed at Ottumwa’s JBS plant. They come from nearly fifty countries. Their job is hard and can be dangerous. At a separate JBS facility in Kentucky, an ammonia leak sent fifty-one workers to the hospital. When hog waste from a JBS plant in Illinois spilled into a nearby waterway, it killed sixty-five thousand fish. In Ottumwa, JBS has been fined for not letting workers use the bathroom when they need to. Court documents from a little over a year ago say it was common knowledge that “If you say you are hurt and need to see an outside doctor, they will just fire you.”

Bernie Sanders’s platform has a lot to offer workers like those at JBS. It calls for stronger unions, higher wages, better benefits, and an end to at-will employment, for starters. Labor scholar Barry Eidlin called Sanders’s Workplace Democracy Plan the “most serious, comprehensive, and equitable plan for promoting workers’ rights ever proposed by a major US presidential candidate.”

But given how many working-class people are alienated from politics, it’s not as easy as “Build it and they will come.” Getting buy-in from people who feel generally disempowered requires hard work. In keeping with this fact, the show of support for Bernie Sanders from JBS workers wasn’t spontaneous: it was organized. And the story of how it happened demonstrates what’s unique about the Sanders campaign, particularly the value it places on bringing working-class people into the political process and the lengths it will go to organize them.

In a strategy more reminiscent of labor organizing than anything typically seen in presidential politics, the Sanders campaign assigned several people — including field organizers Tristan Bock Hughes, Charisa Wotherspoon, Devon Severson, and the campaign’s National Labor Organizer Jonah Furman — to post up at the gates of the JBS meat processing plant. For several nights, they canvassed outside the factory from 10 PM to 3 AM, engaging workers in conversation as their shifts ended. The campaign organizers spoke to workers in multiple languages about their lives, their work, and Sanders’s platform and campaign.

The campaign’s strategy was to find people enthusiastic about Sanders and convince them to not only caucus for him, but to get their coworkers to caucus for him as well. An example of one such person was Wendwosen Biftu, an Ethiopian worker who was excited about Sanders from the beginning. After being canvassed outside the plant, Biftu came to the field office with his ten-year-old daughter, who helped translate for him, and expressed an interest in organizing others to caucus for Sanders.

The Sanders campaign then looped in Adom Getachew, a Sanders supporter and organizer who lives in Chicago, to speak to Biftu on the phone in Amharic. Getachew says that they spoke about the isolation of being an Ethiopian immigrant in a place with few other Ethiopians, and then talked “about getting other workers on his shift to commit to caucusing for Bernie. He got six commitments in just two days from fellow Ethiopian workers. We won because Wendwosen didn’t just turn out. He brought people with him.”

Jacobin attempted to reach Biftu on Monday evening as the Iowa caucuses were getting underway, but he was at work, along with the rest of his coworkers. The United Food and Commercial Workers, the union representing workers at JBS, had arranged a separate caucus known as a “satellite caucus” so that the workers could participate in the political process even though their work shifts take place during normal evening caucus times.

The Sanders campaign understood that the concept of a separate satellite caucus, introduced just this year, might be confusing. So to make sure that the workers they’d identified actually made it to the caucus on Monday before their shift began, the campaign engaged in a second round of organizing. They brought in volunteers Abby Agriesti and JP Kaderbek, union members and labor activists from Chicago, to knock doors and get people to commit to showing up.

Agriesti says that they wouldn’t have been able to secure those commitments without the initiative of workers themselves. On one occasion, she says, “We went into an apartment complex where several of the Ethiopian workers lived. We came upon some women cooking together in the basement. One of them walked me into her apartment and woke her husband up. Her husband, Mebrahtom Geberetatios, got dressed and took me around to introduce me to everybody else. Then he asked to see my list so he could follow up with everybody.”

The fruits of the campaign’s efforts were visible on Monday, when Sanders won the first caucus in Iowa by a fourteen to one vote — the fifteenth caucus-goer being an Elizabeth Warren field organizer. As the procession got underway one of the Sanders field organizers, Charisa Wotherspoon, was spotted translating instructions into Spanish for Honduran JBS workers who’d turned up to caucus for Sanders.

Sanders has portrayed his campaign as a vehicle for a mass movement of working-class people, united across lines of cultural, racial, and national difference. He has said that if elected president he will act as Organizer-In-Chief, helping facilitate a “political revolution” spearheaded by ordinary people themselves. His most ardent supporters believe strongly in this vision, but his critics have downplayed both the diversity of his support base and the unique political orientation of his campaign. They’ve also gone on the attack: in Iowa, Sanders has faced an onslaught of negative ads from both Democrats and Republicans, unrivaled by the rest of his competitors.

If Sanders is able to overcome the bipartisan hostility to win Iowa, win the nomination, and win the presidency, it will be because he was successful in reaching people who don’t typically see their hardships and aspirations reflected in presidential campaigns. It will be because his campaign didn’t just claim to represent the overlooked segments of society, but actually got its hands dirty organizing working-class people, and impressing upon them that the future is theirs for the taking.

On Monday evening, Sanders campaign press secretary Briahna Joy Gray confirmed on CBS that this was indeed the official strategy. “A group that normally isn’t reached out to, pork packers, predominately Ethiopian immigrants, caucused and voted overwhelmingly for Bernie Sanders,” Gray said of the Ottumwa workers, adding that she believes the Sanders campaign is “most able to build the kind of grassroots, broad-based, working-class support that’s required to defeat Donald Trump in a general election.”

Sanders himself struck a similar note in Iowa on Monday, saying, “I think we need a campaign that can reach out to working people, many of whom have become disillusioned with the political establishment and have given up on voting. I think we can bring many of them back into the process.”

In Ottumwa, the Sanders campaign put these values into motion and went directly to workers themselves. Immigrants with language barriers who work night shifts are not high-priority canvass targets for typical political campaigns, but the Sanders campaign met them at the factory gates and in their homes, talked to them about their struggles, and converted them into primary voters.

That approach sets the Sanders campaign apart not just from his competitors, but from every presidential candidate in modern American history. And it can put him and his “political revolution” on a path to victory.