John McCain Is No Savior

In the wake of the Republicans' failure to repeal and replace Obamacare, the media has found its one true hero - their decades-long man crush, John McCain. And while it is true that McCain was one of three Republican Senators who voted with the entire Democratic caucus to tank the so-called "skinny repeal" that represented the last ditch effort to pass something, ANYTHING Republicans could point to as dismantling  the Affordable Care Act, the media’s reflexive fellating of McCain was as predictable as it was misguided.

Of course, as a former flyboy, McCain knew how to milk the drama for all it was worth - ambling onto the Senate floor, gesturing to be recognized, and uttering a single syllable, "no,” as his mic drop moment.

Reporters could not get enough of this - the return of the maverick, blah blah blah, but while McCain did show some political courage, can we not lose sight of several underreported truths?

1. McCain himself helped create this imbroglio by (more drama!) flying back to DC from Arizona to cast a vote that opened debate in the first place. Had he not done this (or voted not to open debate) the rest of the episode never would have happened.

2. The relentless pressure by activists had far more to do with all of the Senate efforts being struck down than anything McCain did after not only voting to open debate but then voting in favor of certain options that other Republicans helped vote down. 

3. Why is the media bending over backwards to laud three Republican Senators, representing less than 10% of their caucus, for voting to NOT strip 16 million people of health insurance? This is a profile in courage? Perhaps some rethinking of how public policy is reported is also in order.

4. Another Senator is battling cancer. Her name is Maisie Hirono, and, unlike McCain, never wavered in her desire to protect access to health insurance for her fellow Americans. 

5. Read McCain's statement released after "skinny repeal" went down. Here’s part of what he had to say:

“I’ve stated time and time again that one of the major failures of Obamacare was that it was rammed through Congress by Democrats on a strict-party line basis (ed. note: that’s a lie) without a single Republican vote. We should not make the mistakes of the past that has led to Obamacare’s collapse, (ed. note: also a lie) including in my home state of Arizona where premiums are skyrocketing (ed. note: one more lie) and health care providers are fleeing the marketplace.”

He also said his goal is to “repeal and replace” Obamacare. This is the hero? Three lies in two sentences from a guy who was given the chance to work with Democrats in 2009 and 2010 but refused to do so? Who has had the better part of seven years to float his own ideas but has remained silent? Seriously?

This is all on top of the fact that McCain, whose health insurance is as gold-plated as it gets and who has been in Congress for more than 30 years, was even opening the door to the possibility that a law would be enacted taking health insurance away from people who are not like him (i.e., a multi-millionaire member of Congress with access to the best health care money can buy), will now be lost to the memory hole of history. It should not. What modicum of political courage he exercised very early Friday morning should not excuse what he did to help instigate the drama or take away from the people who worked far harder than he did to block this dangerous action from going forward.

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Joe, Mika & Donald, the Worst Threesome Ever

The eye rolls start early and do not end until Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, the protagonists of Olivia Nuzzi’s cover story for the current issue of New York magazine, get engaged in the South of France (the affianced’s struggle to tend to her pets with the enormous engagement ring dangling off her ring finger, is, as the kids say, so real). That our lovebirds host a cable news program consumed and obsessed over by the Beltway caste, is largely why several thousand words and a glossy cover photo are given over to them. Oh, and the fact that they are in a fake love/hate relationship with our media overlord Donald Trump does not hurt when it comes to moving magazines and generating buzz among the people who Joe and Mika rub elbows with summering in Nantucket. 

For people who claim not to like each other, the trio seem to spend a lot of time together. Reading through Nuzzi’s piece you will shake your head at the number of private meetings, lunches and calls Trump has with his erstwhile foes. The idea that Scarborough and Brzezinski are somehow foils for Trump is belied by the fact that their access to him remained significant even past his inauguration and extended to visits at the White House and calls between Trump and “Morning” Joe. These tete-a-tetes, which supposedly ended when Trump complained of the coverage he was receiving, gloss over the good times, like when a hot mic caught Trump during a commercial break at a town hall Joe and Mika hosted confirming that the questions they would ask would be of the softball variety or the time the couple spent with the candidate watching the New Hampshire primary returns. 

That is to say, there is more high school drama than a Judy Blume book, but it is all ruse, precisely the type of faux-feud that made a modern-day carnival barker named Vince McMahon a multi-millionaire in the pro wrestling industry and was documented without irony in Mark Leibovich’s seminal book on the fakery of D.C., This Town. Nuzzi mines the trio’s most recent spat, where Trump lashed out at Mika’s cosmetic surgery (it turns out the debate is over what she had done, not whether she had anything done, a sort of fourth-wall breaking point where a person on TV cops to what any casual viewer can tell - that many people appearing on our screen have had “work done”) with the chattering class rising as one in her defense. Nuzzi’s portrayal of Brzezinski is mostly sympathetic. Mika, of the “Know Your Value” campaign, can be both vulnerable and empowered by sloughing off Trump’s taunts, but it is hard to well up much sympathy for her victimhood when she spent much of the campaign expressing her dismay at Hillary Clinton’s nomination. Trump is a distant presence, not quoted for the article but having people in his camp offer rebuttals that essentially boil down to Joe’s jealousy that Trump became President when he had aspirations of higher office and Mika’s displeasure that the self-awareness that once softened Trump’s bombast has dried up. 

Nuzzi also slips on her kid gloves when it comes to the origins of the couple’s romance. And perhaps this is understandable. After all, Scarborough made his bones as an impeachment manager in the 1990s and Brzezinski gives a version of having caused “pain in her marriage” that it does not take a genius to understand what she is implying. But instead of focusing on the murky backstory, the couple instead lean on the idea of mid-life crisis adjacent. Scarborough hits fifty and realizes he needs to spend the rest of his life with Mika and Mika has a lightning bolt moment (the inference being while still married to someone else) that leads her into Scarborough’s arms. The heart wants what the heart wants, or something. 

And I am no judge of others’ fidelity, but laden throughout the article is the kind of hypocrisy that comes from people who had multiple marriages but made their bones judging others (Scarborough) and claim to lobby for women’s rights while genuflecting before Trump (Brzezinski) that makes people who don’t earn their living making millions on television disdain. Anonymous sources quoted in the article highlight the artifice of the “Acela Corridor” political and journalist class, but when you get a fawning cover story in one of the few magazines that matters anymore, do you really care if you are called on your bullshit? 

If it is true that “where you sit is where you stand” things are unlikely to change. Trump is portrayed as rubbing the couple’s nose in shit over the trappings of his office and Joe and Mika are comfortably ensconced in a lifestyle fit for the 1% with multiple houses and an amen corner of politicians and famous-as-journalists (a great turn of phrase Nuzzi uses early in the piece) guests eager to kiss their asses for three hours each weekday. Left unsaid (not that it needed to be) is that this is all mutually beneficial. Trump uses Joe and Mika as avatars of “fake media” and the more he attacks the couple, the higher their ratings go. 

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Book Review - In Search of the Lost Chord

It has been said that history is written by the winners, but one massive exception to that rule is the hagiography associated with the hippie movement of the 1960s. And I do not say that lightly — as someone who followed the Grateful Dead in the 80s and 90s and believes in social justice and equality — the idea that peaceniks were a failure is not a conclusion I come to lightly or happily, but in reading Danny Goldberg’s In Search of The Lost Chord a gauzy, Pollyanna-ish remembering of the 1967 Summer of Love,  much of the falsity of what we have come to think of and know about that time in our country’s history is exposed as more pipe dream than reality. 

The saying “If you remember the 60s, you probably weren’t there,” is a ha-ha shorthand for an era of peace, love, and lots of drugs, but the goals of the movement - ending the Vietnam War while striving for social, racial, and gender equality - have a shaky track record. Goldberg has his rose-colored glasses firmly in place and as a 101-level survey of the time when our country metaphorically went from black and white to technicolor, when the Beatles went from lovable mop tops to auteurs who created Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band, and the promise of JFK dissolved in the rice fields of Southeast Asia, the reader is well-served. 

Goldberg has all kinds of interesting little nuggets about the musicians, intellectuals, and scenes spread throughout the country and across the pond into London that formed the backbone of the hippie aesthetic. The people and their mission were both loosely affiliated and at times at odds with one another (the battle between San Francisco bands who eyed L.A.-based producers of the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival with antipathy is nicely sketched) and the push and pull between them is palpable. There is struggle for authenticity, of leadership (or if there should even be leadership), and defining goals and objectives that help explain why “the hippie idea” quickly became a spent force.

Even as the embryonic stage of the movement was gathering force, its limitations were already being exposed. In early 1967, hippie leaders convened in San Francisco, debating, among other things, what it meant to “tune in, turn on, and drop out.” The author of that quote, Timothy Leary, was challenged by the beat poet and nascent hippie icon Allen Ginsburg, who asked: “what can I drop out of?” Leary retorted, “Your teaching at Cal (the University of California-Berkeley).” Ginsburg demurred, stating simply, “But I need the money.” And while Leary was wildly off base when he predicted deer would graze in New York City within 40 years, he was unintentionally spot on when he observed that “If Pepsi-Cola can be marketed around the world, so can hippie ideas.” The only thing he was missing was the fact that it would be used by Coca-Cola and not Pepsi-Cola in service of selling the soda not the ideas.  

Ultimately, many of the broad societal goals the hippies sought to achieve were unrealized. The massive rallies against the Vietnam War failed to end it; indeed, the war escalated and expanded into other countries after the protest movement gained speed. Far from being repudiated, Nixon tapped into the “silent majority” of Americans to win the Presidency in 1968 and one of the largest landslide reelections four years later. 

In the inner cities, from Watts in 1965 to Newark in 1967 and other cities in between and beyond, rioting exacerbated white flight to the suburbs, resulting in de facto segregation that would last for decades. Indeed, comments Goldberg discusses from a report issued by the Kerner Commission (a group commissioned by LBJ to study the underlying causes of these urban riots)  in 1968 could have just as easily been written today. Goldberg notes, “the main conclusion was that the riots resulted from black frustration at the lack of economic opportunity” and recommended things like “more diversity on police forces, stronger employment programs, and the creation of housing opportunities in the suburbs . . .” Sound familiar? 

Gender equality would make important advances with the passage of Title IX and a dawning awareness of sexual harassment in the workplace, but the Equal Rights Amendment ran aground in the late 1970s while equal pay and fiery debates between women who opt for careers over home making have stoked many a book, thought piece, and online battle five decades after seminal works by Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem reached a mass audience. 

But Goldberg has little time to consider the shortcomings of the movement, he is too busy ruminating on his own experiences and that is understandable. An era that coined the term “free love” and had reporters avoiding drinks offered to them for fear they were dosed with LSD was surely a good time, but the lament that the “chord” was lost is overwrought. As Joan Didion is quoted as saying at the time, “we were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a vacuum.” 

What we are left with is a Madison Avenue-invented nostalgia that attempts to short hand the hippie movement via tie-dye t-shirts and VW buses, fossilized classic rock acts and advertisements that take what were once clarion calls for rebellion that are now used in service of selling investment accounts and Cadillacs. Of course, this should not be surprising, the ideals that animated Baby Boomers in the late 1960s transformed into a “greed is good” ethos by the time they hit their 30s and 40s. Indeed, once in power, what defines the Baby Boomer generation is a massive redistribution of wealth upward at the same time massive borrowing has taken place to finance it. Having railed against the establishment, Boomers not only became the establishment, but looted the bank and will leave the rest of us to pay the bill. 

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This Is Not How A Presidency Ends

When Frank Rich was at the New York Times he was the best columnist in America. Now that he is at New York magazine, he is the best long form essayist in America. He is a superior writer whose gifts extend to placing contemporary political events into historical context and he writes with precision and insight that is rare among his peers. His cover story for New York entitled “How A Presidency Ends” is certainly eye-catching, but his thesis, which is that Trump’s disregard for basic political norms and the rule of law will create a critical mass so great Republicans in Congress will eventually toss their leader overboard in order to secure their own political survival, is unrealistic.

Rich connects many dots between Nixon and Trump’s behavior. It is entirely possible that like Nixon, Trump will be undone by a cover-up (firing Jim Comey to snuff out the FBI’s investigation into Russia and potential ties to the Trump campaign) and not a crime. And there is a lot of smoke around Trump’s actions toward Comey, no more damning than the fact that two of the meetings Trump held with Comey look suspicious — the first was held the day after Acting Attorney General Sally Yates advised White House Counsel Don McGahn that Michael Flynn had been compromised and the second took place the day after Flynn resigned as National Security Adviser. In the former meeting, Trump supposedly asked for Comey’s loyalty and in the latter, that he drop the investigation into Flynn. 

But that is public record and while a few Republicans harrumphed over the timing of Comey’s dismissal, none suggested this rose to an impeachable offense. And short of evidence being produced showing Trump directing or being involved in Russia’s hacking of the DNC and Clinton Chairman John Podesta’s email accounts (a la Nixon’s recorded direction to cover-up Watergate) there is no chance a majority of Republicans in the House, much less two-thirds of Senators would remove Trump from office. 

But there is a larger divergence between Nixon and Trump that eludes Rich’s usually scrupulous eye. Trump’s crude attacks on the press are an uglier version of Agnew’s “nattering nabobs of negativity,” and the amen corner both he and Nixon preached to has an ingrained suspicion of and disdain for east coast elites at the New York Times and Washington Post. But unlike Nixon’s time, when right wing media was still in its embryonic phase, Trump is buttressed by a legion of genefluctors from Fox News to online Reddit trolls who protect him. 

He and his communications team have effectively neutered the White House press corps by limiting on-air press briefings, seeding the press room with more right wing voices, and keeping their boss away from anyone but sympathetic journalists in the Fox News-iverse for interviews. Trump has only conducted one solo press conference since being inaugurated and shows no signs of caring that he is stiff arming the press. When he needs to get his message out, he can always pick up the phone and call one of his preferred reporters (Bob Costa or Maggie Haberman) who will dutifully act as stenographer and put his words and thoughts on the front page of their respective papers. 

The spread of right wing media outlets also serves to discredit so-called mainstream media outlets who do themselves no favors when they have to retract salacious stories (as CNN did recently) and inoculate Trump among the faithful by throwing out red herrings like pointing out that lawyers working with Special Counsel Robert Mueller have made political donations to Democrats. They also serve to solidify antipathy toward the same elites Nixon railed against and rile up the base so they do not rest on their laurels, as Democrats did in both 2010 and 2014. 

This accrues to the benefit of Republicans on Capitol Hill. Not only is the party more conservative (and largely purged whatever moderates it once had), but state legislatures effectively gerrymandered Congressional districts in 2010 to such an extreme that in 2012, Democratic candidates in the House of Representatives won 1.2 million more overall votes than their Republican opponents yet that only translated into an eight vote swing, well short of what was needed to put Nancy Pelosi back in the Speaker’s chair. In 2016, Hillary Clinton bested Donald Trump by more than 3 million votes but House Democrats only picked up six seats. 

And while it is true that there are twenty or so congressional districts that elected a House Republican while going for Hillary Clinton, voters have yet to reach a tipping point where Republican candidates have to fear being associated with Trump. Further, the 2018 Senate map is challenging for Democrats, who will probably lose a few of their 48 member caucus because unlike the apathy shown by Democrats in recent off-year elections, the few races held this year suggest Republican enthusiasm is close enough to the Democrats to protect their turf. 

And there is one other thing progressives and liberals need to be wary of. Just as right wing media has hustled conservatives with fevered dreams of faked birth certificates and nefarious dealings in backwoods Arkansas, progressives need to be attuned to, and temper, expectations that Trump’s departure from the White House will be forced. Hashtag 25th-the-45th all you want, the similarities between Watergate and whatever is going on with Trump only stretch so far. And this is not to suggest Rich is a charlatan — far from it; however, the reality is that today’s GOP is a far cry from its 1974 iteration. For all the hand wringing about Trump’s tweets, his attacks on the media, and general disdain for political norms and the rule of law, these are precisely the things his most ardent supporters like about him and unless and until Republican voters indicate they will punish their Congressional representatives for it, Trump is not going anywhere.

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