July 31

I have had a bad headache, like migraine bad headache, since last night, so I am spending the day on the couch, enjoying the one day break from the heat.

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July 30

Something, larger than a stone but smaller than a boulder (?) hit my car this morning while I was driving on Rt. 1. It made a noise on the underside of the car, I didn't even see it, but it immediately triggered my anxiety. It is just SO MUCH FUN when your heart rate spikes to like 130 while you're driving 60 miles an hour, let me tell you. No lights came on and nothing leaked, so hopefully no damage was done, but for crying out loud, when you drive less than 40 miles a week, WHY does even that modest amount of travel have to be so fraught. Oh right, it's New Jersey.

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July 29

My sleep schedule is really off right now. When the pandemic hit in March, I was barely able to stay up past 8:30 and was sleeping until close to 6. Now, I'm up until close to 10 and up sometime between 4 and 5. Part of it is anxiety. Ok, a lot of it is anxiety. My current obsession is the HVAC, which is running a lot more than normal both because I am home all the time and it has been one of the 5 hottest months of July on record. I had tried to schedule a tune up early this summer and then when the place I called told me they could not come out until early August (!) I just gave up instead of trying to find another provider to do it. I just have a lot of anxiety generally about people being in the house and now it's of course worse b/c of COVID. So, every day I try to apportion out running the A/C just enough to keep things "comfortable" (which is to say in the low to mid 70s) and hope I make it through to Labor Day when I usually shut down the A/C for the season.

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July 28

Today is the first day of what passes for a "vacation." Honestly, it doesn't look much different than my work from home days except I don't have to monitor my work email or do legal research. Otherwise, it is like a bazillion degrees today (as it has been this entire freaking month) so it is not like I am particularly motivated to do anything other than lay on the couch.

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July 27

One of the taglines I use in my dating profile is "fighting off dad bod one push up at a time." It is glib and has the benefit of being true, but I will level with you fam, dad bod is starting to win. It is a cruel irony that in quarantine, my fitness routine is probably better than it was pre-quarantine - I can work out when I want and without ever leaving the house. I am actually working out more now than I was pre-Q (three or four days on, then one day off, as opposed to four times a week) but where I think I am losing the small daily battle is the otherwise sedentary life I am living. In the normal world, I was adding 10,000 (or more) steps a day at the office just by going up and down stairs a few times a day and moving around. Now, I'm lucky to get 1,000 because I rarely leave the house. I guess the other thing is just creeping middle age. The ability to maintain fitness and weight goals simply gets harder as you get older and the little skirmishes you lose, be they of steps walked or food consumed, turn into bigger lost battles faster and the ground is harder to take back. 

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1980

In 1980, an incumbent President ran for re-election in the midst of a crisis he had failed to contain. And it was not for lack of trying. If you go back and read about the Iran hostage crisis, you will find out that Jimmy Carter tried very hard to bring that dark chapter in our nation’s history to an end. He tried diplomatic means. He green lit a risky rescue operation that went horribly wrong. He gave up the time and energy he might have otherwise directed at campaigning to try and solve a problem that made him (and our nation) look impotent and weak.

Carter may have been fortunate in his competition. Ronald Reagan was thought to be some combination of an intellectual light weight, over the hill, and a right wing extremist. Even late into October, Carter held a small (3 point) lead among likely voters in polling done by Gallup, which, at the time, was the gold standard in the field. Reagan gave a polished performance in the competitors’ lone debate (his rhetorical question of whether voters were better off than they were 4 years before is still cited in presidential races to this day) that moved lots and lots of late deciding voters into his camp. He destroyed the image of him as bumbling (or dangerous) and his message of an America with better days ahead resonated with an electorate exhausted by years of inflation, high interest rates, and unemployment. 

Media types are always looking to compare the present day to history and that is understandable. Joe Biden’s healthy polling lead over Donald Trump has many reporters eyeing 1988 as a cautionary tale of calling a race too early. There, Mike Dukakis was ahead in one poll (also Gallup) by up to 17 points late into the summer, only to lose 40 states (and the election) to then-Vice President Bush in November.  

But to me, and something I have tweeted about a few times, 2020 is far more likely to look like 1980 than 1988. Why do I say this? For several reasons. Trump, like Carter, got elected promising to shake up Washington. Carter, a little known Governor when he ran for the Democratic nomination, offered a fresh start after the convulsions of Watergate (and to a lesser extent, the Vietnam War). Trump, while certainly better known, also offered himself as an outsider who would “drain the swamp” and draw on his supposed business acumen to grow the economy. 

One of the reasons Carter ultimately faltered is that he failed to make good on his campaign rhetoric. Even before the Iran hostage crisis, the nation remained mired in slow/little economic growth and the psychic wounds from Vietnam had sapped our belief in our military and its use as a force for good in the world. Trump, by contrast, has had an ocean of corruption and scandal follow him into office at a level unseen since Nixon, and arguably, ever. Between his impeachment, the ethics scandals of people like Scott Pruitt, Ryan Zinke, and Alex Acosta, and the wanton grifting of the public fisc, the “swamp” Trump promised to drain was an ever-deepening cesspool before COVID hit. 

Second, Carter was, charitably, a bit of a prig. A born-again Christian, Carter often came off as a scold. This happened most famously in his “malaise” speech, a word he did not actually use, but became associated with the overriding message of moral rot in the country that was eating away at the fabric of our community. At other times, whether it was lecturing people about lowering their thermostats or personally reviewing requests by aides and elected officials who wanted to use the White House tennis court, Carter looked like a nag and a wet blanket. Trump, is, charitably, a bit of a prick. The quotes are well known, but his glaring racism, misogynism, xenophobia, and so much more make him as popular as herpes with all but his MAGA followers. Caging kids. Calling white supremacists “very fine people.” Shithole countries. In the same way Carter’s parsimony turned off Americans who were already suffering and did not want to be treated like children, Trump’s odiousness runs counter to who we like to believe we are as a nation - charitable, progressive, open minded, and welcoming of all people, regardless of race, creed, ethnicity, or sex. 

Third, their opponents share similarities. While Reagan and Biden’s politics will never be confused for being the same, both were experienced hands at politics. Reagan with two terms as California Governor under his belt and Biden having two terms as Vice President after a long career in the U.S. Senate. Much was made of Reagan’s age (as the Trump people are trying to do with Biden) and the fear that he would steer the country in a rightward direction (as the Trump people are trying to portray Biden as a dupe of the left). 

Finally, and most importantly, are the crises Carter and Trump faced. While Carter was hands on and did all he could to get the hostages freed from Iran and Trump has checked out on doing anything to mitigate COVID, voters’ reaction has been the same - widespread disdain for both. What Iran exposed with Carter and what COVID exposed with Trump is the same thing - incompetence. For Carter, it cemented the view that he was simply in over his head. That his lack of experience and inability to bring a small country like Iran to heel even with our military might, made America look small and weak. For Trump, his indifference to COVID has revealed all that people knew about him - his narcissism, his obliviousness to facts, his laziness - that some looked past in 2016 but cannot do now because this is not a reality show, it is literally a life and death situation that other countries, with competent leadership, have gotten a handle on while we have not. It has exposed a different kind of weakness, a different kind of impotence, than Iran did, but the result is no different. Americans by wide margins, see our nation heading in the wrong direction and see a man standing at the White House podium saying things utterly divorced from their reality. 

Looked at in this way, the late October breakers who abandoned Carter and swung to Reagan appear to be making their judgment about Trump’s failures earlier in the race, perhaps owing to Biden’s credentials as a former Vice President to a still popular former President who is a safer alternative than Reagan was viewed to be until that debate performance. It explains why polling shows the closest states from 2016 like Michigan and Pennsylvania swinging sharply to Biden’s camp, but the true canaries in the coal mine for a 1980-like sweep are in places like Arizona, Georgia, and even Texas. If those states abandon Trump, then you could see a Biden victory that may not reach the 489 electoral votes Reagan won in 1980, but could fall comfortably in the 360-380 won by Bill Clinton (twice) and Barack Obama (once).

There is one other consequence to that scenario. While Reagan’s victory is remembered as the birth of modern conservatism, a less remembered result of his landslide victory was the 12 Republicans who won U.S. Senate races that night too. Democratic incumbents like six-term incumbent Warren Magnuson, four-term incumbent Frank Church, three-term incumbents Gaylord Nelson and Birch Bayh, and the Democrats’ 1972 Presidential nominee, George McGovern, all lost. In 2020, so-called purple state Senators like Cory Gardner and Martha McSally are viewed as highly vulnerable, but as polls show Republican incumbents like Joni Ernst (Iowa), Thom Tillis (North Carolina), and Susan Collins (Maine) trailing their opponents, you can start to see the ripples of larger waves forming. If Trump continues to repel all but his ardent base, a 1980-like tsunami might take out other thought-to-be safe Senators like Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell while under-the-radar races like Alaska could also swing blue. 

Of course, as we are constantly reminded, there is still a lot of time between now and election day. But early voting starts in six weeks and COVID is not getting any better. Trump may have modestly changed his ~ tone ~ this week, but tone does not change the facts on the ground or the continued misery we are all experiencing. If, on election night, Biden is declared the winner early and down ballot races not even thought to be competitive for Democrats break in their favor, expect to hear a lot of flashbacks to forty years ago.

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July 25

I've been thinking a lot lately about my 40s. They are ending in a few months. So much time squandered. On the personal front, I started by digging myself out of the worst mistake of my life and got divorced. I dated a bit and then about 2 years later I met someone who broke my heart. Flash forward 7 years, and I'm utterly alone and have not had a serious relationship since and have not really dated in several years. On the professional front, I was on a glide path into upper management in my office and distinguished myself on a myriad of occasions only to get passed over when an opportunity arose. In the military, they call this "up or out," well I was "out" except I did not retire, I just got dumped into a backwater part of our office where I still reside, cooling my heels now that the pandemic has made any employment both scarce and not something one walks away from without solid back up plans.

So, yeah, a total waste of a decade. A DECADE.

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July 24

Had a productive day (and it's only 1:30). I slept like shit, which always helps in terms of getting the day started. Regardless, I did a grocery run (as good as it's going to get so long as COVID is around - everyone in masks, mostly distanced, and in and out in 15 minutes), got a work out in, and wrote a brief.

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July 23

I passed 13,000 followers on Twitter yesterday. I will admit I take some pride in having organically built this healthy following. I never ask people to follow me (gauche) or pay for followers (straight up bullshit) and I have always believed you should tweet the same whether 1 person follows you or 1 million. I did pick up some new people by hash tagging a few tweets, which stopped doing a long time ago largely because of what happened when I did it yesterday - lots of bullshit replies from people I end up blocking. It is just one of those tradeoffs you make on social media. If your tweets get exposed to more people, more people are likely to engage with them - some you will want to engage, some you will not, and others in between. 

My general rule is I do not engage with trolls, I just block them. My other rule is people who include me in replies usually get blocked (always if they do not follow me, regardless of whether they are replying agreeing or disagreeing with me). I think Twitter is a choose-your-own-adventure platform and mine is to tweet, rarely retweet and every now and again tag someone I follow with something I see or read that I think they will find interesting. Your mileage may vary.

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July 22

I am really starting to wear down. I think it is the heat. It is just unrelenting. I am doing the bare minimum each day, just trying to ride it out until (late?) next week when it is supposed to cool down. I am also rethinking my plan to retire to Arizona. Ha ha.

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