I’m a huge fan of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Rachel Bloom. I’m also a huge fan of anything that will get the now gray-haired monster from 1600 Pennyslvania Avenue.
So with apologies to Ms. Bloom, here is a remix/parody of “I Have Friends” — a song that seems peculiarly applicable in this epoch of contending with a raging narcissist who can’t leave the White House gracefully.
Today was the first day in which I felt proud to be an American since 2016. Joe Biden became the 46th President of the United States. With his sweeping victories in Georgia, Pennyslvania, Nevada, and Arizona, Biden won several states that seemed beyond him — often by a razor-thin margin — and defeated the menace that had threatened to permanently destroy democracy.
The mood here in Brooklyn was one of jubilation. Cars honked for hours. People danced in the street. As I did my laundry, an exuberant Jamaican woman offered hilarious commentary to accompany what came from the television. It was the same television in which I had witnessed Hillary Clinton concede while folding my shirts in hopeless tears. Grand Army Plaza was thronged with jumping bystanders feeling a wave of possibility that I haven’t witnessed since Obama took office in 2008.
There still remains much that is uncertain. Namely, whether the Democrats will take the Senate. Two Georgia seats are heading into a twin runoff race. There have been whispers from Alaska about Dr. Al Gross having a mail-in shot. Even Cal Cunningham in North Carolina is behind now by only 95,739 votes, with 2% of the ballots left to count.
But somehow the hard details don’t matter today. Today, we restored dignity and empathy to the Presidency. And this was no small battle. As an American, I feel that we have a strong shot at regaining democracy again and maybe even listening to each other. And I know that everybody I talked to in the streets of Brooklyn felt the same way.
I don’t feel any desire to punch at or mention the man who Biden is replacing. Frankly, that man is digging his own grave by refusing to concede or to even leave the White House with dignity. One feels that a giant marshmallow has deflated and melted. And it’s a strange feeling given how much of a threat he was only last week. He’ll probably pull a few shenanigans in the next 75 days. But what we can confidently say is this: The system held. The republic endured. People made compromises and knew who they needed to stand behind. Let us hope that this spirit of unity holds into the new year and the new presidential administration.
When CNN anchor Don Lemon pointed out to Chris Cuomo on Thursday night that he had to cut off some of his friends because they were “too far gone,” I knew exactly what he meant. The problem is that the disgraceful act of punching down at anybody who is struggling isn’t confined to the right anymore — even though all the calls for basic human decency have emerged from Democratic leaders. Back in August, Biden gave an acceptance speech at the DNC that was surprisingly eloquent. He demanded an America that was “selfless and humble” and hoped to redefine the nation as one of possibilities rather than division. The Left’s talking points have seemed — on the surface, at least — to prize decency and humility as the honorable traits that distinguish them from Trump’s minions.
Earlier in the week, Wallace Shawn wrote a thoughtful essay for the New York Review of Books that featured some surprisingly trenchant truths (for Shawn, at any rate) about the way in which America has shifted away from being kind:
Trump has liberated a lot of people from the last vestiges of the Sermon on the Mount. A lot of people turn out to have been sick and tired of pretending to be good. The fact that the leader of one of our two parties—the party, in fact, that has for many decades represented what was normal, acceptable, and respectable—was not ashamed to reveal his own selfishness, was not ashamed to reveal his own indifference to the suffering of others, was not even ashamed to reveal his own cheerful enjoyment of cruelty…all of this helped people to feel that they no longer needed to be ashamed of those qualities in themselves either. They didn’t need to feel bad because they didn’t care about other people. Maybe they didn’t want to be forbearing toward enemies. Maybe they didn’t want to be gentle or kind.
Shawn is absolutely correct. But a certain type of professional pundit who professes to speak on behalf of regular Joes and Janes, usually epitomized by Dirtbag Left types sitting on Patreon-fueled piles of money — the kind of brunch-entitled elitist or “sensible” middle-of-the-road type who not so secretly despises the vast promise of humanity — would seem to suggest that some people who claim to lean left are just as guilty in cleaving to false pretense. To even point these obvious blind spots out is to be falsely branded as a Quillette fan. (When I called out the aforementioned elitist on his insensitivity to the brave food service workers he poked fun at, even citing articles pointing to how they were underpaid and risking their health during the pandemic, he decided to personally attack me, much in the deranged manner that he once demanded that a Nigerian prove his country of origin within ten seconds.) It’s clear that many of these self-appointed experts, driven by hubris and the Need to Matter, are unwilling to practice the very empathy that they profess to stand for. You won’t find them at Black Lives Matter protests. You won’t see them committed to tangible action that can get us closer to the goal of an America that considers everyone. Above all, you’ll never see them listening. And this does a disservice to the heartfelt DSA types committed to indefatigable organization or the Democrats rolling up their sleeves for a long and hard fight that considers the bigger picture.
I’ve had to end two friendships since the pandemic began. These two people weren’t Trump-voting Republicans, but rather strident neoliberals who felt as if their right to enjoy the good life was not something to be shared by those who fall into a lower income bracket and who seem incapable of perceiving life outside their hermetically sealed bubbles. I’m a far left progressive who was in the tank for Bernie and Liz, but who swallowed his pride for the greater good and who extended numerous hours phone banking for Biden out of a need to preserve democracy by any means necessary. The strategy here, one shared by other progressives who see stability as a long game for radical change, is to revive an American framework in which we can theoretically listen to each other again and make true change happen that is good for everyone.
But my perspective is a bit different from that of my moneyed middle-class peers. I grew up white trash. I have been homeless. I have lived in environments in which physical and emotional abuse was the daily norm. I have a toxic family who relished in hurting me and who left me to die repeatedly. I’ve had to do considerable rewiring of my attitude in the last six years so that I don’t feel resentment, but wonder and gratitude for all that I have and that I can pass on to those who are hurting. I have tried to pay it forward by taking care of other people in my life even as I often stay silent about my own needs and my own difficult struggles. I have known what it is like to have only thirty cents in my pocket and to have no pecuniary hope for the future. I have known what it’s like to have people in positions of power go well out of their way to smear me and distort the truth of my life. I have lived entire months in which I have eaten nothing but Top Ramen. And I am deeply aware, given the present unemployment crisis and the failed economic relief for Americans, that I could very well find myself in that place again, along with many other people who are dear to me. I believe that everyone deserves basic welfare and a second chance — even if it comes at the risk of repeat offenses, as we saw over the weekend with Ruth Shalit Barrett. To not extend such clemency is to align yourself with the Dirty Harry acolytes who believe that all people are hopelessly corrupt and incapable of change.
To believe in such liberalism right now can, in some circles, be an act of apostasy.
I decided to end these two friendships — one of which had endured for more than fifteen years — because these two neoliberals refused to consider the homeless and the working class even as they insisted that they “knew best” for America. Because I was such a loud advocate for the working class and the marginalized, these two former friends proceeded to disrespect me, somehow sensing that I was lesser by way of not adhering to the uninventively vanilla and somewhat sociopathic idea that the middle-class was the common origin point. These two “friends” vitiated me when I had given so much of my time and my energy to them. Something about our austere political atmosphere had made this kind of “What’s in it for me?” style of friendship a political issue, much as empathy, which must remain inclusive to anyone irrespective of political affiliation, has become a partisan issue.
In short, what united my neoliberal ex-friends with the hideous Trump cult was the selfish idea that there was only one narcissistic narrative that mattered: theirs and only theirs. Let’s not forget that the self-absorbed and the selfish can be found at any point on the political spectrum. You can suss them out fairly quickly by their need to announce their good deeds rather than simply performing their benevolent acts. There isn’t a concern for posterity or for extending a hand to the underprivileged. There isn’t a sense of historical continuity.
What I hope that everyone voting on Tuesday can come to understand is that we have two completely different paths for the future of our nation. One of them is a terrifying road to authoritarianism. The other is a path to greater promise. But let’s not be selective about our empathy. It’s a mistake to assume that all Republicans are Nazis, even though there are plenty of strong reasons to condemn the Republican Party’s repugnant actions over the last four years. When contending with fascist policies, your job is to fight hard, at any cost, for a greater tomorrow. When fighting systemic racism, your job is to be indefatigable.
Even so, the only reason I reached Republicans and Independents and converted them into Biden voters while phone banking was because I took the time to listen to their grievances and I paid close attention to their life stories. I took the time to find common points. We must remember that the people who are uncertain about Biden are driven by the same qualities that we ultimately are: empathy and decency and the sense that they are being heard rather than getting left in the dust. Flexing your ego on social media or within the framework of an article that only your peers will read may make you feel better. But are you actually doing the work? Are you trying to get people to listen? Do you have more than a superficial understanding of the clusters of people you are speculating about and for whom you falsely profess to be an expert? Because as far as I’m concerned, that tactic is just as inconsiderate as Trump leaving millions of Americans in the cold and refusing to offer a healthcare plan or a strategy for national recovery. As we look forward to a prospect in which we can hopefully move to a governmental system that takes care of everyone, we must not fall into the same trap as Trump. We are the United States of America. And that means finding new ways of reaching total strangers who we swiftly condemn as our enemies.
After several calls to the insect’s publicists, Reluctant Habits had the good fortune of landing an exclusive interview with the fly that landed on Mike Pence’s head during the October 7, 2020 vice presidential debate. We normally don’t pay our subjects for interviews, but, given the newsworthy nature of this get, the fly insisted on a large bag of Domino Sugar before speaking with us. The fly is currently in negotiations with Simon & Schuster for a six figure book deal and has also recently taped a reality TV pilot called Life After Larva for Peacock TV. The fly spoke to us in a strange patois of English and buzzing. We did our best to transcribe the conversation so that humans could understand it.
Why did you decide to land on Mike Pence’s head last night?
BZZZZZ. BECAUZZZZE IT WAS THERE!
You were there for two minutes.
BZZZZZ. YES, THE PENZZZZZZZZZZZZZZE IS A DEPENDABLE STATUE. BZZZZZZZZZZZ.
Uh, he’s a living and breathing human being.
HE IZZZZZZ? BZZZZZZZZ. HE WAS STIFFER THAN THE BRIGHAM YOUNG MONUMENT I LANDED ON YEZZZZZZTERDAY. BZZZZZZ.
Did you detect any signs of COVID On Mr. Pence?
BZZZZZ. BZZZZ. I HAVE LARGE COMPOUND EYES THAT SEE EVERYTHING! THE WHITE HAIR WAS A NICE PLACE TO REST AFTER MUNCHING ON ROTTING CARRION!
You’re dodging the question, Mr. Fly. Although it’s true that Pence’s left eye was notably pink.
BZZZZZ. TWAZZZZZZ INDEED. YET STILL NOT AS APPETIZING AS THE RAT I FEAZZZZZZZTED ON IN THE BACKROOM WALLS OF KINGSBURY HALL. BZZZZZZZ.
Wait a minute. I thought they sanitized the place to prevent infection.
BZZZZZZ. WE FLIEZZZZZZZZ CAN GET IN ANYWHERE. MUCH LIKE OUR FRIEND THE COVID-19 VIRUZZZZZZZZZ. NOT EVEN PLEXIGLAZZZZZZZZ WILL STOP UZZZZZZZZZZ! BZZZZZZZZZ!
You’ve spoken directly with the virus?
BZZZZZZZZ. WHY YEZZZZZZZZZZZZ!!!
Wow. Why didn’t you land on Kamalas’s head?
BZZZZZZZ. SHE WAZZZZZ NOT INFECTED WITH MY FRIEND THE COVID VIRUZZZZZZZZZZZZZ! BZZZZZZZZZZ. ALZO, SHE HAD A SOUL! BZZZZZZZZZZZZ. ALZZZZZZOOO, YOU FOOLISH HUMANS HAVE IT BACKWARDS! YOU CATCH MORE OF UZZZZZZZ WITH VINEGAR RATHER THAN HONEY. BZZZZZZZ!
Do you feel bad about distracting the American public from the real issues of this very important election?
BZZZZZZZ. NOOOOOO. THERE ARE SO MANY OF MY BROTHERS AND ZIZZZZZZZTERS. MORE OF UZZZZ THAN YOU. IT’S ABOUT TIME YOU PAID ATTENTION TO UZZZZZZZZ. BZZZZZZZZZZ.
Has celebrity changed you, Mister Fly?
BZZZZZZZ. MORE DECAYING FRUITS AND VEGETABLES TO ZPREAD MY ZEEED! BZZZZZZZZZ!! THE BEGINNING OF WORLDWIDE FLY DOMINATION! BZZZZZZZ!
You’re getting a tad megalomaniac there.
BZZZZZZZZZZ. WE ARE NO WORSE THAN YOUR FASCIST LEADERZZZZZZZZ. SUBMIT TO UZZZZZZZ NOW, HUMANZZZZZZZZZ!
Alright, here’s the bag of sugar.
The moral turpitude from the monsters who crawl on Vesey Street was very well-known in the five boroughs even before the pandemic. Just before any New York Magazine staffer entered a venue, the bartender would clang a bell and announce to the barflies with a stertorous holler that they could stay at the bar at their own peril. The door would open with an ominous squeak and the bartender would distract the vicious predatorial arriviste with charm and, if necessary, a free drink to avoid an Adam Platt takedown. It wasn’t always easy to appeal to the New York contributor’s narcissism and barracuda-like hello in these first vital minutes. But the bartenders did a decent job, even when their lives sometimes ended that very night.
The bartender’s honorable distractions usually offered you a few minutes to give the New York contributor the slip. You’d flatten bills on the bar, placing them just under the check presenter, and then you’d discreetly walk away, hearing the bloodcurdling sounds of the New York writer planting his vampiric fangs into the bartender (along with the bartender’s helpless screaming). You hoped that the generous tip would be enough to help cover the bartender’s funeral expenses. We New Yorkers do try and look out for each other.
Or, to put it a less inventive way, approximately 85% of the people who work at New York Magazine have the moral instincts of a striped hyena.
This is all common knowledge in media circles. Actual facts.
The striped hyena will often pretend to be dead when attacked and will stop at nothing to attack anyone — even a predator of greater size — in a dispute over food or, in this case, the expression of needless cruelty. Follow any New York contributor who gets pushback for a vile and disproportionately callous tweet and the New York contributor will pretend as if she is dead and not there. Which is precisely what Jonathan Chait and Olivia Nuzzi did in the last few days, of which more anon.
You see, these contributors are secretly savoring your attention in their notifications! They’re converting your likes and favorites to justify why their mediocre thoughts should translate into regular television appearances! They are forwarding all of it onto editor-in-chief David Haskell to prove — in an age of heightened media layoffs that always wound the wrong people — just why they should remain employed after writing such garbage hot takes as “Why Liberals Should Support a Trump Republican Nomination” when they’re refusing to disclose their conflicts of interest. (Jonathan Chait’s embarrassingly smug and insufferable article, which seriously suggested that Trump’s Presidency would follow the flagstones established by Arnold Schwarzenegger as California Governor, was rightly named one of “the worst takes of the 2010s” by The Outline.)
chait update: he has deleted the BOFA tweet which, as i understand it, is a felony in every state pic.twitter.com/t2GyarxaeK
— Ashley Feinberg (@ashleyfeinberg) July 13, 2018
New York contributors — specifically, the sophomoric and sociopathic pundits Jonathan Chait and Olivia Nuzzi — represent a repugnant breed of amoral Chuck Tatum types who view real life as a joyless sudoku puzzle to be filled in with superficial findings. Chait actually believes he’s some intellectual, but lacks any ability to discern clear satire or to comprehend common lingo. Nuzzi masquerades as as journalist, believing that a white supremacist’s musical taste represents some unique human insight that will make her name. And the media scarfs this up. When Spin‘s Jeremy Gordon actually followed up with Depeche Mode on the Richard Spencer question, it was a dark day in journalism. But even Gordon was savvy enough to understand that there was something preposterous in running with such a story. It’s a pity he never thought to go to the source of this nonsense, which was Nuzzi, and interrogate why such a nothingburger “bombshell” from a white supremacist resonated as much as it did. But then media people trust media people too much.
Journalism should never be about superficial attention. But when you’re as mediocre as Chait and Nuzzi are (and it’s worth nothing that Nuzzi really wants to be Ann Coulter: so stop calling her a journalist already), when you never have anything fresh to say, it’s often necessary to venture into bestial waters and play the attention economy game.
From Jonathan Chait during the afternoon of August 21, 2020:
From Olivia Nuzzi on August 20, 2020:
Both of these tweets are without wit or humanity. It says a great deal about New York Magazine’s hideous atmosphere and Haskell’s complicit approval of eyeballs by any means necessary that these tweets would be published within days of each other.
Presidential. pic.twitter.com/GzKhlmfvyW
— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) August 21, 2020
I have my issues with Joe Biden. But you would need a heart of stone to not be genuinely moved by the way that Biden reached this stuttering kid and gave him hope. So much hope that the kid went onto support him at the Democratic National Convention. Chait isn’t delivering a “spicy take.” He’s conveniently ignoring responsibility for his vile words, falsely claiming that there was something more “refined” to his tweet. No, there isn’t. And isn’t it funny how pundits never seem to have the time to address criticism?
Political leaders have always taken time out of their schedule to speak one-on-one with their constituents. It’s literally part of the job. And in the case of Biden, it most certainly is “high-leverage use” of his time.
As for Nuzzi, she’s a cocky and callous 27-year-old who sold her soul for a pittance. One would expect someone to turn into a heartless cynic much later in life. But that is not the Clay Felker tradition and Nuzzi is on the Ann Coulter fast track. Nuzzi is, of course, referring to how Biden lost his first wife Nelia and his one-year-old daughter Naomi in a 1972 car accident and how Biden also lost his son Beau in 2005 because of brain cancer. Aside from the complete dismissal of how trauma, or grief, has become one of Biden’s most effective ways of connecting with people, Nuzzi fundamentally does not seem to understand the way trauma works. Much like depression, one can relieve trauma throughout one’s life — sometimes in crushing waves, sometimes in little rivulets. That Biden has used his trauma to relate to everyday people should be the focus here. That he also used trauma to give a crying Meghan McCain solace on a memorable 2017 appearance on The View should also be worthy of attention. This is where the pundit should opine. You take in the obvious developments and offer a unique spin. But, like Chait, Nuzzi has nothing but repugnant superficiality.
Chait and Nuzzi are woefully unsuited to opine about this election. Because, for professional sociopaths like them, empathy never factors into the political picture. Even after hope and empathy were the basis of Obama’s meteoric rise to the White House in 2008. Even though empathy was the very message Biden was offering in his final night speech at the DNC.
Empathy is, in short, the very quality that any pundit should be focused on during the next 74 days. It is the very quality that helped Biden to raise $70 million during DNC week. But if you don’t actually have empathy — as Chait and Nuzzi clearly don’t — then you’re in no position to offer useful context in this presidential election.
Chait and Nuzzi’s disgraceful tweets were roundly ratioed. But they were both too cowardly to respond to the complaints. They couldn’t read the room. And if you can’t read the room, you have no business calling yourself a journalist, a pundit, or a media expert of any kind. Especially when you dance around the truth like a sociopath.
I watched much of the interminable DNC coverage tonight, waiting for Jerry Lewis and Sammy Davis, Jr. to show up, and I’m sorry, but I demand better. Business as usual isn’t going to rid us of that evil man in the White House. This is the most important election of our lives. Phoning it in with condescending montages and feel-good bullshit isn’t going to cut it.
Aside from the passionate pizzazz from Bernie, who decried authoritarianism against the incongruous backdrop of chopped wood, and Michelle Obama’s mild concession that Trump was ill-suited to the Presidency (which is a bit like saying that breathing in carbon monoxide is bad for you: sure, it’s something you need to say, but it’s hardly the foundation for the brio one sees in, oh say, the good King rallying the troops in Henry V), this was a largely comatose affair that could have played on any UHF station twenty years ago, complete with a cameo from Tom Vu telling you to come to his seminar. And even if my ridiculous transposition were to actually transpire, I’m pretty sure Vu would have been the liveliest and most memorable figure.
Fake smiles propped themselves up, tendering platitudes and quips that could have been cribbed from a cornball Hallmark card. Kloubuchar’s sham dentition, in particular, was truly a phony crocodile look for the ages. I’ve seen that self-serving look espoused by far too many cutthroat types in corporate boardrooms. But few of these speakers had any plans and they never espoused anything close to real empathy over the many people suffering throughout the nation right now. Even an In Memoriam montage for the 170,000 Americans killed by COVID played at a remarkably brief clip, as if some twitchy kid hopped up on Mountain Dew in the control room was randomly determining the trajectory of the broadcast. John Kasich looked as if he was between holes on a golf course and looked eager to return to the game. You resented him for being there. Eva Longoria looked better prepared to host some VH1 special rather than one of the major political congregations of the year.
Where was the true compassion for the millions of Americans who are unemployed or who face eviction right now? Where was, in short, the real emotional conviction? We’re living in a hellscape. Let’s not forget that. Read the national temperature and it’s pretty clear that this isn’t the kind of environment that you organize a harmless little potluck over. We are in a place that demands mobilization and action and passion and conviction. Sure, it’s nice to know that Biden talks to regular people while riding Amtrak. But it’s a sign of how far our standards have plummeted that this tepid corporate nonsense, with its overwrought tunes and those relentless bullet points of info reminding what each speaker had done, has apparently caused so many to mist up or to express “how proud” they are to be a Democrat. It turns out that being a risk-averse neoliberal is a bit like being a member of Rotary International. You pat people on the back for saying nothing special and then you use your card to get the 10% discount at Denny’s.
Frankly, I was mostly appalled and deeply uninspired. Only Bernie’s promised appearance tonight kept me watching. You can’t act as if the millions of people from many backgrounds who mobilized behind Bernie never existed. Hell, you can’t pretend that real working people and real unemployed people who are seeing their life savings and mental health nosedive don’t exist. The Democrats are making the same damn mistake they always have. They act like the party of the middle-class and they never come across as the party of the people. And if they’re not careful during the next three nights, Trump is going to swoop in just as he did in 2016 and speak to these very real people in ways they want to hear. And these people, desperate for anything, will buy it. And we’re going to be in a sizable cesspool from which we will probably never be able to escape. The hell of it is that mainstream Democrats never want to hear this. But they’re the ones who really need to. Because they’re the ones who put their fingers in their ears and say “Ka Ma La I can’t hear you.”
I’m starting to fear we’re going to lose this. And we really can’t. If Trump is re-elected, it’s going to permanently break our country. I’d put my own passion into trying to get people to vote for the greater good. But the problem here is that the so-called greater good gives me nothing to be passionate about. And I’m not someone who is ever going to offer fake passion. It’s the job of the Biden campaign to close the deal. And the present presentation format simply isn’t going to cut it.
I’m going to be avoiding political news for the rest of the week. I’m doing this for my own sanity. I have an audio drama to finish editing and freelancing jobs to carry on with and lovely actors to record some insert scenes with. And frankly, like many of you who were disappointed in last night’s results, I need to devote my time and energy to summon hope and positivism and joy after the sorrow and sleeplessness caused by Super Tuesday. (I finally did get some sleep. But it wasn’t easy. And I know I wasn’t alone. I was texting with three friends at 4 AM, all of us up, all of us worried, all of us advocating for different candidates, all of us seeing the shocking reality ahead of us. What serious political wonk looking at the long game implications wasn’t up at an ungodly hour contemplating the horrific consequences of four more years of Cheeto?)
The Democratic Establishment, a cowardly entity that prioritized a formula that didn’t work in 2016 and that went all in on a doddering Wonder Bread spokesman who cannot get names, dates, or places right and who is less inspiring than Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, and George McGovern combined, decided that Joe Biden would be the man to defeat Trump and coordinated accordingly in Dallas on Monday night. Even the best polls inform us that Biden can barely muster little more than 50% against the worst President that this nation has ever had the misfortune to endure.
I will vote for Biden if he is the frontrunner. But he won’t get a dime from me. I won’t campaign for him. I have no enthusiasm for this man whatsoever. I may as well be voting for a potted plant that can occasionally form coherent sentences while it is being watered. Honestly, someone needs to find Corn Pop and get his side of the story. I’m guessing Biden wasn’t nearly as tough as he thought he was.
Sure, we have to vote for him in November if it comes to that. We have little choice. But Joe Biden is not a man for the people. He is not a unity candidate. He is meaner than Bernie and more of a bully. Biden’s needless attacks and insults on voters — such as berating the two vets who bravely confronted his pro-war record in Oakland, calling an Iowa voter “a damn liar,” and telling another voter questioning his policy that he was fat — are not the stuff of a President who must consider the viewpoints of others and remain coolheaded and respectful when facing justified criticism. Frankly, Biden’s conduct here is far more Trumpian than any comparisons that have been applied to Bernie.
And poor Elizabeth Warren. She couldn’t even carry her own state. She refused to see the writing on the wall and stayed in the race too long. And now Warren and Sanders supporters are at each other’s throats on social media. Fractiousness and divisiveness. The stuff we don’t need right now. The best thing that Warren can do — if she truly believes in progressive policy — is to drop out of the race and persuade her followers to vote for Bernie. That’s the only way we’ll get a progressive President at this point. But it’s not likely. It looks like we’re all going to be holding the bag for a gaffe machine.
November will be the equivalent of attending a mandatory corporate meeting and falling asleep and getting reprimanded for not paying attention to the floundering and boring old man, devoid of innovation and originality and true awareness, spearheading the PowerPoint shitshow that expresses little more than vanilla platitudes and the status quo and a remarkably uninspiring litany of mainstream awfulness. I will vote — like many, without a shred of passion or conviction, holding my nose the entire way, much like someone disposing of a rat caught in a glue trap, feeling the sense that I am not changing a damn thing and knowing that Biden is as inspiring as accidentally walking into a giant heap of moldy white bread during a morning stroll — and I will probably go home right after my vote and drink many shots of whiskey, contemplating how the DNC cowered and caved when they could have created hope and dreams and inspiration and built upon Bernie’s coalition and given more than a few fucks about universal healthcare and a world in which people didn’t have to go bankrupt to stay healthy. Amy, Beto, Pete — all easily purchased pawns. When Trump wins again in November, they will have to live with this. I’m sure they’ll sleep quite well. After all, they had to be promised something. The worst thing about all this is that all of America will fall victims to authoritarianism and abject cruelty and a nation in which income inequality and exploiting the poor and the middle class is ever more the status quo. Good hard-working American people who clearly don’t deserve to be sacrificed to the corporate gods worshipped by neoliberal centrist cowards — this will be the new normal. And it will take at least a decade to recover from this madness. That’s the best case scenario.
Yes, it’s vital to accept realism. But we cannot lose hope despite these nightmarish truths. It fills me with sadness to see a remarkable progressive movement manipulated and short-changed so expertly by an Establishment instilling fear in swing voters who were, only days before yesterday, completely in the tank for Bernie. Perhaps we were fools in believing that progressive momentum would continue unabated. Still, it was the best kind of foolishness: the one that involved taking care of others, standing for something bigger than ourselves, believing that people were worthy of human rights and dignity, feeling empathy and passion and conviction, and placing pure energy in a beautiful dream that the Democrats could once again return to their roots and alter the national landscape and improve wellbeing much as they had with the New Deal and the Great Society. Still, it’s equally important to not have your hopes and spirits and idealism and ambitions paralyzed by the truth. And who wants to listen to hopelessness? I certainly don’t want to be guided by it.
We will rise again. We will fight again. Bernie is still a long shot. But do we want to tell our grandchildren that we didn’t go the distance? It may take years, but we have no other choice. For now, let us regroup and be gentle and be true and be bold and crack jokes so that we can find the faith again. That is what gets people eventually on the right side. That is the true path to unity.
Pete Buttigieg left the presidential race because he didn’t want to be humiliated on Super Tuesday. He had been roundly thrashed last week by brave workers risking their livelihood after his hollow platitudes to those fighting for fifteen dollars an hour didn’t land and he was received by unremitting ridicule. Moreover, he didn’t have the money to win. He had $6.6 million at the beginning of February, just a half million less than Biden did. And then South Carolina happened. Tom Steyer, who took the state’s motto “While I Breath I Hope” quite literally by going all in, had bested Buttigieg by three percentage points. Then Steyer dropped out. And the polls showed Buttigieg not doing all that well. Behind the unpopular Bloomberg in Utah. Just 8% in a February 19th Washington Post/ABC News poll. Barely 10% in a CBS News/YouGov poll released on February 23rd. He had canceled his pivotal Florida trip, claiming a cold, much like Frank Sinatra. But he didn’t have Sinatra’s popularity or his power. He didn’t have young voters. He didn’t have African-Americans. He couldn’t win, even though he had declared victory in Iowa before the results were in and carried himself in the final weeks of his campaign much like Little Lord Fauntleroy walking the streets of New York City with an aristocratic air.
But now he’s out. And what this means is that the Democratic race has come down to Bernie Sanders vs. Joe Biden. This, however, is an election in which Sanders has the clear advantage, not Biden. Conventional wisdom might suggest that voters cleaving to Buttigieg would put their faith in a dependable mainstream moderate with brand name recognition like Biden. But the donations and the polling figures paint a different picture. Sanders raised $46.5 million in February alone, easily dwarfing the Biden war chest. A Morning Consult poll released on February 27, 2020 shows Bernie ahead as a second choice among Buttigieg voters by 21%. It’s admittedly a narrow lead over Biden and Warren, who did merit 19% each in this poll. But it nevertheless speaks to the significantly underestimated way in which Bernie has built a vast coalition.
It’s possible that the flailing campaigns of Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren may be able to take some of the wind out of Bernie’s sails. Klobuchar, who sustained a level of remarkably controlled rage against Pete in the last two debates, will no doubt be galvanized by this news. But it’s doubtful that she will crack much more than 6% in most of the Super Tuesday races. Warren has a slightly better chance, but her support has plummeted in the most recent primaries. 9.2% in New Hampshire. 9.7% in Nevada. If we look to Nevada as a litmus test, the 14.3% that Buttigieg won in that state would likely be split among Bernie, Biden, and Warren. And if that’s indicative of the national clime, that’s simply not enough of a share for her to roll past Biden, who will likely see stronger numbers in future races after his win in South Carolina.
Biden represents the likely second place candidate. But he’s going to need to mobilize a lot of people to donate money in the next few weeks. And he’s going to need to have a very strong showing in the fourteen states up for grabs just two days from now.
All this is very good news for Bernie. But his campaign should not grow complacent. As I argued last night, he’s going to need someone like Stacey Abrams in his corner. He’s going to need to demonstrate to black voters and older voters that he’s worked out the numbers and that he stands with a coalition that is inclusive of centrists and the South. His present strategy of pointing out that universal healthcare and free college tuition are not radical ideas is a start. But this is a place where Biden is likely to attack him on.
Buttigieg’s exit is definitely Bernie’s gain. But it’s not the end of this grueling race. Not by a long shot.
Joe Biden won the South Carolina Democratic primary tonight. As I write this, with 67% of the precincts reporting, Biden leads by 48.68%, with Bernie Sanders in second place at 19.3%, Tom Steyer in third place at 11.4%, Pete Buttigieg in fourth place at 7.9%, and Elizabeth Warren in fifth place at 7%.
First off, Biden’s win doesn’t negate Bernie’s present momentum as Democratic primary frontrunner. And it doesn’t discount Bernie’s ability to build broad and inclusive coalitions. Even in South Carolina, Bernie did very well among younger black voters in the exit polls. What he needs to do now is to appeal to older voters and, of course, more African-American voters. He has a strong partnership with Nina Turner and, nationally speaking, his numbers are up among blacks — with 20% describing themselves as “enthusiastic” about Bernie.
Warren’s campaign is nearly finished. Barely 10% in both Nevada and New Hampshire. Just 7% tonight in South Carolina. We’ll know more on Super Tuesday, but, despite an increasingly stronger profile at the debates, she’s just not getting through to voters. My prediction is that she will drop out of the race before Buttigieg and that this support will likely go to Bernie. Buttigieg has proven to be incredibly tenacious, but his track record prevents him from winning the broad support of black voters. On that front, Biden definitely has more of a shot nationally than Buttigieg ever will.
The likely reality is that the three top Democratic candidates will be Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, and Pete Buttigieg. Of this trio, Bernie stands out as the most progressive candidate. And he has the support of Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Pramila Jayapal, and Rashida Tlaib. But to clinch the national race, Bernie needs someone who is (a) African-American, (b) a woman, (c) from the South, and (d) who can unite moderate liberals and progressives.
That person is Stacey Abrams.
If Bernie is the frontrunner, Abrams is the only logical choice for vice president. She’s been the deputy city attorney of Atlanta and an incredible figure in the Georgia General Assembly, single-handedly stopping Georgia Republicans from implementing a cable tax that would shift the burden to working people. She’s shown that she can reduce prison expenses without the crime rates going up. So she’s good with the numbers. Abrams’s powerful response to this year’s State of the Union address demonstrated that she was authentic, personable, and pragmatic, and showed that she genuinely cared about working people. In talking about her father hitchhiking home without a coat (he had given the coat to a homeless man), Abrams proved that she was better than Warren in talking about her working-class roots and tying this personal experience into the need for kindness and sacrifice.
What’s greatly appealing about Abrams is that she’s formidable — especially in her 2018 gubernatorial battle against Brian Kemp — but has always come across as a voice of empathy and reason. She is a natural born leader and she has said repeatedly that she wants to be President one day. So she’d definitely bring her A game as veep. Among moderates, she could be perceived as the gentler voice to Bernie’s bellowing. Plus, she’d clean Mike Pence’s clock in the vice presidential debate.
But aside from these terrific credentials, we’d also have the historic precedent of the first African-American woman running for vice president. Not only would this carry on Obama’s legacy (she earned his endorsement while running for Georgia governor), but this would also add a vital new context to Bernie’s proposed plans for Medicare for All, tuition free education, and guaranteed housing. Progress shouldn’t just be about adopting vital and significant policy changes. It also needs to ensure that the people in power reflect the people of America. This would also lay down the flagstones for Abrams becoming President — whether in a subsequent election or in the terrible event that Bernie, who is 78 years old, dies while serving as President.
It’s not enough to want Trump out of office. If the Democrats want to win, they need people who will be inspired enough to show up to vote. And in order to do that, the 2020 Democratic ticket needs the same hope that fueled Obama’s campaign in 2008. Bernie is close to this, but it’s clear that he cannot build a coalition on his own. He needs Stacey Abrams to be there with him.
On Tuesday, Andrew Yang dropped out of the 2020 presidential race. He was only able to crack 2.8% of the vote during the New Hampshire primary and a mere 1% of the Iowa Caucus votes. But Yang’s presence represented an outlier sincerity that was sui generis, a welcome reminder that the Democratic frontrunner this year can possess a genuine empathy for the American people that can be worn on one’s sleeve without apology. Yang filled the void left by Beto O’Rourke’s exit with his off-kilter sincerity. He was an inspiring force for the “Yang Gang,” a group of supporters who were just as passionate as “Bernie bros” and justifiably excited to see an Asian American represented in a vital election race. He was the lone non-white regular on the debate stage after Kamala Harris, Julian Castro, and Cory Booker dropped out of the race. And after Bong Joon-ho swept the Oscars on Sunday with Parasite, it seems a great letdown to take in the dawning reality that Yang won’t be participating in future debates. In an age in which Jack Dorsey and his crew of idiots upholds racism and hateful xenophobia on Twitter through ineffectual algorithms incapable of parsing nuance and intent, we truly needed more voices like Andrew Yang to set the record straight on a very real disease that ails us.
Yes, Yang, with his lack of necktie and his MATH pin always clipped to his lapel, was socially awkward at times. During the third democratic debate, when Yang introduced a raffle where ten families would receive a “freedom dividend” of $1,000 each month for a year (he later expanded this to thirteen families), he was received with bafflement and modest ridicule. But this seems to me unfair. Unlike other millionaires who entered the race for ignoble and narcissistic reasons (**clearing throat** Bloomberg **spastic and theatrical coughing**), Yang really wanted to solve our national ills with wildly original ideas. He believed that he could cure systemic racism with his universal basic income concept, providing purchasing power to minorities. While this was a batty idea and while his tax policy was more concerned with implementing a value-added tax rather than addressing income inequality, there was nevertheless something appealingly immediate about his position. Was it really any less crazy than finding the essential money for Medicare for All or Elizabeth Warren’s plan to forgive $1.6 trillion of student debt? Yang smartly recognized that one of our long-standing national ills requires a swift remedy and that mere lip service — the empty and cluelessly myopic white privilege that one sees prominently with Pete Buttigieg — won’t cut it.
Yang also had a refreshing sense of humor about his campaign. He sang “Don’t You Forget About Me” at a campaign rally. He crowd surfed at another rally. He even skateboarded before an appearance. Andrew Yang brought an instinctive sense of fun that seemed beyond most of the other candidates, but his heart seemed to be in the right place. He never came across as wingnut as Marianne Williamson or as stiff as Tom Steyer or as cavalierly hostile to voters on the fence as Joe Biden. Even if you couldn’t see him as President, it was almost impossible not to like the guy.
Yang’s willingness to commit to positions of empathy and understanding in provocatively inclusive ways was one of his great strengths. Last September, when comedian Shane Gillis was hired by Saturday Night Live as a regular and fired after repugnantly racist remarks about Chinese Americans were discovered on YouTube, it was Yang who called for a dialogue and a second chance for Gillis. Yang remarked, “I thought that if I could set an example that we could forgive people, particularly in an instance where, in my mind, it was in comedic context or gray area, that I thought it would be positive.”
Yang didn’t really have the opportunity to display the full range of these subtleties. But we did get one moment during his final debate when he calmly responded to Buttigieg shallowly grandstanding about the collective exhaustion of people outside Washington: “Pete, fundamentally, you are missing the question of Donald Trump’s victory. Donald Trump is not the cause of all of our problems. And we’re making a mistake when we act like he is. He is the symptom of a disease that has been building up in our communities for years and decades. And it is our job to get to the harder work of curing the disease. Most Americans feel like the political parties have been playing ‘You lose, I lose, You lose, I lose’ for years. And do you know who’s been losing this entire time? We have. Our communities have. Our communities’ way of life has been disintegrating beneath our feet.”
While there’s certainly a very strong argument that present frontrunner Bernie Sanders has united variegated people by highlighting their stories, Yang had a way, unlike the other candidates, of going directly to the underlying heart of aggravated Americans in the heartland who altered their votes in the 2016 election after being fed up after years of condescending vacuity. It is them who the Democratic candidate must speak to. Yang’s inclusive approach to empathy seems well beyond Buttigieg’s platitudes, but it appears to be increasingly adopted by Amy Klobuchar (which partially accounts for her third place win in New Hampshire).
Andrew Yang opened up a promising road for people of color to speak to voters who are still knowingly or unknowingly practicing systemic racism. And for this not insignificant contribution, he’ll have a place in my heart. America may not have been ready in 2020 for Yang’s approach to empathy, forgiveness, understanding, and inclusiveness. But this nation will almost certainly be prepared for this in future presidential elections. It will take some time, but I think history will see that Yang was ahead of the curve.
PHILLIP: So Senator Sanders, I do want to be clear here. You’re saying that you never told Senator Warren that a woman could not win the election?
SANDERS: That is correct.
PHILLIP: Senator Warren, what did you think when Senator Sanders told you a woman could not win the election?
I must confess that CNN’s Abby Phillip’s “moderation” in last night’s Democratic presidential debate angered me so much that it took me many hours to get to sleep. It was a betrayal of fairness, a veritable gaslighting, a war on nuance, a willful vitiation of honor, a surrender of critical thinking, and a capitulation of giving anyone the benefit of the doubt. It was the assumptive guilt mentality driving outrage on social media ignobly transposed to the field of journalism. It fed into one of the most toxic and reprehensible cancers of contemporary discourse: that “truth” is only what you decide to believe rather than carefully considering the multiple truths that many people tell you. It enabled Senator Warren to riposte with one of her most powerful statements of the night: “So can a woman beat Donald Trump? Look at the men on this stage. Collectively, they have lost ten elections. The only people on this stage who have won every single election that they have been in are the women. Amy and me.”
Any sensible person, of course, wants to see women thrive in political office. And, on a superficial level, Warren’s response certainly resonates as an entertaining smackdown. But when you start considering the questionable premise of political success being equated to constant victory, the underlying logic behind Warren’s rejoinder falls apart and becomes more aligned with Donald Trump’s shamefully simplistic winning-oriented rhetoric. It discounts the human truth that sometimes people have to lose big in order to excel at greatness. If you had told anyone in 1992 that Jerry Brown — then running against Bill Clinton to land the Democratic presidential nomination — would return years later to the California governorship, overhaul the Golden State’s budget so that it would shift to billions in surplus, and become one of the most respected governors in recent memory, nobody would have believed you. Is Abraham Lincoln someone who we cannot trust anymore because he had run unsuccessfully for the Illinois House of Representatives — not once, but twice — and had to stumble through any number of personal and political setbacks before he was inaugurated as President in 1861?
Presidential politics is far too complicated for any serious thinker to swaddle herself in platitudes. Yet anti-intellectual allcaps absolutism — as practiced by alleged “journalists” like Summer Brennan last night — is the kind of catnip that is no different from the deranged glee that inspires wild-eyed religious zealots to stone naysayers. There is no longer a line in the sand between a legitimate inquiry and blinkered monomania. And the undeniable tenor last night — one initiated by Phillip and accepted without question by Warren — was one of ignoble simplification.
Whether you like Bernie or not, the fact remains that Phillip’s interlocutory move was moral bankruptcy and journalistic corruption at the highest level. It was as willfully rigged and as preposterously personal as the moment during the October 13, 1988 presidential debate when Bernard Shaw — another CNN reporter — asked of Michael Dukakis, “Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?”
But where Shaw allowed Dukakis to answer (and allowed Dukakis to hang himself by his own answer), Phillip was arguably more outrageous in the way in which she preempted Sanders’s answer. Phillip asked Bernie a question. He answered it. And then she turned to Warren without skipping a beat and pretended as if Sanders had not answered it, directly contradicting his truth. Warren — who claims to be a longtime “friend” of Sanders — could have, at that point, said that she had already said what she needed to say, as she did when she issued her statement only days before. She could have seized the moment to be truly presidential, as she has been in the past. But she opted to side with the gaslighting, leading numerous people on Twitter to flood her replies with snake emoji. As I write this, #neverwarren is the top trending topic on Twitter.
The Warren supporter will likely respond to this criticism by saying, with rightful justification, that women have contended with gaslighting for centuries. Isn’t it about time for men to get a taste of their own medicine? Fair enough. But you don’t achieve gender parity by appropriating and weaponizing the repugnant moves of men who deny women their truth. If you’re slaying dragons, you can’t turn into the very monsters you’re trying to combat. The whole point of social justice is to get everyone to do better.
After the debate, when Bernie offered his hand to Warren, she refused to shake it — despite the fact that she had shaken the hands of all the other candidates (including the insufferable Pete Buttigieg). And while wags and pundits were speculating on what the two candidates talked about during this ferocious exchange, the underlying takeaway here was the disrespect that Warren evinced to her alleged “friend” and fellow candidate. While it’s easy to point to the handshake fiasco as a gossipy moment to crack jokes about — and, let’s face the facts, what political junkie or armchair psychologist wouldn’t be fascinated by the body language and the mystery? — what Warren’s gesture tells us is that disrespect is now firmly aligned with denying truth. It isn’t enough to gaslight someone’s story anymore. One now has to strip that person of his dignity.
Any pragmatic person understands that presidential politics is a fierce and cutthroat business and that politicians will do anything they need to do in order to win. One only has to reread Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes or Robert A. Caro’s Lyndon B. Johnson volumes to comprehend the inescapable realpolitik. But to see the putatively objective system of debate so broken and to see a candidate like Warren basking in a cheap victory is truly something that causes me despair. Because I liked Warren. Really, I did. I donated to her. I attended her Brooklyn rally and reported on it. I didn’t, however, unquestionably support her. Much as I don’t unquestionably support Bernie. One can be incredibly passionate about a political candidate without surrendering the vital need for critical thinking. That’s an essential part of being an honorable member of a representative democracy.
Bias was, of course, implicit last night in such questions as “How much will Medicare for All cost?” One rarely sees such concern for financial logistics tendered to, say, the estimated $686 billion that the United States will be spending on war and defense in 2020 alone. Nevertheless, what Abby Phillip did last night was shift tendentiousness to a new and obscene level that had previously been unthinkable. When someone offers an answer to your question, you don’t outright deny it. You push the conversation along. You use the moment to get both parties to address their respective accounts rather than showing partiality.
This is undeniably the most important presidential election in our lifetime. That it has come to vulgar gaslighting rather than substantive conversation is a disheartening harbinger of the new lows to come.
One would need a heart of anthracite to not be wowed by Senator Elizabeth Warren in person. On Tuesday night, at the Kings Theatre in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn — a venue that I was able to walk to from my own stomping grounds, where I am one of a handful of white guys living in a four story building thronged with apartments — Warren was an electric speaker. Wearing a cyan blazer and hitting the stage with the energy of someone at least two decades younger, she filled one of Brooklyn’s finest cathedrals with a series of stump speech talking points in which she discussed her unexpected life decisions — dropping out of a scholarship program to marry her first husband (“Husband #1. It’s never good when you have to number your husbands.”) and why she decided to be a teacher and a professor rather than a lawyer.
One of Warren’s strongest moments was when she described how government could benefit people. She pointed out a time in American life in which toasters would set houses on fire because the toasters would be kept running and a fire emerging from the oven would quickly latch onto an adjacent drape, setting the kitchen and thus the home into a costly conflagration. But when consumer protection laws added an automatic timer to the toasters, the fire problem disappeared. She used this metaphor to segue into her own noble efforts at banking regulation. It was another fine example of how Warren so adeptly connects with smart yet concise everyday comparisons that most Americans understand.
Before this, Julian Castro, who recently abandoned his presidential campaign and seemed to be preparing for a possible role as Warren’s running mate should she get the Democratic nomination, spoke eloquently about the need to include everyone — ranging from those with disabilities to those who are victims of racism and police brutality. And while Castro — dressed in shirtsleeves, relaxed and magnetic on stage — said all the right things, I am not sure if the crowd really understood his full message. I am also not sure if the crowd truly empathized with the two speakers who came before him — whose names I tried to suss out from a Warren volunteer and whose names are tellingly not included on the official Warren website. They were not even included on Warren’s live Twitter stream. But these two speakers felt real to me because they told tales of losing family members due to callous immigration policies and the risks of staying proudly undocumented. Castro and these two speakers were the real America, the America of the 21st century, the America you need to appeal to if you expect to win a presidential election.
I did not take notes, but you have to understand that I didn’t intend to report on this Warren rally at all. I had stupidly believed that the Warren crowd would be a motley group from all walks of life. But on Tuesday night, I was feeling increasingly uncomfortable by how Caucasian and affluent and neoliberal the whole affair was. Despite the fact that one audience member tried to heckle Warren by getting her to badmouth Mayor Pete (to her credit, she didn’t take the bait), the tone was more of a Buttigieg rally rather than a Warren one. The audience was largely white and upper middle-class — a veritable sea of Wonder Bread and Stuff White People Like that unsettled me. As I joked to a friend by text, “This rally is so white that I feel like Ving Rhames.” The volunteers were white. They used ancient cornball slang like “Ditto!” without irony. Was I in Brooklyn Heights or Flatbush? As I stood in line, these people talked of vacationing in France and of the stress of getting out of bed at 2:30 PM and they did not appear to recognize their privilege. I was able to bite my tongue, but I must confess that it rankled me to say nothing. There were complaints among the Warren faithful against Bernie Sanders, about how he was “too mean” and “not nice.” But nothing was said about his policy. Maybe they secretly understood that Sanders is the leading candidate among black millennials and that this is going to be trouble for Warren. The overwhelming takeaway I had was that these white Warren supporters were utterly clueless about how much of a disconnect they had to anyone who isn’t white. I was certain that few of them had ever been poor in their lives.
I watched two African American women try to get into the Kings Theatre, but who were denied entry into the theatre because the Warren volunteers overlooked them in the line and didn’t give them the requisite green sticker that secured them entry. It seemed to me a form of racial profiling. I watched white people refuse to leave tips for the black bartenders who were servicing them. (I dropped a Lincoln into the tip bucket because this upset me.) The first people to leave midway through Warren’s speech who weren’t parents trying to quiet down their kids were African-American. I watched one woman throw up her hands as Warren spoke. And this bothered me. I am sure that this is not the message that Warren wishes to promulgate.
Maybe what I’m trying to identify here is a specific risk-averse form of whiteness. A peculiar timidity that is out of step with these turbulent times and that is certainly contradictory with Warren’s ongoing chant, “I will fight for you!” Just before the rally began, my phone pinged with distressing news of Iran pummeling the Al Asad airbase, which houses American soldiers, with missiles. It was clear retaliation for the American assassination of Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani. It was, by any objective assessment, the beginning of a major international conflict — possibly a protracted war. Castro and Warren, to their credit, acknowledged this at the beginning of their respective speeches. But I brought this up with the white people who attended the rally, thinking that they would share the same horror for unnecessary bloodshed that I did. I was told to shut up and to not bring this up. Because whiteness is blind and selective about the big issues. Not just with the rich inner lives of people who aren’t white, but with cataclysmic events that produce violence and for which privilege insulates white people.
Then it really hit me. The Kings Theatre was in my neighborhood, which I love with all my heart. According to the 2010 census, only one fifth of Flatbush is white. The average household income here is $56,599, which doesn’t buy you a lot of cheddar in New York but that allows one a modestly happy existence. I recognize my own privilege, but I do not consider myself superior to anyone and I spend much of my time listening to other people’s stories. After all, the whole point of life is to always consider perspectives that are not your own. Who the hell am I to declare my life better? That isn’t what democracy is about.
Please understand that I have the utmost respect for Elizabeth Warren and I think she would make a fine President. But it’s her supporters that have spawned these sentiments. I truly believe they don’t get it. They are simply more sedate versions of the “Bernie bro” stereotype that they have spent the last three years kvetching about. But Bernie spent the last four years learning from his mistakes and trying out an approach that was more inclusive. Warren’s white volunteer base does not seem to understand that you can’t win the 2020 presidential election if you lack the ability to appeal to people who are not white. If you want to do affluent white people things on your own time, such as blowing $180 on a Sunday Funday brunch and complaining about how hard it is to have it all, that’s fine. I’m not going to begrudge you for it. But don’t think for a second that your multicultural myopia will guarantee you an election victory. If you can’t be bothered to remember the names of people who aren’t white and who are genuinely brave and who have truly lived — and, again, I am guilty on this front with the two speakers and I will do better next time — then you have no business participating in presidential politics.
The upshot is that I do not believe Elizabeth Warren can win because the white people who volunteer for her campaign cannot listen. They not only refuse to recognize their privilege, but, if my experience on my own home turf is any indication of a possibly larger national problem, they refuse to do so. Bernie, by contrast, has found support among Muslims and many other groups that the Warren volunteer clan will not talk to because, as nimbly documented by BuzzFeed‘s Ruby Cramer, he has adopted a strategy of presenting stories that represent struggles.
“PEOPLE FIRST” read the letters held by the premium volunteers allowed to sit on stage. But are they really committed to people? Or are they being selective about it?
Elizabeth Warren knew the right neighborhood to go to. But she cannot win because, for all of her dazzling prowess and her willingness to take selfies with anyone who shows up, she cannot reflect the diversity of that neighborhood. And if her present logistical base gets a vital neighborhood in Brooklyn so unabashedly wrong, how can we expect her to appeal to the gloriously variegated possibilities of America?
It was a warm May afternoon and my two daughters and I had been invited to Washington. Vice President Joe Biden was apparently a huge fan of my old podcast The Bat Segundo Show. Just three weeks before my visit to the Beltway, one of Biden’s aides called me out of the blue and said that I was to receive an award. Apparently, Biden very much enjoyed the introductory segments featuring my unsettling alter ego, Bat Segundo, who lived in a Motel 6 and often complained about his ex-wife.
“Every time Joe hears Mr. Segundo’s voice,” said the aide, “he starts hugging people around the office. Your podcast has really worked him into an affectionate frenzy.”
“Hugging people?” I replied.
“Yes. And smelling hair. You know the Biden way.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Well, he believes that the key to connecting with other people lies in taking in their fragrances, ideally through significant inhaling of their hair.”
“I don’t want Joe to smell my hair. Besides, I’m bald and I don’t have any.”
“Can he smell your armpit?”
“No!”
“Can you grow a beard? Joe really likes hair.”
“No. It’s too hot. You know the New York summers.”
“Well, he probably won’t stand behind you and smell your tender aroma anyway. You’re a man.”
“What?”
“He mainly does this with women.”
“I don’t know whether to be perturbed or personally offended! Shouldn’t there be equal opportunity sniffing?”
The aide coughed and quickly changed the topic.
“Listen, you’re doing a great service here. Your interviews with literary authors are top-notch. We want to give you an award. A Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.”
“Really? Gosh, I’m humbled. I mean, I just interview authors. I haven’t even published a book!”
“But you’re doing much more than that. You see, Joe really likes Mr. Segundo. As I said, there’s something about Mr. Segundo’s toxic masculinity that drives him crazy.”
“Uh, you do realize that Mr. Segundo is a fictitious character, right? He’s satirical.”
“Oh, I know that. But Joe doesn’t.”
“Ah.”
But my anxieties were soon put to rest after the aide told me just how decent Biden was. Sure, Joe was a touchy-feely guy. But he was our touchy-feely guy. If Joe liked to smell hair and leap upon total strangers with his ravening bearlike arms and take in other people’s fragrances, then maybe this was the slightly creepy human touch we needed to connect with each other as we advanced further into the 21st century. After all, every liberal I knew was so lonely. Besides, who was I to quibble with Biden’s failure to adjust to modern times? Who was anybody to criticize Joe after their visible discomfort? I was a registered Democrat and Joe was being Joe. It was more important for me to place party unity above such petty concerns as whether or not a man, even one on my side who possessed tremendous political power, was being weirdly inappropriate with his affection.
Anyway, I got on a bus with my two daughters. Lizzie, my youngest, had spent the previous afternoon drawing a large illustration of the kids in Syria. I encouraged Lizzie because I had heard that Joe liked it when kids talked about Syria. I was told by a journalist friend that most of Biden’s foreign policy had, in fact, been inspired by kids whispering nervous sentiments into his ear, often as they were wondering where mommy and daddy were, as he stood mere inches away from them and beamed that wide Biden smile. And this seemed decent, so profoundly decent, of him that I became genuinely moved and finished off the box of Cheez-Its that I had taken along with me on the bus. I wept with great inspiration into the empty red box, thinking about what a great and decent man Joe Biden was as Maggie (my oldest) tried to wipe the orange crumbs from my fingers and asked if I had seen my shrink that week. (I hadn’t.)
The three of us arrived at the Library of Congress shortly after being cleared by the Secret Service. We walked through a long hall into a decorous room, where the vice president was there. Or rather we found out he was there when he stood behind Maggie and shouted, “Boo!” Maggie jumped in fright, but was soon soothed by Joe’s decent hands, which were busy massaging her neck. It was so decent of him, so unusually good for Joe to think about how stiff my oldest daughter was from the bus ride. He was clearly a man who cared. And he soon moved onto my youngest daughter and started massaging her shoulders. It was a decent gesture and a decent massage. And I said to Joe, “Hey, what about me? Don’t I get a shoulder rub?”
Joe laughed, waved his hand in the air, and said, “You have two lovely daughters.”
The new narrative about Biden suggests that he is exploitative and solipsistic in his encounters with women. Although I did not witness what the women who have come forward to criticize Biden experienced, what I do know is that my two daughters had much looser shoulders inside the Library of Congress and that they had stopped paying attention to me, preferring to spend time with Uncle Joe. He habitually nuzzled, hugged, and kidded around with them. He tuned in emotionally, although, when I told him about the box of Cheez-Its I had wept into on the bus, he didn’t seem to listen. He also asked why my wife hadn’t arrived. And I told him that she was busy treating patients at the Kalaupapa leper colony and that she only came out to Brooklyn four months out of the year. “I’m really disappointed she’s not here, Ed,” said Joe. Then he leaned in very closely and said, “But if the two of you are ever in town, bring her along. I have a few comforting words I want to whisper into her ear. And you need to be there when I do this.” And this incredibly generous offer, which was so comforting, demonstrated again why Joe was so decent. I was very proud to be a Democrat that day.
And so I stand with Eve Gerber, Alyssa Milano and The View, and all the others who are willing to look the other way when a decent man presents himself as the inevitable choice for the 46th President of the United States! Let us surrender our moral standards when it comes to our party and honor this tactile politician, this decent man, this great avuncular touchy-feely saint of America! Yes, other presidential candidates are capable of showing the appropriate physical restraint when meeting and listening to strangers. But none of them are as popular, as likeable, or as decent, as Joe Biden!
I, for one, admire Biden’s deviant decency!