Quadrennial political conventions were seldom exciting

 This post was published in the Wilson Times Aug. 28, 2020

            You might say that I grew up on televised political conventions. Just as the nation’s two major parties have presented their platforms and candidates for the 2020 elections, I’m remembering what it was like to watch the fuzzy black-and-white, sometimes raucous, seemingly never-ending party conventions of the 1960s and ‘70s.

            The pre-cable television networks of that era staffed the conventions as if they were covering World War III. Sometimes it seemed that they might have been covering a war. The networks aired hours and hours and hours of programming, during which very little was happening on the convention floor and podium.

            There was little drama in most conventions, although in those days before  primaries took over nominations, the conventions actually chose party nominees.

In 1960, the youthful, handsome John F. Kennedy defeated Lyndon Johnson, the most effective and productive Senate majority leader in history, for the Democratic nomination. In 1964, NBC reporter John Chancellor was detained on the Republican convention floor for refusing to give up his assigned stand-up position on the floor so the “Goldwater Girls” could dance through. One of the most memorable scenes in convention history was Chancellor being escorted off the floor. It was amazing enough that Chancellor was suited up with a huge backpack of batteries and electronics that was supposed to keep him in touch with the network anchors in a studio high above the convention floor. He used the new technology to announce as he was led away, “This is John Chancellor, somewhere in custody.”

            The 1964 GOP convention also had another political drama. With Barry Goldwater the presumptive nominee, some “moderate” Republicans (to the left of Goldwater), tried to swing the nomination to former Pennsylvania Gov. William Scranton, but the last-minute ruse failed, and Senator Goldwater went on to the largest defeat in presidential history.

            The 1968 Democratic Convention was full of drama, but much of the drama took place outside of the convention hall in the streets of Chicago. Roving battles took place between well-armed police and well-prepared protesters opposing the Vietnam War and grieving over the murders of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Mayor Richard Daley defended police conduct, but Sen. Abraham Ribicoff, inside the convention hall, accused Daley’s police of “Gestapo tactics” on the streets.

            The horror and mayhem of the Democratic Convention helped ensure the election of Richard Nixon. The networks had most of their cameras and reporters inside but managed to show some of the relentless violence sweeping the streets outside the convention.

            Thanks to COVID-19, neither of this year’s conventions will be as exciting as these past gatherings. I watched several swatches of the Democratic Convention last week and found the digital format in some ways superior to the old, in-person crowds. But television in the cable and streaming era can’t spend whole afternoons and evenings on the coverage of an event that everyone knows how it ends before it begins. Hour-long convention speeches, one after another, put Americans’ attention spans into a coma. The COVID-19 convention strategies may become the norm.

            Years ago, I suggested that the presidential State of the Union address had become theater more than political information and should be replaced by the State of the Union email or text message to members of Congress. The public would enjoy reruns of “Father Knows Best” more.

            Democrats this year focused on the experience and empathy of nominee Joe Biden in contrast to President Trump’s frequently unruly reign and his need to disrupt, lie, insult and antagonize. Republicans will claim for President Trump every good thing that has happened in the past four years.

            Voters will get the final say (we hope) in another five weeks.

 

Congress should be able to follow constitutional procedures

 

This post was printed in the Wilson Times Aug. 14, 2020

            During all the times I served on councils, boards and other bodies responsible for churches, nonprofit groups and charities, I always insisted that the board members adhere to the official rules set down in charters, bylaws and other governing documents.

            It’s too bad the U.S. Congress — the “People’s House” of Representatives and “the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body,” the U.S. Senate, frequently ignore the rules and U.S. Constitution, which give them their authority.

            Once upon a time, public school students learned early on in mandatory civics classes about the system of checks and balances among three co-equal branches of government — Legislative, Executive, and Judicial — divisions that make American democracy unique and successful. But these policies and rules set down in the first three articles of the Constitution are ignored or skirted or forgotten more often than not. Civics classes are rarely offered in today’s public schools.

            Last week’s case in point was the second corona virus relief package. The House, dominated by Democrats, passed a relief package totaling $3 trillion (that’s in addition to $3 trillion in the first relief bill), but the Republican-dominated Senate found the House bill too generous and expansive. The House found the Senate’s $1 trillion proposal too stingy to address the crisis. The two chambers were at an impasse.

            The Constitution and generations of civics books have told us that when this happens, a conference committee with members of both houses shall meet to work out the differences. In the current impasse, neither chamber would take up the other’s bill, a sign of the partisan chasm of our politics. Instead of organizing a conference committee to resolve the differences in the two proposals, congressional leaders began negotiating with the Executive branch, not with members of Congress.

            President Trump has “come to the rescue,” as he sees it, with a series of executive orders that partially restores the recently expired $600 weekly federal unemployment benefit. Trump offers $400 a week, but with many strings and barriers attached, along with an order to “consider” a housing foreclosure ban, which the House wanted to implement.

            Trump has ordered that the payroll tax on earned income should not be collected through the end of the year. The payroll tax supports Social Security  (6.2 percent from employees and 6.2 percent from employers) and Medicare (1.45 percent each from employees and employers), both funds face long-term shortages. The temporary tax holiday will have little impact on consumer spending but a potentially large impact on the solvency of Social Security and Medicare, two of the most successful and popular government programs in U.S. history. He also touts the plan as a loan that has to be repaid, perhaps. Trump says he’ll forgive the payroll tax loan, and, hey, if he’s reelected, he’ll extend the loan forgiveness into next year!

            Trump’s announcement was aimed at maximum electoral impact, but the more bothersome issue is the Executive Branch taking over legislative matters. Certainly, the Constitution doesn’t grant a president the right to circumvent what happens in Congress. The president’s only constitutional duty in this process is his right to veto a bill passed by both houses, with the limitation that if both chambers reject his veto by a two-thirds vote, the vetoed bill becomes law.

            Article I, Section 1 of the Constitution clearly states: “All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress … which shall consist of a Senate and a House of Representatives.”

             Modern presidencies (post-World War II) have taken an outsized view of the office, leading to complaints of an “Imperial Presidency.” Congress shares responsibility for its loss of constitutional authority. Members of Congress have negotiated with the president, not with fellow legislators, to get bills passed. Congress has also passed laws that leave to the executive branch the creation of rules and regulations implementing those new laws.

QAnon conspiracy theories make 2020 stranger than ever

 

This post was printed in the Wilson Times Aug. 21, 2020

 

Just when you think politics and Congress can’t get much crazier, you find out they actually can.

            November’s election might put eleven adherents to the way-out conspiracy theory/cult/religion/political movement known as QAnon in the U.S. House of Representatives. Marjory Taylor Greene’s win in the Republican primary for Georgia’s 14^th Congressional District has raised some alarm or second thoughts among some voters and politicians. Greene won the primary in a district that never toys with Democratic candidates. Her primary win was, as they used to say about Democratic primary results in North Carolina, “tantamount to election.”

            Short of a resignation or a major health problem, Greene is going to join the House of Representatives, and she might not be alone. We could end up with a “Q” Caucus in the House.

            The FBI has labeled QAnon a domestic terrorism threat. Facebook has abolished one QAnon group with a reported 200,000 members for violating membership rules. QAnon has not been removed from all social media, however. Estimates of followers on social media are as high as 300 million worldwide.

            These actions have forced QAnon out of the shadows, at least a little. QAnon is still filled with mystery, beginning with the identity of the anonymous leader of the group, a philosopher/prophet whose insights, predictions and allegations are eagerly awaited by followers.

            What’s the conspiracy all about? No one, other than Q himself/herself, knows the details. Loosely, it alleges that there is a “Deep State” conspiracy to overthrow the Trump administration, or something like that. “The Storm,” in Q parlance is an anticipated global war, which is said to be coming soon. The conspiracy is beginning to get some attention from the news media, including a cover story in the June issue of The Atlantic and an article in the Washington Post headlined “QAnon is a menace; ignoring it isn’t an option.”

            QAnon sprang into the public’s attention in October 2016, when Edgar Maddison Welch of Salisbury, N.C., decided to take matters into his own hands after he read about a Q claim that a pizza parlor in Northwest Washington, D.C., was actually a front for a pedophile ring that included Hillary Rodham Clinton. Welch traveled to Washington and barged into the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria wielding his AR-15 rifle and a revolver. Welch demanded to see the children he had been told were part of a child sex ring operating out of the basement of Comet Ping Pong.

            There was no basement in the small pizzeria. Undeterred, Welch fired a few rounds with his rifle and forced open a locked door at the back of the pizzeria. He thought it must be the secret chamber where captive children were being abused. It wasn’t. It was a closet. Embarrassed, Welch laid down his weapons and surrendered to police. “The intel on this wasn’t 100 percent,” he told the New York Times. It wasn’t even 10 percent. Welch was sentenced to four years.

            Q communicates with his followers through enigmatic, official-sounding messages posted online and through brief aphorisms, which are called “crumbs.” (Why does that make me think of fecal incontinence?) Q predicted that Hillary Clinton would be arrested, along with co-conspirators, on Oct. 30, 2017, followed by a violent, nationwide uprising. That didn’t happen, but the Q faithful are still believers.

            The whole QAnon phenomenon is proof of the gullibility of many Americans, whose fertile imaginations cannot settle for bland reality. President Trump could probably put a stop to this ridiculousness with one simple declaration, but he won’t do it. Some followers believe Trump is Q.

Biden wins title as the forgiving candidate

 With his selection of Kamala Harris as his vice presidential running mate, former vice president Joe Biden lays claim to the title of the candidate of forgiveness.

Biden has a forgiving soul. How else can you explain his selection of Senator Harris from a field of successful, talented candidates his campaign had been vetting for months? How else could Biden cheerfully team with the woman who had laid an ambush for him in the first Democratic Party debate last year?

In that initial debate of the primary season, Harris immediately stood out from the field of 10 hopefuls on the debate stage as she quickly grabbed the moment and accused of Biden opposing school integration through busing of students to achieve desegregation. Biden had not seen it coming. After all, his position on school busing in the 1970s, when it was a hot-button issue in many states, was not appreciably different from Harris' own position, which was that local school officials, not the staff of the Department of Education's Civil Rights Division, should determine where and how students should attend school.

If Harris' vocal condemnation of Biden wasn't enough, her campaign staff provided to TV networks and cable news a photo of cute little Kamala preparing to get on a bus to go to school. That shot was aired before the candidates' debate was over. 

Biden has previously said he didn't hold a grudge about that ambush, but his graciousness in handing his vocal assailant a spot on the presidential ticket goes beyond most people's forgiveness quotient.

Biden has captured the forgiveness prize, but it was never a contest anyway. President Trump, Biden's opponent on Nov. 3, is not known for forgiveness. He is known as a master of retaliation, retribution, revenge, reprisal, holding a grudge, exploding in anger at the smallest slight, counterattack. Trump has said he never asked God for forgiveness because he had never done anything that needed forgiving.

If forgiveness vs. revenge becomes an issue in this year's presidential election, voters will decide whether they want a man of humble forgiveness or a man of never-waning vengeance and outrage. It will be scary to see how many voters will choose the latter.

I was wrong about obituaries

 This post was published in The Wilson Times July 30, 2020

I was wrong.

            A dozen years ago, I was an editor at this newspaper, which, like every newspaper in the country, was reeling from a tidal wave of changes in the news and advertising industries. Publishers, accustomed to what executives in other industries would consider phenomenal profit margins, were facing a future in which the paper’s primary source of revenue was abandoning print.

            Publishers everywhere were trying to find a way to make ends meet. It would not be easy. Classified advertising, the reliable gold mine of newspapers, was falling off a cliff, pushed over the edge by an existential change in how people sold items, sought workers for job vacancies, bought things and sold houses and land, by upstarts such as eBay, Craig’s List, Facebook, Google and other new and unexpected competitors. Newspapers were fighting for their lives.

            One subset of this anxiety-filled debate was over obituaries. For all of my newspaper career up to that time, obituaries had been an afterthought. At a weekly newspaper I edited in the1970s, the funeral home down the street would walk its obituaries directly to the newspaper. When I arrived in Wilson, the newspaper used a lower-echelon employee to handle obits. Until fax machines and email came along, obits were taken by telephone; calls could be difficult, even coming from a trusted local funeral home or an upset survivor.

            That procedure had to be modified, a story I’ll get to in a moment.

            The debate that affected every division of the newspaper was about whether to charge for obituaries. Most newspapers had begun to charge for obits in the same way they charged for classified advertising, by the inch. It seemed to be the way the industry was going. It was “clean” in that newspapers billed the funeral home, not the grieving family. The cost was generally passed along to the family by the funeral home, becoming a relatively small addition to the funeral costs. One eastern N.C. publisher who had made the leap to paid obituaries called it “low-hanging fruit.”

            My argument was that obituaries were among the most important news in the paper each day. The audience for a particular obituary might be narrow, but it is passionate. Obituaries are clipped and saved. They are read over and over. They are precious beyond words.

            Ultimately, my argument lost. The necessity of operating revenue to stay alive exceeded my “principled” insistence of serving the reader with all the news.

            What I never anticipated was that the change to paid obits made the obituary pages much more interesting. When treating obits as news, we had an obligation to treat everyone the same, limit the length of obits and to decide whether grandchildren, great-grandchildren, cousins, etc. would be listed by name.

            In the new era of paid obituaries, some obits run two full columns (several hundred words) or more. And some are written very entertainingly. An obit in the Raleigh N&O a decade ago made national news with its snarky, rambling final last word in a really cutthroat sibling rivalry. The sibling paying for the obit got the last, insulting word.

            The other story mentioned above: In the old days of obits as news, a man stormed into the newsroom one day to complain that he was not dead, despite an obit that said he died in a traffic accident several counties away. We had credulously taken the obit as provided via telephone by an out-of-town funeral home. He threatened to sue. A call to our lawyers assured us that saying someone is dead when he’s not is not libelous.

            But how did the error happen? It turns out, according to law enforcement sources, that the alleged deceased had called in his own obit, identifying himself as a family spokesman. He allegedly faked his traffic accident death because his ex-wife had not been sufficiently upset when he really was injured in an earlier accident. He allegedly made up the fatality to give her reason to mourn. His threatened lawsuit over his obit was never filed.

How America ended up with this pandemic

This article from The Atlantic is long, but it's the most thorough explanation of how a virus crippled an unprepared, inattentive and misled nation and ultimately the whole world. Take your time. Read it carefully.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/09/coronavirus-american-failure/614191/