Flight or Fight?

 

This past week, watching one of those old-fashioned  linear cable TV news shows, I saw a story about some Americans wanting to leave the US in the wake of the recent election. It may come as a surprise that we are not welcome everywhere else as permanent residents, but some countries have a population imbalance and are welcoming immigrants, especially young people. This is not a new concept. I remember when Australia, a few decades ago, was recruiting Americans to fill its need for certain professions.

Most of my friends who voted for Kamala Harris don’t want to, or can’t, leave the country, and some are just tuning out the news from sheer exhaustion now. Believe me, I get it. But trapped in the depths of my loser liberal silo, I have reached the conclusion that this is what the opposition wants us to do.

We can’t undo the result of this presidential contest,  but voting is not over. There will be advise-and-consent hearings, and votes, in the US Senate on Mr. Trump’s nominees for important posts. The Republicans are in the majority, but will they all vote to confirm nominees considered to be unqualified or with serious problems in their past?

Going forward, some of the President-elect’s signature initiatives have enormous price tags and may require a vote of Congress, which holds the purse strings. Using the military to round up and deport illegal immigrants could face court challenges. There are things that can’t be done just by the wave of a presidential wand.

But we do have to be realistic. Donald Trump’s victory, and the Republican control of both houses of Congress, entitle him to a fair chance to implement his policies, as long as they are lawful. They will be tested, and If they don’t produce the positive results he has touted, there will be a response long before the next presidential contest, such as in Congressional elections two years from now.

This is America, and even if Mr. Trump wants to become a dictator for even a day, he can’t expect our institutions to just disintegrate. The media he has problems with won’t be cowed easily. Americans do not have a tradition of staying silent when things they don’t like are happening.

I now live in earthquake country, near a city with tall buildings. Those likely to stay standing in a major quake are supported by pylons driven deep into bedrock. The United States is supported by a legal framework that has stood for almost 250 years, and it will take a lot to bring it down. Unless those of us who disengage let it fall.

Will the Real America Please Stand Up?

 

You may know of that TV game show called To Tell the Truth, introduced decades ago, in which three contestants claiming to be the same person face a panel of celebrity questioners. Two of the contestants are impostors who are lying; the third is the real person, who must answer truthfully. At the end of questioning, the celebrities guess who is real. Finally, the real person stands up, and the celebrities often find that they guessed wrong.

If you’re wondering where the real America is, looks like it stood up this week. At least the America we have now.

Though it was forecast as a tight race, Democrat Kamala Harris wasn’t  expected by most pundits to lose the Presidential election to Donald Trump. But she did, maybe not quite by a landslide, but big, including both the Electoral College and, as it appears likely at this writing, the popular vote.

If I may extract some good news from this, that double victory hasn’t happened in a while. If Trump won in both categories, there will likely be no complaints about thwarting the “will of the people.”

Most important, though, Harris made the customary phone call to congratulate Trump, in recognition of the longstanding American principle of the peaceful transfer of power. But in a subsequent speech, she said that while she accepted the election results, she was not conceding the fight for the principles she ran on.

She ran what looked like a near-flawless campaign, full of A-list celebrities and surrogates and Republican crossovers. Her message was aimed at middle class people, young families with children, small business owners, people struggling to find housing, and women desperate for reproductive health care. The ground game featured an army of eager volunteers, and campaign funding broke records. So how did she and the Democrats so drastically misread the room?

Was it about the border? Transgender issues? What groups were snubbed? Was the Harris message ignored just because she’s female? There are calls for Democrats to engage in soul-searching to figure it all out.

The opposition, of course, doesn’t have to soul-search. They got what they wanted. Donald Trump could shift the country toward autocracy. Fine, they seem to say, what we have now hasn’t worked for us, let’s try something new. There will soon be a shift from the theoretical phase into implementation. Maybe things won’t be as bad as Democrats fear. Or maybe they will.

Mr. Trump likes it when folks compare him to Abraham Lincoln. It would be lovely if he followed President Lincoln’s famous words from his second inaugural near the end of the Civil War: “With malice toward none, with charity for all.” We’ll see what happens.

Standing Down

 

The decision by the owners of two major newspapers, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post, to quash their editorial boards’ endorsements of Kamala Harris in the presidential race represents a sad trend. While decisions by some media organizations to forgo endorsing candidates are not new, the action by these two owners stands out.

Post owner Jeff Bezos argued that the public already thinks the media are biased and that endorsements not only don’t help with that perception but don’t change anyone’s mind anyway. As expected, critics believe Bezos caved to pressure from Donald Trump.

Was this a good business decision? It doesn’t look like it in the short term, with more than 200,000 readers canceling their subscriptions. Perhaps that wouldn’t have happened had the Harris endorsement been published, as readers are accustomed to newspapers making endorsements, a time-honored tradition.

Not all newspapers are unbiased, of course, but in the case of major legacy publications, news and opinion typically are well-understood to be separate. Political endorsements usually come with a substantial summary of the reasoning behind them. Further, there are op-ed pages where alternate points of view are encouraged. In fact, Bezos himself used the latter to explain his ruling.

The question arises, what good are editorial endorsements anyway? Presumably, newspapers are in the business of covering elections and are a lot closer to the issues than their readers, so an endorsement, theoretically at least, is based on a thorough  understanding of the facts available.

True, some voters, maybe out of being either lazy or too busy with other things, will slavishly follow a newspaper endorsement. Others don’t care, preferring to make up their own minds. But there is a lot of space in the middle, where voters use editorial endorsements as data points in their consumption of election-related material from a variety of sources.

Jeff Bezos’ decision was undoubtedly a surprise. But did he have the standing to do what he did? Absolutely. The only response I have is that he knew or should have known, as attorneys often say, what business he was getting into when he acquired the paper. It should not be simply a cash cow, a conversation piece, or a badge – especially the Washington Post, which already saved our republic, not all that long ago.