It’s All Debatable
I have a friend, Gary, who reads this blog with regularity and who more or less shares the same political outlook I have. He was just out visiting the last few weeks and we got into mud wrestling more than once about which direction thing would likely go in the 2020 election. I am an avowed optimist and let’s just say that Gary is not so much. I usually attribute less than optimistic outlooks to the fear-mongering Republicans among us, but there is no rule that says that you can’t be liberal, even progressive, and still have an edge to your expectations. I suspect Bernie has more than a few edges after 2016 and seeing the country slide further from his ideals over the last three years. So, I will not think ill of my friend, Gary, since I value his sage counsel and friendship and believe that on balance I have exhibited excessive optimism on any and every aspect of my life over the last 60+ years (I am giving myself a break about my pre-school years since no one at that age has any reason for being less than a raving optimist).
One of the problems I am finding in my new life out here in San Diego is that I am more prone to losing track of time and the days. With the sun shining every morning and the birds and bees fluttering around without a care in the world, pollinating our cactus and succulent garden for posterity, I have been lost in a haze of work and good weather. I am so engrossed in my work right now and it is all very solitary work, so I can’t really recall when I last shaved or showered since the hot tub (which I dip into most mornings) tends to wash away most of my sins. One day rolls into another and day and night are a blur (it’s 1am right now and I forgot I hadn’t written my story for tomorrow morning….). I have a big deadline on Friday, so I expect to be able to return to the land of the living in a few days more of writing (my expert report is already up to 110 pages and cranking). I am rebutting another expert’s report that is 235 pages long with appendices. He is a Rocket Scientist (literally a physicist that went to Oxford) so I am doing what one learns to do in life, I am putting my head down and running straight at him in hopes that it will intimidate him by sheer force of will. Actually, my credentials in the arena are very different, but equally pertinent and I can always say I’ve had hundreds of rocket scientists like him working for me in the past and one must take everything their rigorous minds can concoct with a large dose of salt.
As I have wandered around in my expert stupor, I kept losing sight of exactly when the Democratic debate with Mike Bloomberg on stage for the first time would be. I kept annoying Kim by asking her if it was on tonight (said to her three days in a row I think). It became a joke for us at one point. So, imagine my surprise when she called me tonight and told me the debate was on and didn’t I want to watch it. You see, even though our home is just under 4,000 square feet, which makes it big by NYC apartment standards, but not so big by house standards, it does tend to sprawl out laterally on one level across this hillside. As it so happens, the kitchen is at one end of the house and my office is at the other. So rather than bother with an intercom (those damn things never work and become both obsolete and an eyesore so quickly), we just call each other on our cell phones. So I got the debate message on my iPhone and I hustled across the house to hear what was what with my man Mike’s debating skills.
Well, its great that we are down to only six people on stage now, but let’s face it, all those other politicians have a lot more experience debating and being under the hot lights than Mike. During his 12 years as mayor he did his share of public speaking, but that was seven years ago and the rest of this gang has been going from debate to caucus to debate for a year already. If it sounds like I’m making excuses for him, you would be right. He got a bit beat up on the stage tonight. Everyone took a piece out of him, but no one more than Elizabeth Warren. Mayor Pete followed the mayoral code and left him alone since he was busy chewing on Amy Klobucher’s ankle. Joe is polite to everyone in keeping with his good guy image and because he doesn’t want anyone to come after him. And Bernie is mad at everyone (he and Gary should get along if they ever meet) and he could tell Warren had blood in her eye for Bloomberg.
When the dust settled it remains hard to tell who won and who lost, or whether these debates do anything to upset the trends or the balance. I still think Amy and Elizabeth will fade first. Then Joe and Pete will slide into oblivion, and it will be down to the Socialist and the Billionaire. I predicted the Billionaire all along, but thought Bernie was a goner several times. Bernie has deep support from his base and Mike has lots of money to buy ads and votes. Bernie will say Mike is an Oligarch and Mike will say you need a proven manager to run the country and he’s the only one on stage who has ever started a business, much less built it into a $60 billion fortune.
As Gary started texting me after the debate about how Elizabeth and Amy did so well, my response was to say that it was nothing a few hundred million for ads in Super Tuesday states like Virginia couldn’t solve. I just saw a statistic that shows that Bloomberg is accounting for 99.5% of the political ad spending in Virginia right now…and that included the spending by the Orangeman hisself.
I listen to all the pundits (at least all the MSNBC pundits) and I don’t think anyone knows a damn thing about what will and won’t work in 2020 in American politics. After 2016, everyone has a right to be circumspect, Russians or no Russians. While jousting with Gary by text, not my natural medium since it requires more crispness than my literary tendencies gives me, I came up with two ditties that I plan to road-test here and start to use here and there. The first is my accusation that Gary as a septuagenarian is rallying his septuagenarians to the cause of antiseptuagenarianism. He thinks everyone except Amy and Pete are too damn old to be president. I tend to agree, but I do like Mike.
My other one is a gem. It’s a riff on the Geico commercial that has the camel coming through the office saying, “Hey, Mike, Mike, Mike, Mike, guess what day it is? It’s hump-day!” Well, I think Bloomberg needs to use that one. I think its debatable that the debate was his hump-day one way or the other, but that day will come as it comes for us all. I’ve got my fingers crossed that he does as well as Jake from State Farm….