Perspective from the Oakland Hills

     "It makes me feel better to believe that Kamala will win next week with relative ease."

             Tony Farrell

College classmate Tony Farrell is a familiar name to my regular readers. He is the marketing executive who worked for The Gap, The Nature Company, and The Sharper Image. He has posted here about having managed the short-lived Trump Steaks account, even though he gets teased about it.

I value his perspective. He lives in an especially nice part of the San Francisco Bay area, the bay-facing west hills of Oakland. He lives among friends who golf, attend tennis tournaments, and take international vacations. Tony's general circle of friends and associates represent an essential element of American politics. They are "the donor class." Their opinions matter, even though their influence has been diminished by multi-billionaires muscling in with nation-state-size investments in political campaigns. Donors play a filtering role, deciding which local mayor, district attorney, or candidate for statewide office could fund a winning campaign. They make or break the campaigns of the presidential candidates hoping for a breakthrough in Iowa and New Hampshire. Candidates drop out when they run out of money.

Some readers resent their influence. I don't. They pay attention to candidates. They make qualitative decisions. They have a perspective and self-interest, but at least they are Americans making judgments. Better them than the alternative that has taken its place: people "doing research" by reading lies cooked up by Macedonian server farms paid for by Putin, or by Twitter/X bots re-tweeted and amplified by Musk's revised algorithm.  

Tony thinks Kamala Harris will win. I interpret this as a reflection of the opinions from his small but important micro-climate. Trump isn't merely crude and offensive to that set and to Tony. Trump's tariff policy is bad for business. 

Guest Post By Tony Farrell            

Election Forecast
I do not worry about polls because didn’t polls give Hillary a 90-percent chance of victory in 2016? Pollster -- what a funny way to make a living; but apparently easy and without penalties for being utterly wrong.

I once heard good advice (in a business context): “You don’t need to know anything more about the future than you already know" -- which is nothing.

In my self-absorbed anthropologist role, among my old-White-man country club set, Trump is toast. A group of eight of us are planning a golf trip to Ireland next year; when the original itinerary was published, among the six courses was one named “Doonbeg.” The tour operator had tried to pull a fast one: When you Google “Doonbeg,” you’ll see it is a “Trump International” resort and, to a man, all in our group refused to go. No one was willing to give a penny to the grifter Trump; we all agreed, privately and separately before discovering all had the same attitude. That is very different from 2016, when there was some quiet Trump support. Now, there is none. The criminality of January 6 turned the tide, and Trump’s recent behavior is sealing the deal with everyone I come across (except during a recent trip to South Carolina.)

It makes me feel better to believe that Kamala will win next week with relative ease. For this, as amateur pollster and pundit, I will suffer no penalties for being wrong. But I believe the energy level on the Democratic side is too high, too fervent, too heartfelt, compared to the Trump side, which is leaking fuel and, at some level, has no energy to continue. I think the female vote, across all tabs, will be decisive; many more women than men will vote, and those women will be overwhelmingly Democratic. Quietly, I believe a good number of Trump supporters will not vote for him, although they may vote Republican down ticket. Some may feel they have nowhere else to turn, and are strongly driven to maintain consistency (as we all are), but I believe the energy to continue is weak.

On Tariffs
One source of Republican weakness (and certainly among my elevated business crowd) is the issue of tariffs, and Trump’s utterly misplaced love for them. As many of Peter's regular blog readers know, I worked as a merchant for The Gap in the late 70s and early 80s, often traveling to Hong Kong to source jeans. It’s completely stupid, dealing with tariffs in reality! The tariff on “basic” jeans was 10 percent; on “ornamented” fashion jeans, 45 percent. We spent an inordinate amount of time ornamenting fashion jeans with functional stitching, so they could pass customs as basic clothing (because the decorative stitching, for example, held the back pockets together). We’d have to get a ruling (for the paperwork), that the lower “basic” tariff applied. Moreover, our wonderful government had issued annual quotas on the number of jeans that could be imported from various countries, like Hong Kong. “Quota” was an asset that could be owned and licensed; quota was a huge source of wealth among many former factory owners overseas who, by luck, ended up owning quota; they closed their factories and lived off quota fees! Depending on the economy and fashion trends, quota varied greatly in price; sometimes almost zero per pair; sometimes as much as $5 per pair of fashion jeans. All this to protect a non-existent clothing manufacturing business in the U.S.! So, as I would negotiate buying jeans for The Gap, we’d deal with Hong Kong factory owners (they all seemed to have gone to Notre Dame or USC), and we’d get invoiced for the basic manufacturing cost of the jeans (say $3.85 per pair), plus 45 percent duty/tariff (if “fashion,” now $1.73), plus the price for “quota” (let’s say $4.00), for our final cost for one pair of jeans of $9.58. The retail price would depend on our target gross margin, in those days about 58 percent, so The Gap prices the jeans at $22.80. Notice who pays! First Gap, ultimately the customer. And look what duties and quotas did to that price: Instead of less than $10 for a pair of fashion jeans, it’s more than double that. Not sure where Trump thinks the U.S. gets money from all this.

 The reality was tariffs and quotas had nothing to do with saving U.S. jobs or specific industries. All the know-how and skill were overseas. We could barely get crude Ocean Pacific shorts made in the U.S.! I just saw it all as progress: In the late 19th century, New York City was just like Hong Kong, with clothing makers on one floor, button makers on another, zipper makers elsewhere in the building. That work first migrated south, then overseas. And my first job tossed me right into the stupidity of a very messy, distorted marketplace; our government hard at work getting union votes, basically. I was distressed to be a part of it.

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