Easy Sunday: Admiring Arnold Palmer

     "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK? It's, like, incredible."
          Donald Trump: January, 2016, Sioux Center, Iowa

Incredible and true. 

Yesterday, in Pennsylvania, Trump spoke in admiration of Arnold Palmer's penis. Really.

CLICK HERE: 38 SECONDS

Democrats think this is certain sign of Trump's fading mental capacity. So gross. So inappropriate.

Incidents like this one in Pennsylvania don't cost Trump votes. His supporters have a "Yeah, but . . . " attitude. They acknowledge Trump is crude, but it doesn't change the important thing. That's the dismissive "Yeah." The "but" is that they think Trump will get things done. 

But what about character? 

The character trait a great many Americans think important is that he is a fearless and unconstrained bully. He won't let laws, honesty, or decorum tie his hands and bow to the feminization of America. Trump will do the things that Biden just worked at. He would secure the border; deport bad guys; end "woke" tomfoolery; flood the country with cheap gasoline; and bring peace to the world by scaring the bejesus out of Russia, China, and Iran with his unpredictability. 

New York bond traders have a crude phrase for a certain kind of market player, described with initials: BSD. BSDs are bold and opinionated men who control huge blocks of money. They move markets when they come in with big buy or sell orders. They are BSDs: the Big Swinging Dicks of financial markets.

Trump admires BSDs. Elon Musk, the biggest and richest BSD in the world, supports Trump. Of course, Trump would speak that way in admiration of Arnold Palmer. Palmer was "all man."

As president Trump would have the power to change public policy as abruptly as a $40 billion buy order changes Twitter.  Crude as it was, Trump was sending a message in Pennsylvania. If Americans want a BSD in the White House, someone to get stuff done, it takes a man.

[Note: To get daily delivery of this blog to your email go to: https://petersage.substack.com Subscribe. Don't pay. The blog is free and always will be.]

First frost

It frosted yesterday. Melon leaves are wilted. 

A melon field looks its worst the morning after the first frost.

I always look forward to the first frost. 

By October I am ready for summer's end. It has been over 50 years since I have been in school, but the first cool mornings always signal the same thing to me, the switch from farm to school, from being outside to being inside. I miss the school bells.

I still grow a few melons to eat and give away, but most of my attention has moved to the eight acres of grape vines I planted on the pumice-soil portion of my farm. My 60 acres are a piece of the 180 acres my great-grandfather, a veteran of the Union Army, purchased in 1883. I am installing propane-powered wind machines that stir up the air on mornings when temperatures drop into inconveniently-timed frosts. In the spring frosts might damage new buds, and in fall frosts can damage grapes before they are ready to harvest. Cold air drifts down off the two Table Rocks on its way to the Rogue River and settles on the ground at my farm. My farm is a "cold" one, meaning it gets frosts when other places, alongside slopes where the cold air drifts off, do not.

Cold air is heavier than warm air, so sometimes frosty air is just hugging the ground and warmer air is above it. Those are "inversions." The propellers mix the air and so long as there is warmer air above it the mixed air is above freezing temperature. Sometime it is simply cold, all the way up. Wind machines are an imperfect solution to frost damage.

The first frost is the real two-way-facing symbol in my life, not the Janus that gives the name to January and the new year. The first frost brings me memories of this time, August 1967, a few weeks before I left for college. I earned and saved a Harvard tuition -- $1,760 my freshman year -- by fighting forest fires by day and growing and selling melons to local fruit stands and grocers early mornings and weekends. This is the "before" moment, when it is still summer.

I am on the right. My father is next to me. My brother, David, holds the watermelons. Two cousins visiting from Syracuse, New York, are on the left. 

The "after" moment takes place primarily indoors, in classrooms, libraries, and then, in my adulthood, in offices wearing suits and ties.

In previous decades, October represented something new, open-ended, and generally very good in my mind. I liked being in school and I liked my work as a financial advisor. In my youth, at the time of the photo above, the end of summer meant I was leaving the sweat and physical work of fields and forests and getting getting back to the serious business of promoting social change. My generation was going to change the world and fix everything.

This October is different. It contains an element of dread. My fellow countrymen may well pick Trump to be their leader. Even if they don't, Trump is already claiming the election would be rigged against him, that the media was unfair to him, thus voiding the results, and that voting fraud will have taken place in whatever places he lost. I see no chance that Trump will concede an election defeat. More troubling to me is that I expect that Fox News, Republican officeholders, and a great many of my neighbors will echo Trump. They will claim victory, and stick to the story. It almost worked in 2020.The wrath of GOP voters will descend on anyone who hesitates to agree. Fox lost audience when they reported that Arizona voted for Biden. It won't make that mistake again. Republican officeholders saw what happened to Mike Pence, Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, and the others. Politically, the nation is heading into a storm.

But on the farm, things are quiet. That system is working as it should. The melons are dead. The leaves will start falling off the grapes and the plants will go dormant for a few months. 

It's all okay.

[Note: To get daily delivery of this blog to your email go to:  https://petersage.substack.comSubscribe. Don't pay. The blog is free and always will be.]

Chilling effect: Don't poke the bear.

"You don't tug on Superman's cape

You don't spit into the wind
You don't pull the mask off that old lone ranger
And you don't mess around with Jim"

       Jim Croce, 1972

American businesses, including the news media, are preparing for a Trump presidency. They are making nice. 

There have been some curious incidents. JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon made some conspicuous comments praising Trump. CNN, CNN, and NBC made some strange hires. Tech firm founders made giant contributions to Trump.

Trump is a deal-maker. I believe Trump in fact thought that his telephone call to Ukraine's President Zelenskyy was "perfect." Ukraine wanted the military aid delivered and Trump wanted Ukraine to give him a campaign issue. It's the most natural thing in the world for Trump: You help me; I help you. 

Democrats worry that in a Trump second term the power of the government will be brought brutally and unjustly against people, businesses, and institutions. It may not be necessary. Listen to Trump. He says he wants to be dictator for a day. He says he wants a very rough hour with shoplifters. He wants conspicuous victims, and then thinks everyone will fall into line out of fear. They are already doing it.

The dialog between Trump and Bloomberg editor-in-chief John Micklethwait shows how Trump thinks and how he will use his power. Micklethwait's question was about whether Google unfairly uses its dominance in search. Notice what interests and motivates Trump. It isn't the merits of the issue. It's about whether Google was "friendly" to Trump.

MICKLETHWAIT: The U.S. Justice Department is thinking about breaking up Alphabet, as Google likes to be known now. Should Google be broken up?”

TRUMP: I just haven’t gotten over something that the Justice Department did yesterday where Virginia cleaned up its voter rolls and got rid of thousands and thousands of bad votes. And the Justice Department sued them, that they should be allowed to put those bad votes and illegal votes back in and let the people vote. So, I haven’t gotten– I haven’t gotten over that. A lot of people have seen that and I can’t believe it.

MICKLETHWAIT: But the question is about Google, President Trump.

TRUMP: Yeah, look. Google’s got a lot of power, very bad to me, they are very bad to me. I can speak from that standpoint. They only have bad stories. In other words, if I have 20 good stories and 20 bad stories, and everyone’s entitled to that, you’ll only see the 20 bad stories. And I called the head of Google the other day, and I said, “I’m getting a lot of good stories lately, but you don’t find them in Google.” I think it’s a whole rigged deal. I think Google is rigged just like our government is rigged all over the place.

MICKLETHWAIT: So, you would break them up, in other words?

TRUMP: I’d do something. You have to have– look, I give them a lot of credit. They’ve become such a power, such a power. 

Even out of office, Donald Trump enforces obedience and personal loyalty. If you cross Trump, you are out. There are loyalists and enemies. 

Brooks said he wanted to help Trump void the 2020 election, but there was no legal way to do it. That wasn't good enough.

In a Trump presidency there will be well-publicized lawsuits and the checks and balances of a federal system will continue. The real damage will take place out of sight, in the choices businesses make, in the way news stories are framed, and in the way that federal agencies administer the law. I expect a big shift to anticipate what Trump wants. There will be fear inside minds, offices, and board rooms, a fear well understood in places controlled by a strong leader or party. Avoid displeasing the leader. Avoid a purge. Keep your head down. Don't poke the bear.

Better yet, flatter the bear. Slather it on. 

[Note: To get daily delivery of this blog to your email go to: https://petersage.substack.com Subscribe. Don't pay. The blog is free and always will be.]

The most useful lesson in politics that I learned while at Harvard

I did not learn my best political lesson from a Harvard professor.

I learned it from the father of a girl I was taking out for a date. 

     "The Irish stick with the Irish. The Italians go with Italians. Jews stick together, but they're in the suburbs now. There aren't enough Negroes to elect anyone. Poles and Greeks have to go with the Italians. People stick to their own kind. That's how they vote."
            Mr. Conway, in the parlor of his home near Central Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts

Mr. Conway was Marylou's father. He sat me down on a Saturday afternoon to find out who I was and what my intentions were. Marylou Conway was a senior at a Cambridge high school. I was a college freshman. We were both 18. 

In late afternoons she staffed the dry-cleaning place across the street from my dorm. Lewandos. It had a logo of a cat doing laundry. I dropped off one of my three sport jackets. When I entered the shop three days later to pick it up, Marylou was there again. She smiled and addressed me by name. "Hello, Peter."

She remembered me! 

We struck up a conversation, then another, and then a "date," such as I could afford. We took the subway out to Revere Beach to look at the ocean. We could sit on the retaining wall and look at the waves.

I went to the Conway home. Before Mr. Conway called for Marylou to come downstairs, he engaged me in conversation for a half hour or so. Mr. Conway seemed to find satisfactory that my father was an elementary school principal -- not rich, but respectable. He heard about the farm and my melon business. I had short hair, was clean-shaven, and was at Harvard. That was probably enough to suggest I could someday earn a living and support a family. He asked what I was learning. I mentioned a political spectrum, liberals and conservatives, and the politics of the war in Vietnam. Issues of public policy, I said.

He said issues were irrelevant to how people vote. He said people stick with their own kind when they vote. They claim they like to mix, but they don't. People vote for people like themselves. And then he said the words at the top of this page about Irish sticking with Irish.

Democrats have defined Trump as a racist. I believe it is objectively true, but Trump is probably not any more racist than was Mr. Conway or the people of Boston and Cambridge that Mr. Conway described. Trump is simply more frank and direct about it. Trump says he prefers people from Norway, not dark-skinned people from "shit-hole countries." Politicians may feel that way, but it is crude to say it aloud. Trump does anyway. People like that he says what they secretly think. He likes people who are like himself. He is not alone. People sort themselves into circles of like-minded people. It might be ethic similarity, an age cohort, a political cohort, a religious cohort, a group defined around work, or a combination of those things. Everyone does it.

I wrote two posts about neighborhood and the clash of signs: My Harris sign, my neighbor's Trump sign, and a third neighbor's homemade sign calling Trump a liar and felon. It was stolen, but it is back up.

My neighborhood is at a political crossroads, where country club Republicans meet well-educated Democrats. No one is persuaded by signs. It is all tribal signaling. All of Oregon's electoral votes will go to Harris.

Even though I was born in Medford, I suppose I would be more simpatico with my neighbors if I lived in college-town Ashland, an enclave of educated, prosperous liberals, where people vote four-to-one for Democrats and "YES" on bond issues. Democrats say they like diversity, and they do, but they are thinking about race and ethnic diversity, not political diversity. There aren't many Trump signs in Ashland.

We are in a battle between political tribes. Trump has simplified the tribal choices. Those undecided voters in Pennsylvania are deciding right now if they are mostly normal White Christian folks, under pressure from smarty-pants liberal elites who bend over backwards to help victims of prejudice, and not them. If so, they will vote for Trump. Or, are they people who are put off by Trump's rabble-rousing ethno-nationalism and the tone of resentment, and aren't part of the whole MAGA tribe vibe. In that case they will vote for Harris, even if they aren't all that sure about her positions on issues. The undecided voters aren't looking at issues. They are in between tribes and deciding which one fits better.

It is mostly about Trump. You are either in Trump's tribe or you aren't.

[Note: To get daily delivery of this blog to your email go to:  https://petersage.substack.com Subscribe. Don't pay. The blog is free and always will be.] 

Immigration backlash

Action. Reaction. Secondary reaction. 

Democrats responded to Trump's racist opening campaign statement. 

They should have responded to the need for better immigration enforcement. 

Hindsight is 20-20.

Trump held a rally in Aurora, Colorado. A top policy and strategy aide, Stephen Miller, was a warm-up speaker:

Stephen Miller: "Look at all of these photos around me. Are these the kids you grew up with? Are these the neighbors you were raised with?” 

Aurora Colorado crowd:  "NO!"

Miller: “Are these the neighbors that you want in your city? No, these are the criminal migrants that Kamala Harris brought into your community. And as swiftly as they came, Donald Trump will send -- them -- back."

 

 

This morning, on MSNBC of all places, I saw a Trump ad. It said that Kamala Harris intentionally brought illegal immigrants into the country to spread drugs and to rape and murder Americans. 

How did we come to this? Here is the oscillation of events:

1. Trump came down the escalator and said immigrants from Mexico were "not their best." They were criminals. Rapists. Drug-carriers.

2. Democrats responded to the racism in the statement. Maybe this was bait by a mastermind strategist. Maybe it was just Trump expressing the everyday xenophobia that I heard everywhere in Boston during the busing era of the 1970s. People of Irish ethnicity disliked people of Italian ethnicity, and vice versa. Both groups respected but disliked Jews, who moved to the suburbs to get away. All Whites disrespected and feared Blacks. People had their own neighborhoods. 

By defining Trump's comments on immigration as racism rather than the operational failure of a government-run immigration system, Democrats went into careless oppositional mode. They condemned Trump's efforts to control the border. They scoffed at a wall. They called deportation cruel. They called for abolition of ICE, the border enforcement agency. And when Biden was in office they allowed flagrant gaming of the asylum system. The result was an even more chaotic border. Democrats figured that if Trump said it, it had to be wrong because it was inevitably racist.

3. That created the present backlash against Democrats' blindness to an operational problem. Harris is scrambling to catch up, but the political damage was done. Democrats looked insensitive to a problem Trump now defines as a combination of weakness, wokeness, or a cynical effort to admit people who will vote Democratic in gratitude for all the welfare Democrats will give them.

The oscillation of action and reaction is accelerating, with Miller, JD Vance, Trump, and others talking about foreigners cutting your throat in your kitchens.

Democrats were accurate when they noted and condemned Trump's blunt dog-whistle racism. From the first month of this blog, back in the summer of 2015, 3,860 posts ago, I noted that Trump connected with audiences on fear and dislike of the ethnic and cultural "other." On Sept 18, 2015 I watched from the audience Trump's speech in Rochester, New Hampshire, the one where the questioner asked if Obama was a Muslim.

The only insight I would add is that there is a good reason why Trump may not have perceived the question as one he needed to address McCain-style. It is that the raucous crowd did not give any hints of being surprised or offended by the question. No one shouted “idiot” or “sit down,” and no one booed or hissed. The general crowd noise, audible in the tape, stayed the same. Donald Trump is very attuned to the crowd, engaging it constantly. 

But Democrats were wrong to treat the issue solely as one of deplorable racism. There was, in fact, an operational problem that impacted American security, American labor, and American laws. Democrats are the party that asserts that government can solve problems. When it fails to do it a demagogue can take an issue and run with it, taking it to a higher, cruder level.

Back in 2015 I could see hints of Trump's future success. Trump wasn't just a clownish playboy celebrity with a schtick. He was connecting with people in a way that Hillary Clinton did not. He was appealing to the ethnic tribalism I saw in Boston, and he was making it work to his advantage.

[Note: To get daily delivery of this blog to your email go to: https://petersage.substack.com Subscribe. Don't pay. The blog is free and always will be.]

Denise Krause: How an underdog wins an election

Denise Krause can win her election for county commissioner.

She will be a watchdog. Not an echo.

On the surface it looks bad for her. She is a Democrat in a Republican-majority county. Powerful business interests have endorsed her opponent. 

Her situation is hopeless, right? No. She can win.

Krause: from her campaign website

First, a disclaimer and context. I contributed to Denise Krause's campaign and hope she wins. I get along with Republicans and over half of my financial advisory clients were Republicans. But on matters of politics I hear more from Democrats than Republicans nowadays, especially since Trump changed the GOP. No doubt this colors my judgment. One more thing; I have a history. I won an election for county commissioner notwithstanding the Reagan landslide of 1980. That experience seems to me eerily similar to this one. Nearly every wealthy, powerful civic leader in Jackson County supported my Republican opponent. But I won anyway. In fact, I think that's why I won. That's why Denise Krause can win.

Krause has a Ph.D. in preventive medicine and for 25 years she managed large budgets and a staff. She more than meets the professional qualifications for the job. She led the effort to change the county charter to increase the number of commissioners from three to five, to make the positions nonpartisan, and to reduce their pay if the number of commissioners increased. The initiatives lost, but Krause became known for her effort. Her opponent, Randy Sparacino, is also qualified for the job. He is a retired law enforcement officer, the former Medford police chief, and is now the mayor of Medford, a nonpartisan unpaid position. 

Two years ago Sparacino ran as a Republican for a state Senate seat in a district that includes the Democratic portion of the county. He lost. Upstate GOP PACs spent $1.1 million in this tiny media market. The ads depicted Sparacino as a hard-right Republican foot-soldier of the state GOP -- a losing message in that district. The campaign re-shaped his reputation from nonpartisan mayor to a good, reliable member of the local GOP/ Chamber of Commerce/ people-in-power team. He is Mr. Establishment. 

That is Sparacino's strength. It is why he can massively outspend Krause. Sparacino is the convenient replacement for a departing member on the three-person Board of Commissioners. With major donations from the construction companies, paving companies, and garbage company franchise-holder doing business with the county, the county commissioners' team defeated the county initiatives. Why did these companies care whether there were three commissioners or five? They surely didn't. They donated because commissioners in their mutual support circle asked them to defend the status quo. They did what any businessperson doing business with the county would do. They said yes.  

A Sparacino advertising blitz is underway, with endorsement ads from members of the local business and political establishment. Elect our friend! He's one of us. Like his voters pamphlet, his campaign website is primarily a long list of endorsements. Each of those 35 dots below opens a web page to yet another industry group, business leader, or local politician endorsing Sparacino. 

Sparacino campaign website

That is not Krause's doom. It is her opportunity. Randy Sparacino is indeed, a reliable member of the local establishment team of mutual supporters. She doesn't have to prove that. Sparacino says it himself, repeatedly. If voters want a replacement member of that team, they should vote for Sparacino. 

I suspect that Sparacino and this team misunderstand the moment and the electorate. In fact, I think they have it backwards. People are suspicious of tight teams of public officials, business contractors, campaign donors. They are all good buddies. It is the classic good ol' boy closed loop.

Voters of both major parties are in an ornery mood. The newly MAGA GOP is ready to believe dark conspiracies of corruption by people in power, and the commissioners and their group of campaign contributors are most certainly the people in power here. Democrats have their own worries about democratic process, campaign contributions, and behind-closed-doors power. Everyone fears the swamp. There is lots of suspicion in the air. In the recent May election on initiatives to update the county charter, Jackson County voters did not give the commissioners a vote of confidence. Quite the opposite. The public doesn't seem to want more of whatever commissioners bring to the table. The vote to increase the number of commissioners from three to five failed 55% to 45%. The public voted 63% to 37% to cut the commissioners' salaries in half. Voters don't think they are getting their money's worth.

Voters generally seem grouchy about politics at every level, national, state, and local. I hear complaints that the commissioners are useless and unworthy rubber stamps for the county administrator. The team Sparacino is joining is in a slump. 

Krause is the outsider here. She is positioned as an independent voice. She isn't part of the team. She can question and challenge the county administrator's recommendations in a way the current commissioners appear not to do. In the midst of a jail crisis the county decided to spend over $60 million on a recreation center that can double as a "pandemic crisis" building. I don't know anyone in the general public who thinks that was a great idea. Krause has an opportunity to look like -- and be -- an independent and credible watchdog. 

Krause will be outspent. Maybe the brute force of all the advertising will win it for Sparacino. His problem is that its volume and source of his ads demonstrate what people suspect -- that he is just another member of the closed group that runs things in the county. Krause is not.

That's why Krause can win. 

[Note: To get daily delivery of this blog to your email go to:  https://petersage.substack.comSubscribe. Don't pay. The blog is free and always will be.]

The attraction of autocracy

Black and Hispanic voters are turning toward Trump

Maybe they are impatient for change and will accept being insulted as the price for getting it. 

Americans seem willing to try a strong man who doesn't futz around. 

In 2020 Joe Biden won about 90 percent of the votes of Black voters and 63 percent of the votes of Hispanics. Kamala Harris would have a solid lead in the polls if she had that level of support. She doesn't. She has about 76% of the Black vote and 56% of the Hispanic vote. What more could Trump do to turn off Black voters than to call Harris "low IQ" and "mentally retarded," and use Haitians as the example of a disgusting and frightening "other?" What better way to lose the votes of Hispanics than to describe them as rapists and criminals with "bad genes?" 

As Barack Obama said to Black and Hispanic Americans this week: Can't you see that he is insulting you? 

Democrats may be missing the target when they complain about Trump's danger to "democracy." They are defending Constitutional process but maybe frustrated voters want tangible results instead. Democrats promise "hope and change" and say that government would bring it. Medicare-for-all, had it been implemented back in 2009, would have been a dramatic, visible change. But democratic process in the form of Republican opposition and health insurance lobbying stopped it. So we got the complicated, watered-down Obamacare. The Great Financial Crisis was a failure of government regulators to stop crazy risk-taking by banks. Government made a problem, and then democratic process caused an unnecessarily slow exit out of it. Republicans wanted to make sure that the "Obama recovery" was slow and unsatisfactory, so they insisted on underfunding it. 

Trump says he will enact great medical care, that he will make the economy boom, and that he will intimidate Russia, Ukraine, China, Iran, and Hezbollah into being peaceful. He sounds confident. Who knows? It could happen.

The Democratic reputation as the "can do" party took a blow when cities led by Democrats, including Portland, Oregon let George Floyd demonstrations turn violent, then persist night after night. People see TV images of organized shoplifting in California cities. The Biden administration was slow to address the sharp increase in immigrants claiming asylum at the southern border. All this shaped the idea that Democrats are irresolute and incapable. 

Trump openly and proudly says he will be undeterred by democratic process. He says he will be dictator for a day. He says he will direct police to be "very rough" and that they would be immune from any consequences. He says he will invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807. He said he will impose tariffs by executive order. He said he will deport millions of people and use the military to do it. He says he will fill the executive branch with loyal people who will promptly do what he orders.

Trump told Senate Republicans to vote against the very immigration bill they had helped negotiate. They did as he asked. Trump declared Mike Pence, Mitt Romney, George Bush, Dick Cheney, and much of his former White House staff and cabinet officers to be persona non grata. The GOP now shuns them. Even out of office and under indictment, Trump exercises power. The actions he has taken, and the ones he says he will take if elected, are high-handed, but when you are president nothing he does is illegal, he says. Trump made that improbable claim, and even the U.S. Supreme Court buckled to protect him. That is power.

Trump does not take "no" for an answer, even the "no" of losing an election.

Personally, I am disgusted by this celebration of lawbreaking autocracy. It is an assault on democracy and the rule of law. But I recognize that it has appeal to people, especially people who are impatient for change and are frustrated with government.

The awful reality is that autocracy is a feature for Trump. It helps explain why Trump might win.

[Note: To get daily delivery of this blog to your email go to: https://petersage.substack.com Subscribe. Don't pay. The blog is free and always will be.]