Easy Sunday: "And here's the surprisig part."

Would someone please train large language model artificial intelligence to stop using the same tiresome device?

"Hey! Wake up! Here comes the point."

You have read it. You have heard it in scripts for TikTok, Reels, Instagram, YouTube Shorts. 

--  "Here's why that matters."

--  "But here's the kicker."

--  "Here's what nobody expected."

-- "The result?"

--  "But here's the thing."

--  "But it turns out that what is really important was what no one noticed."

Those are AI giveaways and I see them several times a day. So is the "em-dash," although I have sometimes used an em-dash instead of commas to set off appositive phrases for the 11 years that I have been writing this blog. 

I don't use artificial intelligence to write blog posts, so readers will find fewer examples of the "look-at-this" device in these posts. Since I tend to "write long," and then cut about a third of what I wrote before I push the "Publish" button, those phrases usually get cut.

I think AI offers bullshit in opinion journalism. It creates the equivalent of empty calories. Vague words gloss over knowledge gaps. It is a conflict-avoider in a realm where facts and opinion conflict, and the edges of agreement and disagreement are the point. For example, if I wanted AI's help to describe U.S. policy on Israel, it might say;

Under Biden, America's forward-facing, qualified and guarded support for Israel's military engagement with Gaza contrasts with Trump's more-robust stance, although Trump was restrained by policy constraints imposed by an increasingly-restless public.

I believe the sentence above is  accurate, but every descriptive word is unfalsifiable. Forward-facing, guarded, more-robust, restrained, constraints, and increasingly-restless are words that likely conform to what a well-informed person could agree with, but that person would be filling in the blanks from his or her own existing knowledge base, thinking "Yeah, that is sort-of right." The sentence fills up space; it doesn't inform. It did not require the purported author to state a position about either fact or policy. If I were to write that way, why bother?

So here's the thing: I expect to keep writing the old fashioned, do-it-yourself way.

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A litmus test for Republican candidates

I have a question for Republican candidates:

 Would they defy their oath of office to please Donald Trump?

The litmus test is whether they dare disagree with his assertion that he won the 2020 election. If they won't risk his wrath now, they will surely cave when it really matters.

Click for Audio and transcript

Phone call between President Donald Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Saturday, January 2, 2021

Trump:

You know, we won the state. If you took, these are the most minimal numbers, the numbers that I gave you, those are numbers that are certified, your absentee ballots sent to vacant addresses, your out-of-state voters, 4,925. You know when you add them up, it’s many more times, it’s many times the 11,779 number. . . .

 Raffensperger:

Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is the data you have is wrong.

Trump:  

I mean, look. Brad. We have a new tape that we’re going to release. It’s devastating. . . .

Raffensperger:

 You’re talking about the State Farm video. And I think it’s extremely unfortunate that Rudy Giuliani or his people, they sliced and diced that video and took it out of context. The next day, we brought in WSB-TV, and we let them show, see the full run of tape, and what you’ll see, the events that transpired are nowhere near what was projected. . . .

Trump:

I won this election by hundreds of thousands of votes. There’s no way I lost Georgia. There’s no way. We won by hundreds of thousands of votes. 

But in Fulton, where they dumped ballots, you will find that you have many that aren’t even signed and you have many that are forgeries.. . . And you will find you will be at 11,779 within minutes because Fulton County is totally corrupt, and so is she totally corrupt.

Ryan Germany, the General Counsel in Raffensperger's office:

 What we’re seeing is not at all what you’re describing. 

Commentary on this hour-long phone call has primarily focused on Trump and his plea that Raffensperger find him 11,780 extra votes. Read in its entirety, one sees how skilled and formidable Trump is as a negotiator. Trump is relentless, unwavering, adamant, and the hard sell goes on for an hour. 

One also gets new respect for Brad Raffensperger. He was under enormous pressure, and he didn't cave. He did his duty.

Trump has a technique that we observe in this conversation and we see repeatedly in his second term of office. He asserts a pretext which is untrue and even implausible on its face that justifies doing something illegal. Invade Venezuela because they are carrying out a "foreign invasion." Impose tariffs on every country because every foreign country is supposedly using slave labor. 

In the conversation with Raffensperger, he was giving a multitude of face-saving pretexts to get the result Trump wanted. Make Trump happy -- or else disappoint him and face the consequences.

The cost of angering Trump is well understood by Republican officeholders and candidates. The list of political roadkill is long: Liz Cheney, Mike Pence, Chris Christie, Jeff Flake, Tom Massie, Bill Cassidy, John Cornyn, and the Indiana state senators. I watched the reaction of Republican activists to Pence in New Hampshire. He was not celebrated as a profile in courage. Quite the opposite.

Pence may get his reward in heaven, but not from Republican voters. I was happy to do a selfie with him at a GOP event. He was standing around friendless.

Friendless Pence

GOP candidates for a state office might want to dismiss Trump and his claims as irrelevant to their office, saying it is a federal matter and about Trump, not them. That isn't the reality. Candidates for state office are subject to being dragooned into Trump's web of dishonesty. It is happening in Oregon right now where Trump claims, despite evidence to the contrary, that our vote-by-mail system allows multitudes of illegally-cast votes. 

If Trump were to telephone a Governor Christine Drazan and demand that she use a pretext of "questionable" votes in Multnomah County, perhaps based on a meritless accusation by a talk show host or Republican precinct committee person, and she received the full-court-press Trump laid on Raffensperger, would she defend Oregon's vote, or would she cave? If the same call were made to the Republican caucus of the Oregon state senate, perhaps a demand that they file a lawsuit claiming that alternative slates of electors be given equal weight to the ones who were actually elected, would Brad Hicks consent? That is not a theoretical idea. Incumbent Republican state senator Kim Thatcher did that in the days prior to the January 6 Capitol invasion, and she was re-elected and remains a senator in good standing.

We are at a moment when Republican candidates can prove up. A candidate who mumbles, distracts, and avoids disagreeing with Trump's insistence that he won the 2020 election in a landslide is showing his or her true colors: They are unwilling to disagree with Trump's pretexts. Willingness to concede a loss is an essential element of democracy. If they won't do it now, they surely won't do it under pressure and when it really counts.

Republican candidates might be "nice people," or have "common sense," or be regular church-goers, but if they cannot disagree with a dishonest attack on democracy, they are unfit for political office in a democracy.

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Yesterday's post: mistake or irrelevant?

 "Peter, yesterday's post was a mistake. It gave Brad Hicks a big advantage. What if he takes your advice? He could win."

And

"Peter, blather on. Whatever. Your so-called advice is irrelevant. You don't understand elections. Denise Krause will win whatever Hicks does."

Photo from his website

Today's post is a followup to yesterday's. Some Democratic readers thought I "gave away the store" when I advised the GOP candidate for state Senate in my local district to give away most of the campaign money pouring into his campaign.

I also got criticism from people who said I should stop fooling myself by thinking that my advice is relevant to winning elections. "Its about party and turnout, period. Not about message." The GOP has no real principles, the argument goes, because Trump changes them on a whim. The only real GOP principle is that he drives Democrats crazy. Republicans follow along out of inertia and party loyalty. Republicans are Republicans. What matters if they vote. But they will vote Republican in any case.

That theory says that Democrats are Democrats. Trump has been a north-star pointing south. Trump wanted to be hateful and he succeeded. Democrats don't have a leader or a clear direction but are united in being infuriated by Trump. This theory says that since Oregon's Senate district number three is majority-Democrat, what Democratic candidate Denise Krause must do is let voters know she is a normal Democrat. Brad Hicks cannot help being who he is, a Republican, and he can spend all the money in the world and nothing will change either that or the vote. The vote is locked in.

In some respects, the two comments converge into a single one. Both say that brand matters. The first worries that Brad Hicks can change his brand from a current Republican into something closer to the kind of nice-guy bipartisan Republican who used to win elections in Oregon. The second comment embeds the idea that those days are gone. Republicans cannot change and they don't want to. They have become Trump-compliant. 

I worked with too many Republican clients over the years to think that every Republican is a mini-Trump, and that they all share his narcissism, racism, dishonesty, misogyny, corruption, and greed. Most of my former clients still vote Republican, so they tolerate those qualities in him, but they don't share them. My advice to Hicks was to do something dramatic and visible to project a different brand from being typecast. From the outside, where I and 99 percent of other voters see campaigns, that is exactly what he is marching lockstep into.  

In my view of politics, candidates have some small ability to adjust their brands beyond party -- if they choose to. They can try to do it with words, but those are mostly ineffective. If they are going to do it, it must be done with big gestures that are unmistakable, even to people barely paying attention. His brand is mostly formed and has been so for decades: He is a good looking, married, Republican man; a Chamber of Commerce CEO; and he is conspicuously very tight with the richest, most powerful businesses locally, statewide, and nationally. It is a powerful brand. His campaign is confirming that brand by where it gets its contributions. 

I think Hicks has a brand problem, especially this cycle. The brand links Hicks tightly to distant, powerful elites at a time when there is bi-partisan suspicion of elite power. Trump has led Republicans to be suspicious of elite universities, elite science, elite expertise in food, medicine, diplomacy, and the Fed. Events have caused all voters to be skeptical of elites running oil companies with windfall profits, pharmaceutical companies with high drug margins, and especially technology companies with data centers. 

Many people are feeling economic stress. Big, powerful, distant businesses and business elites don't come across as the allies of those people. People are skeptical of them, especially now, what with Trump's tight crony relationships with businesses and pay-to-play deals. The aura of corruption is very present. Nevertheless, Hicks  appears to have chosen to ally with the business elites. He is leaning into his brand. It is consistent with his apparent values, politics, and biography. 

I think he has a losing brand, especially this year and especially in this district. I may be wrong. We will see.

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Advice to a Republican awash in campaign contributions

What to do when wealthy, powerful Republicans give you a million dollars to use in a state Senate campaign? 

Give it away.

Really. Give it away.

Too much money is a good problem to have -- if one has the sense to realize it is a problem. 

From the Hicks campaign website

Republican candidates for the Oregon 3rd Senate district representing Medford and Ashland Oregon receive a million-plus dollars every cycle from upstate Republican senators' PACS, from Republican-oriented corporate PACs, and from wealthy Republican donors. This year's beneficiary is Brad Hicks, the former CEO of the local Chamber of Commerce. Contributions are pouring in. [Click, then enter Committee ID 24485, then Transaction Type: contribution.]

Spending it overwhelms voters in this small media market. Cycle after cycle, the spending produces the message that the candidate is a solid, loyal, agent of the great Republican hegemon of business elites with all the money in the world to browbeat voters. It is a losing message.

My advice for the Hicks campaign is for him to accept maybe $200,000 in donations and give the rest back, however much it is. The more that comes in, the better, as long as he gives it away to charities. 

First thing is to return the $5,000 he got from the PAC of Altria, the Marlboro cigarette people. What was he thinking taking that donation? He doesn't need the money and he has to know that Democrats will showcase that donation. And give back the money that arrived in $10,000 hunks from Republican state senators welcoming you to their team. It communicates that they want a grateful and indebted senator, not an independent one; a bad message. Give back the money from the bank, pharmaceutical, and real estate PACs. Hicks problem is that he already looks way too tight with business elites, and this just confirms it. Most of all, give back the $249,000 from Nike founder Phil Knight's PAC aimed at creating a state legislature to his liking. I like Nike shoes, and I am grateful for "Uncle Phil's" $2 billion donation to Oregon Health Sciences University, but I don't want him buying himself a legislature. It looks wrong and out of scale. I liken it to the Qatari jet gift to Trump.

Pick two or three local charities to receive the PAC money. Use the portion of the money from rank and file local Republicans to fund a sensibly-scaled campaign, and include some ads to say what you did. Don't overdo the self-praise, or it will wreck the message. The goal is to look public spirited, not braggy.

The Hicks campaign received large donations from people associated with what is now an international auto dealer, Lithia Auto Group. I have good feelings about those people, even if they mostly give to Republicans. They are prosperous, public spirited, and local -- a good combination. My recommendation is to give the money back to them and ask them to make a tax-deductible contribution to Southern Oregon University with it. This is a natural for them. They already donate large amounts to SOU and it turns an after-tax political donation into a tax-deductible charitable one. Let them publicize the switch and why they did it.

I suspect that Lithia's leadership would be the best route to getting buy-in from the big upstate PACs that have invested so heavily in this race. Lithia's leaders are market-savvy, and Republican strategists have proven they are not. Auto dealers know that no amount of advertising will convince a working man who needs a pickup truck to haul his tools that he should buy a small sedan insead. No amount of money will persuade a blue constituency energized by fear of Trump and MAGA enablers to elect a Republican foot-soldier dressed in a Trump uniform of red, white, and blue. The upstate GOP establishment that created the river of cash will need some persuading. God knows they won't listen to me. They might listen to someone from the DeBoer family.

I am offering practical advice. It won't irritate voters with tiresome ads. It makes a point people agree with, that big money is ruining our politics. It communicates a message of public service, not partisanship. By redirecting their money Hicks would make a visible gesture that maybe, just maybe, he has a tiny bit of independence from the MAGA establishment and business elites sending him money. And people will talk about the campaign with surprise, not loathing. 

The problem with this advice is that it doesn't work to fake it, to go part way to just give away a pittance and then brag about it. That backfires worse than doing nothing because it is both hypocritical and partisan, and the avalanche of campaign ads gives away the game. This works only if he is all in. Be bold. Radical generosity is what reframes the campaign, if he dares to do it.

I realize I sound as crazy as Jesus: Give away money to the poor, put down weapons. This sounds like pie in the sky idealism, not real life. Only a very gullible Republican candidate would take such unrealistic campaign advice. I get that.

I expect the Hicks campaign to proceed the tried-and-true way. As Napoleon allegedly said, "God is on the side of the big divisions." Hicks has the big divisions, and the momentum of every campaign is to use the money if it has it. History shows it backfires, but maybe, if the campaign spends enough money, that fellow will buy the sedan he knows he doesn't want.

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How to write a nasty negative campaign commercial

A poorly-done negative TV ad is ugly, unconvincing, dishonest, and it turns people off politics.

Moreover, it can backfire. 

Nonetheless, we will see lots of them. 

We see negative ads because candidates and campaign consultants think they work. They demonize the opponent. Call me naive, but I think exaggerated, hyperbolic ads backfire, at least in Southern Oregon. 

In August we are still in the soft focus let-me-introduce-myself phase of campaign commercials. We get direct-to-camera narrations of what a wholesome person the candidate is, showing the candidate at his home, in a familiar local landmark, at his place of work, talking genially with one or more sets of readily-identifiable constituent groups, e.g., people with hardhats. 

Negative ads start in September. The goal is to define the opponent as dangerous by creating a caricature of him. The elements of that are using creepy music, depicting the opponent in blurry black-and-white photos and video, and by freezing the frame of videos so that the opponent is depicted
mid-word or mid-blink.

Another device is to choose a voice-over narrator with a deep voice, speaking with an ominous tone of implied warning about the opponent while showing text from some presumably neutral news source.

Yet another is to use video clips of the opponent looking happy, while the narrator describes some problem. The implication is that while we hear about inflation, crime, suicides, or business closings, the opponent is happy and unconcerned.

Race matters. It is commonplace in negative ads to adjust the color filter so that dark-skinned opponents are made to look darker-toned, and therefore more "other" to Whites.

The Oregon 3rd senate district race has been a place where negative ads have been used extensively, so I will use it as an example. This year Democrat Denise Krause faces off against Republican Brad Hicks. The district is light blue because it includes Ashland, a charming college town with a Shakespeare Festival that attracts upscale, educated residents, i.e. Democrats. It is understood to be a winnable district for Republicans if they just spend enough money, and then even more money. Past races attracted a million-plus dollars of upstate Republican money, corporate PAC money, and the "usual suspects" of local prominent donors, pouring into a small media market. Money is pouring in again this year. More about this in subsequent posts.

A frequent attribute of a bad negative ad is that it ascribes bad motives to the opponent. Let me invent such an ad, starting with the Democratic candidate. A Krause ad might claim "Brad Hicks wants to pave over paradise and turn our green farms and forests into a parking lot for his corporate buddies."  (He favored reducing the size of a national monument area.) Another might say, "Republican Brad Hicks must be impressed with Donald Trump's lawless ICE agents, since he supports using our tax dollars to force local law enforcement to help ICE out." (Like most Republicans, he opposes the Oregon sanctuary law.)

A Hick's ad might say, "Denise Krause wants to lock up our forests so that they burn up in uncontrollable wildfires, filling our state with dangerous smoke." (She opposes selling land in the Siskiyou Monument.) Another might say, "Denise Krause doesn't care about the property theft, rape, and murder done by illegal aliens, since she opposes having local law enforcement participate in lawful ICE enforcement." (She supports the sanctuary law.)

Note that these ads use a common device: They speculate on and attribute bad motives to their opponent by exaggerating a position on an issue, inventing a catastrophe, and then saying the opponent favors the catastrophe. Do political campaigns actually write such ads? Yes they do write them. I expect you to see them.

The problem with being a Democrat in this district is that the candidate will get outspent five or ten to one, which lets the Republican candidate define them. The problem with being the Republican candidate is that one is awash in money from the most powerful people and business interests in the state, and they donated the money so it could be spent. And spent it will be, in amounts so conspicuous that it cannot be ignored. History shows that the pressure is irresistible to spend it with negative ads. That has an unintended meta-message, an unsaid message within the denoted message. That message is that the Republican candidate is a captive agent of a very rich, very dishonest, Republican power elite who will say anything to win power. Voters reject that.

Tomorrow I will make a "modest proposal" for how Republicans should instead spend the money pouring into Brad Hicks' campaign. I support Krause. So why would I give Republicans good advice? Because they won't take it.

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The Boston Tea Party and Hamas

American schoolchildren learn that the Boston Tea Party was the work of patriots. 

They destroyed property. They refused to pay a tax that generated the revenue to pay for Boston's defense. 

We call the Tea Party protesters the good guys. 

A regular reader of this blog told me he thought that in a decade Americans will understand the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol to be similar to the Boston Tea Party, as an act of rebellion by the people. After all, the Senate had refused to impeach Trump, and the 2024 electorate, knowing what had happened. and hearing Trump insist that he had won the election and the Capitol protesters were the good guys, voted for Trump. He was vindicated. 

His predicted outcome needs just one more event to fall into place, he told me: election of a Republican president in 2028, which he said was likely because Democrats are still angry and divided over trans rights, immigration, DEI, and Israel.

Our understanding of the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s is undergoing change. There was a good cause (equality), charismatic heros (e.g., Martin Luther King, Jr.) unattractive villains (racist Southerners) and a context that forced action. Black WWII veterans felt they had earned equality, and we were competing with the USSR to appeal to non-aligned nations as a beacon of freedom, and the segregated South was a conspicuous embarrassment. We think peaceful protest, non-violence, was the magic formula that made this possible. No violence; good cause.Trump is re-writing that history: He positions the civil rights victories as mistakes that took something precious from the White majority. 

Simultaneously, there is another revision taking place coming out of the ideology of struggle and conflict voiced by democratic socialists. It is an article of faith that change doesn't happen when people ask nicely. People don't empower the disempowered out of a sense of fair-play. Justice comes from a clash of competing sources of identity and power, usually requiring violence. White people in authority needed the push that came from riots in Detroit and Watts and other cities to realize that the time for dithering had passed. 

Democratic socialists have absorbed some of the language and ideology of class struggle. Power must be wrenched from the hands of the geriatric officeholders, from the establishment, from corporations, from the elites. 

Century-old history can be kind to insurgents. In 1980 the Supreme Court concluded that the U.S. had shamefully broken the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie which placed Sioux and Northern Comanche land in the Great Sioux Reservation. White settlers and prospectors were trespassing looking for gold and homesteads, breaking the treaty and defiling sacred lands. Sitting Bull's army had a just cause. 

The short-term response to Custer's Last Stand was backlash and disaster for the tribes.The immediate response of White Americans to urban arson and rioting in the 1960s was overwhelmingly negative. 

Democrats have a political problem now. Some of their candidates who won primary elections said impolitic things about the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. They described it as the inevitable, understandable reaction to Israeli policy on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. The idea is that sometimes it takes a Tea Party, a wipeout of Custer's troops, urban arson, or a murderous incursion into Israel to send a message that gets attention.

Most American voters do not agree that Hamas carried out justice in a just and necessary attack on October 7.  Americans are souring on Israel, but their instincts are toward less violence, not targeted justifiable violence. 

Time and current events bend our understanding of the past. I suspect that the reputation of the Hamas attack will age poorly over the decades ahead, but perhaps I miscalculate. I thought the January 6 Capitol attack would end Trump's career and be a matter of endless shame for Republicans.  

But in the meantime, I think it would be wise for Democrats who said anything positive about the Hamas attack to walk it back.

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Yet more corrupting grift

President Trump is selling public property and pocketing the money.

--  It corrupts the markets.

--  It steals from the public.

--  It corrupts the government.

--  Republicans in Congress could stop it, but they don't.

Trump Media and Technology Group launched a new paid data service on August 1, providing faster access to market-moving Truth Social posts. The price is $100,000 a month, discounted to $60,000 a month under a three-year contract. Donald Trump's revocable trust owns approximately half of Trump Media.

President Trump uses posts on Truth Social to announce official acts that move financial markets. Milliseconds faster access to paid subscribers seems trivial at first glance, but being first to enter trades matters to computer-driven quantitative trading firms. Wall Street firms are paying the fee. It is worth it to them.

Early access to fee-payers corrupts the markets. Our financial markets rest on the presumption everyone has the same opportunity to be right or wrong. This head-start release of information makes advantage explicit and sanctioned. Now we know. People who pay a fee get a head start.

Selling early access is theft. We American taxpayers are being robbed. If the president of the U.S. is going to announce an official act, for example, bomb an Iranian oil refinery, news that would likely raise the value of American refineries, then that intellectual property belongs to the American public, not to the Trump family. Early access should not be sold at all, but if it is  to be sold, the revenue should go to the U.S. Treasury. Those Wall Street firms are not paying $100,000 to get early access to Trump saying that he bought Melania white roses for Valentine's Day; that news would be personal. But market-moving news of official acts is information that belongs to us all. 

Republican members of Congress are demeaning themselves by their acquiescence. They know better than to tolerate this, and they would not tolerate it from anyone but Trump. They know this looks wrong and is wrong. It sets a bad precedent. They are silent and cowering. 

The early-access sale reveals and clarifies something about Trump's understanding of his role. He does not consider himself a trustee, operating on behalf of the public. He is an owner. He understands his election in 2016 to have been, in effect, a successful purchase of a trophy property. Therefore, information about his public acts belong to him, not the public. It is a feudal, monarchical understanding of the presidency and the government.  L'État, c'est moi. Trump is the state. 

This helps clarify why Trump would feel entitled to tear down the East Wing of the White House. It was his to do as he chose. I have no doubt that he thinks he is improving it, but he isn't thinking like a tenant, nor a trustee of a public building. 

An owner's mindset helps explain his attitude toward the 2020 election. He acquired the presidency in the 2016 election. My 30-year experience working as a financial advisor taught me that people experience loss with five time the intensity as they do opportunity for gain. Trump did not face the 2020 election thinking he and Biden had an equal right to be elected. No. Trump had the presidency in hand. It was his. And someone --  Joe Biden, Democrats, Black voters in cities, Mike Pence, non-citizen voters, election workers, tabulating machines, corrupt state and federal judges -- took his presidency from him. 

The most dangerous thing about Trump's understanding of his role as owner, not trustee, is that his Republican enablers in the Congress are not contesting him on this subject. Their acquiescence is normalizing Trump. The public is getting accustomed to an elected strong man, with unlimited power to govern and the right to personal use of public property and the public trust. Trump is in trouble, and his power weakened, but not because he is acting like a king and Republicans object. He is in trouble because he foolishly led us into a war, we have inflation, the tariffs are unpopular, and the economy is continuing to squeeze a majority of Americans even as they see wealthy people getting richer.

The Trump monarchy is faltering, not because it is undemocratic and unconstitutional, but because he is bad at governing.

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