Grassroots campaigning for Harris

We don't get postcards much anymore.

We don't get cards from vacationing friends writing, "Wish you were here." We have Facebook for that now.

My sister is writing postcards to Democrats in Pennsylvania, saying "Wish you would vote."

Penny Flenniken

My sister, Penny, lives in Portland, Oregon among like-minded people. These would be liberals; people who recycle; owners of electric cars; listeners to NPR; watchers of MSNBC and CNN and Bill Maher and John Oliver; retired school teachers; and people who support a woman's right to choose. We were brought up in the Methodist Church, but she no longer attends any church. She is in book groups. Penny is a Portland, Oregon Democrat. 

Of course, she is disgusted by Trump. Back in the hopeless days when it looked like Biden would be the only alternative to Trump, she asked around to see if she could "do anything." A friend of a friend connected her with an organized effort to increase the Democratic vote in Pennsylvania. I asked Penny if this was something organized by the Biden -- now Harris -- campaign. She didn't know. She knew what was important to know, that someone thought that hand-writing postcards to strangers in Pennsylvania might spare us another Trump presidency.

The task assigned to willing volunteers in presumably safely-blue states was to let inactive Democrats in battleground states know somebody was thinking about them. Somebody human, Somebody who hand-wrote a "thinking of you" postcard. 

The printing, honestly, could be improved, I realize as I look at these postcards, but the irregular lettering makes it clear this message was not done by a computer. Do the people I am mailing them to care? Well, how many personal letters do I receive in a given week? Not many.

So the postcard receiver may be impacted by the fact that someone took some effort. I can barely do five postcards in one sitting. It's slow, since I must print and not write in cursive because the reader may not know cursive

Penny had a long career as a public school teacher. She learned to write cursive in public schools in the 1950s, but cursive isn't being taught anymore. Now students are taught to read and write printed letters and to use a keyboard. 

I am writing to Democrats in Pennsylvania who didn't vote in the last election. If their job or family circumstances make that difficult, they can write to VOTE.PA and receive a mail-in ballot. That's good information for them to know, right? That is what I tell people in the postcards. Mostly, I think, the value of these is that people know that someone out there took a moment to tell them they hoped they would vote.

Does any of this effort matter? On election night you can be sure I will be checking the results from Allentown, Bethlehem, and Jim Thorpe, all cities in Pennsylvania. If Harris wins by two or three votes, maybe this would have been the margin.

This is a tiny drop in the bucket of campaign news, but it is how close elections are decided.

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Which states tax the most???

Your state tax burden depends on whether you are poor, in the middle, or rich.

In general, the rich pay a smaller portion of their income.

Here's a surprise. Notwithstanding their reputations, California and New York are not the high tax states for the average person.  They are only high tax for their wealthiest citizens.  

Texas and Florida are not the low tax states they are reputed to be. They are low-tax for the very richest citizens, but they are are high tax states for the average citizen.

The chart below is the one that shapes most people's thinking about high and low tax states. New York, California, and my home state of Oregon are there on the left. Texas and Florida are presumed to be low tax states. No wonder Elon Musk moved to Texas. There's no income tax there.

The chart below is for the second quintile in income distribution. middle and upper-middle class people. These are "normal," financially comfortable people, frequently two-income families with mid-level jobs and homes in middle-income neighborhoods. 

Charts by Kevin Drum's excellent website

New York and California slip down and the "low-tax" states move up. 

Some taxes, like a progressive income tax, are highly visible collections of money at the source, earned income. The richest do, indeed, pay more.

Some states rely on other ways of collecting money. Sales taxes collect a higher percentage of income from poorer people. Lower quintile earners spend their money in places where sales taxes are collected. Wealthy people tend not to spend all their income, or they spend their money in places that aren't taxed, for example on foreign vacations, private school tuitions, household and landscape services, etc. Car registrations, tolls, and gasoline taxes collect nearly as much from people who make $15/hour as they do from multi-millionaires.

States and localities sometimes pay for general common-good services such as storm drains, parks, and police by making them flat fees attached to a water bill or other utility. A person with a small starter-home pays the same as the person with a mansion. Some states charge hefty fees for annual licenses  to do low-income jobs, including barbers, nail technicians, and landscape workers. In Oregon, hourly laborers working in marijuana gardens are especially hard hit with annual registration fees.

Property taxes based on assessed value have a surface appeal of fairness. The bigger the house, the higher the tax. In reality, it taxes bottom-quintiles a higher percentage of their income. A middle-income couple's home frequently constitutes by far their biggest asset. A two-income family making a total of $80,000 to $100,000 a year might own a median-value home valued at $400,000. It might pay property taxes totaling 2.5% of its value in a high-property-tax state, $10,000. A top 1% earner making $800,000 to $1,000,000 a year, ten times as much, likely has a bigger, nicer home, but is unlikely to have a home costing $4 million, the same five-times their annual income. They will pay property taxes to support overall state services, but at a far smaller share of their income.

I invite readers to look up their state in the chart below, drawn from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy  States are listed in the order of the index of inequality of tax treatment between income groups. Florida is first. In Florida, for example, the top 1% pays 2.7% of their income in state taxes, while the poorest 20% of Floridians pay 13.2% in state taxes. 

Oregon readers will see that Oregon, with it highly visible nearly flat 10% income tax, plus an inheritance tax on estates over $1 million, has a very even burden across the board, and therefore a low index number. Prosperous Oregonians may not like it, but it works out to be about an equal proportion of incomes up and down the income scale.

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Weird

Weird.

Democrats think they found a word to discredit Trump: "Weird."

Trump isn't "weird."

Trump is a "malevolent narcissist."

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz called Trump "weird," and it is circulating among young adult voters, the people who have picked up lime green as a team color.

Walz performed one of the jobs of a vice presidential candidate, being an attack-dog critic of the opponent. He is on the very short list of potential running mates for Kamala Harris.

Weird is the wrong word.  Weird is offbeat. Unconventional. It is independent, and often in a good way. Senatorial candidate John Fetterman was weird, in his shorts and hoodie. It was a happy, sloppy, comfortable "everyman" look. It was a net positive for him.

Ten years ago, back when Portland, Oregon, was the best city on the west coast -- before the riots and homeless tents --  the phrase "Keep Portland Weird" was a point of local pride.

Trump goes far beyond "weird" into manic lunacy. Trump is sick. He doesn't drink, but he acts like a man with a drinking problem, a belligerent drunk. Trump types out ALL CAP ravings, sometimes of catastrophe, sometimes of anger that fellow Republicans are disloyal, most often of wild claims of his own brilliance. and anger at the perfidy of others. These are just in from last night:

 

We read about Donald Trump in high school when we were assigned to read Moby Dick. Remember Captain Ahab? Remember reading about his mono-mania that nearly got everyone killed? Trump is Captain Ahab. 

Trump lacks self-awareness and self-control. Yesterday's Easy Sunday short post urged Trump to "keep talking," as he used his time and audience in Atlanta to bash the popular Republican governor and to insist, against all evidence, that he deserved to win the 2020 Georgia election and that the state's governor and election officials owed it to him to cheat on his behalf. How self-destructive. Even Republican partisans admit it. Trump is his own worst enemy.

He goes off script to serve his mania. At some point a Trump feature becomes a Trump bug. A courageous ambition to win, win, win, becomes a sick inability to recognize reality.

George Conway is promoting PsychoPAC, a group that defines and creates advertisements describing Trump's behavior. Conway notes that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM-5, has a description of acknowledged diseases. One of these is narcissistic personality disorder. Five or more behaviors confirm a diagnosis of the condition. These include grandiose sense of self-importance, fantasies of power and brilliance,  a belief one is special or unique, a need for excessive admiration, a sense of entitlement, being interpersonally exploitative, a lack of empathy, enviousness, and arrogance. Conway observes Trump has them all.

One does not need to "medicalize" Trump. One can simply look and observe that Trump is acting out of control. He is manic. He is lashing out. His repeated claims that Harris has "low IQ" -- now that she is Black in his eyes -- comes across as unsubtle racist dog whistling. Would any prudent person choose Trump to be a trustee for one's estate in light of his convictions for fraudulent and self-dealing business practices? Would any reader of this blog in a position as a board member of a business or nonprofit organization hire someone with Trump's history and current behavior to be a school superintendent, a hospital director, a park department manager, a college dean, or even the branch manager of a 7-11 corner store? Trump would be a time bomb.The red flags are waving.

Biden was diminished by age. Democrats acknowledged it and dealt with it. Trump is diminished by some combination of age and personality disorders, and the condition has gotten worse. Republicans had options, but they stuck with Trump, warts and all.

Now that Biden is gone, Trump's warts are center stage. And worse yet, Trump is showing them off.

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Easy Sunday: Trump insists on looking backward.

Democrats are catching a break.

Trump was in Georgia, bashing popular Republicans, complaining that they wouldn't cheat to let him overturn the 2020 election.

Keep talking, Mr. Trump.

Today's Atlanta Journal-Constitution website

I asked a Trump-supporting attorney who reads this blog to explain to me his version of Trump's effort to stay in office following the 2020 election. Maybe it could be a guest post, I said.

He declined to do so. He said, "You keep asking me for responses to old news. I am done with the Monday morning quarterbacking and want to focus on keeping the anti-American Kamala out of the White House. She is a threat to democracy as we know it while 45/47 will make America great again."

Trump supporters are right to want to avoid the subject. Shining a light on Trump's actions after losing the 2020 election puts the focus on Trump's worst, least defensible behavior as president. It is Trump who won't change the subject.

In yesterday's rally in Georgia, Trump spent 10 minutes tearing into popular Georgia Governor Brian Kemp for refusing to overturn the Georgia vote back in 2020.

He’s a bad guy. He’s a disloyal guy. And he’s a very average governor. Little Brian, little Brian Kemp. Bad guy.

The rally comments were preceded by Trump posts on Truth Social that complained that Kemp and Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger were disloyal and ungrateful and failed to help him reverse the election result. He wrote

[Kemp} should be seeking UNITY, not Retribution, especially against the man that got him the Nomination through Endorsement, and, without whom, he could never have beaten Stacey Abrams. He and his wife didn't think he could win. 

Trump said Kemp could have stopped with a phone call the Georgia prosecution of him and the electors who signed false affidavits of election. Kemp refused to interfere. Trump wrote that Kemp was a "bad guy," and added the complaint that Kemp's wife had said she would not vote for him.

Kemp, in Twitter, told Trump that he would not be "engaging in petty personal insults, attacking fellow Republicans or dwelling on the past. You should do the same, Mr. President, and keep my family out of it."

Georgia is a battleground state that had slipped badly out of contention for Democrats. Polls taken in Georgia after the debate showed Trump leading Biden by five to 10 points.

It is all different now. In the most recent poll, taken July 29 and 30, Harris led Trump by one percent.

And that was before Trump came back to Georgia and drew headlines by complaining that Kemp and Raffensperger wouldn't consent to overturning the Georgia election.

Trump is self-destructing. Democrats shouldn't interrupt him.

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A gut choice for VP

I hope Harris picks Pete Buttigieg, but I suspect she won't. He's gay. 

I suspect she will pick a straight White male.

Notice the irony: A straight White male would be a DEI choice. 

The best choice for the job is the person who would bring a new round of enthusiasm, a bit of WOW! to the campaign. Pete Buttigieg can handle himself in public. He would make Trump look like a senile, ranting King Lear in comparison. It would be an easy-to-see contrast: Old criminal crackpot with demons versus an earnest, rational person.

If it isn't Pete -- and I think it won't be -- it is because of identity issues. A mixed-race, dark-skinned female needs a symbol of normal-ness, i.e. a straight White man. 

Just by standing there beside her, a Mark Kelly, Andy Beshear, Tim Walz, Josh Shapiro, or Pete Buttigieg sends a powerful body language signal that she doesn't hate White men. Even though she is married to a straight White man, she would be accused by Republicans of disrespecting them if she doesn't choose one. If she were to pick a highly qualified woman, Gretchen Whitmer, for example, then it would be a female ticket, and femaleness would be the centerpiece description of the campaign. Men would feel displaced from their rightful position as the default normal. What's wrong with us? Man-haters! 

She solves that problem with a DEI choice, a VP that demonstrates diversity, in this case gender diversity. It must be a guy. And probably not a gay guy. Otherwise: What's wrong with straight men? Straight man hater!  

A college classmate volunteered to me that he preferred Mark Kelly as the VP pick. I asked him why, requesting that he not look anything up to rationalize and justify the preference he had announced, but instead to tell me what he knew about Kelly that was the basis for the preference. He wrote, "I believe I knew that he was a fighter pilot, probably based on newspaper reading the past week." That would have come on top of knowing Kelly was a male in late middle age, a U.S. senator from Arizona, and married to former U.S. Representative Gabby Giffords, who was shot and badly injured in an assassination attempt. That's about it. My classmate understood a tiny bit about Kelly's identity, not his policy positions on taxes, labor, fossil fuels, etc. He made inferences about politics and character from that. A fighter pilot surely has physical courage and a bit of electoral sparkle. Let's try a fighter pilot for VP.

Trump's confrontation with Black journalists at their convention was intentional and strategic. He chose to make Kamala Harris's very identity -- Black? Indian? -- a matter of controversy. JD Vance got on board, calling her a "chameleon." Trump is doing here what he did with Obama and his Hawaiian birth; call it fraudulent. Is Kamala Harris who she says she is? Trump just made her identity "questionable" because he questioned it. How easy! Trump also intentionally mispronounces her name. Is it Kam-a-LAH? Who knows who she is? What, really, is her name and race? Since there are questions, she must be hiding something. Why does she hide? 

It's a trick and it works: delegitimize the identity of your opponent. Even today tens of millions of Americans, possibly a majority of Republicans, tell pollsters they doubt that Obama was born in America. Biden won by eight million audited, counted, and recounted votes. Trump says Biden lost and that Biden is illegitimate, a fake president, a fraud. His party follows along.

Identity matters because very few people know the policy positions held by candidates and officeholders. We have a general idea based on their party identity, their biographical identity, and who their friends and detractors are. We fill in the blanks and make our gut preference.

I like Buttigieg because he is a good age to be president, and because he articulates Democratic policies so very deftly in the face of hostile media. That's reason enough for my gut.

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Who should be the nominee for vice president?

Democrats are giddy and hopeful. 

Kamala Harris isn't just new. She is catching on.

Democrats now dare to look ahead. They are asking each other, "Who should be the choice for vice president?"

Democrats passed the torch. They aren't clear what Harris stands for yet because she hasn't defined herself within the Democratic spectrum that reaches from Bernie Sanders and AOC to Joe Manchin. No matter. It is enough that she appears electable and might save the country from a man who plotted to overthrow an election to stay in office, nearly succeeded, said he would do it again, and chose a vice president who said he would help him do it.

Meanwhile, Republicans are stuck with a candidate that 55% of Americans loathe. 

Since there was no primary, Democrats did not divide into irreconcilable camps fighting about climate, Israel-Palestine, peace, health care, immigration, and taxes. Those issues rumble under the surface. Potential vice presidents are more than Hollywood central casting criteria. They will have baggage based on who they excite and disappoint. 

Josh Shapiro

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro looks perfect from a central casting point of view. He's a straight White male governor of a blue-wall state. He might calm the nerves of people uncomfortable with a dark-skinned biracial female president. He might not be sufficiently anti-fossil fuel to please climate progressives; there is fracking in Pennsylvania. He is Jewish. That will reassure some Democrats but will worry others. Will he be too uncritical of Israel's handling of the Palestinian population? Progressives, led by teachers' unions, made organized protests opposing Shapiro. Shapiro has supported school vouchers. He is 51.

 Mark Kelly

Mark Kelly is a former astronaut and is married to assassination-attempt victim Gabby Giffords. He is a popular Arizona U.S. senator. He would bring some border-state credibility to the promise that a Harris administration would deal with immigration. Arizona is a battleground state, which is good. Less good is that Kelly made organized labor unhappy because he opposed rules that would have declared some "independent contractors" to be "employees." His manner has been mild and moderate, and he would be a reluctant "attack dog." He is 60. 

Tim Walz

I had never heard of Tim Walz until this week. He is the governor of Minnesota and a former six-term U.S representative from a red district. He won anyway. He had an NRA endorsement. He shifted left when he became governor. His presence would signal Harris wants to include rural, traditional, Midwest-nice values and style in her presidency. Politico headlined that he had "Midwest grit, the Midwest sensibility." The Wall Street Journal says:

Known for his folksy dress and manner, Walz likely would help Harris the most in battleground Wisconsin because he is already well-known in western portions of that state that share media markets with Minnesota. He might also play well in battleground Michigan—one-third of the “blue wall,” along with Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, seen as crucial to Harris’s hopes in November.

Progressives who oppose Shapiro are urging her to choose Walz. He is 60.

Pete Buttigieg

Donald Trump has shown Americans the appeal of a courageous defy-conventional-wisdom approach to politics. A VP choice that would create the most astonishment, the most electrifying buzz, is Pete Buttigieg. He has been nationally vetted from his campaign four years ago. Trump's sexual history probably inoculates Buttigieg from sexual scolds on the Christian right; homophobes weren't going to vote Democratic anyway. Buttigieg brings to the table something that has been missing since Obama left office, an articulate centrist Democratic spokesperson who can take the argument to Fox. Biden couldn't. Harris may well be able to. Buttigieg already is and looks great doing so. He is young enough that he may not frighten Harris into thinking she has to muzzle him. He will get his turn to be president, and in the meantime he can take the message to middle America.

There is a school of thought that American elections have become a contest of TV excitement. Of buzz, not policy. Trump's power comes because he dominates public attention. He is a shock-jock, a provocateur. Trump is getting old and erratic and so is the Trump schtick. 

I think the matchup Trump fears the most is a Harris-Buttigieg ticket. They would upstage Trump. We've seen the Trump show. 

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Trump crashes and burns at Black journalists' convention

Trump wanted to crash and burn.

How dare those uppity and ungrateful Black nobodies disrespect him? 

Trump was on message. Trump is sticking with his team

Robert Reich called the interview "a meltdown" and "calamitous." Aaron Rupar said Trump "self-immolates." 

Here are highlights of the confrontation between Trump and Black journalists. ABC-TV correspondent, Rachel Scott began:

A lot of people did not think it was appropriate for you to be here today. You have pushed false claims about some of your rivals, from Nikki Haley to former President Barack Obama, saying that they were not born in the United States. That’s not true.

You have told four congresswomen of color who are American citizens to go back to where they came from.

You have used words like “animal” and “rabid” to describe Black district attorneys.

You’ve attacked Black journalists, calling them a loser, saying the questions that they ask are stupid and racist.

You’ve had dinner with a white supremacist at your Mar-a-Lago resort. So my question, sir, now that you are asking Black supporters to vote for you: Why should Black voters trust you after you have used language like that?”

Trump responded by saying:

First of all, I don’t think I’ve ever been asked a question in such a horrible manner. The first question. You don’t even say hello, "Hello, how are you?" Are you with ABC? Because I think they’re a fake news network, a terrible network.

Trump's supporters see him as a man with a grievance. Everybody picks on him, like right here, where he sits getting criticized by a Black woman. His base agrees with Trump that he has been treated unfairly by the news media. By Democrats. By prosecutors. By the Justice Department. By his own disloyal cabinet members and White House staff, who wouldn't back his plan to stay in office. By ungrateful Republicans who became RINOs. By ungrateful Jews, who ignore how much he did for Israel. By ungrateful Christians, some of whom fail to vote. By ungrateful Blacks, whom he helped as much as did any former president, including Lincoln. 

Trump's multiple grievances and complaints give his supporters permission to minimize to minimize or endorse Trump's past and present behavior. He was provoked. He was picked on. What about Hunter Biden's laptop? He is just lashing back, defending himself.

And now, here at the convention, there was a technical problem and he was kept waiting for 35 minutes. Trump complained that it was disrespectful of them. How dare they?

This image of Trump in the chair, defiant, while being picked on, is exactly what Trump wants. Trump is a salesman. Even the most clueless of salesmen know that insulting Black journalists is not the way to win votes with a Black constituency. Instead, you find common ground. Trump is doing the opposite. This wasn't an accident. Trump didn't crash and burn. He was making a statement.

This was a highly racialized encounter. Trump kept race front and center in his comments. It wasn't "presidential candidate" and "journalist." It was "White presidential candidate" versus "Black female journalist." How dare they disrespect him? 

In the days after the assassination attempt, Americans wondered if Trump would push "reset." He could be a unifier. It might improve his popularity. No.  

Donald Trump isn't a unifier, and it wouldn't improve his popularity. There are more Whites than Blacks in America. There are a great many people who feel aggrieved by Blacks pushing into formerly all-White, all-male spaces of votes, jobs, and elected offices. These are his base voters: White males. A great many of them don't vote, but might, if they felt motivated. They don't want Trump to make nice with Black journalists, with their set of demands to crowd into new spaces. It is a zero-sum world. If a Black man or woman gets the job or promotion or public office then a White guy didn't get it. 

Democrats put a stake in the ground with their policies. They are the diversity-is-OK party. They are the party of professional women. They confirmed their policy preference with a Black female presidential candidate.

Trump isn't about getting along. Trump's America recognizes competition. If somebody wins, then somebody loses. Immigrants don't make new jobs, they take jobs; your jobs, Trump said. The culture is talking about diversity and sharing power. Many White Americans feel nobody is sticking up for the interests of White people amid all that sharing. Trump is, and he isn't being friendly about it. He understands who his friends are, and he is demonstrating that he will take on their racial rivals. There are sides in this competition and he is fighting for his team.

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