Vance Depresses Me

Someone took a shot at Donald Trump again, but this time Trump wasn't it and the shooter was captured alive.   I'm actually beginning to worry about Trump and his chances of survival, because well, it's like this . . . he could still be President, but if he's elected and something happens to him before Inauguration Day, that means James David Vance will become President!

Vance depresses me.  He depresses me mainly because he makes Trump look like Robert F. Kennedy - Senior - by comparison.  He has a shockingly vicious attitude toward women - not just dismissing unmarried women as childless cat ladies but belittling the abortion rights movement and wanting to keep women in loveless marriages with abusive husbands by opposing no-fault divorce.  But the most jaw-dropping think that Jaw Drop Vance has done is to dig in on pushing discredited rumors that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, a town between Dayton and Columbus, were eating pets even after this debunked tidbits were leading to bomb threats there and forcing the locals to suffer the consequences.

I ask again . . . why is he a U.S. Senator? 

And how is it that he could be one heartbeat - one beat of a heart congested with high levels of cholesterol - away from the Presidency? 

Vance is a cartoonish parody of a U.S. Senator with his fictitious life story, his faked interest in ordinary people's lives, and his glib, indifferent attitude.  When he first appeared on the national stage in 2016, he put on a good act, hawking his memoir, a book as bogus as those pet-eating rumors, and he even got an interview with the PBS NewsHour (which, incidentally, I still haven't gotten back to watching), presenting himself as a street-smart tech tycoon with a boy-next-door demeanor.  The media took his memoir as seriously as a Zakiya Dalila Harris novel. The real Vance is a fascistic sycophant with an unfulfilled lust for power. 

I've been hearing how Ohio voters have buyer's remorse over favoring him instead of Tim Ryan for Ohio's open Senate seat in 2022.  I don't think so, mainly because Ohio has become so reflexively Republican that when it changed judicial elections form nonpartisan to partisan, Democratic judges that had been elected repeatedly on nonpartisan ballots went down to defeat once they had to identify themselves by party.  But if I'm wrong and Ohioans do have buyer's remorse over Vance if the Trump-Vance ticket loses in November and Vance stands for re-election in 2028, could Tim Ryan defeat him in a rematch?  I think he could, but he won't get the opportunity, because the way the Democratic Party works, the party does not want to nominate a candidate that had been defeated by the Republican incumbent to oppose the same Republican.  Ohio Democrats will likely fear that Vance, having defeated Ryan once, will know how to defeat Ryan again, and therefore Ohio Democrats - assuming there are any left by 2028 - will tell Tim to take a hike.  Chances are they would have told Ryan to do the same had Sherrod Brown not run for re-election this year and had there been an open Democratic U.S. Senate primary.

And yes, I still think it.  Washington Democrats are glad to be rid of Tim Ryan because of his own driving ambition, which led him to an ill-advised challenge to Nancy Pelosi's House Democratic leadership and put him forever in her doghouse and then led him to an ultimately quixotic campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.  I think part of the reason U.S. Senator Gary Peters of Michigan - the chairman of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, who served concurrently with Ryan in the House - was happy to find a way to keep the Senate in Democratic hands without helping Ryan in Ohio, because he probably couldn't stand the guy.

But even if you think that Timothy John Ryan deserved to lose his Senate bid and be consigned to the Archipelago of Failed Democratic Candidates, does anyone in Ohio really deserve James David Vance?

And does America deserve Vance as Vice President?       

Kamala!

Okay, Kamala Harris is Joe Biden's running mate.  It was less of a surprise than I thought it would be, because she looks great on paper.

So do I have a problem, guys, with the choice?  Not really.  She makes sense politically, and despite her dust-ups with Biden in the 2020 campaign primary debates, she gets along with him, and there are no hard feelings against her on Biden's part.  She has a distinguished record as a California Attorney General and as a United States Senator, and she not only brings racial and gender balance to the ticket but geographical balance as well; she is now the first Democratic nominee for national office from a Western state.

Since she was always the obvious choice for Vice President, the choice, now that it's been made, seems rather anticlimactic.  As for me, it's gotten to the point where I don't care anymore.  The stress of the pandemic has worn me down, I feel exhausted, and I'm just glad this VP drama is over.  Now I don't care what happens between now and November, as long as it leads to the defeat of Donald Trump.

Carry on.

Gerry, We Hardly Knew Ye

Geraldine Ferraro, who died Saturday at 75, will likely be remembered as a figure in American history more for what she didn't achieve than for anything she actually did accomplish. She was, of course, the first woman to run for Vice President of the United States on a major party ticket, as well as the first Italian-American vice presidential candidate for a major ticket. What she didn't achieve was the Vice Presidency itself - the 1984 Democratic national ticket on which she appeared suffered a 49-state loss. But is her nomination all she will be remembered for? And is that enough to ensure her a place in history alongside other major American political figures of the 1980s?

True, she is not associated with a great deal of legislation in Congress. In fact, she was only in the House of Representatives for six years. But she was a natural leader and a key member of the House Democratic caucus, serving as its secretary and also serving as a member of the House Budget Committee. She championed chemical waste cleanup efforts an even supported some military programs like the Pershing II missile, among other things. She was known for her toughness and her traditionalist New Deal background; though a woman, she was not exactly a wild-eyed left-winger. (She represented a district in Queens that included the neighborhood represented in TV show "All In the Family," which was just as conservative as Archie Bunker himself.) She did, though support pay and retirement fund equity for women, as she believed in fairness. I doubt anyone would have questioned her record and her integrity. The shady business dealings of her husband, John Zaccaro, were a separate matter.

When Democratic presidential candidate Walter Mondale selected her as her running mate in 1984, I expected her to become a monumental figure even if the Democratic ticket lost. It's no secret that failed vice presidential candidates are forgotten by history, except for Franklin Roosevelt (the 1920 Democratic vice presidential candidate) and Earl Warren (the 1948 Republican vice presidential candidate). After all, no one remembers John Logan, the losing vice presidential nominee of 1884, a hundred years before Ferraro - and Logan founded Memorial Day. But while Ferraro's gender and ethnic origin seemed to be enough to ensure her lasting fame as a vice presidential nominee, she had a distinguished career as a lawyer and as a public servant that suggested a greater future in American politics - and also suggested that she would not be as easily forgotten as Logan.

It didn't quite work out like that. Ferraro's attempts to win a Senate seat from her home state of New York in 1992 and 1998 were unsuccessful, and a feud between her and Democratic Senate primary candidate Elizabeth Holtzman in the 1992 campaign - prompted by a negative Holtzman ad Ferraro thought linked her unfairly to the Mafia because of her Italian heritage - was seen as a disaster for the women's movement. She served with distinction as the American ambassador to the United Nations Commission of Human Rights in President Bill Clinton's first term, which didn't exactly get her a lot of media attention. Ironically, she got plenty of media attention as a host of CNN's "debate" show "Crossfire," a program long since discredited, in the mid-nineties. I got to wondering if Ferraro would become more than a trivia question in the history books after all.

She may yet become an important figure in history. But her legacy, as it pertains to greater female participation in American politics, remains a mixed one. I came across this quote from Judy Goldsmith, president of the National Organization for Women in the mid-eighties and a fierce critic of the modern conservative movement: "No one asks anymore if women can raise the money, if women can take the heat, if women have the stamina for the toughest political campaigns in the country. Geraldine Ferraro did them all." Goldsmith said this in December 1984. Of course, Mondale had lost to President Ronald Reagan in a landslide the previous month, the Equal Rights Amendment had failed two years earlier, and neither party came under a great deal of pressure to select a female vice presidential candidate in 1988, as Gerald Ford had predicted they would.

Call me cynical, but Ferraro's impact on American politics was no greater than the impact of the Go-Go's, the first girl group that played their own instruments and wrote their own songs to break through commercially, was on American popular music. Have you seen any all-female rock bands lately?

More importantly, how many more women in America hold elective office? Not as many as you might think. Despite Hillary Clinton's presence - and her own spirited 2008 presidential run - women are still underrepresented in government in this country. I saw one statistic showing that the United States ranks 72nd among 186 countries in the female share of seats in the lower houses of national legislatures. (We're tied with Turkmenistan; Sweden, the United Kingdom, France, South Africa [!] and all three Baltic states are our superiors there.) Nancy Pelosi's tenure as Speaker of the House proved to be short-lived; now the House is run once again by a conservative male Republican who opposes abortion rights.

And if Geraldine Ferraro's only living legacy is Sarah Palin - and possibly Michele Bachmann as well - it doesn't bode well for the future. :-(