The Week That Is (So Far)

Too much to keep up with, so I'll be brief . . .

The Democratic presidential debate two days ago (October 15) showed that, even if she's not really the front runner for the party's presidential nomination, Elizabeth Warren has surged to the point where she's being taken seriously.  All of the candidates - even Joe Biden - grilled her on her policies, specifically on how she'd pay for Medicare health coverage for anyone, and she ducked and weaved without ever answering the question.  Bernie Sanders - refreshed and ready to move on after his heart attack - as honest about it, saying that taxes would have to go up.  The fact that few if any candidates went after Biden suggests that he's through.  Not so.  Biden is still leading in a few polls and he's well ahead in South Carolina, and he projected strength and resolve in light of Donald Trump's attack on him and his son Hunter in a press conference the day after the debate in Ohio.  Hunter Biden himself was impressive in his interview with ABC's Amy Robach.  Both Bidens have gone a long way toward addressing the involvement or lack thereof in Ukrainian business dealings, but of course there are too many second-guessing skeptics who will say that they're not satisfied.

Even as impeachment is gaining support in light of Trump's mismanagement of a misguided effort to knock Biden out of the 2020 presidential campaign to make Warren the Democratic presidential nominee and give her the full McGovern next November, Trump  has mangled the carefully crafted U.S. Middle East policy to the point where the Turks have turned the Kurdish enclave in Syria into the greatest pocket of misery west of Bangladesh, and the Islamic State terrorist prisoners held there are escaping.  It took House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, during a White House meeting on Syria, to stand up - literally! -  to Trump over the matter in full fury while her male counterparts in the room bowed their heads for the shame if being there (stop pussy-whipping yourselves, guys), after which Pelosi - whom Trump called a third-rate politician - and Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer stormed out.  And yet Trump may survive all this despite bipartisan fury over his Syria policy simply because he supporters think a Kurd is something that cows chew.

Meanwhile, House Oversight Committee chairman Elijah Cummings just died.  RIP. :-(  This could be a blow for House Democrats trying to make a case against impeachment that can persuade at least a few Senate Republicans to vote for conviction in a Senate trial.  Yes, yes, the House Oversight Committee will have a new chairman - I don't know who that would be - but, at this juncture, saying that the House Oversight Committee could get another chairman seems like saying that Led Zeppelin could get another drummer after John Bonham died. :-( 

Elijah's Cummin'

U.S. Representative Elijah Cummings (D-MD), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, should have seen it coming (no pun intended there), and he probably did, when Donald Trump slammed him for spending too much time investigating him and not enough time trying to fix the rat-infested Baltimore neighborhoods he represents.  Indeed, Trump angered many a Baltimore resident - and native Baltimorean Nancy Pelosi - by suggesting that the entire city was a hellhole.  

Except that his district, Maryland's Seventh U.S. House District (a map of which is below), includes Baltimore neighborhoods that aren't stereotypical urban ghettos and also includes several suburban and some rural areas, with a good deal of it stretching along the Interstate 70 corridor forty miles west to the town of Mount Airy.  But not only does it include some black ghettos in black-majority Baltimore, it's also a black-majority district - about 54 percent black and 36 percent white, with other groups making up the rest of the district's population.  It's also the second-wealthiest and the second-best-educated black-majority House district in the country. 

Trump's comments are in keeping with his attitude that any black-majority piece of real estate must be a big slumscape.  Kind of weird for a guy whose first properties as a real-estate owner included an apartment house in East Orange, New Jersey, an overwhelmingly black suburb of Newark that has its run-down neighborhoods but also has some charming areas with homes as beautiful as any you'd find in the overwhelmingly white neighboring town of Glen Ridge.  And this isn't the first time Trump has attacked a black congressman representing a black-majority district; just before he moved into the White House (courtesy of Debbie Wasserman Schultz), he attacked Georgia congressman and civil-rights icon John Lewis for problems in his House district, even though the demographics in Lewis' district are similar to Cummings'.  If there's anything Trump can't stand more than a black congressman who can't stand him, it's a black congressman who's investigating him.  And these attacks are perfectly well-tuned to whip up his base and get them to the polls next year.

Trump and his supporters complain that his criticisms of Cummings are not racist but rather a frank examination of how Democratic policies toward the cities and local Democratic control of cities like Baltimore, which is a whole lot better off than one might think (despite former Mayor Catherine Pugh's forced resignation over a book deal gone bad, a continuation of old-fashioned Baltimore corruption), have failed inner-city populations and cities in general.  Someone should send Trump a video copy of native Baltimorean Barry Levinson's 1990 classic movie Avalon, which showed how cities declined as a result of pro-suburban, autocentric policies championed by both parties in the postwar decades.  Then maybe he'll get it.  (Yeah, right.)  This was the same Donald Trump who promised to rebuild our cities and towns but now exploits the problems of urban America to whip up anti-black sentiment.

But then, maybe what Trump is doing now isn't racist this time.  Because as I recall, Baltimore's last white mayor, Martin O'Malley, ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 but (again, courtesy of Debbie Wasserman Schultz) never got taken seriously.  I am convinced that, had O'Malley been Trump's opponent in the 2016 general election. Trump would have levied the same blistering attack for Baltimore's failings on him that he did on Cummings.  Assuming, of course, his attempt to identify O'Malley as the father of a single black TV newswoman's child based on a rumor started by Maryland Republicans didn't do the trick. (Irony.)

And you can bet that O'Malley, a Batlimorean by choice and a friend of Cummings, had a lot to say about Trump's tirade.

O'Malley should have run for President in 2020.