Democrats: Choose Your Upcoming Battles Wisely

Part One of Three

With Joe Biden’s entry into the 2020 Democratic primary field, it seems the Dems have just about tapped into all socio-political-economic demographics they possibly can. Overall, it’s an interesting and broad-spectrum lineup, and while I have no favorites, I do have some bias about where I’d like to see the party position itself by the beginning of the actual primaries. Here, in the firsts of three parts, I’m going to discuss the topics favored currently by the Democrats; offer suggestions as to why their vision, so far, is clouded by unrealistic expectations and their unwillingness to look at the real issues facing most Americans; and, finally, propose a limited shelf of ideas and policies to pursue. Part One looks at the economy, international relations/foreign policy, and education.

The Economy

If the party’s top five, or even ten, contenders are going to make any headway against Trump’s ever-increasing chances for re-election (yes, that’s what I see trending), they are going to have to put away any notions of winning points on the economy. As of this week, the economy is motoring along just fine in the eyes of most voters; there are micro exceptions and valid countervailing anecdotes, of course, but in the macro sense, a reasonable person, outside the D.C. Beltway, sees no need to critique the current administration’s economic record. The average voter doesn’t care unless interest rates explode, unemployment soars, gas goes to five bucks, and grocery costs double. That’s not happening. 

So, it’s not the economy, stupid; it’s something else. Yes, it’s important to call out the president on his bizarre appointments for the Federal Reserve Board; no, it’s not worth more than 30-seconds in a speech. Yes, there is some traction to be gained by noting that many Americans, in this relatively stable labor market, are working two or more jobs, where once one job sufficed. But Democrats are not going to beat Trump on this one overall. Yes, it is true that many of us did not benefit from Trump’s tax plan (this writer certainly did not), but will that message carry a candidate to primary or general election victory? No. Mention it, explain it with a few stats and anecdotes, then move along.

International Relations

Nor should the Democratic candidates spend undue media capital forming anti-Trump policy pronouncements on international relations. Yes, Trump’s take on the World Order is so horribly skewed toward dictators and thugs, and yes, many of our long-time allies are daily amused or aghast at Trumpian boasts and bloviations. But you know what? You ask the guy who runs the dry cleaner in Wilmington, Ohio, or the woman attorney in the halls of the Meridian, Mississippi, courthouse, or the recent grad student at the University of Washington, or the new parents watching over their prematurely-born baby at the hospital in Lincoln, Nebraska, and they will, at best, give you an eye-roll at the mere mention of Trump’s foreign policy poop pile.

Foreign policy, as it was once practiced and respected as a tool of international engagement to prevent war, or as a means to negotiate an end to war, is, at worst, anathema to the American electorate’s attention, and, at best, a tolerable topic for maybe 30 seconds. Using foreign policy as a lever to establish fair trade deals for American businesses and level the international trade playing field overall, is a topic best left to the dwindling number of experts who still believe some active comity between nations can lead to improved global economies. The exceptions to Americans’ dull yawn over foreign policy can be found in the soybean and wheat fields and in the stockyards of the nation’s farmers and ranchers—to them, access to foreign markets, and protection from economically-distressing imports is a prime concern, and a valuable topic for any Democrat to work on as he or she stalks the hustings in search of votes.

Education

With respect to education, the Democrats seem, at least as of April, 2019, to be hyperventilating about college this and college that. Free college for all, free community college, debt forgiveness across the board, qualified debt forgiveness, reduced college loan rates, etc. There is no question that college debt is crushing too many graduates and that debt is lingering far longer than it should. Reasonable solutions, solutions that will not further the nation’s long-term debt, must be proposed, debated, and moved through Congress. 

But this is not the time to throw out promises of some sort of universal panacea to the college loan/debt problem, nor is it the time to promote college-for-all policies that are freighted with long-term trillion-dollar costs to the nation’s already pummeled treasury. And, frankly, while the eye-candy of free college and debt forgiveness makes cable news headlines and probably stirs the interest of some Americans, the underlying, the fundamental, the cornerstone education issues that must be addressed ahead of college access and financial relief are the quality of, and access to, pre-K-to-12 education, and the re-training of workers whose analog jobs are either evaporating or morphing into cyberwork.

In this writer’s opinion, there is absolutely no value in a discussion about access to post-secondary education until, and unless, the nation’s primary and secondary school systems are consistently advancing students from all socio-economic groups who are fully prepared to enter institutions of higher learning. To say to a student (and to his or her family), “Here are the free keys to a shiny college education,” without preparing that student (and family) for the rigors and necessary discipline of higher education, is to dilute the value of higher education while leading unprepared students down a long and frustrating road. To the Progressive Democrats who say, “Open wide the doors to universal higher education,” I say, “Even if you can do a thing, that doesn’t mean you should do a thing.” It’s unfair, and, in my opinion, unethical, to dangle in front of the public a promise fraught with likely failure.

Coming up: the military, climate/science, immigration

"The 480," Eugene Burdick, And Philosopher-Kings

Cover art for "The 480" audiobook

As many of my social media followers are, by now, tired of hearing, I recently completed the narration of a 14-hour audiobook, "The 480," which, in part, is the subject of this column. Most of the books I’ve narrated over the past six years (I’m still a novice in the audiobook industry) were projects taken on in the normal course of seeking a bit of income and, to fully disclose, because I like the whole narration process. However, in this case, I did not seek out this book, nor was it assigned to me by my publishers. No, this book reached out of the past—guided by the hands of someone I have never met—and reminded me in the starkest and darkest of terms that the past is, indeed, prologue. 

The distant mist of memory to which I refer was a time of discordant stirrings of a new form of presidential politics—electioneering by digital analysis and the impasto-like application of pigments of data on a broad national canvas designed to fool the voting public into embracing the “image” of a candidate as painted with the brushes and palette knives of political operatives. The resulting work was a masterful trompe l'oeil that helped John F. Kennedy eke out a thin win over Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential election. We would not see the like of such eye-foolery for another half-century, but, make no mistake, the painters of such deceptive works of dark art never left their studios.

On March 21, 2018, E.J. Dionne, Jr., The Washington Post columnist and professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University, wrote a column titled, “Yes, we should be outraged about Facebook.” Dionne’s opinion was prompted by the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica story that had many of us wondering just how social media’s ability to gather and manipulate personal information—without our knowledge—was shaping political discussions and influencing national campaigns.

The opening paragraphs of Dionne’s column made reference to a book I’d read as a teenager more than fifty years earlier. It was a novel I remembered for its audacious exposure of a new tool: the IBM mainframe computer and its data punch-cards. The IBM machines were being used by political campaign operatives of the early 1960s to analyze voter demographics and apply that analysis to shape a given candidate’s image to suit specific categories of voters. That book was “The 480,” by novelist Eugene Burdick, co-author of “The Ugly American” and “Fail Safe.” In response to Dionne’s column, I launched myself on a year-long journey to bring “The 480” into the 21st century and the world of audiobooks.

My effort had three distinct motivations: The first was to honor the work of a writer who saw far beyond his time and who found it necessary to send a cautionary warning to a distant and troubled America; the second reason was to remind today’s generation of hard-line voters and fence-sitters that nothing in politics is ever as it seems and that vigilance and common sense must be exercised daily; and the third reason behind my work was to bring Mr. Burdick’s paper-bound work into the 21st century world of audiobooks. So, how did I get there?

Here are E.J. Dionne’s opening paragraphs which I read a year ago this month:

“In 1964, the novelist Eugene Burdick published “The 480.” The best- selling book described, as Burdick wrote in his preface, “people who work with slide rules and calculating machines and computers which can retain an almost infinite number of bits of information as well as sort, categorize and reproduce this information at the press of a button.”

The title refers to 480 categories of voters, defined by demographic characteristics, created by the Simulmatics Corp., a real company, as a way of targeting appeals to small subgroups. The novel’s drama centers on data manipulation’s role in lifting a dark-horse candidate toward the Republican presidential nomination.

We’re told of five different campaign mailings directed “to five carefully selected groups that shared only one quality: they were likely to turn out to vote and they had a special grievance.” I suppose that’s two qualities, but you get Burdick’s point. And, yes, the author’s engaging tale was based on reality: John F. ­Kennedy used Simulmatics in his 1960 presidential campaign.

‘The 480’ speaks to how long Americans have worried about the manipulation of our political decisions by tech magicians with access to mounds of information.

The Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal takes our paranoia to a whole new level. But paranoia, implying psychologically unhealthy delusions, is the wrong word. There is nothing disordered about the outrage created by the invasion of an estimated 50 million Facebook accounts for the ultimate benefit of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

The upshot is that private companies that traffic in the enormous amounts of personal data we voluntarily give them are not living up to their obligations both to each of us as individuals and to the common good.”

As I read Dionne’s column, Burdick’s sentence, “The 480” speaks to how long Americans have worried about the manipulation of our political decisions by tech magicians with access to mounds of information,” stood out in its prophetical starkness, and I knew with an absolute certainty that this was a book necessary to any 21st century conversation about the ever-growing weave of threads of intrusions, manipulations, false narratives, and outright lies-masked-as-truths running through the fabric of American life. It was with that sentence ringing in my ears that I set out on a quest to find the copyright holder of “The 480” and win permission to bring Eugene Burdick’s written word to life as an audiobook.

Over the nine months following E. J. Dionne’s March, 2018 column, I tracked down and had long discussions with the rights holder. Mr. Burdick died in 1965, shortly after “The 480” was published, and for the next fifty-three years, the novel faded into the increasingly noisy background of dynamic political reality and aging fictional political literature. When I eventually I contacted the rights holder, they were, at first, uncertain about the whole audiobook notion, about me as a stranger approaching them from out of the blue, and about my reasons for wanting to do the audiobook. I completely understood their hesitation; I’d already run across the delicate subject of sharing something personal with the world when I published, in 2015, my grandfather’s Hollywood diaries, “It’s The Pictures That Got Small,” in which can be found myriad personal foibles, flaws, and unkindnesses. And yet, it was a book that had to be honest, even though it was about family.

As my discussions with “The 480’s” rights holder expanded and warmed, I learned more about Eugene Burdick and his legacy, and the rights holder learned more about my passion to speak truth to power, and how I believed “The 480” still had that potential to re-focus the blurred lines that seem to define, vaguely, today’s political narratives—if there are any valid narratives or boundaries left at all.

In order to build confidence with the rights holder, I narrated the book’s preface and first chapter and sent them along as a sort of peace offering—and as proof that I could, in fact, narrate a book. As I began to record the preface, I wondered how my voice would sound to the ears of someone who had actually heard Mr. Burdick speak, and who had lived through the years of “The 480’s” creation. Was I a voice from the grave? Suddenly an unwelcome intruder, impostor, memory thief? There are members of my family whose voices have been stilled for decades; would I want to hear their words again, but in very different tones, pitches, pauses, breaths, emphases, passions? I’ve narrated only 30 or so books so far, some from well-known authors who died almost 100 years ago, and some who are quite alive, and never did I wonder about my voice substituting for theirs. And yet, with “The 480,” I found myself with the odd feeling that Eugene Burdick was sitting here in the Dungeon with me, watching me, listening to me, encouraging me to keep on with the story.

At the beginning of this year, I received the enthusiastic go-ahead from the rights holder to begin narrating “The 480,” and for nearly two months I bent virtually all my emotions and skills toward completing Mr. Burdick’s novel as an audiobook. I reached out to voice coaches to help me get certain accents—from India and Pakistan to the Philippines—just right, and to help me with pacing and breathing and pausing in all the right places. I had the joy of creating character voices, using as models some people I had known in my political life, and others who just came from somewhere within me. I hired a fine proofer (who is also a wonderful narrator)—Jenny Hoops--and a suburb editor/engineer—Bob Evoniuk—to keep tabs on my flubs and technical processes. And I had the support of Spoken Realms, my go-to publisher.

As the audio version of “The 480” began to take shape, the political discourse in the country continued to unravel—the threads of disunity, disaffection, and undisguised inter- and intra-party distrust with almost everything related to the nation’s welfare, maintenance, image, defense, and representative foundations frayed at every seam of American life. The deeper I got into the book, the more I experienced what Eugene Burdick was describing in terms of his perspective in 1964. But now, in 2019, his view of a jaundiced, winner-take-all, ends-justifies-the-means political and social scream reached a fevered pitch, and has become far more nuanced in its planning and visibly dangerous in its execution.

As I write this, the 2020 campaign for the presidency is well underway, with more Democrats than I can ever recall vying for their party’s nomination, all eager to unseat a president who is, in my opinion, caked in the mud of corruption and perfectly at home in that coating of immorality, lies, and sneering debasement of all that is good about our country.

The conditions are ripe for a hero of mythic proportions to save us from ourselves, a hero like John Thatch—the protagonist of “The 480.” But no such hero has yet to rise above the waters of disunion, despair, and divisiveness that are slowly drowning us. It won’t be Pete, it won’t be Kamala, it won’t be Bernie, it won’t be Elizabeth, it won’t be any woman or man who is currently reaching for the gold ring…and that most certainly includes Joe. I hope, with all my 50 years of participating in our democracy as a voter, that the right person for the right time will emerge, but it seems less likely with every passing day. And yet, in “The 480” Eugene Burdick invented a character who comes so close to my ideal.

As I voiced him—John Thatch—I gave free rein to my wildest hopes that somewhere in America a real John Thatch exists and will make him or (Joan Thatch?) herself known. Yes, I know, our heroes are all gone now, at least heroes as I define them. I’m looking for a philosopher-leader, born with a sense of justice, raised on dreams of equality, imbued with the ability to lead with fairness, capable of articulating noble and achievable goals, internally-driven to inspire a nation with grasp-exceeding visions. I am not wishing for a flawless human being; I am wishing for a human being who, flawed as we all are, is not afraid to be vulnerable, and who recognizes and embraces the fact that we are all in some state of disrepair—which is a human condition not to be mocked but to be understood and accepted. Others, long ago, debated the notion of such philosopher-kings and the city-state, Kallipolis, in which they lived.

This morning, The Washington Post’s Kathleen Parker, as if answering my call for a hero, wrote on the very subject of philosopher-kings, or, as her column was titled, “We need a philosopher president. Does such a candidate exist?”

Parker’s words say it far better than I can:

“In his most famous dialogue, “The Republic,” Plato, via Socrates, explored the idea that a just state would best function under the leadership of a perfectly just philosopher-king.

That is, an intellectually curious person who pursues knowledge; is intelligent, reliable and wise; and embraces the simple life. To test the hypothesis, Socrates is asked by an interlocutor to imagine a competition between a perfectly just man — who would be perceived by an ignorant public as unjust — and a perfectly unjust man, who is ruthless, immoral, gets away with murder, figuratively, but appears to be just.

Though this is more complicated than described here, one unavoidably thinks of President Trump, who, apparently seems “just” to — or at least is approved by — 39 percent of the electorate, yet meets the very definition of “unjust.” Ruthless and immoral, he somehow always escapes accountability.”

Parker continues:

“As we know, Trump doesn’t like to read, seems to abhor knowledge, is unreliable from moment to moment and embraces a gaudevillian, as well as vaudevillian, life. He’s the opposite of the philosopher-king and, given the pendulum theory of presidential succession, we’re now primed and ready for one. But, who?

Does such a person even exist in the land of Twitter and Snapchat? Does our narcissistic culture engender the sort of person we last saw strolling along a wooded path lost in thought? If such a person were to exist, would he or she stand a chance of attracting voters with the kind of message that urges people to think rather than one that cajoles them with sophistry?”

Over the past two months, I’ve met, become, and given voice to that mythical leader, John Thatch, through the wonderful descriptions Eugene Burdick used to create him. Thatch is without a doubt flawed—we see his imperfections as Burdick slowly pulls back the veil as the story progresses. But is Thatch, flaws and all, a model for what we need so desperately today? In 2020? For the future life of our country? I’ll let E.J. Dionne (and Burdick) have the last word on that:

“In his preface to “The 480,” Burdick said he hoped his book would illustrate ‘the political realities of today and the political hazards of tomorrow.’ Well, tomorrow is here, and its hazards outstrip even Burdick’s prophetic imagination.”

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