Category Archives: Random Blogging

The Book Of Beckwith

The Snyde Report–an Indiana website promoting the state’s Democratic candidates–has begun including what it calls The Book of Beckwith–quotes from Micah Beckwith–in its daily reports.

As Indiana readers know, Beckwith is one of the four far-Right theocratic candidates on this year’s statewide Republican ticket. He’s the only one who has publicly described himself as a Christian Nationalist, although it is highly probable that Jim Banks and Todd Rokita share that mindset. (Unlike Beckwith, however, they’re sufficiently politically savvy to avoid publicly embracing it.)

Here are some “Beckwithisms” from a recent report on “the book of Beckwith.”

Micah, 1:8 -Pastor Micah Beckwith pushes the racist White Replacement Theory in post.
Pastor Micah Beckwith, Republican candidate for Lt. Governor and self described Christian Nationalist pushed the racist White Replacement Theory in a recent Facebook post.

Micah, 1:7 – Micah Beckwith compares vaccination policies to Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews.
“And that to me is the issue here, because now you’re, it’s what the, it’s what the Nazis did to the Jews. They legitimized some citizens to be legal citizens and, they, they delegitimize, they made delegitimize citizens out of the Jews.”

Micah 1:6 – Pastor Micah Beckwith shares post advocating that brown people crossing the border should be shot
Pastor Micah Beckwith, the MAGA Republican Lt. Governor candidate shared a post on Facebook advocating brown people crossing the border should be shot. No comment from Pastor Beckwith’s running mate, Mike Braun.

Micah, 1:5 – Micah Beckwith states people should not vote for a politician who is not pro-life
“I always tell people. Don’t vote for a politician if they’re not first pro-life because the Declaration of Independence says there are three unalienable rights that our creator has given us and has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And if he will not protect, your life, he will not protect your liberty and he will not protect your pursuit of happiness.”

Micah, 1:4 – Micah Beckwith states The Indy Star, members of the left and Methodist and Lutheran ministers want to cut off the private parts of children “they were praising that these pastors for saying you’re doing the right thing by, by allowing people to be able to cut off the private parts of children and, and so I think again the reason that The Indy Star sees me as a threat and they should because they want to do an act, they want to act things that are just plain wicked.”

Micah, 1:3 – Micah Beckwith states The Indy Star wants to mutilate children, put pornographic material in the hands of children and murder babies. “They want to murder babies. I mean, like, so I’m against that. So, they probably are a little scared.”

Beckwith is running for Lieutenant Governor, a post dealing with tourism and agriculture, not “biblical fidelity,” but like his fellow culture warriors, he displays little to no interest in those boring governmental tasks. And while Braun constantly minimizes the importance of his running-mate’s theocratic extremism, Braun–as Star columnist Briggs recently pointed out–is 70, an age where life insurance “gets more expensive for a reason.” 

If Beckwith was truly an aberration, that would be one thing–but he isn’t. Thanks to Indiana’s extreme gerrymandering, which has moved the “real” election in many districts to the primaries (where GOP challenges come from the Right), Republican candidates for legislative office have become more and more extreme. I’ve written about the contest in District 24, where the Republican running for the Statehouse is a Beckwith clone, but that isn’t the only Indiana contest featuring a looney-tunes Republican more focused on culture war than on the mundane tasks of governing.

I would ordinarily hesitate before calling a political candidate a “looney-tune,” but a look at the “Book of Beckwith” really requires that label. Does any sane American really believe that the “Star, members of the Left and Methodist and Lutheran ministers” want to “cut off the private parts of children”? That we should indiscriminately “shoot Brown people at the border”? That vaccinations are a Nazi plot? Etc.

Granted, the Presidential election is by far the most important choice voters will face this year, closely followed by contests for the House and Senate. But we ignore state down-ballot races at our peril. Thanks to a state legislature in thrall to a super-majority of Rightwing extremists, Indiana is rapidly becoming a “health desert,” where medical care–especially but not exclusively for women–is increasingly difficult to access, where public education is being purposefully starved in favor of religious schools, and gun ownership with no pesky “strings” attached is proliferating.

Hoosiers need to Vote Blue all the way down the ballot.

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Do Endorsements Matter?

Harris pretty much destroyed Trump in the debate, but as I keep reminding myself, this year, we can’t take anything for granted.

Nothing about this campaign is normal.

For example, seasoned political folks tell us that endorsements rarely make a difference, but then they’re focusing on the traditional endorsements issued by newspapers and political allies. It will be interesting to see whether the steady roll-out of very untraditional endorsements from sources that haven’t previously issued them will matter, and if so, how much.

According to CNBC, declarations for the Harris/Walz ticket include a recent letter from eighty-eight business leaders.

Eighty-eight corporate leaders signed a new letter Friday endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president.
Signers include former 21st Century Fox CEO James Murdoch, Snap Chairman Michael Lynton, Yelp boss Jeremy Stoppelman and Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen.

If the Democratic nominee wins the White House, they contend, “the business community can be confident that it will have a president who wants American industries to thrive.”

In the past, most business leaders have avoided taking political positions, based upon the common-sense belief that public support for one party would likely piss off customers belonging to the other party and would thus be bad for business. It is likely that the CEOs who signed this letter did so because of their conviction that a Trump victory would destabilize America and the economy in ways that would be far worse for business than some temporary partisan pique.

I think it’s unlikely that an endorsement from corporate leaders will matter to–or even be seen by– the average voter. But another group of endorsers is a lot more high-profile and far more unusual. They are the very visible Republicans who have publicly joined with “Never Trump” Republicans like those at the Bulwark and the Lincoln Project to support Kamala Harris.

A few days ago, I posted a copy of the letter signed by over 300 members of past Republican administrations, urging other members of the GOP to support Harris. Since then, both Liz Cheney and her father, former Vice-President Dick Cheney, have publicly come out in support of Harris, each of them confirming a personal intent to vote for her. (Interestingly, former Vice-President Mike Pence, who served with Trump, has said only that he will not vote for his former boss. Maybe he’ll write in “Mother”?)

Will those unprecedented endorsements–which in any other campaign would be politically earth-shaking–matter?

An article from ABC, announcing them, asked that question.

Big-name Republican endorsers of Vice President Kamala Harris are testing just how many disgruntled GOP voters are up for grabs in her race against a polarizing former President Donald Trump.

Former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, a member of pre-Trump GOP royalty, became the latest and most prominent Republican to back Harris Wednesday. Harris also has endorsements from former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., and hundreds of local Republican officials to try to puncture what her campaign views as Trump’s soft underbelly with Republican voters who are uncomfortable with the former president’s brash and unorthodox brand of politics.

The campaign’s consistent outreach is just one part of Harris’ overall path to Election Day, but now, with no bigger names left on the table for support, the vice president will likely find out if there’s more support to be had from dissatisfied Republicans — or if she’s already maxed out.

My own analysis borrows a couple of terms from economics: micro and macro.

My “micro” level analysis is necessarily limited– circumscribed by the people I personally know. Most of the Republicans I worked with back when I was a Republican are appalled by what the party has become. Those I know and still interact with loathe Trump, and are forthright in saying they intend to vote for Harris. Several have completely abandoned the GOP. Rather obviously, the new endorsements won’t affect them.

More significantly, they aren’t representative of the millions of people who voted for Trump in 2020.

That means that the “macro” question is the all-important one: how many Americans are MAGA partisans who will go to the polls and enthusiastically vote for a neo-fascist movement headed by a mentally-ill (and increasingly senile) would-be autocrat? How large is the cult that comprises his base–and (given the Electoral College) where do they live?

There are two aspects to that “macro” question: 1) how many people have actually “drunk the Kool-Aid” versus the rest of us? and (actually more consequential)–2) how many members of each of these incommensurate groups will show up to vote?

All of this ignores the weirdest question of all: how many previously politically-unengaged “Swifties” will vote thanks to Taylor Swift’s endorsement?

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What Keeps Me Up Nights

I sure hope I make it to November–not because I’m old (although I am), but because I spend my days obsessively following politics–both national and local– and vacillating between hope and despair. Indiana is scary enough, but as I noted yesterday, the national election will pose an existential challenge: America will either go forward or far, far back.

The source of my angst about the Presidential election was recently summarized in one of Robert Hubbell’s daily Substack newsletters. As he wrote:

The election will be decided by hundreds of millions of Americans taking democracy seriously by voting in tens of thousands of elections at a moment in history when one party wants to deny women full citizenship and personhood, deny Black Americans the right to vote, deny LGBTQ Americans their dignity and equality, deny children safe schools, deny all Americans a future free of man-made climate catastrophes, deny workers of a living wage, and deny the peaceful transfer of power every four years.

When I look at the threat posed by that party–once (in a very different world) my own party–I fear for the futures of my grandchildren and the others of their generation. I get bitter when I think about a reversal of the social progress made by activists of my own and previous generations who worked hard to bring the American “body politic” closer to our founding aspirations of liberty and equality. 

But most of all, I mourn the death of my long-held belief that the great majority of my fellow Americans are sensible, good-hearted and fair-minded. Until very recently–actually, 2016–although I knew that there were angry, disturbed and hate-filled people “out there”–I estimated their percentage of the population at something between 10%-15%. I have been rudely disabused of that estimate, given the grim recognition that millions of my fellow-citizens continue to support a man who is defiantly ignorant, hateful and very obviously deeply mentally-ill–presumably, because he gives them permission to revel in and voice their own bigotries and grievances.

And then there’s the Electoral College, which scholars estimate gives Republicans a 3% advantage….

But then I get hopeful. (I have emotional whiplash..)

The Harris/Walz ticket is so normal, and the enthusiasm they’ve generated is so encouraging. Not only do the Democrats have better candidates, former Republicans–including very conservative ones like Liz Cheney– are coming out of the woodwork daily to endorse them. They’ve raised much more money, which–in addition to powering their campaign–is another sign of support and enthusiasm. They have a widespread “ground game” with far more field offices than the Republicans. New registrations are up, especially among groups that tilt Democratic, calling the “likely voter” screens employed by pollsters into question. 

In the wake of 2016, there has also been an explosion of grass-roots organizing. According to a 2019 report from the American Community Project, those post-2016 grassroots groups — sometimes labeled “Resistance” groups — have become an electoral force to be reckoned with.

Reporters and academics have established certain baseline facts: The new groups are disproportionately composed of middle-aged to retirement-age college-educated women.

They are especially prominent in America’s “suburbs.”

Their hands-on campaigning formed part of the “Blue Wave” that flipped suburban seats to the Democrats in November 2018.

Since 2019, those groups have continued to grow and multiply, in significant part thanks to Dobbs, the Supreme Court’s reversal of a constitutional right to reproductive liberty which continues to motivate voters, especially but not exclusively women voters. 

I can’t shake my belief that if Americans of good will and good sense turn out to vote, Democrats will not only win, but win big, that November could really be a “Blue Wave” election, a turning point that could revive my previous faith in the American public. 

MAGA is, after all, a reaction to the broad cultural changes in this country–changes that include widespread acceptance of the growing equality of women, LGBTQ+ Americans and people of color. Large numbers of families now include same-sex couples and/or religious and racial intermarriages. Fewer Americans report memberships in fundamentalist Churches. Workplaces are increasingly diverse, and Americans from a variety of backgrounds now work together and get to know each other. All of those cultural changes have lessened fears of the “Other” that were once more widespread.

I remained convinced that MAGA Republicanism is a panicked reaction to those cultural changes by people who feel threatened by them. Social change is destabilizing, especially for people who lack the personal or communal resources to adapt–but surely, that doesn’t describe a majority of Americans.

In November, we’ll see which of these contending analyses is correct, and we’ll know what kind of world my grandchildren will inhabit.

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Ceding My Space

This is Labor Day weekend. There are just over two months to election day, so it seems important to share the recent opinion of patriotic Americans who have served the United States in the federal government.

The 230+ former officials who signed this letter all served in Republican administrations. They recently issued it to explain their unequivocal endorsement of the Democratic ticket–to explain why they will vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. I am reprinting their letter in its entirety–I don’t want to paraphrase, select portions, or otherwise alter its language.

The signatories are individuals who understand government–and the existential choice presented by this election.

I’ll return to my own commentary tomorrow. For today, here’s the letter, and a reminder that there are still some Republicans who put country over party.

_____________________

Bush, McCain, and Romney Alumni for Harris Statement

Four years ago, President George W. Bush, the late Sen. John McCain, and then-Gov. Mitt Romney alumni came together to warn fellow Republicans that re-electing President Trump would be a disaster for our nation. In those declarations we stated the plain truth, each predicting that another four years of a Trump presidency would irreparably damage our beloved democracy. We made those announcements months before lies about a stolen election became everyday talking points and six months before Trump incited an insurrection, cheering on a mob of sore losers and sycophants as they tried to use force to overturn the will of the American public.

We reunite today, joined by new George H.W. Bush alumni, to reinforce our 2020 statements and, for the first time, jointly declare that we’re voting for Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz this November. Of course, we have plenty of honest, ideological disagreements with Vice President Harris and Gov. Walz. That’s to be expected. The alternative, however, is simply untenable. At home, another four years of Donald Trump’s chaotic leadership, this time focused on advancing the dangerous goals of Project 2025, will hurt real, everyday people and weaken our sacred institutions. Abroad, democratic movements will be irreparably jeopardized as Trump and his acolyte JD Vance kowtow to dictators like Vladimir Putin while turning their backs on our allies. We can’t let that happen. We know now, thanks to exit polling and voter data, that it was moderate Republicans and conservative independents in key swing states that ultimately delivered the presidency to Joe Biden—honest, hardworking Americans in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, and beyond that put country far before party. We’re heartfully calling on these friends, colleagues, neighbors, and family members to take a brave stand once more, to vote for leaders that will strive for consensus, not chaos; that will work to unite, not divide; that will make our country and our children proud.

Those leaders are Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz.

_________________________

You can access the signatures–all eighteen pages of them–here.

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What The #*#* Is Wrong With The Media?

I generally resist characterizations of “the media.” There are literally thousands of Internet sites maintained by newspapers and magazines, specialized sources of information on everything from foreign affairs to medical conditions–in short, a massive number of sites offering “news” about pretty much everything, and doing so from a wide spectrum of perspectives.

That said, it is true that what we sometimes call “legacy media” (or, in Sarah Palen-speak, the “lamestream media”) exert a disproportionate influence over popular opinion. When it comes to political coverage, accusations of inadequacy or downright bias have been mounting–with good cause. (If you want to read a scathing–albeit accurate–description of  political coverage, click this link.)

The question, of course, is why? (Of course, that question isn’t limited to the media’s reluctance to call a lunatic a lunatic–it also extends to the question why millions of Americans actually intend to vote for a mentally-ill ignoramus, but today’s post is about the media.)

Talking Points Memo is one of the most reliable sources of political news, and a column by its editor/publisher Josh Marshall recently considered the issue. Responding to a reader who noted the almost-exclusive media focus on the horse-race rather than on policy–and the GOP’s utter lack of policy under Trump– Marshall wrote

At an important level, Harris shouldn’t want to and can’t expect to be judged by the bar set by Donald Trump, a degenerate scamp on his best days and a virulently racist wannabe dictator on his worst. But the comical disconnect between the two standards is one elite political reporters as a whole need to have some reckoning with. And beyond that, NR’s and many others’ responses to these complaints show the anger that has built up over the years over the almost total click-the-snooze-button, we-don’t-have-time attitude of most campaign reporters when it comes to discussions of policy. Sure, everyone hates the press and just finds their own reasons to do it. Sometimes the press as a group and concept does indeed become the punching bag for all of people’s gripes and grievances about how campaigns and politics generally play out. But there’s a very legitimate gripe here. And it’s the source of the intensity of a lot of the pushback on this front.

The New York Times has come in for significant criticism for what–to a rational reader–appears to be a reluctance to apply the same standards to Trump that it applies to his opponent. Before Biden withdrew, the paper focused relentlessly on every indicator of Biden’s age, while generally ignoring evidence of Trump’s (he’s only three years younger) and his manifest mental infirmities. There was particular anger when the Times fielded a poll asking responders whether Biden was too old to be President. As one angry reader wrote in his “cancel my subscription” missive: “did you ask your random voters whether Trump is too insane, doddering, racist, sexist, criminal, traitorous, hateful to be effective as President? This is not a poll. It is your agenda.”

There are numerous other examples, and I return to the question I posed earlier: why??

Some observers have speculated that the media–always a target of Trump’s enmity–is simply frightened that Trump will exact revenge if elected. Others attribute the seeming bias to the profit motive: to the extent newspapers can even the electoral odds, they sell more papers. I have difficulty believing either of these motives–the Times and Post have been courageous truth-tellers in the past. But the skewed and inadequate reporting is too obvious to ignore.

Before the 2024 campaigning began, PBS Public Editor considered a unique aspect of Trump coverage:

Never in the half-century I’ve been paying attention have the media faced a major candidate who inspired the loathing Trump provokes. I haven’t seen polls that address this—and the media have little incentive to commission them—but I can say with confidence that Trump is widely despised by the working press. For the most part, aside from an ideologically committed sliver, journalists find him dishonest, corrupt, depraved, cruel, and very likely sociopathic, and fear his re-election would be a historic calamity that could do lasting harm to core democratic institutions. 

Now, it’s reasonable to ask whether if you believe that, you can do your job as a journalist.

Is the political press simply over-compensating? Who knows?

If Faux News has taught us anything, it’s that “fair and balanced” is very different from “accurate.” 

All that said, I think we may be detecting a shift in the wake of a “Democrats in Array” Convention showcasing excellent speakers and enthusiastic delegates.

Let me know if you see it too…..

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