DEI

 

IDK I really like women who laugh. Talking to UNITE HERE at Culinary Union Hall, Las Vegas, photo by Ellen Schmidt/Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Mrs. Vance isn't laughing:

Here's somebody who went to Yale from freshman through J.D. and picked up an M.Phil. in modern history from Clare College, Cambridge, along the way, and has clerked for Judge Kavanagh before he was elevated to the Supreme Court and Justice Roberts after he was, and has been a really high-powered lawyer with a bicoastal practice (Los Angeles and Washington) at the firm of Munger, Tolles & Olson, described as a "top contender in the cool, woke category" of law firm in 2019, when

Munger has elected eight new partners, and 60 percent of them are women or lawyers of color. What’s more, three of the new partners...took parental leave during the year they were up for partnership—and one of them is a male. The audacity!

(She quit the firm last week after her husband was nominated to be the Republican candidate for vice president in the November election, not because it was too woke there, but maybe to get more in line with her husband's well-known policy positions,

It turns out that normal Americans care more about their families than their jobs, and want a family policy that doesn't shunt their kids into crap daycare so they can enjoy more "freedom" in the paid labor force.

— JD Vance (@JDVance) April 29, 2021

so she could spend more time with her kids in the family's third home, in Ohio, the state for which the husband has been serving as freshman senator since January 2023. Of course their kids' daycare isn't crap, but the finest money can buy.)

I don't know that you'd want to call her a diversity hire herself, though she is a woman of color (Dravidian by "race", the child of Telugu speakers from Andhra Pradesh). I'll bet she has had a terrific work ethic and fabulous grades throughout her education and career, and I'm told her admired writers include Zadie Smith and Vladimir Nabokov. I have no doubt she's fully qualified for every school and every company that's taken her on.

Nevertheless, when she's thinking about civics, as in the tweet above, it's pretty much at a mediocre seventh-grade level. I mean it's embarrassing. 

I know it's common for presidential candidates to claim their VP choice is just the best possible person for the job, as if there was a qualifying exam and they just picked the one with the highest score, but are you seriously believing them? Dan Quayle? Sarah Palin? 

That isn't how it's done. Picking a vice president is a complex job, weighing a number of different factors. First and foremost, of course, should be whether the person is qualified, in intellect and temperament, to step into the presidency in the event of a disaster, as Quayle and Palin really weren't, and Democratic candidates generally are, like Mondale or Gore (though there was the Eagleton blunder, really an injustice, willingness to seek help for mental illness should be taken as a good sign, not a bad one; and John Edwards turned out to be an awful blunder, though the guy did give great speeches). Then, it's nice if they bring some political benefit to the ticket, typically geographical: John Kennedy, the Massachusetts Catholic, went for Texan Lyndon Johnson to help quiet the nation's Know Nothing fears (though Johnson also brought extraordinary influence over Congress, which greatly helped him, after Kennedy's killing, to push through the JFK agenda). Johnson in turn chose the Minnesota hyperliberal Hubert Humphrey, as Carter would later choose Mondale.

Then there are ideological contributions: Reagan picked G.H.W. Bush to appease the people who feared his ideas on economics were too crazy ("voodoo economics", as Bush had called it during the campaign), Obama picked stalwart old Joe Biden in part for similar reasons, reassuring the public that the Black man wouldn't be too radical (ironically, Biden as president was able to bring much more radical ideas forward than Obama had been). Trump is too stupid to be able to think this way, but Paul Manafort (not just a grotesque criminal but also a skilled Republican operative, which is not a contradiction) did him a solid in 2016 by literally forcing him to pick the pious Indianan Mike Pence, bringing across the white Evangelical community that has become the most loyal component of the Trump coalition, with its bizarre but sincere belief that Trump is what Jesus wants—Trump really wanted an outer-borough insult comic like himself, New Jersey's Chris Christie, I believe because he thought standing next to Christie made him look slimmer. 

Freed from the restraint of people who know what they're doing, this year he's made a historically bad choice, chameleon JD Vance, performing as Trump's Mini-Me (a different approach to accessorizing Trump, perhaps), and bringing in not a single vote over and above the votes Trump was already guaranteed to get, and a résumé considerably thinner than Sarah Palin's was (we like to call her a "half-term governor", but that was her fourth election, after one for Wasilla city council and two for Wasilla mayor, while Vance is as of yet a one-third term senator who's only ever gotten elected, and barely, in a thoroughly red state against that idiot Tim Ryan, once), and apparently a colossally bad public speaker (unlike Kamala Harris, whose much-maligned laughter is generally associated with something that's funny, his seems to be a response to losing his train of thought as completely as Biden did that one time during the "debate", and he did it a lot more than once). But he's descended from Kentucky "hillbillies", and that's what he was chosen for. That's the opposite of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. But it certainly is what it looks like when you go with race instead of qualifications.

Starting with Bill Clinton, and it's something we ought to give him serious credit for, even Carter didn't really think of it, presidential candidates have typically sought vice presidents who could find something to do with their time while they waited for the president to die. His choice of Al Gore, another wonky white guy from the non-deep South, was wildly unconventional, but the two complemented each other, with their different temperaments and subjects and their similar culture, and formed a real partnership, and Gore's signature initiative, "Reinventing Government", really did something [though as commenter Aardvark Cheeselog suggested after this was posted, the hollowing out of the civil service and massive privatization that ended the "era of big government" was not a great thing]. W. Bush's equally out-of-the-box naming of a fellow Texas oilman pretending he was from Wyoming, Dick Cheney, to compensate for his own lack of education and experience and interest in the job, didn't work out so well, of course (I always say Bush really wasn't such a terrible person, but in so far over his head it took him six years to realize how badly he was doing, when he got his father's lieutenants in to rescue him from Cheney and Rumsfeld, and by then it was too late to save the presidency, as the mortgage-backed securities crisis loomed), but it reinforced the pattern.

Obama's selection of Biden in 2008 seemed like an attempt at a conventional response to an extraordinary situation ("here's an old white guy to calm you down, we won't do anything that Black"), but it was also meant to compensate for real gaps in Obama's preparation, in foreign policy and national security questions, not that those were the only ones where Biden played a role, and it was extraordinary. Biden deserves credit for it too, for his willingness to look like the administration's comic relief; he was an essential element in Obama's thinking, as a matter of fact, but he wasn't that interested in glory—he was interested in making the policy work.

And Biden's selection of Kamala Harris is on that model: he certainly chose her for her political reach into a world no US presidential candidate had ever tried to reach before—not only women, as Mondale had tried to do in 1984 with the choice of Geraldine Ferraro, but Black women, the element of the party to which he owed his own elevation after the South Carolina primary in 2020; but also for a personal reason, as we know, because his son Beau, as Delaware attorney general, had really partnered with Kamala Harris, as California attorney general, to get stuff done, during the foreclosure crisis of 2011-12:

In her memoir, Harris called him an “incredible friend and colleague” who became a close collaborator. “There were periods, when I was taking heat, that Beau and I talked every day, sometimes multiple times a day,” she wrote. “We had each other’s backs.”

Biden chose Harris for an extraordinary reason: not just for the obvious reasons that had prevailed, I don't know, since 1832, when Andrew Jackson picked New Yorker Martin van Buren; because he knew her as a family connection, with his beloved dead son. If a "DEI hire" is a bad thing, that's not what this was.

Which is more than can be said for the vice presidential candidacy of "JD" Vance, now acknowledged in the Trump camp (writes Tim Alberta) to be a dumb, arrogant political mistake

born...of cockiness, meant to run up margins with the base in a blowout rather than persuade swing voters in a nail-biter

(the "base" being that white working class that Vance, the rich Peter Thiel protégé, supposedly represents), which Trump is now regretting, while he unexpectedly faces Harris, who I'm sure he sincerely despised as a "DEI hire", as a skilled, smart, vigorous opponent. LOL.

Joe Did What? Trafalgar Edition

The Battle of Trafalgar, 21 October 1805 by Clarkson Frederick Stanfield, via Wikipedia.

 Well, I guess this certainly does change everything, and that's refreshing. 

I'm going to stay angry for a long time at The Times and Politico and other big media and the "liberal" tech billionaires for the dishonest backdoor trick they pulled, when they couldn't succeed in turning the public against Biden and shifted instead to convincing us that we had turned against Biden by ourselves, or rather that our neighbors had, through the bogus "age issue", warning us not that Biden was a bad president, but that he'd lose because other people thought he was too old, and our punishment for supporting Biden would be another Trump term (on the basis of a polling model that has consistently failed by underestimating the Democratic vote for six years now). They recognized our deep fear of the consequences of another Trump term and exploited it, in a way that actually made Trump's reelection more likely, using the debate disaster as evidence of a permanent degeneration (which it obviously wasn't—Biden had never showed up in that condition before and never has since). It was irresponsible and disgusting.

I'm not too angry with the congressional party leaders, or the "centrist" representatives in their precarious suburban seats, or even the bedwetter commentariat. The fear is real, and it's justified. What could be lost in another four years of Trumpery is almost incalculable; I'm thinking especially of the backsliding in the elimination of fossil fuels, but the "deconstruction of the administrative state" as prefigured in the Project 2025 document turns the entire civil service into an easily corrupted tool for tearing down regulations, and reduces the Justice Department into the president's personal police agency. It really is the end of the republic, alongside plans for a federal ban on abortion, vigilante takeovers of school libraries, the insane powers for evil conceded to the presidency by the Supreme Court even as it strips the office of its power to do good. The thing is, fear is a lousy counselor, and their Fantasy Politics League plan to get rid of Biden by obliterating the primary results with some kind of pantomime competition, before or during the Democratic convention, as somebody leaked the plan to the abominable Mark Halperin (now working for Newsmax), was a terrible, senseless plan that would have flung us into even worse uncertainty than we already had. Don't panic.

If You're a Star They Let You Do It

 

Poster for The Frogs, Trinity College Dramatic Society, Toronto, 1902, via Wikipedia.

My theory of what makes Biden the best candidate to beat Trump is pretty simple, and ought to be cynical enough for anybody: it's that he's the only possible candidate at the same level of celebrity as Trump, with the same degree of star quality and a similar ability to work an audience, his reducibility to a three-stroke line drawing or a meme image (as the smiler in the aviators), or a comic book hero (Sunny Joe as the secret identity of Dark Brandon). Elections are reality shows now, and while that's deplorable in many ways it's where we are at the moment, and the only way out is through.

Kamala Harris comes closest to Biden in reality-show capacity, as she has become in the last months, with the fiery oratory and that warm relaxed laugh, and I'm very glad she's there, but she hasn't been exposed enough, and there are the other issues to consider (is she entirely ready for the racism and misogyny she'd have to cope with at the top of the ticket? Is it even fair to her?). The nice governors seem nice, if you're enough of a news junkie to know, but they don't have any established character as performers; we haven't seen them campaign, and still less have the people who count, the members of the electorate. And there's so little time to do it in! (A season of American Idol takes about eight months to put together, from auditions to finals.) And so little evidence that any of those supposed candidates are even willing to jump in—people, that's not because Newsom or Whitmer or Pritzker is too shy, or afraid of looking disloyal, they're politicians; it's because they've calculated they'd be most likely to lose, they're young enough to save themselves for a more auspicious year, and I think they're almost certainly right.

If Biden were really seriously diminished in capacity to the point where he couldn't do the job, it would be different; it would be his duty to resign (and President Harris, I would add, would be a much more compelling candidate than Vice President Harris), but everybody knows that's not the case—that's why there've been no calls for him to resign. All the more since his meeting with the press after the NATO conference on Thursday, which took a remarkable turn; it seemed to be going the way you'd expect, a debate between Biden and a Greek-comedy chorus—

FROGS

Do you really believe you're up to the job? You think you can convince us?
Brekekekéx-koáx-koáx! Brekekekéx-koáx-koáx!

BIDEN

Look, I'm doing the job right now! I'm not being facetious!

—when rescue appeared from an unexpected deus ex machina, the New York Times Washington bureau chief, David E. Sanger, who came up with an idea I'd had myself

My fantasy for tomorrow's presser Biden: OK why don't you test me? Ask me a substantive question and see if I'm capable of answering. Press corps: Biden: OK, person, man, woman, TV, camera, that good?

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) Jul 10, 2024 at 1:22 PM

and asked Biden a question about the policy environment of the NATO summit, as a way (as he later explained it to CNN) of testing his cognitive capacity:  

The Rules of the Game

 

So French voters did that thing they do periodically, usually in a presidential election, and rejected fascism decisively in the second round of the snap legislative election. Somewhat grudgingly—they don't want the candidates they voted for to think they're impressed, but they know their duty.

As did the parties, which showed commendable discipline in carrying out the program of dropping out candidates to turn every race into the two-person race in which they had the best chance of defeating the Rassemblement Nationale. But it was the massive turnout that completed the job and defeated not just the fascists but the pollsters as well, who kept predicting a majority for the Rassemblement well into yesterday afternoon,  even as they noticed an unexpectedly large number of voters.

I couldn't help thinking I was seeing a repetition of a pattern we've been seeing a lot of lately, of voters breaking the poll predictions when they're voting to say there's a degree of authoritarianism they can't tolerate, in Brazil and in Poland, Spain and Iran, even when it's not enough to really change anything, as in the losses endured by authoritarian rulers of India and Turkey, and Hungary (in June's EU election), and of course in the United States of America in elections going back to 2018 reacting against the chaos of Trumpery, the terror of the incompetent COVID response and the racist violence of police forces, the overturning of Roe and rush to outlaw abortion.

I mean, it's not just heartening, but it's also interesting that the polls keep erring in that direction, with authoritarians underperforming. It doesn't happen when authoritarianism isn't a primary issue, like in Germany in June (where the appeal of the fascistoid Alternativ für Deutschland is still only in the former East Germany, while voters in the former West were punishing the sort-of leftist government by voting for the normie conservatives). Though in Britain one survey had Nigel Farage's "Reform Party" winning 18 seats in Thursday's general election (they won four).

The Gaza News Is Biden News

All of a sudden this morning the Gaza ceasefire seemed to be back in the air. I was determined not to let them sucker me again

but right now an awful lot of things really seem to be happening, starting with yesterday morning's Biden-Netanyahu call, which went on for half an hour, according to NPR, and during which, according to the White House readout,

President Biden and the Prime Minister discussed ongoing efforts to finalize a ceasefire deal together with the release of hostages, as outlined by President Biden and endorsed by the UN Security Council, the G7, and countries around the world.

The leaders discussed the recent response received from Hamas. The President welcomed the Prime Minister’s decision to authorize his negotiators to engage with U.S., Qatari, and Egyptian mediators in an effort to close out the deal. 

or going back beyond that to Tuesday's reports in The New York Times and Jerusalem Post that the Israeli military leadership is starting to get seriously fed up with Netanyahu's apparent insistence that they should have to fight two wars simultaneously, against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and demanding that the government start prioritizing getting the hostages back, even if it means accepting Hamas's terms and withdrawing from Gaza entirely, and apparently saying so sort of openly, to The Times:

I happen to have Alexander Hamilton right here with me...

Drawing by David Levine, New York Review of Books, 1964.

 

It's a little amusing that Roberts is citing Breyer there, in Clinton v. Jones, that's the Paula Jones case, where Breyer is arguing, in a unanimous decision (Democrat Stevens wrote the opinion), that Clinton was not immune (from civil lawsuits based on private conduct), in spite of the fact that Clinton was indeed the president at the time and the case was certainly "distracting his time and energy", the thing the Framers are said to have been so particularly tender about, and in spite of the fact that this was only the third time in American history that such a suit had been filed against a sitting president. Clinton had failed to prove, Breyer thought, that the US government needed for Clinton to have the immunity:

As Madison pointed out in The Federalist No. 51, "[t]he great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack." Id., at 321-322 (emphasis added). I agree with the majority's determination that a constitutional defense must await a more specific showing of need; I do not agree with what I believe to be an understatement of the "danger." 

It seems to me that with Trump v. United States the Court has turned this upside down, shifting the burden of proof from the offender to the offended. Henceforth (I once knew a cat called Henceforth, and a pretty good cat too), it will just be assumed that the president shouldn't be asked to answer any questions, even after they've left office, nor should his White House employees, even when they're glorified nursemaids for the cranky old psychopath, like poor Hope Hicks helping him ride his way through the scandal of the Access Hollywood video. She was part of the apparatus enabling Trump's "energetic, vigorous, decisive and speedy execution of the laws" when he was paying his hush money debt to Michael Cohen with $420,000 in checks disguised as legal fees so nobody would know about it, so it looks like her testimony in the New York case should not have been given, and his conviction now seems likely to turn into a mistrial, even though you'd be hard put to name any occasions when he executed any laws at all beyond his photo op bill-signing moments with the presidential Sharpie.

It would be fun to put that on trial, wouldn't it?  "Do you recall faithfully executing any laws in 2017, Mr. Trump? Can you list some of those for the jury?" But of course it's unimaginable.

It's also difficult to imagine a Supreme Court majority now citing Federalist 51, with its focus on checks and balances among the three branches, and Madison wistfully letting on how much he wished he could have had the president and Supreme Court justices directly elected:

Kenobi v. Vader

Image via Lovepop.

I. Senility

Tim Miller of The Bulwark, a month ago:

Biden didn't do that on Thursday, though he did really lose the thread for one awful moment early in, trying to process this torrent of falsehood, delusionality, and incoherence from Trump supposedly explaining the enormous budget deficits of his time in office

Because the tax cuts spurred the greatest economy that we’ve ever seen just prior to COVID, and even after COVID. It was so strong that we were able to get through COVID much better than just about any other country. But we spurred – that tax spurred. Now, when we cut the taxes – as an example, the corporate tax was cut down to 21 percent from 39 percent, plus beyond that – we took in more revenue with much less tax and companies were bringing back trillions of dollars back into our country. The country was going like never before. And we were ready to start paying down debt. We were ready to start using the liquid gold right under our feet, the oil and gas right under our feet. We were going to have something that nobody else has had. We got hit with COVID. We did a lot to fix it. I gave him an unbelievable situation, with all of the therapeutics and all of the things that we came up with. We – we gave him something great. Remember, more people died under his administration, even though we had largely fixed it. More people died under his administration than our administration, and we were right in the middle of it. Something which a lot of people don’t like to talk about, but he had far more people dying in his administration. He did the mandate, which is a disaster. Mandating it. The vaccine went out. He did a mandate on the vaccine, which is the thing that people most objected to about the vaccine. And he did a very poor job, just a very poor job. And I will tell you, not only poor there, but throughout the entire world, we’re no longer respected as a country. They don’t respect our leadership. They don’t respect the United States anymore. We’re like a Third World nation. Between weaponization of his election, trying to go after his political opponent, all of the things he’s done, we’ve become like a Third World nation. And it’s a shame the damage he’s done to our country. And I’d love to ask him, and will, why he allowed millions of people to come in here from prisons, jails and mental institutions to come into our country and destroy our country

When Tapper asked Biden to respond to "this question about the national debt", he managed to remember more or less what the question had been two minutes earlier, and started off fine, too, answering the question as he'd expected to get it, with the right numbers, though he sometimes struggled for them:

Ask Etty Kett

Dear Etty,

I know a bunch of people who would like to be ambassador to Uruguay, and as President of the United States I'm definitely entitled to give one of them the job. But I can't give it to all of them. So I had this brilliant idea that I could auction it off to the highest bidder, like give me a billion dollars and I'll name you ambassador to Uruguay?

Only my lawyers think I might get into trouble for that, and to be honest I've had some bad experiences with stuff like this recently. Like I had this charitable foundation where I used to get people to make me payments so I wouldn't have to pay income taxes on them, because I'm smart that way, and this stupid state attorney general, a colored lady by the way, this is what affirmative action gets you, said I was violating the law on charities and closed the whole foundation down and made me pay a big fine. And then this actress I banged years ago wrote a whole story about having sex with me and could have published it in the middle of my presidential campaign and I had my other lawyer pay her a hundred thirty large to keep it to herself and then when I was paying him back I kind of structured the payments to make them look like normal legal fees and now I'm stuck with a 34-count criminal conviction from yet another colored prosecutor for falsification of business records for which I can't even pardon myself since it's not in a federal court.

So I thought it would be best if I just took the money straight, like a billion-dollar check, and deposit it, not in the superPAC or whatever, but right in my own account. Will that work?

Blessed in Bedminster