What Robert Mueller Leaves for Us: Over to You, Nancy

Robert Mueller did what he needed to do for his country: He discovered it had been compromised.

By whom, he can't exactly say. Ken Starr, in effect, took that right away from him more than twenty years ago, when, in his excessively religiously afflicted zeal, he found what he thought he needed to find: that Bill Clinton had had an affair with a White House intern and acted on that affair inside the Oval Office. Not only that, but he had lured Clinton into lying to a grand jury to try to do what people who cheat on their spouses must ultimately do: lie to someone about it.

This, stemming from what appeared to be a fraudulent land deal that Hillary Clinton was supposed to have engineered--but evidence of which was found to be wanting--and resulting from Starr's maneuvering his zeal through the Supreme Court to get him to open doors into Bill Clinton's checkered personal life, sent a warning to Congress that resonates this morning: that, given all kinds of room, a special counsel can find all kinds of conclusions that result in a witch hunt.

From there, of course, Bill Clinton's lie was thrown back into his face by Republican members of Congress, who impeached him and threw this obviously and pseudo-righteously ginned-up case to the Senate, which acquitted him far short of the two-thirds majority necessary to throw him out of office. But Starr's overreach caused Congress to act to limit any future special counsel's purview of any future investigations of any president suspected of wrongdoings sufficient to warrant potential impeachment hearings.

So Mueller said only what he could say: that

• first, given the limited scope he had been allowed, that his bevy of lawyers couldn't find sufficient evidence of a conspiracy between the 45 campaign and the Russians who had, clearly, penetrated our election process enough to have had influence over it--at least, enough evidence to charge the president, from what we've been able to uncover (though there's sure enough funny business going on to say that the Russians have been monkeying around in our machinery, and everybody should be very worried about that);
• second, that it's possible enough that 45 committed obstruction of justice toward the investigation that his office can't rule it out--which means that there's a decent chance that it might have happened (and has listed ten sound reasons to think so); and
• third, that even if it could conclude it, it's not the job of that office to actually do so. That is up to the Congress, that's the way the system's supposed to work, and he's sure not going to be the one to step over that line--the line being that he can't bring charges against someone if a court isn't supposed to be following up, because that constitutes a bill of attainder, specifically prohibited by the Constitution, as it should be against anyone, like it or not. Failure to restrain ourselves even against this ghastly individual, who knows no restraints, might cause a general, universal breakdown of ethical behavior that would slide us far more deeply into the kind of chaos that would, in fact, help the monster more than bring his behavior into anything close to the curb.

There really isn't a thing in there that's different than what's already been said. That, too, is what Mueller took a minute to say: If the Democrats ask me, I can't say anything beyond what the report has already done--create a passageway for them to look more closely at the obstruction charges, and take it from there. In fact, I won't say anything more, not because I don't have personal feelings about it, but that those would fuel political fires that have already been stoked to white-hot levels. I don't want to become known for that. I'd just as soon you did the investigations from here. Que' sera, sera.

Lots of analysts have already said as much. That Mueller went out of his way to actually stand up in front of everyone and say so, though, means that, though he might not mean to do so, he's giving Congressional Democrats his blessing, and he doesn't want anyone to be misled by that gesture.

The person now on the hot seat is Nancy Pelosi, whose rhetoric--clarifying her understanding of impeachable behavior on the one hand, yet advising against its implementation on the other--might now be nudged toward beginning at least an impeachment inquiry by far more than those presently doing so. As of 48 hours ago, fewer than 40 members of Congress actually favored opening that kind of inquiry. Within another 48, we'll know if that number is starting to rise, as well as a possible groundswell that may sweep all of us into a showdown that will put the Constitution into stark relief--and potential jeopardy.

Hang on. This is getting vital. Can we do this? Can we save the republic from ourselves?

Be well. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark

Row On Row: Here, Too, They Lie in Grafton, WV

We are the dead.
Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn,
Saw sunsets glow....

To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep....

From "In Flanders Fields," by Lt. Col. John McCrae, Canadian Army, 1915

The small, unprepossessing town of Grafton, West Virginia, population 5,500 give or take, the kind of place that history has made but nearly everyone has missed, has within it a national military cemetery, just off Walnut Street, on the southwest part of town. The B and O Railroad, there for more than a century and a half and making Grafton a significant battleground region of the very early days of the Civil War, slides alongside the closely-clipped lawns and neatly-kept graves distributed evenly among tiered hillsides, framing the property parallel with the street above it.

It is not well-traveled. Businesses are stretched largely along mostly dilapidated buildings on Main Street, on the other side of the Tygart River, two bridges away. Had the area have been subdivided, other homes would probably have been built and expanded a quiet neighborhood.

By order of the Adjutant General in 1875, says the plaque not far from the front gate, the cemetery is open sunup to sundown. No carriage or vehicle can proceed within it at anything faster than walking speed. No refreshments are allowed.

I wondered, as I walked alone among the graves on a Saturday afternoon, how many people actually visit over a year's time; though gorgeous hydrangeas blossomed in places, there were no flowers laid anywhere. When I visited Grafton on May 12 for its International Mother's Day celebration, which it proudly and justly claims to own, I was advised by more than one person to be sure to return for Memorial Day, because that was a very big deal around there. I could not, but I promised myself to do so.

Grafton also lays claim to Memorial Day's development, you see. In a kiosk alongside the sidewalk next to Walnut Street, it says that, when the cemetery was first dedicated in 1869, schoolchildren were invited to strew flowers among the graves. That became known as Flower Scattering Day, which apparently morphed into Decoration Day, and hence Memorial Day.

It was my impression that Memorial Day's origins had more to do with honoring black soldiers who died for the freedom of their progenitors in the Civil War. But like other historical events and commemorations--the birthplace of the Republican Party comes to mind; both Jackson, Michigan and Ripon, Wisconsin lay claim--this has perhaps a fuzzy, disputed basis that might lack a solid research foundation but suits the locals just fine.

Another kiosk, this one containing a loose-leaf binder, stands at the base of the concrete stairs leading into the cemetery. It has pages upon pages of those who lie there; to the best of someone's knowledge, their dates of birth/death and dates of internment are listed. Sometimes, the latter two dates are not close together, suggesting that they might have been buried quickly near a battlefield and then disinterred and laid to final rest here, with comrades, a job I can't imagine having. Some gravestones have rankings; nearly all have their home states carved into them. A significant number went back to the Civil War.

Not nearly all have been identified, though. By my count, some 688 graves were not. Those are marked not with standing stones, but with imbedded markers with only their site numbers. And this cemetery, perhaps two blocks square in total size, paled in comparison to the one about two miles west of town, officially named the West Virginia National Cemetery, with hills upon hills of graves going on for dozens of acres.

A date can tell a story by itself. I copied down a few dates that I, a former history teacher, remembered like the back of my hand. I couldn't help but see, for instance, that a few who lie there perished on June 6, 1944.

That was D-Day, the greatest invasion in world history to this time. There was another theater of World War II, of course, in which battles were being fought on various Pacific islands. No reason any of those who died on that date couldn't have been killed by Japanese forces on places like New Guinea, Guam, or the Philippines, all campaigns going on at that time.

There was help available. A site called HonorStates.org claims to have tracked 90% of all the deceased of both world wars, a heck of an accomplishment if true because we're talking about more than 550,000 who died altogether. Through HonorStates, I found biographical information on these men buried in the Grafton Military Cemetery:

• Private Jamie McComb, from Taylor County, WV, where Grafton is located, who died on Omaha Beach on D-Day. Jamie was a member of a transportation unit. I wondered if a shell hit the transport in which he was riding, one of the "Higgins boats," as they were called (because as Stephen Ambrose wrote in his book D-Day, they were built by Higgins Industries in New Orleans, and could carry troops to landing beaches in just 18 inches of water, getting them as close as possible, enemy fire notwithstanding), launched from larger vessels in the English Channel, as it approached the beach. Maybe Jamie McComb actually made it to Omaha Beach that terrible but triumphant morning. We know that he didn't make it to his 20th birthday.
• Private First Class Max Stemple, who was born in Grafton. He flew into Normandy with the 101st Airborne Division, the Screaming Eagles, and died that same day. Like McCord, it did not say exactly how he died. Lots of the 101st parachuted into France just after midnight to secure bridges and ruin enemy communications in anticipation of the invasion, just six and a half hours away. Some were spotted and shot before they hit the ground. Some came in on gliders, dropped by planes whose flight paths had been disrupted by Axis anti-aircraft fire, and whose landing areas were largely unknown because their pilots landed literally blind in the darkness in unfamiliar areas, completely remote from where they thought they were going. The unlucky gliders were destroyed upon landing and many of the airborne soldiers on them were killed before they had had a chance to carry out their missions. Many of the airborne troops from the 101st and the 82nd, "All-American" Division, who survived those crashes were separated by the formerly coordinated, now-random landings and spent much of the overnight hours trying to find each other, never mind the enemy-held objectives (read Cornelius Ryan's The Longest Day for firsthand testimony from those who survived). Either way, Max Stemple might not have seen dawn. He was 17 days short of his 32nd birthday.
• Staff Sergeant David Casto, of Nicholas County, was a member of the 377th Parachute Field Artillery Battalion, 101st Airborne, when he died on D-Day. He was 25 years old.
• PFC Roy Kirby, also from Grafton, was in Company B, 401st Glider Infantry, 101st Airborne. He managed to survive his glider landing and advance with his Allied comrades for two more days. He was 34 years old.

Others weren't as easy to trace. There were men from Ohio and West Virginia cavalries who died during the time of the Battle of Gettysburg (thanks to the Ohio History Connection for its help here), but they weren't at that decisive moment in history. They were in or near Beverly, Virginia, which I tried to find on a gazetteer but couldn't, at least not exactly. It appears to be in the Shenandoah Mountains.

Nonetheless: Today we take a moment to salute them, in Grafton, West Virginia and elsewhere. They saved us from the further ravages of slavery and authoritarian fascism, the latter of which seems to be making a very disturbing comeback. If that next war comes to turn it back once again, it's not absurd now to ask: Which side will we be on? 

On the 75th anniversary of D-Day, coming up next week, 45 will be traveling to France to speak at a commemorative ceremony. Will he perform with the propriety with which this event is being staged, with the survivors of the battle, now at least in their 90s, gathering for probably the last time? Or will he descend once again into a pathetic, ridiculous, hyperbolic overflow of irresponsible, politically-laced ranting? That we even have to wonder about this monster performing so horribly, "breaks faith with those who have died," if you allow me to paraphrase from the above poetry.

I'm cringing. Aren't you?

Be well. I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

Two Worlds: Can A Balance Be Struck As One Becomes "Educated"?

Tara Westover has courage. Of that, there can be no doubt.

Westover, the author of Educated, on New York Times best-seller list for more than a year now, had the guts (or the temerity, depending upon who inside her family one might ask) to put into print her life-changing transit from fundamentalist-survivalist in the back hills of Idaho to a far more secular, Cambridge-based scholar. This was not a leap, either of faith or despite faith. It was a gut-wrenching, daring, genuinely dangerous excursion into literally the rest of the world, with starts and stops and endless questioning about substance and process. You know how it ends by reading the back flap, because it catches up with her where she presently is. What you don't know is how the steps were made, how faith is redirected, and how, when family and faith are so intertwined, leaving someone's vise-like grip on one sometimes must mean the leaving of another, not unlike getting a divorce, with all its regrets and weight of confrontation while stepping into another endless unknown, yet knowing it must be done, and reversal would be far worse.

It was done while knowing next to nothing about it, about what learning truly is and how one adapts to the educational system at its highest level with almost nothing of the preparation that the rest of the college-educated world has had to develop and (at times) to endure through grade school and high school. But the center of the transition and the awakening was learning--learning about the world far more than whatever is contained in the Bible; about unleashing the path of wonder that, once opened, can never be closed; about, as the Clarence Darrow-like figure in the play and film Inherit the Wind said in open court, "The Bible is a book. It's a good book. But it's not the only book."

She didn't absorb herself in Danielle Steel novels, either; at least she didn't say so. She took on John Stuart Mill and Hume and Rousseau and Madison and Hamilton. She combined ideas so lofty that her coaching professor was simply stunned. She stretched herself at Brigham Young (once she caught on to what her exasperated friend told her, read the textbook: note that someone had to actually tell her that), at Cambridge, and at Harvard; not a bad educational legacy, that.

All this while trying to deal with a paternalistic obsessive father who repeatedly cared only for the spiritual needs of his children as far as he wished to extend the caring--which is to say, as far as it helped him meet his own needs, always falling under his control. All other modes of learning were dangerous and risked eternal damnation. Though he kept a framed copy of the Constitution, he spent years preparing the family for the day when, like Ruby Ridge (not lost on any of this family), the government would come for them as it did for the tempest-tossed Spencers, who ran afoul of the FBI in a horrible moment of survivalism vs. submission to government.

Most of us were welcomed to try college, at least, as my parents suggested that I and my brothers do (and we all have at least bachelor's degrees). They sent us off with the understanding that many of their generation had: that ours should be better than theirs (and it was educationally; what has happened as a result of it is quite open to interpretation, since the next one has new challenges we've left it with). Tara's father and mother cut off the children who dared to extend themselves intellectually, who challenged a lifestyle they found stifling and increasingly stranger the more they stepped away from it.

Tara saw it before she went through it. She knew she wouldn't make her family happy. But she kept going because she could feel herself becoming someone new, and she liked that new person. In doing so, she had to question the basis of her own faith, since her family and her church were the only places she sustained it. Public school was forbidden. Only poisoned ideas could be learned there.

It was through the arts that the world became, gradually, a new. fascinating and inviting place. One creative endeavor that demonstrated a latent talent led to another. The parents tried to absorb the good it did Tara, as long as she remained home and helped the family. They saw it as an addition; she saw it as a trap, pressing down on her much like a cult, irrationality bouncing off her growing armor of intellectual development and expansion of ideas.

It all begs the question: How should religion fit into our lives? Should it be the dominant gateway to all thinking and interpretation of the world in which we live? Or should it be put into perspective, with beliefs considered against the backdrop of history and common sense? Is a literal interpretation of the Bible--as if there really is any such thing; usually, it's expanded cherry-picking--a bulwark with which to hold off evil, or a guideline returning us to simple truths in case we're littered with confusion? Is it a matter of being able to count on the Bible or other basic religious text, or a matter of demanding it at every turn?

All this against the backdrop of the secular state as well; the idea that laws devised by people of varying religious backgrounds, including those who are not religious at all, govern us and not what a religious text says, making morality relative and not absolute. Religion has been utilized to claim and achieve freedom as much as it has to squash it. We need to remember that as we re-enter the very intense issue of whether a woman has the right to control her body, and where that right ends.

Tara Westover gives speeches, too. I'd like to hear her someday. I'd like to know where she now is on her journey--either farther away from religion than before, or having incorporated it into her evolving and brilliant intellectual growth. She felt forced to run from her family literally to another continent to be everything she could be, but nothing close to what she has become--an emerging scholar of political philosophy--could have taken place had she remained in her father's scrapyard. Has she achieved a balance between these deeply contrasting worlds, in her mind if not in fact? Or can that no longer take place, since her family has eliminated her presence for all practical purposes?

No one's journey is the same. All we can do is play with the cards with which we've been dealt, pick from the deck, and improve our hands with each turn.

Be well. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark

Forty. Four-Oh Have Declared for President the Last Two Campaigns. Why?

According to my rough count, about forty people have declared themselves for president in the last two campaigns. Forty.

This list does not include those who might have declared and wouldn't have made bad candidates, like billionaire Michael Bloomberg and U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio. They looked, said they were looking, became part of some conversations, took a deep breath, then said no.

What does this say about our politics? Allow me to hazard some speculations:

• There are some serious egos out there. To even pretend that you either know enough, are strong enough, or experienced enough to take on by far the most significant position in the history of the world, means that your self-esteem doesn't need rework and polishing. Or maybe that it does, since that's clearly true of the incredible misfit we now have in there.
• There is serious money out there. Whether it's enough to go around is something we're going to discover as we go, but there won't be many of the 22 Democratic candidates at present who will fall short of the 65,000 individual donors necessary to qualify for the first round of debates next month (though one of them, according to her online ads, is apparently New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, which would be a shame because she's got the chops to stand in there with the rest). Granted, it's a big country, and the contributions vary widely, but for at least that many candidates to have enough to get campaign engines started says that, as a driver of the economy, politics doesn't take much of a backseat to anything else (and this doesn't include all the Congressional and state races happening next year as well). All of these campaigns must have staff hired to run offices in all the primary states, print information to be mailed, and run the overwhelming TV ads that will serve the purpose of pounding our sensitivities into submission yet again. Remember that Mitt Romney and Barack Obama each spent one billion dollars on the 2012 campaign. 45 will spend more than that; you can count on it.
• There will be highly qualified, personally interesting candidates who will go one-and-done, but probably shouldn't. We'll get exactly one look at them before the polls will render them off the radar, or keep doing so because they never really got on it. Some of the bigger names (Biden, Sanders) may or not not do well, but their support is probably well enough established that, if they goof, they'll have enough time to recover and stay in the battle. Candidates like Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O'Rourke and Pete Buttigieg will need to do well, and will probably survive, too, barring a Whoa! comment of some kind. But Tulsi Gabbard, Seth Moulton, Marianne Williamson, John Hickenlooper and others on what appears to be a kamikaze mission? Whatever they say, it will have to be first, completely unique (good luck there) and/or sufficiently and noticeably attractive as to bump their polling to 4 or 5 percent (up from, maybe, 1) and call it a huge win. Just sit there for a minute and think, especially if you're a Democrat: What possible combination of phraseology and word candy would be something that you haven't heard before and would sell out to vote for and even work for at this very, very early point, especially if, in the back of your monkey mind, you've already eliminated at least one-third of the group?
• Our political perspectives are going off the rails. Polarization takes place when people can't and don't see the big picture, when people grab at the first thing that looks new and flashy, yet manageably shallow and simple to absorb. Gerrymandering has deepened this inclination, since more officeholders being in increasingly wink-and-nod, okey-doke, automatic-win districts means that the only foes they have to hold back are people supposedly on their own side, but who have dreamed up something even more severe than the ideas that made the automatic winner automatic. So to stand out in a field of nearly two dozen, a candidate has to say something so different as to draw upon something outside the mainstream (see above). But then, we used to understand the presidency as a position for which a broad consensus was desirable and necessary. Not with 45, though. The only thing he thinks he needs to do is keep his slavish minions close to his hip and hope that the economy's success and the, uh, advantage of actually having been president take care of the extra five percent he'll need to sneak into the back door of the Electoral College, the only majority that means anything. Again.
• Respect for the presidency has taken a big fall. This has been evident since Bill Clinton's administration, where the haters took hold even before Monica Lewinsky got into the household lexicons. Disrespect has easily traded hands enough so that many more people are no longer awed at the concept of being president, when that other person, as incredibly incompetent as he is (we can still say 'he' referring to past presidents), stands there and shoots off his mouth and has no idea what he's doing. Regardless of results, and especially since we have a complete, lying, terrible dolt in office right now, don't expect this to change soon.

Some of this just flat isn't fair. But some of it makes sense. There's only one president for this whole, increasingly ungovernable country, and the winnowing out process has to start earlier to sift out those who the public doesn't prefer, regardless of reasoning. The person who will have to stand up in 45's face will have to be the one quick on their feet and unafraid of staring down numerous insults and countless lies. It's probably better that that person will be the result of what might be a needle in a political haystack. When the first process ends, we must hope that that needle is still sharp enough to see the second process through.

Be well. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark

Two Lessons We Aren't Learning: Part Two

You know why people don't like liberals? Because they lose. If liberals are so fuckin' smart, how can they lose so goddam always?

--Jeff Daniels, playing news anchor Will McAvoy on "The Newsroom"

Lisa Neubauer has my undying respect and admiration. But that's not much more than she now has.

Oh, she's a state appellate court judge. Nice position, but she's not on the state Supreme Court. She ran but was defeated.

She must have forgotten about Louis Butler. That was more than a decade ago. The memory might have faded. It might have been written off as one of those 'exceptions to the rule.'

Except the rules have changed, and Democrats or those leaning in their direction don't want to face it. They keep getting after Republicans for denying the way the world has changed, for dreaming of a life that has long since passed and making rules to return to it. In every way but politics, they would be right.

But in politics, the Republicans have taken charge of the narrative, the process, and the attitudes behind them. This one part of our culture, which ironically has become the passageway to controlling it, represents a flipping of the mentality.

The Democrats don't get it anymore. They don't get what they need to do, so they don't get the positions they crave, either.

I got another earful of that at the Milwaukee County Democratic Party meeting last week. I heard from state party chair Martha Laning that Neubauer had a chance to accept monies from Democratic Party donors, but refused. She didn't want to be tainted with Dems-versus-Reps rhetoric; you know, bias.

So she ran on the high road. Meanwhile, according to internal polling, she was leading by eight points--nearly a landslide total--with a week to go in the campaign. Her campaign ads were straightforward, featuring mostly her own voice, and filled with supportive facts, namely, that she had the support of over three hundred state attorneys, judges, and law enforcement officers. Brian Hagedorn, her homophobic, excessively religiously afflicted opponent, who had been an assistant attorney general, Scott Walker's personal lawyer, and a law clerk for outgoing state Supreme Court judge Michael Gableman (more on him below), had six, according to her campaign's count. Six.

It was looking like a slam dunk. She was in cruise control. On Election Day, Neubauer polled some 48,000 more statewide votes than the winner of the previous state Supreme Court election, Rebecca Dallet, also a liberal, who had won handily, just the previous year.

Yet, Hagedorn won by 6,000 votes. He did take last-minute money. It suddenly rained down like an Asian monsoon. At least 1.3 million dollars, said Laning.

That was enough to scare up, and I mean exactly that, 168,000 more Republican-leaning voters, many of whom were probably not going to show up otherwise. How? By buying fear-mongering ads that had next to nothing to do with whatever issues that the campaign was actually supposed to represent.

"They were [45] ads," said Jeff Neubauer, Lisa's husband, who ran her campaign, with whom I discussed the stunning defeat at the Democratic Founders' Day dinner. "It was like they were voting for [45]."

All of this tells us that:

• Wisconsin is gripped by fear as much as any other state;
• 45 supporters will answer the clarion call in 2020--you can count on it;
• Putting this result together with the closeness of the gubernatorial race in 2018, Wisconsin is as purple as any state could possibly be; 
• Citizens United surfaced its ugly head at exactly the most cogent moment; and
• Democrats forget what happened to Louis Butler and, once again, paid the price.

Butler, whom I have known for a half-century (we were fellow political science majors at Lawrence University in Appleton, and he obviously did a lot more with it than me), was appointed to the state Supreme Court by then-governor Jim Doyle in 2004. Butler became the first black person to have ever served in that position. He served out the last two years of the term of Diane Sykes, who was appointed by Bush-43 to the 7th Federal Appellate Circuit (and who may replace RBG if the latter succumbs during 45's tenure; she's been mentioned before, and though not as radical as others, wouldn't be as controversial a choice). Butler ran for a ten-year term in 2006, and was defeated by Gableman, a circuit judge from the northwest corner of the state.

The campaign was perhaps the most controversial in at least the last century. As Lisa Neubauer tried to re-introduce, state Supreme Court races are, or were, supposed to be run on the fairly vague issues of qualifications and temperament, which tend to be appropriate because of the more general, overall character of the court's interpretive rulings. But, just as the national Supreme Court appointments have evolved from something akin to high-mindedness, Gableman injected issues such as criminal rulings in cases involving violence and drugs (He accused Butler of finding a "loophole" in the law to put a child molester back out on the street, for example), leaning on Butler's experience in the far more cosmopolitan area of Milwaukee County, where he, too, had been a circuit judge. When the campaign turned in that direction, Gableman was able to utilize hot-button phraseology ("putting criminals on the street") that brought forth accusations of being racially tinged.

In other words, relative to those former standards, Gableman played dirty. And he got away with it, since the Wisconsin Supreme Court tied 3-3 on whether Gableman had committed ethics violations. Butler addressed that matter tangentially in ads late in the campaign, but low turnout--another bellweather of Republican strategy--did him in. 

Hagedorn replaced Gableman, who resigned amidst rumors of a federal appointment by 45. The U.S. Supreme Court booted the lawsuit filed to address the severe gerrymandering of Wisconsin state and federal representational districts back to the State of Wisconsin, which means that the next legal decision will, eventually, belong to the state Supreme Court. With Hagedorn's election, conservatives (a.k.a. Republicans) reclaim a 5-2 margin. Had Neubauer won, the margin would have been narrowed to 4-3, with another statewide election next year.

That's what was at stake. No wonder the Republicans panicked and brought emergency big bucks to bear. And they could, because of Citizens United. It doesn't even have to be traceable to a specific source. The dog whistles were sounded, and the minions reported dutifully. (Expect all the more in 2020.)

As mentioned in the previous blog, though the Democrats won 54% of the total, statewide assembly vote in 2018, Republicans still hold 63 seats to the Democrats' 36, a raw, naked imbalance, a rubber stamp exposed every two years. Hagedorn's election probably took away any significant reversal in that condition for at least another decade.

All because, said Laning, "A couple of donors just took out their checkbooks." A local blog report written the day after the election said that Neubauer outspent Hagedorn by some $400,000, but listed Hagedorn's total spending at $1.3 million, which meant that he had spent next to nothing up to that point. That can't be true, because Hagedorn was up on television before the rush of the final week. In all likelihood, if Laning's comments were accurate, that reporter hadn't yet known of the effects of the later Republican financial infusions.

Said Laning of Neubauer's highly ethical but naively futile campaign: "I don't think that's going to happen again." Now Wisconsin Democrats have two recent examples of what too many of them have refused to see: That the bottom line of politics is power, and the bottom line of power is winning. The rest of the blanks get filled in with those who have done what they needed to do to get the offices they lust after.

Who knows if extra money from Democrats would have held off Hagedorn's last-minute surge? But it would have been interesting if Neubauer could have spent enough on one last ad of her own, refuting and diminishing Hagedorn's histrionics.

That's the second lesson Democrats are very slow to learn. The third is not that they don't know what they stand for, but they're too scared to say so. This fear has two levels: One internal, the other external. But that's for later, as the new campaign ramps up. There will be plenty to write about on that topic.

Be well. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark

Two Lessons We Aren't Learning: Part One

I went to a meeting of the Milwaukee County Democratic Party the other night. I learned a couple of things that indicate, at least to me, why Democrats aren't winning the way they should, or at least might.

Martha Laning, the outgoing state Democratic chair (whom we will miss), brought a powerpoint of stats from the 2018 elections that saw the end (at least temporarily) of the venomous Scott Walker as governor, as well as a new attorney general and state treasurer. But that's the tip of the iceberg.

Republicans still command an overwhelming advantage in the state assembly, thanks to their clever, lock-down gerrymandering which saw them garner a whole 46% of the vote, but 63% of control. Wisconsin's new Darth Vader seems to be Robin Vos, the speaker of the assembly, who has vowed not just to oppose new governor Tony Evers' budget, but eviscerate it by simply striking his proposals before they even get to the assembly floor.

To do statistical analysis is to deal in history. What was the situation and how did it change? This past decade demonstrated what happens when a party isn't nearly as united as it appears to be, and how that devastates it in terms of tracking both loyal supporters and those undecideds--the ones who, in the end, really do decide elections.

To wit: Laning made it clear that the state Democrats did not gain from Barack Obama's elections as president, though he carried Wisconsin both times. The issue was infrastructure: Obama ran a totally independent national organizing scheme called Organizing for America. It was energetic, it got out in front of everyone else (thus turning back Hillary Clinton a first time), and its messaging resonated. Those were important reasons why Obama won.

But in the wake of his elections, OFA did not share its organizing information with the national Democratic Party, nor with the state parties. They were left on their own. In 2010, when Walker ran the first time, Democrats did not have the advantage of the up-to-date, superior information base that OFA had accumulated. They were doing things like calling dead people three or four times without knowing they had been deceased, or "doing doors," as it's called, to find that supporters had moved or died. This always happens a little bit, but without recent information, each day that old information is used, it becomes more and more inadequate. This wastes time and resources, especially volunteer efforts. They become discouraged and don't come back for more work.

Walker won. Taking control of the legislature as well, Republicans devastated several public unions, draining heretofore solid organizing support for Democrats, and unleashed an apportionment plan that, so far, has survived U.S. Supreme Court scrutiny (they basically punted) and froze representation into very unrepresentative but very favorable positions (see above stat).

The Democrats managed to forge support for a recall election in 2011 (which was more emotional than substantive, leading to its demise), but dealing with the same organizing issues, the Democrats lost by nearly the same percentage than they had in 2010, and lost again similarly in 2014.

I worked the northwest part of the state for the National Education Association in the latter part of the 2012 Wisconsin campaign, though I then lived in Arkansas. The area was still filled with defiant, but oddly inertial, union folks. Many blamed Obama for not coming back to Wisconsin to campaign for Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, who went after Walker in the recall; same candidate, same result. They were going to vote for Obama--Mitt Romney sure wasn't an acceptable alternative--but didn't want to be seen to be as actively in support of the campaign.

They believed Obama had betrayed them at that pivotal moment. That's a matter of perspective. The true damage was beneath the surface, and the Wisconsin Democratic Party wouldn't recover from it until 2018--after two terms of Walker's deep undermining of the meaning of good government. Other state legislatures flipped to Republicans as well, and Democrats quickly lost both houses of Congress in 2010. The Democrats had the White House--and that's about it.

I also worked the same part of the state for AFSCME in support of Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign. It appeared to be short on organizing expertise, thoroughness and spending. It spent half the money that Obama had spent in 2008. It seemed to accept that it would carry Wisconsin. There were fewer rallies, she of course did not return to the state for the final campaign, and I saw next to no yard signs. Like Obama's 2012 campaign, there was clearly some support, but little enthusiasm.

But that support had crumbled. Traveling from small town to small town in my regular job as union rep, I decided to stop into some coffee shops to read some of the weekly newspapers to get a feel for the surrounding public's attitudes about a presidential campaign that looked to me (and to most until the last minute) like a slam dunk. I had returned to Wisconsin full-time after seven years absence, so I was just getting used to the completely different atmosphere surrounding unions. It seemed like Mars.

So I was stunned when I saw op-ed pages filled with hysterical, apocalyptic comments about Clinton, detached from reality by light-years. The 45 propaganda machine had taken hold in rural Wisconsin, not the least of which was due to previous Republican resurgence in that region. In 2012, counties surrounding Eau Claire had turned slightly red in carrying for Romney, but not so much so that it would have turned the re-election campaign against Obama. Now it appeared to be deep, beet red.

Doing doors in Chippewa Falls and Eau Claire--two formerly Democratic bastions--in the final weeks, I found plenty of switching: those who were once counted on to vote Democratic, which was why I was at their doors in the first place, but who told me that it was suddenly none of my business who they voted for. That disingenuousness said one thing: We can't stand Hillary so we're voting for 45. All I was there for was counting, so I couldn't engage them. Chippewa Falls, in particular, had gone red. Eau Claire stayed blue but a much lighter tone.

I returned to the headquarters to report my findings. "We're going to get destroyed in Chippewa Falls," I kept saying. "I'm telling you, we're in trouble."

But I found a degree of disbelief evident. After all, not nearly enough folks had kept track of what was really going on; there were neither the resources nor the attention. The bridge of what seemed to be endless Democratic support had crumbled while no one had checked the underpinnings, and it was on the edge of complete collapse. By ten p.m. on election night, the upset was becoming obvious, the room of supporters had thinned in Eau Claire, and the finger-pointing had already begun.

The lessons have been learned. First of all, when elections end, organizers are released because their vital but temporary tasks have ended for now. A state party needs constant help re-organizing its information to meet new realities, though, so moneys have been raised to keep staffs larger than they once were. That was a development I was glad to hear.

But that money can run out. More donors are needed. Except the state's Democrats are up against a money machine that can only be described as insidious and tsunami-like. That brings us to the second lesson of Things We Still Haven't Learned. That one I'll tell you when I come back.

Be well. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark

We've Been Had. Nobody Wants to Say It. I Just Did.

Having the Attorney General obstruct the obstruction investigation of 45, which is what he's presently doing in real time, is bad enough. But it's still not the most devastating result of all that's happened. Amazingly, we are walking right past it.

We've been had. The 2016 election was rigged.

The Russians changed the numbers. They changed them in the very states in which 45 managed to pull off the electoral upset. They didn't change them in the entirety of each state, but they didn't have to. They did it just enough to tilt the scales.

Nobody's coming out and even seriously suggesting it yet. Discussions are peripheral at best. I'm not sure why. But circumstantially, it's becoming quite obvious.

Let's make some assumptions here:

• 45 will lie about anything and everything. He's at 10,000 and counting. He has no conscience, no integrity.
• The Mueller Report came right out and said that 45's campaign knew that the Russians were dabbling in interference and said nothing about it. In fact, through passivity, it cheered them on.
• 45 and his minions knew the results were tainted somehow. They may not have known how it happened.
• But then, they might have and said nothing. They might not have actually participated, but the discussion between Manafort and Kilimnik is quite telling. They specifically covered battleground states in the Rust Belt: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota. 45 won three of the four and barely lost Minnesota.
• They might have done what they're actually pretty good at--covering their tracks. 
• We know that 45 is lying about there being no obstruction of justice; it's right there in the report. How do we know he isn't lying about there being no collusion? The fact that Mueller didn't find it doesn't mean it isn't still there.
• The polling leading up to the election was drastically off--in fact, it's never been as bad since 1948, when the newspapers all but handed the election to Thomas Dewey, instead of Harry Truman, who won it. How could that happen?
• Has anyone forgotten that this has happened before--in 2000, albeit unintentionally? Back then, Zogby polling had Gore winning Florida by 1% on Election Day. Had the balloting process not been messed up, had people actually voted for Gore instead of those who mistakenly voted for Patrick Buchanan, chads or no chads, Gore would have won--and a lot of poor policies wouldn't have been put into motion. Same as now.

There are too many coincidences here, too many places where things happened and seem to keep dangling without context. There's another factor that not nearly enough of us, amazingly, are taking into consideration: Our refusal to believe we could get tricked and undermined like this, that our democracy is somehow so sacrosanct as to be absolutely firewalled, out of respect if not in fact.

We still think of Russians as, well, over there someplace. We still think of all this as spanning a distance. Incredible, isn't it, that so many of us are still unable to bridge that in our minds? Geography is irrelevant now. They're all over the place, just as we can be.

It says here that they got right inside the machines and actually switched the numbers. No, I don't know this for sure. But I know there's enough evidence to institute a clear and decisive investigation. And if that can't be done, I want to know why not.

I want to know why we aren't getting right to the bone of this whole thing. Are we going to just move on and leave it at that? The wrong person might have been elected--literally the wrong one, not because of his dislikability but because the process got invaded and completely undermined. And much chaos would have never surfaced and never been connected with a corrupt person and people who are bent on dissolving the legitimacy of our government.

Let's start beating this drum. Let's demand action. Let's demand the ultimate accountability. Foreigners on this soil are nowhere near as dangerous and destructive as foreigners inside our computers, ruining the legitimacy of the government that rules us. It is the consummate invasion. It must be traced to the source.

We must proceed on the assumption that Russia, a.k.a. Vladimir Putin, arranged to put the wrong people in charge here. Why does 45 kow-tow to him? Because whether he's seen the evidence or not, he knows--he knows that Putin's the one who put him in power. No one needs to say or admit anything. It's the simple understanding that underlies all conversations.

Congressional Democrats, to their credit, are quite busy with a host of investigations. But they, like most of the rest of us, are overlooking the most important one, the one that should transcend all others: The one that may just prove that the president we have should simply not have been there in the first place, as incredible as that may have formerly been.

Nothing's impossible now. Nothing. We need to get used to that reality. No limitation of ethical conduct exists. Now, it's whether they--either 45 or the Russians--can get away with violations of ethics, of our sensitivities, or of the law. That's it.

The known Russian interference, the flooding of our social media with pro-45 propaganda, should in fact be expected by now. Foreign interference in our affairs is as old as the republic itself, though. During the early 1790s, French minister Citizen Genet roamed the country in efforts to disrupt American neutrality during yet another Franco-British war. He not only made public statements inappropriate for a foreign representative, he even recruited Americans to serve with Frenchmen in privateers, seizing British ships and claiming the right to do so. President George Washington was livid and seemingly helpless until Genet reached out in desperation, since the newly revolutionary, guillotine-mad French government sought him for crimes against it--for which he would have surely lost his head (See Ron Chernow's excellent biography of Washington for details, pp. 692-97). Washington, who knew what deportation would mean, cut him a break, and Genet married an American woman and spent his remaining days in upstate New York.

As obnoxious as Genet was, he didn't fraudulently switch any votes. That would be directly undermining the government's legitimacy. I believe that this is what we have here.

What's happening in the Senate right now, as I write this, is not diminished in its gravity. But the direct cheating on the election compromises all of us, even those who faithfully voted for 45. That it hasn't surfaced yet cannot be left to mere history, to be read in some textbook for future generations.

Be well. I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark