Kamala uninterviewed?

This will be a gripe of short-lived relevance, but I still wanted to say it out loud because there are other themes implicated that have more enduring nature.

About the Harris candidacy, I keep seeing:

“Harris has yet to give an interview…”

As if that's some kind of gotcha that shows weakness, fear, or lack of validity.

She's not exactly hiding. Barely more than a month ago, she was advocating for Biden. All of a sudden, she is thrust into a situation that was not anticipated. She has done extraordinarily, being at once a Vice President and a candidate, charged with assembling a team, approving preliminary messages, selecting her own Vice President after numerous interviews, syncing up on messaging with Walz, preparing presentations for the convention, and surely meeting with a zillion people who have competing theories of how she should spend her very limited time.

I don't know about you, but that's more than I get done in a month.

Not to mention the fact that her job up until now has not been to make policy but to support Biden's policy. It will probably take her a little while to work out how to articulate a strategy of her own, and how to present it in a way that is respectful of the fact that she's still Biden's VP.

All to say it doesn't look to me like ducking anything. It looks like walking straight into a firehose. While it will be interesting to hear an interview, I write off any delay as saying there are only so many waking hours in a day. Few people have assembled a campaign at all in that time, much less one with this amount of momentum. I think she's doing great.

But it's equally reasonable to note that an interview is really not going to shed any more light. It's a form of outreach to be sure, but there aren't secrets that are likely to be uncovered in that way. The people who are against her are hoping there will be a gotcha moment, but I think her policies to the extent that she has them formed yet, are on display. At this point we are trusting values, because that is what this election is about.

I am not a Democrat, but an Independent. By that I mean that I don't vote on anything or anyone just because I'm part of some tribe, I think things through. And I would be writing this same essay if it was Liz Cheney running and she had not sat down for an interview. I know enough about her and her values from what she stood up for in the Jan 6 hearings to know Democracy would be safe under her. I would be unwaveringly saying the same thing as I'm saying about Harris right now: democracy is on the line, and that matters more than anything.

So if you know anything about me, and there's no reason you should—I'm just a random guy with an opinion, you know that climate is in fact my top priority. And that I disagree with Kamala on some really material things about climate, mostly urgency. And she used to be against fracking and seems to have moderated. That's not great. But it doesn't change my unconditional support for her one iota.

Because if Trump is elected, there will be…

• no discussion of science,
• no chance for climate at all,
• no civil rights,
• no protective government agencies,
• no part of government, nor property entrusted to it, that is not for sale,
• no safety for anyone gay,
• no safety for women,
• no safety for people of color,
• no freedom of religion,
• no dignity for the elderly,
• no respect for injured or fallen heroes,
• no respect for people with disabilities,
• no real safety for anyone who is not straight, white, male, young, and rich,
• no safeguards for the environment,
• no workplace safety,
• no employment safety and fairness standards,
• no sane public health policy,
• no chance for fair elections in future elections.

Whatever I might think about Harris—or even Cheney in my hypothetical—and her policies, seems small compared to worrying that democracy is secure. And, believe me, I would disagree with Cheney way more than Harris. But my point is that small partisan matters are not the issue right now, and even large partisan matters are dwarfed by the threat to democracy. Partisan reasons are not the reason to cast a ballot one way or another. Not this year.

Donald Trump is an existential threat to democracy. There should be no higher priority than making sure he does not become US president.

We'll be lucky if the cancer that Trump has planted does not cause a bunch of people to challenge election results without basis and then have the morally compromised Supreme Court that he has stacked approve such antics, completing a procedural coup.

Serious damage has been done to our democracy, and it is limping along as it is. A strong showing for Harris and a Democratic Congress is a chance to have enough time to mend some things.

Otherwise, it's probably game over for US democracy, and a short road from there to game over for the world against climate change as petro-state dictators gain an edge at a terribly bad time.

Any attempt to suggest that Harris needs to sit down and discuss something in more detail completely misses the point and makes no sense to me.

• Democracy, not autocracy.
• Hope, not fear.
• Joy, not anger.
• Acceptance, not division.
• Lawfulness, not lawlessness.
• Constitution, not bullies.

Those are the things Harris stands for, and you aren't going to learn anything materially different from that in an interview. It'll be quite interesting to hear what she says in an interview, but she is not derelict for not having sat down for an interview. We have enough information for now, so let's cut her some slack. She should be getting credit for managing priorities well enough to give us the important things first. That bodes well for the future.

 

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Author's Notes:

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This essay originated as a post on Mastodon. It has been edited to fit the richer format of this venue, and somewhat edited to include additional content not in the original post, so you could think of that post as an initial draft.

The image was created by so-called “generative AI” via Abacus.AI and its interface to the FLUX.1 facility via a chat interface. I'm not sure how happy I am about the idea of these tools, but find myself needing to learn how they work, so I figured I'd use this as an experiment to see how they work. The prompt I used to get this graphic was:

“Make a graphic in black and white that shows, in silhouette form, two people sitting in comfortable chairs, facing each other. One of the people, the person to the right as we're looking on, is Kamala Harris in a pantsuit, and the other, to the left as we look on, is a generic news person doing the interview. There should be a coffee table between them, with a coffee cup on each side so that each would have something to drink if they needed it. Assume that the two are being recorded for television, so it is not necessary for there to be a visible microphone or any note-taking material.

And yes, if you're paying attention, it didn't take all of my instructions. The result was not a silhouette, for example. It just confirms that these tools are not as good as people often say. They make mistakes. Sometimes really conspicuous ones. But this was the best I got after several attempts, and was good enough for this very flexible case. I still am not a big fan of these tools, both for their environmental footprint and because they confabulate freely. They don't really understand, just mimic. That it drew anything at all suggests there were probably other things humans had done that were close enough that it could crib from them. But I'll gripe in more detail about all this on another day.

Simple Political Competence

Media keeps calling it "leadership"—the thing that had been missing in 45's administration, that Biden restored. But 45 was a leader of sorts. His base was drawn to that. What he lacked was the competence to manage the parts of government we rely on.

As a public, we lack competence too. We interview prospective leaders but not on how policy will work. Just please sound sure. We'll vote promises, fear, hope. That's why education must be in reach of everyone: so we ask harder questions and understand the answers. Democracy cannot not survive an uneducated public.

Politics must care about science because policies must address what the world throws at us. Science can't fully predict the future, but it can report the odds, letting us be more prepared. To Ignore such a potential edge shows willful lack of competence.

Climate Change is here, gaining steam. To oppose addressing it is willful denial and plain incompetence. A partisan divide over simple, unavoidable truth makes no sense, but if the GOP wants to draw the line there, say it plainly: They're the Party of Incompetence.

There is a lot of work to do ahead. 45 left things in shambles, some borne of evil profiteering intent, other parts of manifest incompetence of the highest order. Even when dug out from that, we have big problems afoot. We need competent solutions.

Let go of centrism, which says no matter the problem, modest solutions are enough, an incompetent claim. Big problems may need big solutions.

• Identify compassionate goals. (Or why bother?)
• Fairly express problems.
• Offer competent solutions.
• Only then, lead.

Recent shifts in diversity and inclusion are a good start at compassion and fairness. Campaign funding reform is key, too. Properly representing We The People lays foundation to solve the right problems. Competently describing and solving problems will do the rest.

Democratic Values

✓ Compassion
✓ Fairness
✓ Competence
✓ Leadership
  (democracy)

The GOP fancies itself the party of values. Dems have values, too, but have been incompetent at articulating them. That must change.

Compassion. Fairness. Competence. Leadership.

Pick a simple set like I've offered here. Repeat them every single day for 4 years.

The previous President had very few competencies, and terrible values. There is not a lot to learn from him other than what not to do. But he knew how to get a message out. The messages he picked were terrible. But repeating them daily clearly had an effect on many voters.

Democrats should learn from that—not the messages, but a way to deliver messages so they sink in. Daily repetition is essential.

And did I mention repetition helps? It's part of competent messaging.

Bill Clinton's campaign was famously designed around the mantra "It's the economy, stupid." I would almost suggest the phrase "It's the competence, stupid." but calling each other stupid won't get us far.

Also, competence isn't the whole of it, just something recently and conspicuously missing in the GOP. Actually, all of these important qualities are lacking in the GOP, except leadership.

Republican Values

❌ Compassion
❌ Fairness
❌ Competence
✓ Leadership
  (autocracy)

The GOP does offer leadership, but of a pure authoritarian kind.

• GOP policy lacks compassion.
• GOP policy lacks fairness.
• GOP policy lacks competence.

That's why articulating values in this way matters.

• These are not words you can usefully attack.
• These are not words you can easily forge.
• These are words that most voters would say they care about.

Plus, in difficult times, well-articulated values can cut through political disagreements. They serve as a compass to remind us of where we're going, why we're going there, and why it matters to choose plans that really get us there.

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This post began as a Twitter thread I posted on Feb 20, 2021.

The Two Economies

Some are in a rush to
 “reopen the economy.”

The economy.
As if there were only one.

But there are two economies:

• the Essential Economy, and
• the Luxury Economy.

Yes, the Luxury Economy is paused.
And yes, it is losing money.

But the Essential Economy is still operating.

And what a lucky, lovely, life-sustaining thing that is.

Ordinary people—those who work in fields to plant or harvest crops, who drive trucks, who stock shelves or operate cash registers in grocery stores, who keep our lights on, who patrol our streets, who fight fires, who drive ambulances, who operate food kitchens, who are doctors and nurses in hospitals and clinics and nursing homes—ordinary people are, each and every one, nothing short of heroes.

Heroism pervades the essential economy, where amazing souls risk and regularly lose their lives just to keep our essential services working.

We haven’t closed that economy.
So there is no need to speak of reopening it.

Of course, there are people suffering in the Luxury Economy. A great many. Not everyone who works for the luxury economy lives in luxury, so please don’t misunderstand.

But if the Essential Economy creates enough food, housing, health care, etc. to sustain us, then the rest of it is just a dance we do because we are not making our nation more fed, more housed, etc.

If we’re not part of the Essential Economy, we’re the entertainment, amusing them and perhaps ourselves, while we wait for a handout. They’re creating all of the essential value. At best, we’re left to creating “optional additional value,” but by definition nothing we can’t do without, or we’d still be doing it.

So we’re operating at a surplus, not a deficit, and the reason we know that is that the essentials are being met even without our whole population working. We’re just bad at dividing up our collective surplus.

The things society needs to do it is still doing, to the extent we ever were. We’ve always been far from perfect at that, but that’s topic for another day. Right now my point is that the Essential Economy isn’t shut down, only the Luxury Economy is.

And so, you see, to speak of “need” to reopen “The” Economy is a slap in the face to the contributions and, frankly, to the sacrifices made by these heroes.

Let’s be blunt: The whining is about when we luxuriate anew, when profit-taking can resume, when we can start polluting again, when businesses can get back to exploiting within impunity.

These things we so urgently need to get back to are not needs. These are just things that some among us are used to doing because money makes them feel important.

But these activities are not what is important—if they are even good for us at all.

We in the Luxury Economy are likewise not what is important.

We matter as individuals. I don’t meant to suggest we’re expendable. But what qualifies as hardship and what is mere inconvenience is something we owe scrutiny. There are some in the Luxury Economy sitting comfortably on accumulated wealth as others are panicked, barely getting by, worried about keeping a roof over their head or where their next meal will come from. But that isn’t a collective wealth problem, that’s a problem with how we distribute surplus.

Also, many of the people sustaining themselves on amassed wealth think of themselves as virtuous, that they did the right things, that they are deserving of their comfort now. But we see now more clearly that if they earned all that wealth in the Luxury Economy, they’ve provided none of the value that is now sustaining them. They’re just lucky they are now sustained. They are asking for handouts right now, just like the rest of us. They differ only in being more smug, in their sense of entitlement to those handouts they need as much as anyone.

We often run on autopilot, indulging the presumption that things are as they are for good reason. But based on an unscientific survey of my friends, most of whom are on the prowl for yet another Netflix series to binge, my guess is that we have time on our hands, time that could be spent contemplating whether we should ge back to familiar routines or get busy finding new ones.

And so, just to sum up…

The fact that many of us have jobs that do not contribute to essentials is proof of our collective wealth. When we need food we go to work—but not to make food, because there is enough, even if badly distributed and poorly shared. No, when we need food, we go to work just to make money, a dance we do to feel worthy of surplus food and essentials made by a few.

We who do not create the true value, the essentials that are largely and miraculously and heroically still available even now should be thankful supply lines are moving and should be asking how we can help that, how we can assure they are properly paid for arduous, dangerous, and relentless work, how we can make sure their families are taken care of while they do this, and how we can make sure their health care is assured, not whining about when we can resume pointlessness again.

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If you haven’t read my essay Corny Economics, you might want to head there next. This post was intended as a sequel, but I tried to write this on the assumption that you might read them in either order. Otherwise, I might have here used the parlance of Corny Economics, replacing “Essential Economy” with “Corn Economy” and “Luxury Economy” with “Harmonica Economy”.

The 1920 photo by Lewis Hine titled Power house mechanic working on steam pump was obtained from Wikimedia, which identifies it as being in the public domain.

The “drop caps” effect I used is a modified version of the helpful advice from Chris Coyier’s article Drop Caps at css-tricks.com, which I found in a Google search. He suggests it’ll work across multiple browsers, and it looked to me like it should. I used it in a span tag, since my use was a one-off and I didn’t want to fuss with style sheets. And I liked the color enough that it influenced some of the other design, and that in turn led me to the idea of working the entire piece in vary sizes and colors, so I evolved the article from there. I had been looking for a visual way to make some of the points clearer and this was one of several things that catalyzed the final result.

I find I often write text to fit visually, I don’t just mark things up after-the-fact. I change the lengths of sentences so that in plausible line-breaking on various browser settings, I expect it to look good. In cases where I am looking for a particular break, I experiment with reshaping windows and watch for widowing and often just replace spaces with non-breaking spaces ( ) so that if a line break occurs, it has substance and semantic units fall, perhaps more raggedly, in meaningful units.

Our Primary National Values

Biden and Sanders have been debating matters like Social Security. Can we afford it? Biden acts indignant that Bernie would suggest he's a threat to Social Security, yet Biden's record is plain, as well-summarized by Ryan Grim at The Intercept in this tweet:

Biden blatantly lied about Social Security at Iowa's Black & Brown Forum this week:

Q: "Do you think it's fair though for voters to question your commitment to Social Security when in the past you've proposed a freeze to it?"

Biden: "No, I didn't propose a freeze."

"You did." pic.twitter.com/DBzauK2n53

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) January 24, 2020

The Truthiness About Biden

Nor does Biden explain how and why his opinion has changed. In a worrisome pattern he seems to share with Trump, he simply denies he ever had an opinion that is clearly documented.

Stephen Colbert called this “truthiness”—an assertion of “facts” that come not from books or the head, but from the gut.

“Alternative facts,” Kellyanne Conway, counselor to President Trump, calls such affronts to reality.

Biden would have us see Bernie's views as extreme, radical, dangerous to consider. He offers himself as the safe choice. The message from the centrists is that Bernie's notions will bankrupt us. The truth is, many of us are going bankrupt just fine on our own. We need the government to pull the reins on corporate greed, but Biden can't even admit this is where the problem lies.

It's clear that the recent tax cuts for billionaires are part of an organized “starve the beast” strategy by the GOP. Such a strategy works in two steps: first take all the money out of the system into rich people's pockets, then declare that the government is short of money and that social programs must be cut. They've done step one. Now we're back in the same situation as happened the last time Biden championed cuts.

Has something changed? Because it looks to me like Biden has positioned himself as the realist, the compromiser, the one willing to pull a Susan Collins, hemming and hawing for the cameras so it looks like an oh-so-difficult choice, but ultimately “surprising” us by deciding that we need to be fiscally responsible and endure our middle-class medicine rather than ask too much of billionaires.

Because that's the picture he seems to be painting when he accuses Bernie, directly or through his advocates, of being too extreme, too radical, too untrustworthy, too … socialist.

Biden wants us to trust him, but trust him how? Why? The only one he seems to point fingers at is Bernie. And why? Because Bernie is willing to point fingers at who he thinks is the actual source of the problem.

Bernie is willing to say what is obviously true, that we don't need billionaires.

Assigning Value

Biden wants Bernie to be seen as obviously extreme. But is he?

We just had a candidate in the race that had half a billion dollars of literal pocket change. He will probably be as rich or richer at the end of the year as he was at the beginning of the race.

Moreover, Elizabeth Warren in a few simple sentences so destroyed this man's character that all that wealth could not overcome it, ending his run—clear proof that wealth does not measure virtue. Even given the strong tendency people seem to have to follow successful others, which is what seems to have gotten Trump elected, there are limits. As Sarah Kendzior so aptly says:

“When wealth is passed off as merit, bad luck is seen as bad character. This is how ideologues justify punishing the sick and the poor. But poverty is neither a crime nor a character flaw. Stigmatise those who let people die, not those who struggle to live.”    —Sarah Kendzior, in a 2013 essay Poverty is not a character flaw

All to say I don't think there is clearer proof that somewhere in our nation there is enough wealth to enable people to age with dignity: enabling them to be useful advisors and contributors to our society for more years, unlocking a lot of wealth and happiness. They can advise friends, family, and the community in personal and business matters. They can take care of grandkids. They can just not be a burden to younger people who are struggling themselves and might have to take time off for work.

Or we can say that it's more important, as a nation, to have a few Michael Bloombergs. My saying “a few” isn't casual. We cannot all be Michael Bloombergs. Of necessity, mega-wealth accumulates only in the hands of a few. The math only works that way. We're all taught we might one day be rich without bounds, but we should be taught that at some point increased wealth comes at the expense of others, and generally in a way that is disproportionate with actual value contributed to society. Whatever Bloomberg's positive contribution, he has not contributed that much more than other people.

Even if you think all his actions good, and that's up for debate, a lot of those actions are things any person with that money would have done, and are rightly attributed to the money, not the people. And many have done great goods for no reward. So while money is a crude metric of some amount of good people have done, we need to learn that it is not a precise measure and that we are not valueless nor these people with tons of money gods.

And that is what's being debated. Not just "social security" as words, but the values behind it. Our country generates wealth. We have allowed that wealth to flow to a few people, disproportionately. Our government is not a business. It is a group of our us that get together charged with administering a fair set of rules that allow everyone to succeed. The set of rules we have are out of balance, like a clothes dryer with the balance off. The term "wealth redistribution" is tossed around as if it's a bad thing, but it's like with the dryer, it will eventually stop if something is not done to get things back into harmony.

Social security is fair and humane, but it is also an assertion that in our quest to incentivize things as a rush for money, we have limits on how much one person may take from another. There is incentive enough in seeking millions, even many millions. There is little one can do with billions but buy governments or otherwise subvert the democratic will of the public.

That's what we're debating. Tax the rich to bring things back into harmony, or yield public control of resources on a bogus theory that over time we've realized we the public are nothing and only Bloomberg and his ilk have any entitlement to wealth for their amazing contributions.

Push is coming to shove. Billionaires are an active threat to the middle class. The GOP is actively teeing up exactly that conflict, daring Democrats to take that on. Bernie is up to it. That Biden paints Bernie as extreme suggests he's not.

Biden just isn't up to challenging billionaires' entitlement to the disproportionate wealth they have amassed. But without doing so, we'll run short of funds. At that point, we should fully well expect him to make the same choices he denies having made in the past.

So you perhaps understand why I've said I do not celebrate this “anyone but Trump” thing as a victory. I wanted Warren, but at this point, go Bernie!

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Author's Notes:

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The essay which became this post started as a post by me earlier today at reddit.

I also very much recommend Sarah Kendzior's book The View from Flyover Country.