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MAR
03
Chris Matthews’ short goodbye
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
MAR
03
IT’S A STANDING truism of our lives: Things happen fast after taking forever to happen at all. Chris Matthews knows this firsthand. The longtime student of and reporter on American politics is, lately, an accidental victim of the evolution of our sexual politics, and the way men and women relate to each other — the way we live now. Not all those halcyon years ago. Matthews’ political program, Hardball, was for 20 years a program that hard-wired Washington’s cutthroat political culture to the eyes and brains of a wide cable audience, first on CNBC, then later on MSNBC, where the program Matthews hosted was a mainstay of weekday programming. Matthews’ breathless, take-no-prisoners style was a fixture of the program, whose early iterations revealed his healthy bipartisan delight in skewering windbags and those with pre-packaged agendas. Matthews’ show was suddenly, unceremoniously canceled on Monday, March 2, on the eve of what was expected to be
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MAR
02
LAAK (Los Angeles after Kobe)
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
MAR
02
I GREW UP with the man!” Someone shouting on the Willowbrook-Rose Parks Blue Line train platform put the city’s loss into a personal perspective on Sunday, Jan. 26. The death of Los Angeles Lakers superstar Kobe Bean Bryant, along with his eldest daughter, Gianna, and seven others that day in a helicopter accident in Calabasas, Calif., was truly a generational event. Never mind Kobe’s own tender age of 41. The ages of the others who perished in the crash — from 13 to 56 — made this an equal opportunity dasher of hopes. That accidental diversity of disaster had a happier parallel in the city itself. Almost as soon as the news went up, all the day of the crash and every day in local media after that, you were pleasantly struck by the breadth of diversity reflected everywhere. In the streets of downtown, on the trains around the city, on buses in Gardena and storefronts in Compton, Angelenos paid their respects. Tributes to Kobe and friends even in
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JUL
14
This is America. This is not America
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
JUL
14
There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and blood filled than are the people of the United States, at this very hour. — Frederick Douglass, "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" CERTAIN TRAGEDIES are so immense, so numbly overwhelming that they seem impossible to get the mind around. The sheer breadth of their impact, the callous brazenness that led to their creation beggars the imagination. Words, language, fail you. We confront the weight of self-inflicted tragedies like that with the quick fix of patriotism, the rationalization of something done in the National Interest. The Fourth of July is good for that. It’s conveniently difficult to recognize agony when fireworks and brass bands are blasting their way into your attention span. But some atrocities aren’t subject to interpretation and spin, some will not go quietly, some demand to be seen for what they are. The evolving t
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JUL
09
Swalwell drops out
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
JUL
09
HE DID IT knowingly, if not willingly, and fully aware of the rhetorical snark that would come back to bite him. With his withdrawal from the 2020 presidential race on July 8, California Rep. Eric Swalwell has passed the torch, handed off that grand American aspiration to someone else — TBD. If you saw the second presidential debate in Miami, you know Swalwell’s hijacking of that phrase by former vice president Joe Biden, Swalwell’s once-challenger for the nomination, was a club the young Californian tried to bash Biden with. It was Swalwell’s way of announcing — to the people at the Arsht Performing Arts Center and the world — that he was ready to lead the generational change he and others his age and younger have been calling for — to receive that torch as the 2020 nominee. It wasn’t to be. “Today ends our presidential campaign, but it is the beginning of an opportunity in Congress,” Swalwell said in a news conference,
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JUL
04
Kamala rising
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
JUL
04
WHAT A DIFFERENCE a debate makes. This time last week, California Sen. Kamala Harris was consistently positioned in fourth or fifth place in the more consequential opinion polls, part of the fab five that’s become the consensus of voting respondents ... but always clinging to that last rung of the ladder. Former Obama vice president Joe Biden was the top of the pops in the polling by commanding margins, all but lapping the field. It’s been Biden and everyone else, with the former veep floating above the others by double digits. But in politics, as in the physical world, defiance of gravity is a transient experience. You can pull it off for a while, but sooner or later, the glide path to a sure thing falls apart. Turbulence is the one thing that’s reliable. Kamala Harris was there to capitalize — via her own hard work and Biden’s lack of the same — when that happened on June 27 in Miami. The result: four successive post-debate polls that, in
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JUN
29
Speed sniping in Miami: The second Democratic debate
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
JUN
29
BEFORE WE knew who the players would be, there was the temptation to call the first night of a multi-night Democratic debate series “the undercard.” This year’s was different. With its own singular mix of progressive, mainstream and established political personalities, the first debate at the Adrienne Arsht Performing Arts Center had a weight, a velocity of its own. Depending on what you were looking for in a prospective candidate, the undercard could have been the main event. But there’s no getting around it: On the basis of polling response, donations raised and name recognition, Thursday night held more of the heaviest hitters in the 2020 presidential campaign. And the principals — Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, Michael Bennet, Andrew Yang, Kirsten Gillibrand, Marianne Williamson, Eric Swalwell and John Hickenlooper — all knew that a lot was at stake. So the gloves came off early on Thursday night. Health care was
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JUN
27
Speed dating in Miami: The first Democratic debate
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
JUN
27
WHEN THE smoke cleared after the first Democratic debate on Wednesday night, once the after-action reports came in from the Adrienne Arsht Performing Arts Center, it was clear the first firefight in a long campaign was pretty much the rhetorical bullet festival everyone expected. But there were some notable exceptions — survivors that many observers thought were finished. Anything can happen: that unavoidable takeaway from the first candidates’ debate, on Tuesday, should be a signal for the next debate round, on Thursday. In the raw, unscripted punch-ups of a crowded pre-primary campaign, another kind of conflict is in play: With the first debate in the books, it’s clear that candidates are sharpening their distinctions one from another. So far, this hasn’t warfare as much as it is speed dating among rivals for the electorate’s heart and the media’s attention. ◊ ◊ ◊ The first 10 in the tank – New Jersey Senator Cory Booke
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JUN
26
Duty, honor, country, subpoena
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
JUN
26
IN ALL THE noisy anticipation of the first Democratic candidates debate, it almost slipped off the radar, almost: On Tuesday, June 25, House Democrats announced that, after two years of working, silent as the Sphinx, toward completion of the ominously eponymous Mueller Report, the former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III will finally come from behind the curtain and speak to the American people, in his own voice, on July 17th at 9 a.m. at the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, D.C. The heretofore quietest man in Washington is breaking his two-year silence (minus 9-1/2 minutes) with what amounts to a Robert Mueller Residency: two appearances the same day, before the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees. It might be (as he’s already promised) the rhetorical equivalent of watching paint dry, but the country needs to hear it just the same. The previous standout Marine officer has previously said he didn’t want to do it. In his short public statement
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JUN
26
Pecking disorder: Diversity, inclusion and the Democratic debates
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
JUN
26
THE CRAZY quilt lineups for the first two Democratic presidential debates, in Miami, June 26 and 27, are already instructive in a constructive way, without a word said by anyone. With frontrunners cheek to jowl with also-rans and walking rounding errors, the debates on Wednesday and Thursday will be a raucous, panoramic example of democracy at its best, or certainly its most wide open. For starters, this time there’s no undercard, no kid’s table, like we had in the Ring cycle of primary debates in 2016. The demographic hurly-burly of modern America is boiled down into two debates that promise to be a jumble of styles and substances. Fight Night #1 Cory Booker Julian Castro Amy Klobuchar Elizabeth Warren Beto O’Rourke Tulsi Gabbard Bill De Blasio Tim Ryan Jay Inslee John Delaney Fight Night #2 Joe Biden Bernie Sanders Pete Buttigieg Kamala Harris Michael Bennet Andrew Yang Kirsten Gillibrand Marianne Williamson Eric Swalwell John Hi
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JUN
26
Sausage making according to Joe Biden
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
JUN
26
Hair caught fire in Democratic circles last week, and a statement from Joe Biden, the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, was both the spark and accelerant. With one or two words, Biden strayed again out on the American third rail of race, but made a deeper point that eluded much of the media, most of the candidates, and nearly all of the national conversation. A lot of our understanding of Biden’s statement at a New York City fundraiser on June 18 has been undercut by the way it’s been edited, to suit the breathless shorthand dictates of television news and tweet-era attention spans. Consider the full statement, in which Biden attempted to drive home the importance of being able to negotiate in a sometimes hostile environment of a divided Congress, and to express how he navigated those waters in the past ... Read the full essay at Medium
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JUN
11
Along intraparty lines
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
JUN
11
We're still a year and a half from the election, and the 2020 campaign has already been a shape-shifting thing, with the biggest Democratic field in history, and a Republican president determined to prove that he and he alone can defy political gravity, a second time. The Democratic herd will thin itself out, of course; it’s subject to the same law of political thermodynamics as the president*: things fall apart. Majorities narrow. Bedrock constituencies have second thoughts. Lately, everyday GOPeople have done just that, pushing back against the transmitted wisdom of the Republican church. From those occupying the seats in Congress to the ones in folding chairs at town halls, Republicans are starting to think for themselves vis-à-vis Trump's legislative agenda, and who on the other side might be in a position to stop it a year from November. That fact will be problematical for a White House determined to establish a sense of Republican invincibility, behind a si
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JUN
05
Pelosi's dilemma
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
JUN
05
REP. JERRY Nadler, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, announced on June 3 the intent to vote to find Attorney General and presidential tool William Barr in contempt in Congress. That happened the day before the committee issued subpoenas to former White House communications director and Trump whisperer Hope Hicks, and to Amy Donaldson, one-time chief of staff to former White House Counsel Don McGahn. They're the latest moves in the attempt to continue the ostensible fact-finding into wrongdoing by President* Trump, fact-finding that many House Democrats and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi want completed before they even consider the process of Trump’s impeachment -- a process that, in meaningful respects, has already begun in fact, if not in name. Speaker Pelosi has presided over much to'ing and fro'ing about pursuit of "the I word" by the members of the Democratic-majority House of Representatives. This strum und drang is happening mostly because Pelosi and mo
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MAY
28
Expediting justice, like it or not
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
MAY
28
THE WHEELS of justice grind slow but grind fine,” Sun Tzu observed in The Art of War. That observation is a truism nowadays, and has been for a long time, but even that reality has exceptions. Sometimes, justice doesn’t just take its sweet time for its own sake; President* Donald Trump is learning that justice gets fast-tracked now and then — despite his best efforts and those of his proxies to keep that from happening. House Trump is dealing with the inconvenience of that occasional judicial efficiency. Politico, for example, reported on May 23 that Trump’s fight to stop release of his financial records is being fast-tracked for a three-judge appellate panel to make a pivotal decision. From Politico: “In a two-page order, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals’ judges scheduled oral arguments for July 12 in the case that pits the president’s attorneys against House Democrats, who issued a subpoena to the accounting firm Mazars USA for eight
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MAY
25
Pelosi's head game
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
MAY
25
HOUSE SPEAKER Nancy Pelosi reacted recently to the stonewalling of the Trump White House with a statement that was slyly provocative, almost genially subversive. Speaking May 22 at an annual Center for American Progress conference in Washington, Pelosi related what happened at what was supposed to be a frank discussion about infrastructure with President* Trump and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. “In an orchestrated — almost to an 'oh, poor baby' point of view — he came into the room and said that I said that he was engaged in a cover-up and he couldn't possibly engage in a conversation on infrastructure as long as we are investigating him,” Pelosi told the audience. That “cover-up” statement is about as close as Pelosi will get to a full-on shrieking call for impeachment. The statement didn’t exactly breathe rhetorical fire, but it didn’t have to. Trump’s reaction to it — a flurry of tweets, a mandatory chorus o
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MAY
25
Donald Trump’s great cascade
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
MAY
25
DONALD TRUMP has spent more time in getaway weekend mode than any modern predecessor in the Oval Office, but he earned some time away from the office this holiday weekend. He didn't decamp for Mar-a-Lago, his usual haunt, with Melania in tow. Trump, wife and associates instead left for Japan, to meet with Prime Minister Abe and to meet Emperor Naruhito and Empress Masako, the first to ascend the Chrysanthemum Throne in more than 30 years. It's just as well he left town. The fuselage door to Air Force One closed behind a president* with more than the usual bad news to be obsessed over. Some of it will be especially unwelcome, since it calls into question the power, if not the existence, of The Base that Trump has relied on since his term began. Writing in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1986, James W. Mold and Howard F. Stein, of the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, defined the term “cascade” (in biological context) as a reference to “a proc
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MAY
14
Getting out of line: Four departures from the partisan
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
MAY
14
WE PROBABLY shouldn’t have wondered. When you spend enough time in the bizzaro world of presidential politics, anything, it seems, can happen. Anything at all. The one undying catechism of Republican identity in Trumptime, the absolute enduring reality is that the Republicans, from rank & file to leadership, constitute a solid wall for support for President* Trump in particular, and the Republican / conservative agenda generally. But few things monkey-wrench a rule like a real-world, working exception to that rule. Or four of them. Within the last month, four things happened that call into question the willingness of conservatives — from everyday-people Republicans in two deep-red states to lawmakers on Capitol Hill — to abide by the expected Republican orthodoxy of behavior toward those on the other side. There’s been listening going on, and maybe even a reach, back and forth, across the aisle. ◊ ◊ ◊ On April 15, Bernie Sanders, the Ve
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MAY
02
Biden's in. Deal with it.
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
MAY
02
AMERICA IS an idea,” Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. told us in the campaign video from the Biden web site, the web site that indicated like nothing else could that, as of April 25, the former vice president was officially joining the 2020 presidential conversation, making his bid to reclaim the American idea from its captors, foreign and domestic. In the video, Biden speaks over footage of the deadly 2017 neo-Nazi marches in Charlottesville, Virginia, describing those involved as having “crazed faces, illuminated by torches.” “And that’s when we heard the words of the president of the United States. He said there were quote ‘some very fine people on both sides.’” Biden slowly repeats the words “very fine people.” He then said that, with those words, “the president of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it. And in that moment, I knew
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APR
21
The misinformation: William Barr's redaction of truth
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
APR
21
IT WAS ALL supposed to be clean, neat, surgical. The newly-minted Attorney General William Barr would deign to read the overwhelming volume of the 400+ pages of the Mueller Report so we wouldn't have to. Barr, previously hailed as the last institutionalist left alive in Washington, would burn up a weekend to consume the report, and release its findings in a breathtakingly short four! page! summary that would satiate critics of President* Trump, burnish Barr's sterling reputation, and calm the turbulent waters roiling the moats around House Trump. All would be well in the fullness of time. Only it ... didn't turn out that way. What's been developing, or metastasizing, ever since in Washington and the nation has been a growing unease with Barr, President* Trump, and an increasingly brazen willingness to disregard the Constitution in the service of a single president. Barr, once the ostensible new adult on the block, has dug in his heels and refused to release the unexpurgated work
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APR
17
Bernie in the Fox's den
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
APR
17
BERNIE SANDERS turned up on Fox News on Monday night. No, that's not a typo nor a hallucination. The self-described Democratic socialist seeking the presidency for the second time was the guest of honor at a Fox News town hall in Bethlehem, Pa., a kind of Daniel in the lion's den that Roger Ailes built (and unfriendly confines for a liberal of any pedigree). But the fire Sanders brought to his questioners, Bret Baier and Martha McCallum, and the upbeat reception many in the audience gave him, point to a sea change that could make the primary season (at least) an interesting time. Sanders' appearance was one of the more profound shots fired in the still-nascent 2020 presidential campaign, and coming as it did on television, it almost certainly won't be the last of its kind. It got people's attention. The Sanders town hall attracted 2.55 million viewers, with 489,000 of them in the holy grail demographic sweet spot of ages 25 to 54. His audience drew the biggest viewership of the t
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APR
17
Thinning the herd: Donations, Democrats and the process of elimination
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
APR
17
HAVE YOU launched your Democratic presidential campaign yet? That question has its roots in the political reality of the 2020 cycle; the Democratic field is as crowded now as it's been in a generation, with 17 contenders either formally in the race for the White House or seriously considering a bid. But the 2020 contest, like every other such campaign, will be subject to its own attrition, and probably sooner rather than later. If the April 15th finance-tracking report from Politico is to be believed, that winnowing process is already underway, with the electorate making its choices by way of the wallet instead of in the voting booth. The frontrunners at this time are, in some ways, the usual suspects, the ones whose campaigns either started early or benefited from some buzz or another. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the elder statesman of the season (by virtue of running in 2016 and not because of his age) was out in front with $20.7 million, followed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren ($16.5
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APR
03
Watch Kamala Harris. Now keep watching.
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
APR
03
Don’t fall asleep on Kamala Harris. The Democratic California senator, who jumped out front as a declared candidate for the presidency, has been quietly going about her business since her splashy Oakland campaign rollout in January, when Harris both announced her candidacy and set the emotional bar for the campaign — a deft blend of ebullience and duty — that no other Democrat in the race has matched yet. Other candidates have announced since then, like Beto O’Rourke, the early imagistic darling of the 2020 race. Others haven’t formally announced but might as well have; South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg, a startlingly nimble, intellectual force seemingly come out of nowhere, comes to mind. But modern American politics needs money; modern American presidential politics demands it. Cash flow buys a campaign time and space, and imparts the credibility of staying visible. Money keeps the lights on in the office of a presidential dream ... and
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MAR
30
Trump and the price of vengeance
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
MAR
30
IT IS NOT enough that I succeed, others must fail,” said Genghis Khan, the 12th century superdespot who inspired merciless boardroom tactics, equally merciless dictators, and the taste for vengeance savored by the current occupant of the Oval Office. All the punditalk about a possible overreach by House Democrats in the wake of the pending release of the Mueller report pales in comparison to the proven overreach of President* Donald Trump, doing a protracted victory lap over apparently prevailing in that closed-but-not-closed investigation. Trump can’t celebrate a win for its own sake; chaos and conflict are the twin north stars of his persona and his psyche. And now, in the wake of victory, Trump has reanimated conflict with an old foe to address a new enemy. With the potential Richter-scale disclosures in the Mueller report now largely downplayed by Attorney General William Barr’s Cliff’s Notes synopsis of the Mueller report, the president* hasn’t
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MAR
26
Democrats, democracy and the shock of the new
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
MAR
26
THE PROCESS of making a magazine cover doesn’t happen overnight. It’s an endeavor of weeks and sometimes months in preparation, the result of an army of creatives marching, for a minute, in exactly the same direction. By that fact, then, there was no reason to be coy about whether or not Robert Francis O’Rourke of Texas was going to seek the presidency. A publisher like Vanity Fair doesn’t commit to a cover story (and Annie Liebovitz taking the photos!) about someone just pulling his chin about the presidency — like so many in the emerging 2020 cycle. You’re in or you’re out. And O’Rourke’s been in since before that VF cover was published; there was no other reason to put him there. And in that magazine profile, the phenom Beto O’Rourke set the table, and the bar, for every Democrat who’s serious about winning next year. “I think that’s the beauty of elections: You can’t hide from who you are,&rdq
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MAR
03
'We have got to get back to normal': Elijah Cummings' redemption song
By:
Michael E. Ross
on
MAR
03
EVERY SO often, someone rides to the rescue of America with a cri du Coeur from an unexpected place and puts things in a perspective we couldn’t, or wouldn’t, see coming. In June 1954, during the dangerous travesty of the Joe McCarthy era, when a voice of sanity was desperately needed from ... anywhere, Joseph Welch, chief counsel to the United States Army during the Army-McCarthy hearings, stepped up and confronted the apostate Republican senator from Wisconsin with one blazingly honest distilling of outrage: “You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency? It’s been said, in a kind of acclimation, that this was the moment when the McCarthy vilification machine began to grind its gears and fall apart, ending one of the more ruinous episodes in American political history. ◊ ◊ ◊ The three-ring dumpster-fire train wreck of the Trump administration hasn’t given us many unalloyed pro
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