The Struggle Continues

From an online article in The Smithsonian magazine

By R. T. Andrews

‘Lord, we ain’t what we oughta be. We ain’t what we want to be. We ain’t what we gonna be. But thank God, we ain’t what we was.’

That sentiment, expressed by Martin Luther King at an Emancipation centennial event in 1962, can be felt across much of the land this morning.

You could sense the nation’s collective sigh of relief last night as the country began the ceremonial transition, from its Tasmanian devil of a president and his wooden sidekick of a veep, to the reassuring presence of an Uncle Joe, accompanied by his potential rock star of a governing partner, Kamala Harris.

‘Lord, we ain’t what we oughta be. We ain’t what we want to be. We ain’t what we gonna be. But thank God, we ain’t what we was.’

The United States in 1862 was a nation literally at war with itself. Rebels were fighting to preserve a way of life that other parts of the country wanted to leave behind: chattel slavery, religious bigotry, nativism, xenophobia.

For the past four years it seems as if those alternative visions of the world were still being contested. Make America Great Again was a very thin code for a nostalgic call to a past where black people were underfoot, women were in the kitchen, gays were in the closet, and white men were ascendant, under precious few obligations of restraint. Police busted heads on the regular without fear of reprisal, women were silent over all manner of violation, shaming and disbelief being normal consequences for truth telling. Anything outside of an able bodied heterosexual white man was deviant and ‘less than’ by definition.

The irresistible forces of diversity — which is to say, the natural conditions of humankind — have been taking it on the chin and in the solar plexus these last four years. The assault has been played out relentlessly on the airwaves: governance by ego, rooted in confederate nostalgia and counterfeit reality, manipulated offstage as always by forces of unmitigated greed that produce historic wealth inequality.

While the trumpian coronavirus has been momentarily exorcised from the White House, its residence there did incalculable damage to the organs of America: our infrastructure of government, our politics, our society, and our culture.

To expect a Biden administration to restore the status quo that existed before trumpism entered the open sores of our society is fantasy. For the moment we can breathe more easily because the inflammation has receded, that incessant tweeting pain has subsided.

But COVID-19 is still here, wreaking havoc with our health and our economy. To defeat it will require and the immediate attention and intelligent aggression of the new administration, as well as patience by American citizens, who are already fatigued by mask-wearing, social distancing, Zoom meetings, and lost conveniences.

Patience has seldom been a virtue of our national character. While Trump fatigue may be in our rear view mirror, one early measure of the Biden administration will be its ability to forge sufficient consensus around mask-wearing and quarantines while an effective vaccine is developed and distributed.

That won’t be easy. The new president will have a thin margin in the House and implacable opposition in the Senate. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell may extend some good ol’ boy collegiality towards Biden, a former colleague, but he will continue to stand resolutely in the gap against anything remotely resembling progress.

Vice President-elect Kamala Harris superimposed upon the shadow of Norman Rockwell's
1964 illustration of six-year old Ruby Bridges as she was accompanied by US Marshals in the
desegregation of public schools in New Orleans.

Finally, a word on the new Vice President. It is of course far too early to tell, but her elevation to national leadership status may prove to be the most consequential harbinger of a new generation. Barack Obama cracked open a door in a notorious manner, ushering in a twenty-four second “post-racial” America that was immediately followed by in true American fashion by nativistic American backlash. But Kamala Harris, on the strength of black women, has eased into the sidecar seat, from which she is positioned both symbolically and realistically, to change the landscape irrevocably.

To put it another way, there was no guarantee that the Jackie Robinson experiment to integrate major league baseball would succeed. If Obama was Jackie, Kamala is Willie Mays and Roberto Clemente. There is no turning back.

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Cuyahoga Politics Today • Election Limbo: What we see

By R. T. Andrews

Urban/Suburban vs. Small Town Rural. White vs. Other. Red vs. Blue. Looking Back vs. Forging Ahead.  False Narratives vs. Reality. Unlogic vs. Logic.

One day after the election, with the final results for the winner of the Presidency unknown, it is difficult to say The United States of America without irony.

More than 150 million people voted nationally in this year’s election, including a record 5,761,200 votes had been cast in Ohio, according to data from the Ohio secretary of state’s website as of this afternoon.

As of this writing, former Vice President Joe Biden holds a projected Electoral College vote total of 264, with 270 needed to win. Biden’s total includes Arizona, Wisconsin and Michigan. If these projections hold, and Biden maintains his lead in Nevada, he will be the next President.

The remaining states where results are presently still in doubt include Pennsylvania, Georgia, and North Carolina. Trump won these states in 2016, and needs all of them this year to have any hope for re-election.

With the election still in doubt, Trump and his supporters are calling for a halt to continued vote counting in Pennsylvania, where his lead is diminishing, and are threatening to file suit to halt the process. His campaign has also filed suit to review the Michigan results.

With Biden nearing victory, and Trump having made plain that he will not accept such a result, concerns are shifting to how Republicans like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, and Vice President Mike Pence will respond to a presumptive Biden victory.

Ohio Election News

Perhaps the most significant statewide results come from the two Supreme Court races. Justice Sharon Kennedy defeated Cuyahoga County judge John P. O’Donnell by a margin of 55%-45%.  But Justice Judi French lost her re-election bid by roughly the same 55-45 ratio to challenger Jennifer Brunner, a Franklin County appellate judge and a former Ohio secretary of state.

The results narrow the Republican hold on the state’s highest court from 5-2 to 4-3.

Cuyahoga Results

While the state set a record for turnout, Cuyahoga County voters turned out at a less than impressive 67.85 rate, with 603,337 ballots cast out of 889,175 eligible voters, according to figures released by the county Board of Elections.

In a direct challenge to local area leaders, SEIU labor union spokesman Anthony Caldwell was quick to point a finger at Congresswoman Marcia Fudge, Cleveland mayor Frank Jackson, and various Democratic “leaders”, tweeting that they “showed no effort, yielded no votes.”

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This article originally appeared in The Real Deal Press. Republished with permission. 

Kamala Harris visits Cleveland in stretch run

Senator Kamala Harris speaks to a crowd at Cuyahoga Community College
Metro Campus on Saturday during whirlwind campaign stop in Cleveland.

Senator does not pull punch, uses rhetorical question to call out Trump as racist

By R. T. Andrews

U.S. Senator and Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Kamala Harris blitzed Cleveland Saturday afternoon as the countdown to the Nov. 3 presidential election entered its final ten days.

 

Her plane landed at Burke Lakefront Airport where Harris was met by a number of local officials including both Rep. Marcia Fudge and Rep. Marcy Kaptur, whose district stretches east from Toledo into Lakewood and western Cleveland. 

Following a brief stop at a clothing boutique in Lakewood, Sen. Harris's entourage, which included senior Biden adviser Symone Sanders, spent  about ten minutes outside the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections in downtown Cleveland. The Senator stood for in the middle of East 30th  and used a cordless mic to speak briefly to part of a massively long line of early voters snaked around the building on Euclid Avenue, down East 30th Street and around the block.

 
"It’s Kamala, and I came to Cleveland to say thank you! Thank you for voting and voting early. Your vote is your voice, your voice is your vote. There is so much at stake. Don’t let anyone ever take your power. The power of your voice is so important. You are going to make the difference. You are going to make the decision about your future, about your family’s future. It is through the voice of your vote. And you have the power — the power is with the people. … I just came to say thank you. Thank you, Cleveland."

This was the first Saturday you could vote early and in person in Cuyahoga County, and the Board of Elections is the only place you can do it.

The Senator's itinerary also included a stop at Zanzibar restaurant in downtown Cleveland where she met with a group of politically active black preachers.

Later in the afternoon, about 3:15, Sen. Harris spoke to about 50 people in a courtyard on the campus of Cuyahoga Community College. The speech was live streamed. 

One notable moment came when Harris talked about the crisis of systemic racism.

"So we're in the midst of a public health crisis, an economic crisis, and a long overdue reckoning on racial injustice in America. And on this issue, let's be clear, again two very clear choices. On the one hand you have Joe Biden, who has the courage and the commitment and the knowledge of America's history to speak the term 'Black Lives Matter.' On the other hand you have a Donald Trump, who will never speak those words. On the other hand you have a Donald Trump who stood on that debate stage last debate and refused to condemn white supremacists and then doubled down and said, 'Well, stand back and stand by.' And then people say, 'Well, you know do you think he's a racist?'"

The audience laughed a bit at this question, which Harris then answered. "Yes."

"Because you see," Harris continued, "we are also not just looking at one-off comments, we're looking at a pattern." She also mentioned Trump's "both sides" remarks after Charlottesville.

Harris finished her remarks at 3:39 pm and walked a short rope line saying hello to guests as a wonderful youth drumline played.

The Harris entourage, then returned to Burke Lakefront Airport where she took two questions before boarding her plane at 4:20 pm.

The first one was about what she heard from the people she interacted with today.

"That probably one of the highest and biggest concerns is what's happening in terms of the surge around the cases, the COVID cases," Harris responded. "And they want to know that we have a plan. They want to know that there is going to be some adherence to safe plans around not only modeling good behavior but also what we're going to do to get control of the virus around testing, contact tracing, distribution of a vaccine when we get a safe one, And then the economy. I mean one in six Ohio small businesses has shut down."

"These are real issues, big issues, and with no relief in sight," Harris added. "So that's what they want to know there's gonna be some leadership that sees them and understands what they're struggling with right now. And people are struggling with the basics, struggling with health care, struggling with rent, struggling with putting food on the table. And Joe and I, you know, listen, I mean, we believe that there is a solution, but you have to have leadership in place that takes a firm grasp on what's going on, speaks truth to the American people, embraces science, and then implements the plan. And our plan is about testing and treatment and contact tracing. But it's also about getting the economy, working back up again, but doing that in a safe and a smart way instead of denying the existence of this virus and like Donald Trump did ... saying we're rounding the corner. You look at anything that all of you are publishing and reporting — everybody knows we are not rounding the corner. There's a fight that we're dealing with right now. And we've had an utter failure of leadership out of Donald Trump."

Harris was then asked about Amy Coney Barrett's Supreme Court nomination.

"I am voting no," Harris confirmed. "I believe and have from the beginning it's an illegitimate process. … Joe Biden, and the American people, and I all agree that the people of our country should be able to complete this election, which is in 10 days, and then let the winner of the election make a decision about who will serve for a lifetime on the highest court in our land."

[Barrett was confirmed today with only Republican votes, the first in U.S. history a Supreme Court Justice has been so confirmed with not a single affirmative vote from the opposing party.]

Harris's plane took off from Burke Lakefront at about 4:35 pm. 

This story compiled largely from the pool reporting of Henry Gomez, political reporter for BuzzFeed News and a former politics reporter for the Plain Dealer.

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This article originally appeared in The Real Deal Press. Republished with permission.

DeWine walks tightrope in Thursday presser

By Marty Schladen

President Donald Trump meeting with governors, including Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine.
Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine on Thursday provided a glimpse of how difficult it is to be a traditional Republican officeholder in the era of Trump.

The governor has been holding regular press briefings since the spring, when the coronavirus began tightening its deadly grip around the Buckeye State. But on Thursday, he started off by deploring Tuesday’s presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, which has been almost universally panned as an uncivil shout fest. 

According to one count, the interruptions came at the rate of one a minute, and Trump was the interrupter 75% of the time. Trump also stirred controversy by refusing to condemn a right-wing hate group, unleashed a torrent of false claims about the integrity of the vote, and again refused to say that he would accept the independently certified results of an election that polls say he is currently losing.

On Thursday, DeWine reiterated his support for Trump while criticizing the debate generically.

“The debate itself was not our country’s finest hour,” the governor said, adding that “The name calling by both sides simply is not helpful,” and criticizing “hate groups of both the right and the left.”

That DeWine criticized the debate at all is a little jarring in light of his post-debate tweet.

“A great job tonight by @realdonaldtrump!” it said. “Congratulations to tonight’s sponsors @cwru and @ Cleveland Clinic on hosting on a great debate.”

The governor’s critics accused him of both-sides-ism, especially as he and Lt. Gov Jon Husted again sought to reassure Ohioans that their election system is safe and fair. After all, only one of the candidates — Trump — has railed relentlessly and without evidence that mail-in ballots are vulnerable to rampant fraud.

“We have run fair elections in Ohio for a long, long time and I think it’s important on both sides — let’s not presuppose that we’re going to have a problem when both parties have an interest in having a fair election,” DeWine said, adding, “Voters should have confidence in Ohio that their vote is going to get counted.”

During the debate, Trump also fanned worries about voter intimidation when he made unsupported claims of election stealing and urged supporters to  “go into the polls and watch very carefully.”

Apparently responding to those worries, DeWine again couched his warning in terms of both sides.

“We have an obligation to make sure that people of the right and left who want to create a disturbance, who don’t believe in the rule of law, who believe that violence should take over, that that is dealt with,” he said.

Perhaps the most striking is DeWine’s unwillingness again to criticize Trump for refusing to say he’ll respect the independently certified results of the election. That refusal has aroused profound dismay among some observers of the international scene.

Asked last week if he condemned an earlier refusal by Trump to promise to abide by the results of the election, DeWine said, “I don’t condemn anything. I don’t know what’s in his heart or in his mind.”

Asked again whether he condemned Trump’s statements from last week as well as those from the debate, DeWine again declined.

“Whoever loses, once it’s determined that they’ve lost, they lose,” the governor said.

He talked about contested presidential elections in 1960 and 2000. In neither case did the losers, Richard Nixon and Al Gore, refuse in advance to say that they would respect the result, but DeWine cited those as precedents for this year’s contest.

“Whoever loses will concede,” He said. “This is what we do as Americans. This is what we do. This is what we expect and that’s the name of the game.”

Pressed further on whether he would criticize things Trump has said and done in recent weeks, DeWine betrayed how difficult his situation must be.

“Press conference after press conference, I get asked about different comments made by the president or somebody else,” the president’s Ohio co-chair said. “I’m not here to answer every single thing the president says.

“I think I’ve been very clear throughout my career and throughout my time as governor what I believe in and what we will do. It’s not just what I believe in. It’s not just what I say. And so we’ll continue to speak out against violence. We’ll continue to speak out against anything that disrupts the fairness of the election. We’ll continue to speak out against hatred, violence. That’s what my job is. My job is not every single day to critique the president of the United States, or is it to critique Joe Biden. If there’s another president in there in January I’ll have the same attitude.”

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This story is provided by Ohio Capital Journal, a part of States Newsroom, a national 501 (c)(3) nonprofit. See the original story here.

COMMENTARY: Trump is ancient history.

Kamala Harris is America as it is now

By John L. Micek

WASHINGTON, DC - JUNE 16: U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) speaks during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing to examine issues involving race and policing practices in the aftermath of the death in Minneapolis police custody of George Floyd and the civil unrest that followed. (Photo by Jonathan Ernst-Pool/Getty Images)

If there is a more authentically American story than the one of U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, you’d have to make it up.

On Tuesday, the California Democrat, the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, became the first Black woman in American history to be named to a presidential ticket. And across the United States on Tuesday, Black women, who saw themselves reflected in Harris’ eyes, rejoiced.

“I’m so excited I can hardly talk,” former Philadelphia City Council member Marian B. Tasco told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “For us to have an African American woman be a candidate for vice president, that is just so exciting for me, having worked so long in the political arena.”

Harris, 55, who made national headlines with her briskly efficient evisceration of then-U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh in 2018, emerged as an early favorite in the veepstakes when former Vice President Joe Biden announced he intended to choose a woman, likely a woman of color, as his running-mate.

It’s long past absurd that America stands nearly alone in the industrialized world for never having put a woman in the Oval Office — and yes, Clintonistas, I hear you, the popular vote numbers in 2016 said it all. That does not mean Harris joining the 2020 ticket is any less epochal.

Harris, who enjoyed a close relationship with Biden’s son, the late Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden, when she was the Golden State’s top cop, survived a culling process that sometimes threatened to be reduced to a mere popularity contest as various — and vastly qualified — contenders waxed and waned.

As The Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty wrote Wednesday, the very qualities that some believe hampered Harris’ short-lived presidential bid — that she is cautious and deliberate — are the very attributes that make her an ideal running-mate for Biden, who will benefit from her counsel should he win the White House in November.

But crucially, in choosing Harris, Biden picked a running-mate who will meet where the country where it is now: A multiracial and multiethnic republic, where the voices of Black and Brown people have been raised and are, rightfully, prominent, and who will shortly become the majority of the population.

Harris, like President Barack Obama before her, brings an intimate knowledge and understanding of that changing America.

During last August’s Democratic debate, she took Biden to the woodshed over his opposition to busing,  forcefully arguing that it was a ticket to opportunity for hundreds of thousands of Black children just like her. She and Biden later mended fences over that televised moment of confrontation.

While she’s not without her flaws — Harris has been forced to reconcile her calls for police reform during this tumultuous summer of change against her career in law enforcement — Harris is a living refutation of the crass and hateful nativism of the Trump administration.

As he has struggled to brand Biden, a nickname that won’t be printed here was changed in a new round of ads that debuted Tuesday, Trump will similarly struggle to brand Harris.

That’s due in part to changing American attitudes about race and race relations (a majority of Americans support the Black Lives Matter movement), but also because of the policy ground Harris has staked out during her time in the Senate.

Like Biden, a Senate veteran before his ascension to the vice presidency in 2008, Harris is largely a moderate Democrat who will defy Trump’s efforts to paint her as some empty vessel for the party’s progressive wing.

Trump has so far failed to tar Biden with that same brush, though that has not stopped the Conspiracist-in-Chief from trying to craft a Bizarro World Biden who’s held in thrall by The Squad.

Nor is it likely that Harris will wilt in the face of any presidential Twitter storm. Her questioning of Kavanaugh reminded the nation of her prosecutorial bona fides. They were cemented with Twitter shade of her own, when she clapped back at Trump “Don’t worry, Mr. President, I’ll see you at your trial.”

And it’s safe to say she will deal with Vice President Mike Pence with equal precision in any veep debate this fall.

Finally, though it seems grim to talk about it, Harris has the experience and expertise to step in if Biden, who will be 78 by the time of his possible inauguration in January, is incapacitated and unable to serve.

Biden has described himself as a “transitional candidate.” And in Harris he has found an ideal partner to whom to pass the baton.

As much as Trump has tried to move the country backwards, putting up walls, withdrawing America from the world stage, and hearkening back to a segregated past, Harris is a living reminder that the arc of history is always forward-moving.

She’s America as it is now, and will be in the decades to come. Trump is an unpleasant chapter the country can’t move past quickly enough.

This story is provided by Ohio Capital Journal, a part of States Newsroom, a national 501 (c)(3) nonprofit. See the original story here. John L. Micek is the Pennsylvania Capital-Star's Editor-in-Chief. Micek's commentary is syndicated to more than 800 newspapers nationwide by Cagle Syndicate.

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Why do so many blacks back Biden?

Why do so many blacks back Biden?

— Seattle woman succinctly ‘splains

This post by Seattle resident Laurie Goff goes a long way to explain why black people are willing to overlook some troubling aspects of former Vice President Joe Biden’s political career. In less than sixty seconds she gets closer to the heart of the matter than so many of the talking cable heads:

“Let me explain something to you about Joe Biden and why some of the shit that he’s done in his past doesn’t matter. This old rich white man played second fiddle to a black man. Not just any black man, but a younger black man, a smart black man. Not just for a day. Not 1, not 2 but eight years. He took his cues from this black man who had more power than him and was virtually unknown when he took the presidency, and Joe Biden had been around forever. He was willing and proud to be his wing man. Not once did he try to undermine him, this black man. Instead Joe walked in lockstep with him, he respected him, he loved and trusted him. He was led by him and he learned from him. And Joe did not have a problem with it. You tell me what 40+ year “establishment” white politician has ever done that. Joe Biden is cut from a different cloth. And black folks understand that and for good reason. He has shown it. This is what showing up and being an ally looks like. When black people say they know Joe, this is how we know.” 

— Laurie Goff

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