Electoral votes to date: Biden 238, Trump 216, with 84 uncalled.
It’s been a long night. In addition to watching the election returns, our French Bull pup, Zelda, had an allergic reaction to something and we had to rush her to the local pet ER. She is fine and we are back home.
In the presidential election, former vice-president Joe Biden currently has 238 votes and Trump has 216, with 84 votes across six states still uncalled. But looking at the current lay of the land at this later hour, it is my strong contention that Joe Biden will be the next President of the United States. It is simply going to take a day or two for the vote counting to get to a point where the various decision desks can project that victory. But the trends in his favor are quite strong.
I think his national popular vote margin will, in the end, exceed five million (possibly more); and he looks to be on track to win back Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. The fact that he has won Arizona (as called by the AP and by Fox News) tells me his chances in Georgia are pretty good. Having both of these in the blue column would be significant: Only one Democrat has won Arizona since 1948 (Clinton in 1996), and no Democrat has won Georgia since 1992 (also Clinton).
Unfortunately, this is not going to be the landslide blowout the country needed in order to completely repudiate Trump and his dangerous brand of authoritarianism. And he is likely to fight some of these results – because, you know, that’s what authoritarians do.
But over the next week or so, when the dust settles and Trump’s cry-baby antics go nowhere, Joe Biden will be our next president. It’s just going to take a little extra time to get to that call.
I think the chances are pretty slim that Trump and his campaign can once again thread the “popular vote loss/electoral vote victory” needle of four years ago. But, unlike 1992, 1996, 2008, and 2012, my sense of a pending victory for the Democratic presidential ticket is almost non-existent this year. This is likely related to the 2016 election PTSD many of us suffer from. And I have to keep reminding myself that 2020 is most certainly not 2016. The general fundamentals point to a win for the Biden/Harris ticket: economic hardship, high unemployment, a deadly national crisis of historic proportions. If you look at just the last eight months, separate from the previous three and a half years, I just don’t see how our country would opt for a second term of narcissistic and lethal incompetence.
Yet, I’m torn. My gut is telling me this will not be the landslide we need it to be; yet my head is telling me that the tremendous early vote we are seeing has to mean that Americans are fed up and are lining up in large numbers because they want to get rid of this guy.
Sigh! We’ll know whether my gut or my head were right in a few hours. I have an idea as to how things will go down, but I will not publish any predictions here. In fact, the blog will be silent until such a time that a winner is called, or such a time that it becomes obvious that a winner will not be declared before morning.
Quite literally, the future of our republic is at stake in tomorrow’s election. A second term for Donald Trump would be devastating, if not lethal, for the United States and her Constitution.
Our choice tomorrow will determine whether the United States of America can be saved, and her status as the world’s strongest democratic republic recalibrated, or whether she will no longer exist as a free state and become permanently entrenched as another failed democracy, a 244 year experiment crashing to a devastating close.
Authoritarianism vs. Our Beloved Democratic Republic: During the early morning hours of Wednesday, 09 November 2016, the morning after that year’s presidential election, awake after only a few hours of sleep following the late night call of a Trump victory, I opened up my iPad and read that President Obama had called Donald Trump to congratulate him on his unexpected victory and extended an invitation to visit to the White House. At that moment, a tidal wave of emotion spilled from my sleep-deprived psyche. I started sobbing; a gut-wrenching, breathtaking, long cry of anguish.
This wasn’t the cry of a partisan who simply wanted his candidate to win; it wasn’t even the pain of an American who wanted to see a woman elected president. It was the cry of an American who knew exactly what his country had done, the turn it had made toward a hard right form of authoritarianism. I knew that the 2016 election, no matter what the final result looked like, had changed the country for the worse – that the U.S. I grew up in had taken a turn from which it might very well never recover. The subsequent four years have solidified those fears.
The constitutional right to freedom of the press is in danger; the media is the enemy of the state; conspiracy theories rule over facts and science; racial, religious, and ethnic diversity are considered a threat, and aggressive violence against such diversity is advocated by the leader of the country; the right of every American to vote is questioned and those who support the opposition are considered traitors; the chief executive believes he is above the law and in fact frequently (almost daily) breaks it while his partisan supporters in both houses of congress look the other way.
These Republicans, from Trump on down, are not patriots, no matter how much they huff and puff that they are. They are in fact the polar opposite of an American patriot. They personify the very form of authoritarianism that our grandfathers fought against in World War II. That is not the assessment of a partisan who is upset at the results of a national election (had the Republican victor been Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio, my disappointment wouldn’t have been so deep), but rather it is the assessment of an American who understands history and understands that our republic will remain only so long as we will have it. Never under previous Republican presidents, not even under George W. Bush, did I fear for the future of the republic; never under previous Republican presidents did I fear that our Constitution was at risk of being jettisoned.
Donald Trump, his Republican allies in both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, and his authoritarian-leaning supporters down at the state and local levels must be defeated tomorrow. And it needs to be a landslide of hefty proportions, lest their ilk think they can ever try their anti-American shit ever again.
COVID-19: On the issue of the pandemic, I am not sure how any sane American could look at Trump’s performance and then say to themselves, “Yeah, you know what? We need another four year of this.” Since the beginning of the year, hundreds of thousands of Americans have died from this virus – and it is my contention that Trump is directly responsible for the vast majority of those deaths. His decision to eliminate the pandemic team President Obama put in place several years ago, his refusal to listen to actual doctors and scientists (even his own!), and his sociopathic inability to feel empathy for anyone or anything confirm what I argued four years ago: This man has no business being president of the United States.
This coronavirus crisis has proven beyond any doubt that his incompetence is so very dangerous and so far off the charts. His refusal to accept the facts as they are, and his insistence that a national shut down or even a national mask mandate are not needed (because, you know, the virus would go away like magic – it will be “like a miracle,” he said) has led directly to the unnecessary deaths of over 200,000 Americans. For that alone Trump should have been impeached, removed from office, and forced to live his remaining days in a dark hole somewhere.
I mean, come on! In an alternate universe somewhere, President Hillary Clinton was impeached this past summer by a Republican-led House over 3,000 COVID deaths.
Alas, Trump was not impeached over his incompetence on this matter, and as such, voters need to send a clear message tomorrow by handing Joe Biden a solid victory.
Our Only Hope: Full disclosure: I have been a fan of Joe Biden’s for a long time. He was my first choice in the 2008 Democratic primary field, but I never got the chance to vote for him in that contest because he dropped out before my state’s presidential primary. My allegiance then switched to Barack Obama, and I was over the moon when Mr. Obama put Mr. Biden on the Democratic Party’s presidential ticket that year.
My attraction to Mr. Biden, I believe, comes down to the simple fact that he is an American everyman – he’s your father, your grandfather, your brother; he’s the white collar neighbor next door and the blue collar neighbor across the street; he’s the first one at your house when a friend is needed, and the last one to leave after he’s confident you’ll be ok (and then he’ll call you the next day to check in). He’s “Joe” – love or hate his politics, you can’t help but love the man.
Sure, many people feel, as Andrew Sullivan put it recently, that Biden is “a bit of an irritating blowhard who rarely took the chance to edit himself. He was a classic slap-on-the-back backroom pol, with an everyman-on-the-train vibe, who loved the ornaments of public office…”
Sure, I get it. But no one is perfect – not you, not me, not any of the 44 men who have held the office of the presidency. But with Joe Biden we get competence and steadiness; we get empathy and dignity; we get a true American with a heart and a soul and a desire to take America back from the forces of incompetence and hate and put her back on the course of steadiness and a better future.
After four years of narcissism and incompetence – a rather lethal combination – it is time for the United States to acknowledge they made a terrible mistake in 2016 and make a much needed course change.
My sincerest hope is that voters will arrive at their polling places tomorrow much as they did in 1980 – angry and sour at the state of our nation – and vote the incumbent out in numbers so overwhelming that there is no mistaking the rejection. I see in my mind’s eye the following scenario playing out across the country, as described by Chris Matthews in his book “Tip and the Gipper”:
“As I got to my polling station, I remember there was a guy racing angrily into it. In my mind, whether it was true or not – maybe he was just having a bad morning – I saw him as one of the millions of irate citizens piling on, joining the massacre…a voter, it seemed to me, so mad at Carter he intended to vote straight Republican with the intention of flushing the thirty-ninth president out of politics and out of his life once and for all.”
Side note: It’s not the best analogy, because for all of Jimmy Carter’s perceived faults as president, he was a good man who actually did good things and who continually tried his best to do what was right for his fellow countrymen.
The essential fact of the matter is this: The last four years have been a complete horror show. The incompetence is so obvious that I question the sanity of anyone who votes for four more years of it. Under Donald Trump, we are at the ultimate precipice: A deadly virus is ravaging the country. As a result, businesses and jobs are evaporating at rates not seen since the Great Depression. Our faith in each other is frayed and our faith in this great nation hasn’t been this low in my lifetime. The faith can be repaired, but only if we reject the sitting government in tomorrow’s elections.
As presidential historian Jon Meacham said this past summer: “…the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Bending that arc requires all of us. It requires we, the people, and it requires a president of the United States with empathy, grace, a big heart and an open mind. Joe Biden will be such a president. With our voices and our votes, let us now write the next chapter of the American story; one of hope, of love, of justice. If we do so, we might just save our country and our souls.”
And with that, I’ll conclude with what I’ve been saying all year: Save our republic. Vote for Joe Biden.
This is THE best ad of this election cycle, in my opinion. Absolutely stellar and on point. That it was produced by a group of fed-up Republicans really makes it hit home.
Key quote: “We may have thought we were doing the right thing in 2016. But we made a mistake. So it’s time to own up; to be the men our dads raised us to be; to be the fathers our sons need us to be. Because they’re watching us, the way we watched our dads. It’s our turn to set the example. Vote for change; vote for our sons; vote for Joe.”
As I mentioned in my previous post, Carol Marin, the best broadcast journalist in the business, is retiring after this week’s elections. Between now and then, I’ll post some video clips showcasing her excellent work and highlighting a level of integrity that is rarely found in the business anymore.
The video above is a true case-in-point. Back in 1997, during her first 19-year run at the NBC powerhouse, WMAQ-TV, a new general manager and a new tabloid-style news director decided that for some reason they needed to tinker with a highly successful news operation, and thought it would be a good idea to have Jerry Springer provide commentary on the station’s top-rated 10pm newscasts. Springer taped his show right there at Chicago’s NBC Tower, and before becoming the scum of daytime talk TV, he was a news anchor in Ohio. So…hey…you know…why not? <snark implied>
Marin and her co-anchor at the time, Ron Magers, widely acknowledged as the best local news anchor team in the country at the time, balked. Marin quit in protest just days before Springer’s first commentary, and Magers followed her out the door a few weeks later (his contract was a little harder to get out of).
The clips in the video above show Carol discussing the Springer issue on “Chicago Tonight,” the nightly news roundtable on the city’s PBS station, WTTW. (Much of that discussion resonates today – nothing has changed.) The video also shows some very cool behind the scenes footage in the WMAQ newsroom the night of Marin’s final newscast (including interviews with reporters from competing stations, who, in a show of solidarity, went to Channel 5 that night when word got out that Marin had resigned).
Overnight (literally – I’m talking the day after Marin left), the station’s 10pm news ratings plummeted (Chicago was a hard news town for a long time; you didn’t fuck around with the tabloid bullshit and expect it to go over well.)
Springer did just two commentaries before that experiment came to an end. NBC sent senior management to WMAQ to staunch the bleeding; the station manager and news director were out the door within months.
By mid-summer in 1997, though, Carol Marin signed a new contract with CBS News, where she tripled as a correspondent for “60 Minutes,” as a correspondent for a short-lived Bryant Gumbel news magazine, and as an investigative reporter for Chicago’s CBS station, WBBM-TV.
When her CBS contract was up in 2004, Marin was lured back to WMAQ by a more stable management team. In her new role, Marin stuck to her first loves – reporting and investigative journalism; and no anchor work. She also served as political editor. It is from those jobs that she will retire next week.
Later in 1997, Ron Magers wound up across the river at the ABC behemoth, WLS-TV, where he anchored the 5pm and 10pm newscasts – and dominated the ratings – for over 18 years, until his retirement in 2016.
But back to the video above. It’s pretty awesome to see the “news as news vs. news as entertainment” debate as it was framed back in 1997, and to see so much support for Carol Marin in that newsroom that night 23 years ago.
Some other highlights from the video at the top of this post:
At 50:30: A moment of levity from Ron Magers, followed by a shout out to the movie, “A League of their Own.”
At 1:03:40: A poignant moment between Ron and Carol as they come out of commercial break for Marin’s “goodbye” segment (watch their hands).
Below is the full broadcast of Marin’s last newscast at WMAQ on 01 May 1997. Her “goodbye” at 21:48. And at 22:58, notice the support behind her in the newsroom that night – from both inside AND outside the station.
Later in 1997, Marin was awarded a Peabody Award for ethics and integrity in journalism…
After this week’s elections, the legendary TV news reporter, Carol Marin, will retire after almost 50 years in the business. For 40 of those years she worked in her hometown of Chicago, Illinois; 35 at the legendary NBC-owned WMAQ-TV.
As someone who always wanted to be a TV reporter and anchor (of the old school, not today), I have always admired Marin. She is easily the best reporter in the TV news business – straight, fair, tough, no-nonsense; she never made herself the story.
I’ll post some highlights of her career here over the next few days. First up, some great clips courtesy of Media Burn, an independent video archiving site out of Chicago. The clips focus on Marin’s work covering Chicago’s infamous First Ward (aka “the mob’s ward”).
This is the first of what will be several examples of top-notch TV reporting. They just don’t make ’em like Carol anymore.
Wayne Martin Allen 