Category Archives: Americana

Mamdani & The NY Mayoral Race

Americana, Current Affairs, Politics
Doctored picture used by the Cuomo campaign of Mamdan with a heavier and darker beard.

Those Democrats who think Mamdani will hurt their party are right to be concerned, but they’re thinking about the problem the wrong way. It’s not the skeptics they need to worry about. It’s the fans. Those Democrats who think Mamdani will hurt their party are right to be concerned, but they’re thinking about the problem the wrong way. It’s not the skeptics they need to worry about. It’s the fans. Ramesh Ponnuru, the editor of National Review and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in an editorial in the Washington Post entitled How Zohran Mamdani is teaching Democrats to lose.

I can’t speak to how other people feel, but I can say that as a Jewish New Yorker and as a member of a Jewish organization, I think that Zohran has done an incredible job of demonstrating care and concern and shown a real commitment to ensuring the safety of Jewish New Yorkers, of all New Yorkers. Sophie Ellman-Golan, director of strategic communications at Jews For Racial & Economic Justice

I’m not going to let this Communist Lunatic destroy New York, President Donald Trump, after Mamdani’s primary win (and was repeated in August).

Your dedication to an affordable, welcoming, and safe New York City where working families can have a shot has inspired people across the city. Billionaires and lobbyists poured millions against you and our public finance system. And you won. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, US representative for New York’s 14th congressional district

The Anti-Mamdani Movement Is Fizzling New York Magazine

Zohran Mamdani is running for mayor of New York City. He is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America – which is the largest Socialist group in the United States – is 33 years old, a practising Muslim, and, surprisingly, he will probably be the next mayor of New York City. And those are not the most surprising parts of the story. He was born in Kampala, Africa, and moved here when he was seven with his parents,  Mahmood Mamdani, a professor at Columbia University and Mira Nair. The same Mira Nair who is the director of  Mississippi Masala, Monsoon Wedding, and the Amelia Earhart biopic, Amelia, starring Hilary Swank and Richard Gere.

Mamdani holds political positions that Conventional Wisdom, and a big hunk of the Democratic Party’s leadership, think – maybe hope is more accurate – it should be impossible for him to win anything, even a Municipal Dogcatcher Position. As a short aside, about 12% of people in New York City are Jewish, and 2.4% are Indian, and Mamdani has said both Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are war criminals and would be jailed if they came to New York if he were mayor. End aside. And he most probably will be the next mayor of New York City.

Mamdani is running on a platform that includes free city buses and a rent freeze in rent-stabilized housing; he advocates for universal childcare and pre-kindergarten childcare, as well as the construction of 200,000 new affordable housing units and five city-owned grocery stores—one in each borough—to drive down grocery prices. He was also an early supporter of Defund the Police and continues to support public safety reform. He supports a $30 minimum wage by 2030 and proposed giving all new New York City families baby baskets containing diapers and nursing supplies. Mamdani’s platform calls for tax increases on corporations and those earning above $1 million annually. He is running against a lot of very powerful special interests, and I am thrilled that he will probably be the next mayor of New York City.

While I am admittedly biased, the biggest reason I say he will be the next mayor of New York City is that the polls say that. Still, I have other reasons he is likely to become the mayor of New York City: he is young, personable, and, most importantly, authentic; the populace is tired of dour old men running the country for themselves, and Mamdani is running on ideas that are popular even though the conventional wisdom says they are loony tunes.

There is another reason, besides the City of New York’s—and the country’s—general discontent with the status quo, that I think Zohran Mamdani will win, and it is very similar to why Trump won in both 2016 and 2024. To back up a little, there are three ways the Main Stream Media covers elections, and the New York Times and CNN in 2016 are the best examples of that. If they like a candidate, like Hillary Clinton, they give them lots of good, thoughtful – or seemingly thoughtful – coverage. BTW, lots is the operative word in the previous sentence. If they don’t like the candidate, like Bernie Sanders, they ignore him. Just ignore him, and people will forget that the candidate is even running. Or, if they dislike the candidate, like Donald Trump, they will constantly badmouth him. The last way is counterproductive; it ended up keeping Trump in the public’s conscience, and that is what is happening to Zohran Mamdani right now.

The Met Gala or Anna Wintour Has Big Balls

Americana, Art, Current Affairs,

You can’t speak on Black dandyism, Black art, or Black aesthetics without honoring the Black women who shaped, nurtured, and redefined it all. This year, my intention was to uplift and be surrounded by some of the Black women whose brilliance moves me—artists, thinkers, visionaries who carry history and possibility in everything they do. I’ve invited Lauryn Hill, Regina King, Jordan Casteel, Ming Smith, Adrienne Warren, Danielle Deadwyler, Lorna Simpson, and Radhika Jones to my table this year. Thank you all for your presence, your power, and the gifts you so generously share with the world. I’m deeply grateful to have shared this evening with you. Lewis Hamilton on Instagram

Last Monday evening, Michele and I watched the blue carpet extravaganza of the Met Gala on YouTube. If you are not aware of the Met Gala, it started as a dinner party at which the invitees were expected to donate money to the Costume Department of New York’s Metropolitan Museum. The dinner party was a low-key affair for wealthy people who loved and bought haute couture clothing. But everything shifted when Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour took over in 1999. Now, it’s a televised fashion event that brings invite-only famous people together for the price of $75,000 a ticket.

Michele and I got interested in the Met Gala when Lewis Hamilton first got invited to the Gala sometime during the late 20-teens. He and Anna Wintour bonded over clothes and, strangely, for me, at least, over tennis, especially watching Serena Williams at Wimbledon. This year, the theme for the Gala was Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, and Lewis Hamilton was one of the co-chairs.

These are dangerous times to have a political conversation, especially around DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). It is almost impossible to have a nuanced conversation. It is also a time when companies like Boeing and Google have reneged on their DEI commitments under pressure from the Trump Administration (although Apple didn’t). It is a time when a prudent person running a department in a museum that gets money from the Federal Government would not flaunt their DEI cred, but Anna Wintour is not prudent or timid.

Bernie Sanders, Jimmy Carter, and The Press, Still, Mostly About Carter

Americana, Current Affairs
Carter (1 of 1)

Summer is for dating, fall is for mating. Tamara Keith on NPR is a reference to Bernie Sanders not being a viable candidate.

President Jimmy Carter turned 100 last Tuesday, and I want to say something about it besides Happy Birthday, Jimmy, Congratulations. I wrote the paragraphs below in September 2015 when Bernie Sanders was running for President, but the core of it is President Jimmy Carter. 

What most pisses me off this primary season, even as the Bernie Sander’s crowds get bigger, is hearing a pundit say, Of course he can’t win, or even, get the nomination.  And the bigger the crowds, the louder they seem to say it.

As people – politicians, movie actors, athletes, even The Kardashians – move into the collective conscience, a sort of collective shorthand takes over. The press, but it is more than just the press, decides on one simple story, and all the complexities are washed away. Now it is the craziness of Donald Trump or the vague sleaziness of Hillary Clinton; it used to be the naiveté of Jimmy Carter.

My first and lasting impression of Jimmy Carter was that he was far from naive. I first heard him talk in January of 1975, about 21 months before the 1976 Presidential election. I was driving across Nevada on my way to Sun Valley, and just after Lovelock, it started to lightly snow. I turned on the radio, hoping to get a local station with a weather report, and what I got was what I thought was a random Southerner talking about US foreign policy. I kept driving, and the snow kept lightly falling – heavy enough so that the countryside became magically covered and light enough so the highway was kept clear by traffic – and I kept listening. The speaker, who had been schooled in the Navy’s nuclear submarine program, was brilliant, thoughtful and knowledgeable. As I cleared  Winnemucca, still heading east, I started to lose the signal, so I pulled over and listened to the final minutes by the side of the road, heater running, anxiously hoping it wouldn’t keep snowing.  It was so bizarre – sitting in the car by the side of the road, in a snowstorm, in the middle of Nevada, listening to a talk on how to change our foreign policy – that I still remember it.  In the end, I learned that the random Southerner was Jimmy Carter, the governor of Georgia, and I was smitten with him. I still am.

Part of my smitteness is that I am a sucker for Southern populists. I like Huey Long – Education and training for all children to be equal in opportunity in all schools, colleges, universities, and other institutions of training in the professions and vocations in life; to be regulated on the capacity of children to learn, and not on the ability of parents to pay the costs. Training for life’s work to be as much universal and thorough for all walks of life as has been the training in the arts of killing – even though I know a refined and educated person shouldn’t like somebody like Huey Long. I was and am a fan of Bear Bryant – If anything goes bad, I did it. If anything goes semi-good, we did it. If anything goes really good, then you did it. That’s all it takes to get people to win football games for you. And, as might be expected, before I turned on him for Vietnam, I liked Lyndon Johnson over the Kennedys.

But I also remember that speech by Jimmy Carter because it was the most coherent speech on foreign policy that I have ever heard. Carter had been an officer aboard a nuclear submarine, and he had obviously thought about foreign policy and about nuclear war with the total carnage it would bring. It seemed to me that Carter was a peacenik who had actually thought about the problem.  By the time I got back to the office a week or so later, I was telling everybody I knew that Jimmy Carter should be our next president.

The most common reaction I got was laughter, but Carter ran a brilliant, if sometimes very rough, campaign, making enough converts to become president. Starting as an almost unknown outsider, a born-again Christian outsider from the deep South, Carter surprised the establishment press, and I don’t think they ever forgave him for that. Today, partially because of the press’s simplified picture of him, Carter is considered a mediocre president at best, and his decency as a human is regarded as Jimmy Carter’s main legacy. But much of what people didn’t like in 1976 is now starting to seem like prophecy.

Even when we know better, much of what we were told and believe about the Carter presidency comes from the press simplifying a complex man. His honesty and his openness – he was the first, and maybe the last, president to be interviewed in Playboy and the first to wear jeans in the White House – were painted as weaknesses. We want our politicians to be transparent, yet we want them to be powerful as well, and power, even in the best of circumstances, means the management of information, as Nathan Heller pointed out in The New Yorker, and telling the truth is not managing the information.

We are given cartoons of complex people and complex situations, and all nuance is lost. Happy Birthday, Jimmy, and I wish we had listened to you more.

 

DMC 2024

Americana, Current Affairs, Politics
Photo from Los Angeles Times

“Thank you, Chicago, for your energy; thank you, Kamala Harris and Jim Walz, for your vision; and thank you, Joe Biden, for your service.”  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

“The existence of my family is just one example of something that was literally impossible as recent as 25 years ago … This kind of life went from impossible to possible. From possible to real. From real to almost ordinary.”Pete Buttigieg

“Tim Walz is a weaponized Norman Rockwell painting.” Ezra Klein 

“And to be clear: In my entire career, I have only had one client. The People.” Kamala Harris

I thought I must have blogged about almost every Democratic National Convention since Obama. However, as I go back through my blog, I see that the only Convention I commented on was the 2020 Democratic Convention, which was during Covid and was more of a virtue convention on Zoom (mostly, at least, as I remember). Maybe I haven’t written about past Democratic Conventions because all conventions are pretty much the same – especially political conventions.

Political conventions are pep rallies, and the latest Democratic National Convention was no exception. It was more professional than most pep rallies, which is to be expected because the same guy – Ricky Kirshner, who has 26 EMMY Nominations, 9 Emmy Awards, a Peabody Award, and an Edward R. Murrow Award – has been doing DNCs since Clinton. Still, it was a bunch of talking heads, of which only a few were interesting. On the first night, that included Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Hillary Rodham Clinton – introduced as the former United States Secretary of State, which, I guess by the introduction, is higher than Senator – and President Joe Biden.

Of the three, I thought Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Hillary Rodham Clinton gave the best speeches, and President Biden gave the weakest speech. In Ocasio-Cortez’s case, I may have been overly influenced by my admiration for her, but I don’t think so. Ocasio-Cortez – or AOC, if you prefer – is a staggeringly good politician. She has been on the National Stage for less than six years, and she is already a household name. I was surprised at how good a speech Ms. Clinton delivered. Now that she has nothing to lose, she is much looser and less preachy. Listening to President Joe Biden’s speech, I was reminded that, even at his best, he is not a natural public speaker.

The second night, Tuesday, was another night of talking heads – most of whom were forgettable – which ended with three super speeches. The first was by Kamala’s husband, Doug Emhoff, who I thought gave a better-than-expected speech. The night ended with Michele Obama and Barack Obama. Of the three, I thought former First Lady Obama was the best speech. By far. She came dressed for battle, in a sort of ninja outfit, her arms bare and her hair pulled back from her face in a long braid.

What I thought was most interesting about the speeches was the comparison between Michele Obama and Barack Obama juxtaposed to Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Michele Obama and Kamala Harris’ childhoods were in segregated worlds. Tim Walz and Barack Obama were not; Walz because he is White and Obama because his early childhood was in Indonesia and Hawaii. Their speeches reflected that. Both Obama and Walz gave speeches that said we can all get along, with Obama saying, “That’s the America Kamala Harris and Tim Walz believe in. An America where We the People includes everyone. Because that’s the only way this American experiment works.” and Walz saying, “But I’ll tell you what, growing up in a small town like that, you’ll learn how to take care of each other that that family down the road, they may not think like you do, they may not pray like you do, they may not love like you do, but they’re your neighbors, and you look out for them, and they look out for you.”

Michele Obama and Kamala Harris were much less conciliatory. Michele Obama had similar words as her husband but from a different point of view, saying, “Kamala knows, like we do, that regardless of where you come from, what you look like, who you love, how you worship, or what’s in your bank account, we all deserve the opportunity to build a decent life. All of our contributions deserve to be accepted and valued because no one has a monopoly on what it means to be an American. No one.” And Kamala by saying,” “In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man…Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails.” In speaking about the Republican position on abortion, she said, “Simply put, they are out of their minds.”

The third night included Governor Josh Shapiro – who I read was the vice-presidential nominee that the Democratic establishment wanted – former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz. I thought Walz was terrific, a poster child for the mid-west. Still, as somebody who was in the Army for three years, what I find most interesting about Walz is that he was a Command Sergeant-major. There have been many vice presidents who were officers and many who were privates, even vice presidents who were not in the military, but only one other sergeant, Al Gore. Gore served in the Army as an enlisted man, spent six months in Vietnam working for an Army newspaper, and was discharged as a Sergeant E-5; despite that, he was not a career NCO like Tim Walz. Having been a career NCO and not having graduated from Harvard – Walz went to Chadron State College in Nebraska – will bring a much-needed new outlook to Washington.

The last night – the biggest night – was all about Vice-president Kamala Harris. The speakers were old friends, various members of the House of Representatives, and even a member of the Central Park Five, a group of young black men who had been wrongly charged and jailed for a crime they did not commit. Harris’s speech was excellent, but it came after several days of hard-to-follow great speeches. For me, the most appealing thing about Harris is that she will bring a new outlook to the presidency. I hope.

I say “I hope.” because we have been here before. By here, I mean an outsider bringing a new perspective to the inside of the Beltway thinking that has seemed to deadlock Washington. Biden was effective because he had been around long enough to understand how Washington works and doesn’t work. Harris has not been in Washington nearly as long; she was a Senator for only four years before becoming vice president for another four years, but hopefully, she has been around for enough time to know where the power is and how to bring change.

Wow!!!

Americana, Current Affairs, Politics

Will Trump go to jail? Can he be president? What’s next after guilty verdict? Washington Post

That Former President Donald Trump has been convicted of 34 felonies is shocking. At least, I was shocked, although not exactly surprised. I shouldn’t have been shocked either, everybody I talked to thought he was guilty (although the people I talked to represented an extremely biased sample). I also shouldn’t have been shocked because, like almost everything Trump is involved in, his defense was incompetent. They fought everything, starting with “Trump didn’t have sex with Stormy Daniels” when he clearly did rather than concentrating on one or two weak parts of the prosecution.

Quilty of all 34 felonies shouldn’t be surprising because they are linked so that if he is guilty of one, he was logically guilty of them all: the Invoice from Michael Cohen, marked as a record of the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust (felony #1) was entered into the Detail General Ledger for the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, bearing voucher number 842457 (felony #2), and then paid by Check and check stub, Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust Account, bearing check number 000138 which is felony #4, and so on. Still, “Guilty” 34 times is shocking.

Shocking!