Of Lotteries and Taxes

Over twenty years ago Sheryl Crow told Jay Leno a story that I used in writing classes at UMass Lowell: As an aspiring musician, Crow scraped by on an income from the Los Angeles public schools as a substitute music teacher.

At parties she often amused friends with singing popular songs in the voices of farm animals. One night a newcomer overheard Crow’s cows and pigs, chickens and turkeys, and gave her his business card.

Before long she sang in the recording studio of an advertising agency preparing an animated ad campaign for McDonald’s. Crow did not appear in it, but hers was the only voice we heard.

When it was over–I think she said a half hour, tops–she was on her way home with a check for more money than she made in an entire school year. She invested in sound equipment and made a demo tape that launched her career.

Question

At the end of a semester I would choose at least five prompts for the final essay, wanting at least one guaranteed to spark each student’s interest.

Trick was to frame questions that would lead a student to identify contradictions and weigh opposing points of view. Treat was when a student took a stand while still acknowledging the appeal of the other side.

Of the 40 or so students in my two classes, so many chose Crow’s rags-to-riches tale that just months later, telling this story, I could not recall any of the other options. But I sure recall the two main themes of that one:

You can make a fortune advertising a highly colorful but hardly nutritional restaurant chain while you go begging as a teacher in our public schools.
No matter what your circumstances, you can strike it rich and live the American Dream.

Difference between the two was so stark that it made for the shortest prompt for an essay that I offered in 30 years of teaching: “What does Sheryl Crow’s story reveal about America today?”

Discussion

A month earlier my classes hashed through the pros and cons of both sides after a night when too much caffeine didn’t allow me to sleep, causing a day when I needed to improvise in front of them.

My friends and my colleagues had no idea how much I owed to Jay Leno.

Or to John Steinbeck, whose novels—from the well-known and treasured Grapes of Wrath to the criminally underrated In Dubious Battle—serve as rain and sun to a teacher hoping to grow the relevance of literature to modern life.

For my students—still in the planting stage, though they thought themselves in full bloom—stories of the Okies fleeing the Dust Bowl were a cautionary balance to the lottery-like luck of the most popular singer of their day.

On the day I first brought it to their attention—a fitting follow-up to a week with Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men—the discussion could not have been more lively, and the debate between “all for one” and “looking out for number one” was always in jest and good spirits.

Somehow I just don’t think that would play out now as it did in 1996.

Conclusions

While every resulting essay gave all due credit to Crow for developing a skill, more so for investing her good fortune in her own music, conclusions about modern American life were mixed.

As for grades, by this time my only concern was that the writing was logical, coherent, and engaging, and I still laugh at the memory of giving As to arguments I did not agree with and a few Cs to those I did.

But my foremost memory is that every student acknowledged our lack of attention to public interest, in this case schools, and our willing acceptance of private interests that work against it.

Over twenty years later any proposal to improve schools meets with the complaint of higher taxes—all while the proposed increase is spent ten or twenty times over on lottery tickets that make precious few of us rich.

Taxes are “one for all and all for one.” Lotteries are all for “number one.” To paraphrase Steinbeck, we don’t identify ourselves as working class, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

Or, as Crow might crow, “All I want to do is have a little fun…”

-10-

Steinbeck’s line, paraphrased here, appears in his collection of essays, America & Americans (1966) with the words “proletariat” in place of “working class” and “capitalists” in place of “millionaires.”

A young lawyer learned this same lesson in 1797 on the Kentucky frontier when the settlers prepared to vote on how they would enter the union: Slave state or Free. He and his progressive friends stumped the territory, pointing out that slavery benefited but a few plantation owners–what we today call the one percent–while cheapening labor for the rest. They found near unanimous agreement, but when the vote came, it was Slavery in a landslide. In time, they heard over and over that, while most folk agreed with them, they did not want to lose the chance for themselves to buy slaves, get lucky, and get rich. (See Henry Clay: The Essential American (2010) by David Hedler, page 77 or thereabouts as I recall recommending at the time.)

Clay’s experience echoed in the strange episode of “Joe the Plumber” in the 2008 presidential campaign, and the press coined a term for it: “aspirational voting.”

A click of the mouse to the GetJar App Store–https://www.getjar.com–for the picture of Crow.

As is this found on Wikipedia, taken in Finland, 1963, where and when Steinbeck received the Noble Prize for Literature. What was he drinking?

A State that Sounds Like a Sneeze

Not many years ago, at a Renaissance Faire during a break in a jam session, one of the drummers tells the others, all from the South, of a session that included a “slap fiddle.”

Turning to me, he adds, “What you Massachusetts boys call a ‘stand-up bass.’”

“Thanks for calling me ‘boy,’” I quip, and we all laugh.

Old enough to be father to any of them, it wasn’t until I was driving back into the 21^st Century that I realized something: That was the first time in my well-over 50 years I was called by the name of my native state.

Considering my nearly eight years west of the Mississippi, that’s even more surprising. Chalk it up to the difficulty our state name presents to people outside New England.

That’s even true of some who live hear for a while. Recently, former Boston Celtics star Robert Parish, a Louisianan, did a radio promo for a charity endeavor “all across Massatootchetts.”

Garrison Keillor called us “the state that sounds like a sneeze,” and it wasn’t far from Lake Wobegon that I became accustomed to being identified as “from Boston,” no matter that I never spent a night in that city.

Difficult pronunciation, yes, but there’s something else: The name cannot be turned into a demonym without grinding your vocal chords.

And, yes, the word is new to me, having discovered it while writing a recent blog—“Dixie’s Thumb on America’s Scale,” see below—about the Electoral College.

We Massachusettsians (hear what I mean?) are not alone. Try referring to someone from Wyoming with anything near the natural sound of Californian, Texan, Floridian, or what’s good for Michigander.

That led me to a list of names recommended by the US Government Publishing Office (GPO): GPO uses “Wyomingite,” but that’s hardly fit for print, though not so bad as an alternative offered by Wikipedia, “Wyomese.”

GPO recommendations are dry, “Hawaii resident” sticking out like a sore tongue (“Hawaiian” is restricted to Native Hawaiians for good reason), but the alternatives would make Mark Twain (a pseudonym) smile.

Any sports fan can tell you about Cheeseheads, Hoosiers, Tar Heels, and Volunteers, but few know or would want to know the troubled history of the name “Jayhawks.”

Other places need you to stay awhile before you can appreciate their demonyms: Swamp Yankees, Maniacs, Corncrackers, and Goober-Grabbers.

We might be Massholes, a name that is derogatory if an outsider says it (called an exonym), an endearment if we say it (eponym), but on Capitol Hill in Beantown they reject that as much as Massachusanything in favor of Bay Staters.

Beantown—like Hotlanta, Winterpeg, Fort Liquordale—is a nickname that helps reveal a city, but those are place names that don’t work as demonyms. Unless we want to say Beanies, Burners, Frosties, and Drunks.

Two city names that do work were prophetic, even though one honors a chief of a tribe displaced by the white settlers. When Seattle hosted the 1962 World’s Fair with its astonishingly daring (at the time) Space Needle, it was natural to call the residents Seattlites.

But the space industry had a base much closer than Boeing to ground level in Akron, Ohio, home of Goodyear Aerospace. Astronaut Judith Resnik who perished aboard the Challenger in 1986 was also an Akronaut.

My cousins growing up in Akron about the time of John Glenn’s orbit and Neil Armstrong’s landing never called themselves as Akronauts, but they got a lot of mileage out of “Rubber Capital of the World” if you get my teenage drift.

Yet more: If you like irony, Akron, the birthplace of Alcoholics Anonymous in 1935, has a name derived from the Greek word for “elevation,” lending itself to yet another teenage drift—which is now legal for us Massaholics but not yet for Ohohos.

Furthermore, you can find demonyms in our political past (Dixiecrats), morph them into our cultural present (Newyoricans), and if we have a future on the Moon, choose between Lunatics or Mooners–Moonies being already taken.

That’s the beauty of demonyms: You can tweak them to suit any occasion or make them up to fit any folly. Can’t wait to greet all my Rhodie friends at the faire this fall by calling them Swamp Yankees.

As for Goober-Grabbers, I have no idea what those Burners are grabbing, but I do love the sound of a slap-fiddle.

-09-

Here’s the list I found and used if not abused:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_demonyms_for_U.S._states_and_territories

Also found Massachusetts’ Naval & Maritime flag, placed at the top of this post, adopted in the fateful month of 1776 with the motto, “An Appeal to Heaven,” removed in 1971. Maine is the only other state to have such a flag.

As for the Massachusetts state flag just above, there was talk years ago–and just revived this past week–about removing the sword-wielding arm from above the full-bodied, bow-and-arrowed Native American, but you don’t need me to go on and on about resistance to change.

No way around it: Our flag depicts an execution waiting to happen.

The concern, of course, was racial violence, suggesting genocide, which is what really, honestly happened, but that assumes a Caucasian arm despite its being fully-sleeved and a Caucasian hand mostly obscured by the sword’s handle.

As urgent as the debate may be, it obscures us from a profound paradox, as is true of so many recent debates regarding Confederate monuments and displays of the Stars and Bars, not at Trump rallies, but on Southern state capitols and other buildings and memorials:

The people who object to “erasure” of our history are the same people who most adamantly deny it.

Not only that, but the motto around the shield, “By the Sword We Seek Peace, but Peace Only Under Liberty,” is, in today’s terms, alternative history at its Trumpian worst.

Be that as it may, my suggestion is to skip all of that and rid the flag of the arm and sword for an aesthetic reason: It’s just flat-out stupid.

With a dismembered arm floating over a native who doesn’t even notice, Massachusetts sports the Blair Witch Projectof state flags—or the Edsel for my fellow geriatrics out there. Compared to it, the Confederate flag is, historically speaking, no worse.

What is worse, but what has to be said, is that the Stars and Bars are aesthetically, visually better than what this Cradle of Abolitionism now flies.

All of which lends a whole new level of meaning to the song lyric, “Look away, look away…”

Dixie’s Thumb on America’s Scale

Maybe he’s drunk on the grapes of math.

In 2012, Trump called the Electoral College “a disaster for democracy.” But in 2016, it was “actually genius in that it brings all states… into play.”

In Helsinki 2018, he flip-flopped back when asked why Americans should believe Vladimir Putin rather than our own intelligence agencies.

Trump dismissed the entire issue “as a reason why the Democrats lost an election… they should have been able to win, because the Electoral College is much more advantageous for Democrats.”

This year, he has reversed himself yet again as Democratic candidates call for eliminating the EC.

Though Trump supporters usually parrot his fact-and-logic-free claims, this one gives them whiplash. Some attempts out-berserk the Berserker-in-Chief.

Here’s one of my fellow Daily News columnists three months after Helsinki:

“If the popular vote determined national elections, only the most populous states… would… decide the winner, and candidates would not even bother campaigning in the rest of the country… The Electoral College is the great equalizer that makes all of our votes count.”

Maybe he thinks “swing states” are the ones with major league baseball.

A Case to Reconsider:

Absurdity aside, supporters of the EC never mention Alexander Hamilton’s specific mandate in Federalist Paper 68:

To guard against attempts by “foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils… by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union…”

When the electors met five weeks after Trump’s election, his business deals in and campaign’s connections to Moscow were well known via American intelligence agencies to congressional leaders—to whom the electors had access.

Rather than act as Hamilton’s intended check and balance, they rubber-stamped Russia’s scam.

Hence, those who cite the EC’s Constitutional purpose never noticed the most consequential dereliction of Constitutional duty in American history—giving us an administration now bent on removing all checks and balances.

A Case to Recalculate:

Constitutional nonfeasance may be a hard sell, but the EC’s mathematical malfeasance is as clear as a Rand McNally map.

And it is worse than most think. Many assume that electoral votes are proportional, as are US representatives.

Not true. For instance, seven states have just one rep. Combined, that’s half of Michigan’s 14. In the EC, however, those seven outvote Michigan 21 to 16.

The imbalance owes to the inclusion of each state’s senators in the calculation—giving every state two extra votes.

Proportion, then, is as distorted as polar regions on a flat map of a round planet. If you ever marveled at how Mercator stretches Antarctica into impossible infinity, you’ll be cross-eyed at what the EC does for Wyoming.

California’s population is close to 68 times that of Wyoming, yet Wyoming is estimated at 1/53^rd the size of California for representation in the US House.

Such discrepancies are all over the map, figuratively as well as literally considering the substantial difference between 68/1 and 53/1.

Add the senatorial weight, and the ratio plummets all the way to 55/3, or about 18/1. Result: It takes over 700,000 Californians to equal one EC vote. For Wyoming? Under 200,000.

Consequences can be huge. In 2000, George W. Bush won 30 states to defeat Al Gore in the EC, 271-266.

Subtract senatorial weight, 60-40, and Gore, who won the popular vote, wins 226-211.

Senatorial weight? A sixth-grader with a calculator and an information atlas wouldn’t need more than ten minutes to tell you that under 20% of the American population has 52 senators, while over 50% has just 18.

In the Senate, Wyoming is 1/1 with a state 68 times more populous, and those seven states are 7/1 over twice-as-big Michigan—the same margin by which they top seven-plus-times-as-big California.

While the Senate serves other purposes, the EC, like the infamous Three-Fifths Compromise, was a Constitutional sop to the slave-states back in 1787, something else its defenders never mention.

If they claim that inclusion in the Constitution makes the EC sacrosanct, how do they explain Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3?

Put bluntly, why is the Emancipation Proclamation anything other than “government overreach,” an infringement on property rights?

Now, as it did then, America needs to sober up from some very bad math.

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Many across the country are promoting two ways to sober up, and both are gaining some traction, though it is highly unlikely that either will be in place nationally by November next year.

National Popular Vote Interstate Compact

Thankfully, the design is nowhere near the mouthful of the title. Simply put, it calls for each state to allocate all of its electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. Since the Constitution does not dictate how states assign electors, this would not eliminate the Electoral College. Rather, it would bypass it.

The Compact would not take effect until signed by enough states to reach 270 votes. At this writing (8/15), it has passed 16 states (including Mass., Conn., Vt., and R.I.) totaling 196 votes, and passed in either the House or Senate in eight other states (including Maine) totaling 75.

If the proposal completes passage in all of those eight states, it immediately takes effect and guarantees that the winner of the national popular vote wins the Electoral College.

Too late for Bill Tilden, Al Gore, and Hillary Clinton, but let’s hope soon enough to end the list right there.

Ranked Choice Voting

Already a success in Maine, this goes much deeper than the Compact, calling for ballots that allow voters to pick a second choice in a three- or more-way race for one seat. (Should there be multiple candidates for multiple seats, then, yes, there would be multiple choice, pun coincidental.)

The immediate benefit is straightforward, eliminating the agonizing complaint of really wanting A, but fearing A has no chance, so voting for B to prevent the horror of having C win.

Should any candidate gain 50% + 1 of first place votes, then it’s over, and the rankings are ignored. Short of that, the ballots of the last place finisher go to the second choice. If that falls short of producing a majority for a remaining candidate, then it happens again with the last place finisher in that second count.

In effect, Ranked Choice Voting is a built-in run-off.

Don’t know if it would’ve helped Tilden in 1876 or Clinton in 2016 or maybe even Ross Perot in 1992, but if either Florida or New Hampshire had Ranked Choice in 2000, Al Gore would have won.

Still, it would have been messy.

With Ranked Choice, many of the first-place votes Gore gained across the nation would have gone to Ralph Nader. Likely George Bush’s 47.9% would have won the popular vote because Gore’s 48.4% would have dwindled below it.

Yes, Gore would have easily passed Bush and reached 50% with his second rank on Nader’s ballots, but you can imagine the outcry in a country where—as Donald Trump’s presidency has repeatedly proved and Attorney General William Barr has repeatedly enforced the notion that—perception trumps reality (pun hard to avoid).

Should note here that this assumes Gore would have been the second choice for most Nadar voters, since any of them with Bush as second choice would have increased his original 47.9. A more fascinating and useful example would be 1992:

Historians still debate how Perot’s 18.9% would have been divvied up between Bill Clinton at 43% and George H.W. Bush at 37.4%. Most agree that Clinton would have gained at least a third of it, enough to maintain his considerable first-choice lead. Ranked Choice would have answered that before it became a question.

All of that aside, Ranked Choice offers the long-range benefit of allowing third-parties to gain those minimum percentages required for standing in future elections. This is why many proponents of Ranked Choice accuse both the Democrats and Republicans of resisting what they—and, yes, I—see as a common sense measure.

For example, had progressive voters in 2000 been free to vote for Nader without fear of throwing the election to Bush, Nader’s meager—albeit painfully decisive—2.74% would have gone up. It would have easily reached 5% which would have qualified the Green Party for public financing in 2004.

Nor is it out of the question that enough Gore voters plus a few Bush voters looking to “shake up DC” might have allowed Nader to reach 15%—a few less than Perot just eight years earlier. That would have put a Green Party candidate on the debate stages of 2004.

The good news is that these two possibilities are not mutually exclusive.

All who believe that the winner of the popular vote should win an election, and all who crave third-party and independent options in any election, will do well to support both.

-08-

For a more detailed look at qualifying percentages for third-parties:

https://ivn.us/2016/08/12/5-important-number-third-party-candidates-2016

About the Map:

Wanted to use a map from CommonWealth Magazine, but turns out it was 2008 since which time several states have gone up or down one or two. So what you see up top is the all-too-familiar 2016 disaster courtesy of Wikipedia–love that public domain!–where you can find them for every election since Washington vs. No One in 1788. Scroll to the bottom and click your year:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election

Not only that, but I also tracked down, via Wikimedia, an updated version of CommonWealth’s map which reminds me to urgently recommend its accompanying article on Electoral College trends since the Civil War written a week before you-know-who won you-know-what. Opening paragraph about the nature of maps is a gem:

https://commonwealthmagazine.org/politics/rearranging-the-electoral-map/

(Pardon the crop on the right side. Massachusetts has 11. And it’s Rhode Island, not Rhode.)

Sitting on a Park Bench

Eyeing languid swans with no intent, I take a seat on the newly-installed bench along the Plum Island Reserve road just this side of Parking Lot 3.

A few football fields short of my turn-around point past PL3 where I previously sat on the guard rail and chugged my Aquafina.

At first, I thought of it as Dr. Ersing’s Forced March, 3.5 miles from home to that wooden rail and back, but I soon realized the value of a long walk for thinking long thoughts.

And forgot about going to Dr. Narragansett for a second opinion.

The bench offers the benefit of an intermission slightly past the halfway point, although I have one worry.

Putting that aside for about 500 words, I now wonder if I’m still taking these three or four weekly walks for exercise and long thoughts—or just so I can sit on that bench.

When the film Paterson played the Screening Room, I watched it ten times—a projectionist’s perk—charmed by the main character’s attraction to a park bench with a close view of New Jersey’s Passaic Falls.

His focus on hydro power inspires poetry. My survey of stillness, a 180-degree panorama from Essex to Seabrook and miles to the tree-lined horizon, results in so many feel-the-Bern love letters to City Hall.

You think it would be the other way around.

View from the bench is the same as that from my window over the marsh to the mainland—minus all the power lines.

Always sit at one end so that other walkers, birders, or cyclists might feel free—a chance for random conversations, the reason I always recommend travel by train.

A cyclist from Haverhill doesn’t know the name of that city’s downtown parking garage, but rather than show surprise at the odd question, lights up as soon as I ask.

The Rt. 125 bridge to Bradford is named for his nephew, US Marine Ralph J. Basiliere, the first Haverhill casualty of the Vietnam War.

That launches a long reminiscence of those turbulent years. Wish I thought to tell him that the Plum Island bridge is also named for a casualty of Vietnam, Sgt. Donald Wilkinson.

If he doesn’t already know, it’s only a matter of time before I see him again.

With a couple from Michigan I share memories of trips across the Upper Peninsula. Can’t help but mention a bumper sticker I see whenever I visit my Akron cousins. The woman returns the volley with a motion toward the marsh:

“Looks like Michigan isn’t the only place whose ‘best parts are underwater’!”

Two graying women armed with field glasses, cameras, and Sibley’s Manual wander toward me from their Prius halfway down the widened shoulder.

When I motion for them to have a seat, one asks, “Are you the guy who writes for the paper?”

“Depends on what you have in mind.”

The other steps in: “We have an idea for you!”

“Take a number.”

They seem to speak as one: “An advice column! ‘Dear Blabby’!”

They laugh at me laughing until I can admit: “Won’t be the first time I’ve conjured up 700 words for the sake of a slaphappy headline.”

“We’ve noticed!”

Alan doesn’t need a seat on the bench because he wheels in on his own, and I know his name because he does it twice a day, passing the bench four times.

His always-exuberant mood is infectious, snapping me out of dark distractions that accompany non-slaphappy subjects as soon as he says hello.

We laugh at our ailments, relish the breeze, and admire the swans. While we cope with our ailments, shoot the breeze, and, to be honest, envy the swans.

As for that one worry, that bench is so much more comfortable than the guard rail that, even without conversation, it can be a long while before I grudgingly get back up.

Alan cheerfully pumps his tall, narrow wheels toward PL4 while I only think to start away uneasy.

Friends reassure me that the time of rest does not diminish the distance of exercise—a question Dr. Ersing will never hear me ask—but it is a slow pace going home.

Taking time the only way I know.

-07-

When this appeared in print in Newburyport, it was like a litmus test. Most everyone of a certain age recognized the headline, the slightly modified lead and closing lines. As I often told students, a familiar song title or lyric as a title will give the reader an immediate soundtrack. People my age, not needing the hint of Aquafina as the brand of water in the bottle, read this in a range of rock-and-roll tempos.

Others kept telling me how surprisingly lyrical they found the piece. I hear many adjectives repeated, both pro and con, sardonic and whimsical my favorites, but I’m lucky to hear lyrical once a year. Well, yes, it’s framed by three lyrics from Jethro Tull’s Aqualung, I’d tell them. Then I’d mention Aquafina–my idea of a citation–to test their recollection.

About that map: That oversized sandbar is Plum Island, about eight miles long with all of its inhabitants living on the northern two miles above the Gatehouse. If you can see it, perhaps you can see the “P” across from it. That’s Parking Lot 1 and you can follow that road south past the second and to the third “P,” or PL3, my destination in this account.

I live so close to the Gatehouse that the distance would not register on this map which is borrowed from Keep Newburyport Weird where it is far more legible, drawn by Newburyport’s Lucinda Cathcart, quite the lyrical name for a cartographer if I say so myself.

This account appears in Weird along with its gender-neutral child, “Dear Blabby,” conceived by the two birders who found me sitting on a park bench.

Sweet Land of Liberty

(From March 17, 2019) If Beale Street Could Talk plays through Thursday at the Newburyport Screening Room. If anyone can make it, let me know. Our customers can barely speak as they leave, but one managed two words which speak for all: “Painfully beautiful.”

Most painful and most beautiful for me is the transition from the closing scene into the credits with Billy Preston singing “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.” Would love to hear what those who think that kneeling in protest during the National Anthem is unAmerican would think of this film paired with this song if they ever dared considering anything that makes them uncomfortable.

-03-

https://www.google.com/search?rls=aso&client=gmail&q=billy%20preston%20my%20country%20tis%20of%20thee&authuser=0

History Retweets Itself

From Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash over the New Deal (2018), by Eric Rauchway:

Roosevelt contrasted the “theory that if we make the rich richer, somehow they will let a part of their prosperity trickle through to the rest of us,” with his view that “if we make the average of mankind comfortable and secure in their prosperity it will rise upward just as yeast rises upward.” (p. 150)

“He would in the end challenge us because his black sorcery appealed to the worst in men; it supported their hates and ridiculed their tolerances; and it could not exist permanently in the same world with a system whose reliance on reason and justice was fundamental.” FDR on the rise of Hitler, 1933, according to Rex Tugwell, economic advisor. (pp. 197-8)

1) Because no one who would be offended by that would have ever voted for him anyway. 2) It was intended and received as a middle finger to “political correctness” which is the reddest of red meat to his salivating base. 3) As for anyone who is offended, including the target of it, they are “snowflakes” who need to “get over it” because it is, after all… 4) “Just a joke.”

-02-

Hindsight Is Peripheral

Does the word “presumptive” ring a bell?

If 2016 offered just one lesson, it is this: Don’t pick one presidential candidate before hearing all of them.

It’s why the Democratic Party has ridded its nomination process of “super delegates” on the first convention ballot.

Thankfully so, but it applies to each of us as much as all of us.

If I had the power that Vladimir Putin exercised with the unwitting assistance of political fixer Debbie Wasserman Schultz three years ago, I’d put Bernie in the White House right now.

Lacking that, I withhold commitment, and suggest that others do the same at least until all presidential debates are over.

Many Newburyporters attended a Town Hall conducted by California Sen. Kamala Harris in Portsmouth in February, and their enthusiastic reports bode well for 2020.

However, early expressions of commitment before hearing other candidates—and before we know Harris’ record in California—bodes ill.

Whether because we find one candidate immediately appealing or think he or she has the best chance, shouldn’t we take time to see if flaws are exposed, or if another candidate proves stronger?

My eyes—or my ears—were opened days after I satirized New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand for her rising inflection at the end of every sentence even though I agree with most all she says.

No doubt her advisors wasted no time making her listen to the sing-song tape sounding like non-stop questions. Glad to hear she’s a quick study.

At the time I was most intrigued by Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar for a generous sense of humor that belies her incisive, precise questions in committee hearings.

She appeared more viable than my ideological preferences of Bernie and Liz Warren—and perhaps as viable as Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown.

As for Warren, yes, I’m all for her high-charged stands on taxation, health care, education, the environment, and more. But a particular scene during the 2016 primaries is worrying.

If an unwillingness to answer yes-or-no questions was a crime, Warren would be high-charged in more ways than one.

Reflecting on Rep. Seth Moulton’s Town Hall in Amesbury last year, not to mention Newburyport City Hall last decade, I wonder if this is now a Massachusetts thing.

Forget the slurs of “Pocahontas” and “Socialism.” Anyone falling for that brainlessness will never vote for any Democrat anyway. If Warren is nominated, the NRC will play the tape of her dodging one reporter’s repeated question about HRC’s speeches to Goldman Sachs.

Anyone who was LOL at Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s robotic debate performance in 2016 will be ROTFLTAO at Warren’s repeated “Look! The primaries are playing out (blah, blah, blah…)”

Why not have a debate moderator play that tape months ahead of time and see if Warren commits to the same transparency from Democrats that she demands from Republicans?

Yes, transparency, which tempts me to rule out the candidate who has voted repeatedly against lower prices for prescription drugs.

Are New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker’s early supporters willing to let him skate without explaining his connection to the Pharmaceutical Industry? Did they learn nothing from allowing HRC to skate past Goldman Sachs and Monsanto?

Then again, he’ll have as much of a chance to explain himself as any of the others—including Joe Biden following a most damning retrospective of his legislative career in Harper’s March issue.

As my daughter pointed out when reports of Klobuchar’s treatment of her staff put me face down on her dining room table, I risk becoming an example of the very mistake I warn against.

She then reminded me that Booker spends much time listening to people, and Biden has proven willing to admit mistakes. That, from a Los Angelina who attributes both those qualities to Sen. Harris and vouches for her “though not perfect” record.

Together, we then wondered about other candidates such as Texans Julian Castro and Beto O’Rourke, Hawaiian Tulsi Gabbard, Hoosier Pete Buttigieg and others, all with flashes of promise, but yet to be seen in full light.

And that’s the point.

We cannot know who the right candidate will be for November 2020 until primary votes are cast.

Till then, let’s presume nothing.

-01-