Response to Democracy For America's Poll Question

I received a survey recently from Democracy for America, which, if I am not mistaken, is the PAC founded by Howard Dean--progressive, mostly within the Democratic party tent. They asked me to pick my three preferred choices, from a list of about 15, for the Democratic nomination in 2016.  My first choice was Hillary Clinton, my second was Kirsten Gillenbrand (an agreeable Hillary surrogate, should HRC decide she can't run or some such thing), and my third was Joaquin Castro (he must be too young to run for President, but I like putting his name out there).

No mention in my ballot of the two whom I knew were the preferred votegetters of this group's members (and who got the most votes in the end, Hillary being third), Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.  Warren has flat out, repeatedly, said she is not running.  Bernie has hedged on that and now does seem to be about to run, I am guessing because of the renewed war footing Obama has recently placed us on, in both Iraq and Afghanistan.   But let's be serious:  Bernie has no chance of winning the Democratic nomination--he's not even a Democrat--and even less chance (a negative probability, if such a thing were to exist) of winning in a general election.

If anyone should understand this, it's Howard Dean, who was branded a slightly-left winger (i.e., a wacko) and couldn't make it out of New Hampshire as a party favorite.   The Democrats have had one national candidate since FDR who dared to tell the truth and was more than a little left-of-center:  his name was George McGovern, and he won 17 electoral votes out of 538, against one of the most cynical, corrupt Presidents in modern history (Richard Nixon, for you young people unaware of history)--and McGovern was an authentic WWII hero, a decent man, a loyal American, and they threw everything in the book at him.  Those who saw Barack Obama as such a person were either reacting in fear or deluded by hope--they never looked at the reality of his political stances, which were, again, slightly left-of-center (if one insists on a single left-right spectrum, something I resist, but will accept for purposes of argument). Sanders and Warren have no chance of being elected in these United States--maybe in some other, hypothetical one, with a fair electoral process, equal access to media, and less vested-interest talking heads getting in their way, but not this one.

Anyway, the folks at Democracy for America were nice enough to come back to me a few days later and ask me to explain my choice.  Here is my verbatim answer to them: 

Hillary Clinton has the best chance to win the general election, and that is the objective--to win, and win big (so as to win back Congress).
She can be a leader to unify the Democrats, if she has the right program, which in my view should be the following:*
1) A Constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United, and support for a variety of measures--such as ease of registration, Federal control over redistricting abuse, absentee or early voting- to open up and facilitate popular (as opposed to elitist) participation in the political process;
2)  A new set of environmental measures suited to addressing the challenge of climate change;
3) Investment in infrastructure, education, and retraining for a competitive future economy;
4) Settling the long-term budgetary issues of the retirement and healthcare programs in a way that deals equitably with each generation's concerns and assures the programs' long-term survival; and
5) She should announce--before her nomination acceptance speech, maybe when she has the nomination locked up, that she will serve for one term only!
The only problem for some will be her close relations with business and with the military-industrial complex (she is a hawk, no doubt).  The key will be her strong stance for helping the middle-and lower-classes economically and to propose a clear plan to wind up the war in the middle east (if it is still going on in 2016).
Obviously, serving for just one term will break the glass ceiling, she will avoid nasty comments about being old, and avoid the Second-Term Syndrome (which has affected every Presidency in 50 years).  The Democrats can have their battle over future leadership four years later, having accomplished a great deal in her single, historic term in office.  I call it "The Polk Option", after Pres. Polk in the 1840's who did something comparable.
I am Ready for Hillary!  
*And I have a catchy name for the program:  "Vision 20/20"
(as in, seeing things clearly, getting it done by 2020). 

Attentive readers will recognize many of the same points in the above that I made in my previous post on "The Polk Option" earlier this year--I have not changed my mind one iota on this topic, and I am willing to spout freely on the subject as long as space permits, to anyone who might listen.  My next recipients of this unsolicited advice will probably be James Carville--a noted, though untitled, Clintonian--and Stephanie Schriock, a journalist/political advisor/Emily's list director whom I like a lot, and who is rumored to be in contention to be Hillary's campaign manager.

I am not asking for Hillary to announce her one-term plan so early, or as a condition for my support (though I will enthusiastically support the idea if I hear it is being considered):  She should think--and discuss with her advisors--about the optimum timing for such an announcement (above, I suggest either her nomination acceptance speech, or to keep things interesting once she has wrapped up the nomination).  I do feel very strongly that this is the right thing for her to do, the politically most advantageous approach, and one that will cost her none of her effectiveness as President--it will help her win a big majority in Congress, which she will need to accomplish her reforms.

I do ask--require--that she have a plan for what she wants to accomplish as President, in order to earn my support, and for me to feel it appropriate to advocate her Presidency to anyone else.  I also am concerned about the ISIS/Afghanistan moves President Obama has made recently--not their validity in the sense of the war against the pathological ISIS, or the intransigent reactionaries of the Taliban--but the political box they may end up putting Hillary into if the wars do not go well enough to permit Obama to begin pulling back by 2016.

Finally,  I would like to provide a little historical backup for my contention above that the last President who has had a successful second term is Eisenhower--in the sense of being able to continue effectively the policies and approach of the first term.  It's probably out of the question now for Obama; though I feel he can still accomplish a great deal, possibly more than he has in the first six years, whatever he does from here on would be as the result of a complete change of approach, one in which he may have already made a few dramatic steps.  The clock is ticking, though, and Congress is against him.

JFK - didn't make it to a second term
LBJ - the second half of his second term (counting the 1 1/2 years from '63-'65 as his first) was totally ruined by the Vietnam War morass he allowed the US to sink into
Nixon - didn't make it through the second term (Watergate)
Ford - not re-elected
Carter - not re-elected
Reagan - Iran-Contra was just the clearest example of a second-term Presidency with lights on, nobody home (the man was senile in his second term, face it)
Poppy Bush - not- re-elected
Clinton - Didn't get much done in the second term, except surviving impeachment and getting some backlash support in the '98 midterm elections.
Dubya - To my way of thinking, he was not nearly as odious in the second term as in the first, but his popularity hit the skids by 2006 and never rebounded.  Plus, he presided over the collapse of the economy into the Great Crater--if you call that presiding.
Obama - Political pattern paralleling Dubya, only for the other party.  Gets zero credit for the slow but steady recovery of the economy from the worst recession since the '30's (or early '80's, if you want to argue the point). 

Ferguson This, Ferguson That

I have ignored this simmering pot and its frequent spillovers up until now, but I think it's time to make a few points, which should be clearer than they are from all the attention being given to the case:*

1)  Mothers (and fathers), you need to tell your children not to pick fights with armed police officers.  Not just black kids, all kids should understand that.  Whatever irrelevant details about Michael Brown and his life are thrown around, one fact is clear:  he made a big mistake challenging the police officer, and he ended up paying with his life.

2)  The DA is being totally disingenuous with his "all of the evidence" line.  A grand jury exists to indict the people the DA wants indicted, end of story.  I don't need to examine the reams of evidence to figure out that his strategy was to baffle them with b.s. so they would not return an indictment.

As an aside, I recommend watching the film "Q and A" (1990, good performances from Nick Nolte as the bad cop, Tim Hutton as the conflicted Assistant D.A., and others as well).  It was written by a State Circuit Judge named Edwin Torres, who knew what he was talking about from experience. (I actually had the occasion to be a juror in his courtroom roughly around that time--a typically lousy case, the only kind that actually goes to a jury these days.)  The movie's fictional case was quite different from Ferguson's, but the principles which apply to the Ferguson case are the same that are spelled out in the movie (though, slight spoiler, the case is not resolved in the courtroom):  the DA selects the facts that are presented to the grand jury, and thus the outcome.

3)  The cop was genuinely scared--maybe angry, somewhat legitimately--and overreacted with excessive use of force.  He didn't have the right equipment to subdue Brown in a non-lethal way, nor did he have a partner who would have balanced out the power relationship in the incident.  So, yes, the officer is to blame, but no, the blame is hardly exclusively on him.

4)  It's not over.  There will be a civil case, and the officer may lose it.  Cops in the US are almost never criminally indicted for bad policing, and that's true whether the cop is black, white, or brown, and also with regard to the victims of it.  A civil case is a different matter, and it will largely depend on the skill of jury selection, to which both sides are likely to apply high-priced legal/statistical muscle.

5) The real issue hasn't seemed to come up lately:  Why is a town with a black majority being run by a bunch of prejudiced whiteys?  There was an election between the actual incident and the current crisis:  did the blacks show up and vote them out?  Why or why not?

Final, heavily-opinionated note:  I am taken back in my musings to the days of the late '60's/early '70's, when "pigs" was a name often applied to the forces of law-and-order (police, also the National Guard).  That kind of epithet drew a strong counter-reaction, one which was entirely successful for some 30-40 years.  That extreme action/reaction produced a synthesis which basically has left any kind of police behavior beyond reproach from the judicial system.  Violent reaction is, of course, not the right answer, but a little bit more translation of healthy skepticism into policies which reduce lethal use of force and put review of police actions in the hands of more independent authorities would be worth a sober examination.   It's hard to imagine the Ferguson hysterics leading to that, however.

*Way too much attention, in my view:  for me, the Florida Trayvon Martin case was a clearer case of unusual injustice--this is just the "normal" kind.

Whirl D'Oh Fares

This wordplay title restacking the more pedestrian expression "world affairs" (as if we really had any other kind of meaningful affairs than the ones here on this planet) may not fit together as a phrase, but each component has been carefully considered.  First, think of of the events around us today as a wild ride, a "Tilt-a-Whirl",  full of centrifugal forces throwing us apart.  "D'Oh" is a Homeric reference, as in the dullard of Simpsons fame, not the blind Greek bard, and should be understood to connote the awkward and lamebrained methods the nation-states and international bodies use to confront the issues of the moment; while "fares" is a synonym for prices, as in the prices we pay now, and will pay even more in the future, for our reckless disregard for consequences. 

One thing that has become clear in recent months is that a number of powerful nation-states are seeking to fill perceived vacuums and increase their ability to affect, coercively, other nations.  This is called asserting a nation's "sphere of influence", and I have heard the term applied recently to Brazil, South Africa, Turkey, Iran, India, and most frequently, China and Russia.  

Really, though, there is only one country with a "sphere of influence", and that is the US, which can project its influence almost anywhere on the globe.  The rest of them only have "nearby regions of influence"--even Russia, which, with the possible exception of Syria, really can only bully the neighbors that are contiguous to it.  

So, let's start with a nation close to my heart which is, as ever in recent decades, critical, but not determinative to the outcome of current events on the surface of our sphere.  We begin with its internal issues, which are often  closely connected with its behavior in the world at large. 

D'oh-mestic Matters   
(These observations on the US are rather obvious--to me, at least.)
The Republicans in the 2014 midterm elections proved they could win the Senate without any Hispanic votes;  this is good for them because they are currently ensuring they will never get any in the future. President Obama has had plenty of time to plan the immigration Executive Order he announced this week, and it seems he has used the time well:  they are outfoxed, spluttering with anger, unable to counter. 

Those who looked for Obama's true colors to emerge in a second term (like me, I must admit) had to wait two more years;  now he really doesn't have to concern himself about electoral consequences.  That being said, "Obama being Obama" will probably have a net positive effect for his party. 

Following this line of thought, Obama is racing against the clock to achieve successes in Iraq and Afghanistan, so that he can leave the legacy of beating down the Taliban and ISIS, without leaving troops on the battlefield.  This will help Hillary Clinton in her campaign; it is essential to avoid an antiwar schism in her party which could be fatal.

The Keystone pipeline is an issue of only symbolic importance to all participants.  It's now clearly established that it's not a jobs issue, there is no current problem of high oil prices that it would help affect, it's not about energy independence (as the oil will be exported elsewhere), and, finally, the Canadian tar sands oil will be developed, when it is economical to do so (now is questionable for the oil companies), whether there is a pipeline or not (they would use rail lines to send it to ports, if necessary).   I predict it will be hung up in litigation for several more years, then quietly forgotten.  The alternative is that someone foolishly gives the go-ahead, which would lead to massive, possibly violent, resistance. In either case, I do not think the pipeline will ever be completed, nor do I think the tar sands will remain undeveloped for long. 

All these late-stage fossil fuel sources--tar sands, dirty coal, oil shale, deep gas, undersea deposits--are best left in the ground for our grandchildren to exploit, when technologies will be far more advanced, resulting in much lower social costs.  It's OK to experiment with some of these new methods (preferably in relatively uninhabited areas)  and develop the techniques, but we really should be investing now in the renewable sources and slowing the drain of these irreplaceable non-renewable sources.  We will still need petrochemicals for some purposes a century from now.   

As for the polar bears--the poster children for charities looking to hold back climate change--we may as well face the fact that Arctic Sea ice is going away.  I'd like to suggest an idea, inspired by the nests we put on poles for the raptors in some locations:  we should put floating platforms, anchored in some way, out on the Arctic Sea, spaced properly to support a desired number of polar bears in their aquatic foraging.  It seems like a good idea to me--let's see how the bears like it (I'm sure there would be a certain amount of pushing and shoving for space on the platforms.)

There is now a single US meta-issue:  to use Tolkien's phrasing, "one issue to rule them all and in the darkness bind them".  It's the failure, so far, to come up with the means or the strategy which will make the meaningful electoral/political reforms we need.  Until this is addressed, the Republicans will continue to come up with tricks to hide their strategy of preventing "popular sovereignty" (a phrase from the political slavery battles of the 1800's; it means the untrammeled exercise of the people's will); elites will continue to control legislation, or the blocking of legislation; the rich will get richer, the poor poorer, the middle-class scarcer.  This needs to become the central campaign issue of 2016, but it needs to be done in the right way to achieve progress. 

The Democrats' biggest problem right now is the inability to distinguish between the fundamentally non-partisan nature of the meta-issue of electoral reform (as all of us will benefit from progress in democratic institutions) and their own partisan interest in it--as greater democracy will inevitably benefit the Democratic party.   According to a HuffPost poll, a 53-23 majority support a Constitutional amendment (48% among Republicans) to overturn Citizens United; the trick will be getting the 22% "unsure" to weigh in for democracy, and not to forget about this ugly 2014 campaign until the next one comes up with even more waste and negativity.  Even Bernie Sanders, who hardly qualifies as a Democrat, makes the mistake of seeing this as a partisan issue, differentiating between the Democratic and Republican positions on Citizens United, voter ID, and the like

The latest trick is trying to leverage the states' power to control the method of selecting their Electors to the odious Electoral College.  There are two states that consistently vote Democratic for President and have a Republican governor with Republican-dominated state legislatures, Michigan and Wisconsin. Both states are candidates to go the Maine/Nebraska route and assign most of their electoral votes based on the popular vote of the individual Congressional districts, which could send half or more of the EV to the Republicans. (Florida could become another candidate before long,  if the national Republican party keeps alienating the Hispanics.)  This is a fairly desperate move, and its passage would reflect badly on the governors of Wisconsin and Michigan, both of whom may end up being candidates for the Presidential nomination (or, more likely, the Vice-Presidential one)--their support would indicate they recognize their inability to carry their home state in a national election. . 

Of course, the Electoral College itself (the all-or-nothing voting; its separation from the popular vote) is another example, though in this case the Democrats seem to be benefiting from its un-democratic nature:  if the Presidential election were decided based on the majority vote by Congressional district, for example, the Democrats' Presidential near-lock would be long gone.  

The smart Democratic strategy is to assist in riling up the electorate about the deficiencies in our political process--the constant appeals for money, the dark money, the constant negative ads, gerrymandering, the Electoral College, etc.--then let the anger move forward on its own, non-partisan momentum, and reap the benefits afterwards. 

Over the Horizon
As a transition, let's start with a few comments about Ebola.  It has become a major problem this year in several African countries, and its containment has not yet been achieved,  but the idea that it became a significant campaign issue this year in the US was beyond "D'oh"--it was malicious misinformation.  There have been a handful of cases in the US, of people working in healthcare in the outbreak areas in Africa who have caught it and come back for treatment, and two healthcare workers who caught it from one of those people. That's it.  It presents a serious challenge to public health, but not in the US.  If there is an issue of concern outside the affected region, it was about the slow response of the formal international health agencies to the evidence that the Ebola outbreak was surging beyond levels previously seen. 

I would compare Ebola to be most similar, in the nature of the course of the disease in humans, to the plague.  Although Ebola is a virus, not a bacterium like the plague, they have in common several facts:  outbreaks begin with the transmission from an animal to a person, they produce very acute infections with high mortality rates, they are moderately contagious, difficult but not impossible to treat, and outbreaks can be controlled by modern medicine with some basic precautions.  This is not to minimize the severity of the plague, which killed a large percentage of the population of Europe in the 14th century, with serious outbreaks for centuries afterwards, but to say that, though the plague is still around, we can handle the outbreaks if we use some intelligence. 

Much more dangerous in America are the continuous outbreaks of Nutballs with Guns; in some other countries, Nostalgic Jihadi Fever.  I feel sad for those impressionable youths in many countries who are inspired to go, voluntarily, into the hellholes of ISIS-occupied Syria and Iraq; I should have much more sympathy still for those who live there and cannot leave, but both groups should be made aware that any illusions of tranquil, Sharia-inspired, religiously orthodox life there are impossible under a regime such as ISIS', as impossible as ISIS' dreams of world dominion.  There are only two possible outcomes for those there:  moderation and integration, or collective doom.    

Even if Obama is successful in bringing Iraq and Afghanistan to some kind of positive result, though, there will still be huge problems for the next President to deal with:  Syria--even apart from the tumor of ISIS--has no solution in sight, Iran could become a huge issue if the current nuclear talks fail, and now it looks as though the stagnant Israel-Palestine issue may be about to overheat.   It's now Jerusalem, not just Gaza, or even the West Bank, which is the hot spot of the confrontation, which to me indicates the issue is heading for a climax; meanwhile, the possibility of an agreement on the "two-state solution" is ever more remote. 

I come back often to the rising importance of Turkey in the 21st century whirl. Along with Russia (maybe Israel), it is the only country with ambitions to be a direct player in both Europe and in Asia.  Its lengthy borders with Syria and with Iran will make it a critical component in the international efforts directed toward those countries, whether in war or in peace.  Turkey is a longtime ally of the US and a critical member of NATO (it has its second-largest standing military); its role is consistently underrated.  It has been a critical counterweight to Russian expansionism since the Tsarist period, and it is once again in countering the new czar, Putin. As the only significant democracy in an Islamic-majority nation in the region  (a possible argument could be made for Lebanon), its behavior is an important indicator of how events are perceived by moderate Muslims there.  A good example is its up-and-down relationship with Israel, a barometer of that country's ability to get along with its neighbors. 

Turkey aims to join the European Community (if not the European Union); its dynamic economy could provide a boost to that somewhat stagnant (economically and demographically) group, but doing so in a way that explains the resistance:  Europe fears integration with such a large Islamic population--superficially for concerns about immigration and job security, but xenophobia is just as strong a factor.  In fact, Turkey's people, in terms of per capita GDP, are more wealthy than several states already in the EU.         

Turkey was criticized for a lack of alacrity in springing to the US' call to arms against ISIS; it has moved forward, but its hesitancy and ambivalence are apparent.  This is a complex problem for President Erdogan:  Turkey is strongly opposed to the regime of Syrian President Assad, who has oppressed the country's Sunni majority (Turkey has a Sunni majority, as well), and Turkey has had to absorb milions of refugees from the Syrian Civil War.  ISIS' gruesome aggression has inflamed the passions of the Kurds, who are in a life-and-death struggle in parts of Syria (read this eyewitness account of the epic Kobane battle) and in Iraq, and who have been fighting for decades for autonomy in Turkey:  Erdogan has sought a middle ground between support for Kurdish separatists and pacifying his anguished Kurdish minority.  And, there is the inescapable fact that any help he gives to the battle against ISIS will inevitably help Assad.  At the end of the day, the help Turkey will give to contain and destroy ISIS will be conditioned on taking actions to prevent Assad's taking advantage, or it will be passive assistance. 

Pivot to (East) Asia

This post is getting long, and we haven't gotten to the populous hub of the world.  We hope to return soon to the broader topic and pick up some other areas:  Western Europe and its doldrums, Africa, Latin America and Mexico (dealing with a climactic moment in its struggle against the narco-trafficking mobs), Canada (which recently showed us once again its greater maturity in dealing with a security crisis), South Asia, our antipodal mirror image Australia, and Antarctica.  

Among our US Presidents, there have been various sportsmen:  Teddy Roosevelt the big-game hunter, Gerald Ford was an All-American football player, Poppy Bush a star baseball first baseman (I think Reagan and Nixon played football, too; Dubya was a cheerleader....)  I feel confident saying that our current President is the only basketball player among them, so when Obama talks about making a pivot to Asia, he actually knows what he is talking about.  Keep one foot planted in the home turf, and spin body and front foot to the East....

One of the most significant developments in recent months has been the rise of Xi Jinping as the undisputed top leader in China.  Unlike some of his recent predecessors, his style is less being first among many and more using his decision-making authority to focus it even more on himself.  He is surely the most powerful Chinese leader since Deng Xiaoping. 

China flexes its muscles in trying to shoulder aside the claims of Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, and the Philippines around disputed islands in the South China Sea and the Sea of Japan.  The objective appears to be economic, not territorial expansion, as control of these islands may permit offshore drilling, and China remains highly dependent on imported oil.  So far, Xi has not weighed in on the Hong Kong democracy movement's challenge to Beijing's limitations on the free election of the territory's chief executive; when he does so, the matter will be settled.  I would imagine he is looking for a peaceful outcome and wishes to avoid another Tienanmen-style heavy-handed one. 

Japan seems to be falling back into recession yet again.  Prime Minister Abe seized the moment of the announcement of a negative GDP to announce early Parliamentary elections.  To be honest, I don't understand the logic, unless it's that he is so confident of winning, and then subsequently he plans to do something to upset the electorate.  Like, stimulating the economy, maybe? 

Finally, I want to congratulate the new President of Indonesia, Joko Widodo, or as he's known, Jokowi.  He seems to have the popular touch, and so a bit different from previous Indonesian heads of state, who were from rich, dynastic families or prominent military figures.  Indonesia is another country whose importance to the US and to the world economy is not fully understood, a vast, multicultural population with a Muslim majority, and now a liberal democracy.  

In this month of the 25th anniversary of the annus mirabilis when the Berlin Wall came down and the Iron Curtain parted, we should recognize the enormous positive changes that have occurred in our lifetime.  We still have wars, famines, pestilence, and death, but the quality of life has improved for billions.  My note for Thanksgiving!

Mike Nichols

I subscribe to a service with CNN that provides me brief email notices of "Breaking News". Mysteriously, I received a couple yesterday that were empty--no news item contained within.  I figure now that one of them must have been the notification of the death of Mike Nichols.

Let's call him a film director, as he was one of huge importance.  He, along with a few others--I would name Altman, Scorsese, maybe Coppola, Woody Allen, the odious Brian De Palma--were the key figures in the Renaissance of Hollywood film making in the late '60's and early '70's, a wave to which others gave additional impetus, and is just now, maybe, starting to break.  In his heyday, he made the big movies--movies with big actors, big scripts, big budgets--but they were not like today's movies, about Big Toys, or The Most Amazing Thing That Ever Could Have Been Accomplished If It Were True.  His characters were not superheroes; sometimes antiheroes, sometimes villains, sometimes just regular folks. His movies, without exception I would think, were stories of people, and the portrayal through people's actions of their motivations, their inner feelings, their place in society, their anger, their sense of humor.   His art was very humane.

His first films were like cannon shots:  "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf", "The Graduate".  If he stopped there, with that film (his only Academy Award winner), his place in film history would be secure.  Then he made "Catch-22" and "Carnal Knowledge"--at that time, the release of a Mike Nichols film was major entertainment news.  He would cool off, put out his share of flops, but still he came up with some winners through the decades:  "Silkwood", "Working Girl", "The Birdcage", and his last major release (in 2007), "Charlie Wilson's War", about the secret aid in the '80's to the Afghan rebels fighting the Soviets.

He was also much more than a film director, though I didn't know so much about the other parts. With Elaine May, he had a successful comedy team in the 1950's (!) and was instrumental in starting Second City, the improvisational troupe that sourced most of the stars of Saturday Night Live, through all of its run to date.  He was a producer of stage, very successfully, and movies as well. Most notably, he was the producer and director of the TV miniseries version of "Angels in America", one of the finest TV productions in the history of the medium.

We will probably now learn more about his life; he seems to have been a private person.  His imdb.com biography points out that he was real name was "Michael Igor Peschkowsky", born in Berlin in 1931.  That should mean something that we should learn more about; how did he become "Mike Nichols"?

The younger generation may not know Mike Nichols.  They should watch some of his work, but doing so they should be careful not to conclude that he was just working the same vein as all the '60's rehash nostalgia stuff.  Instead, they should realize that, like the Beatles, or the Kennedys, his work is one of the motherlodes, where it all came from.

Accomplished: 0; Spent: $4 billion--A few lessons

Of course, that's just my perspective.  Based on my scoring proposed in my final Pre-election post, absolutely none of the objectives were accomplished.  A few things of a negative nature were accomplished, though I did not put a pre-election valuation on them:

The face of the miserable short-term future chosen by the Florida voters "in their wisdom". 

• The Republicans will have drawn the conclusion that they have just the thing to offset the Democrats' Get-Out-the-Vote strategy:  dumping a couple hundred million in attack ads from dark sources in the last days of the campaign.  That's what they did this time, and it moved the needle 2-3% across the board, about the equivalent of what the Democrats' GOTV can accomplish in its best days.  Unfortunately, the massive money dump worked for the Republicans this time, while the Democrats' "we don't spend as much, but we do it better" did not.  So, the Republicans will be even less open to the idea of spending restrictions. 
• Some Democrats will have learned that their strategy--avoiding their party and their nation's leader in the hopes of maintaining some sort of squishy moderate, non-Obama Democratic posture in states where Obama approval was weak and Democratic identification also--reeked of hypocrisy and failed miserably. Those Democrats may not have much of a political career to come back to after that failure, though. A few who fell honorably and did not fail miserably as campaigners--I'm thinking of Kay Hagan, possibly Mary Landrieu if her runoff does not succeed, a few of the Congressional candidates--may live to fight another day. 
• The American electorate--those low-participation, low-information voters who allowed themselves to be numbed into staying home or browbeaten into voting against their economic interests by the wave of negative ads--they will experience the joy of continued gridlock and obstruction (the Democrats might get into blocking things more, now, to give the Republicans a taste of frustration) which they have richly earned ("in their wisdom"). 
• The central Democratic committees will have learned that they cannot "localize" Federal elections anymore; further, state legislative and gubernatorial elections must be understood to directly impact the Federal elections through rules on voter ID, vote counting, redistricting, and now, perhaps, even Electoral College vote allocation.   Also, it might help to have something like an issue to point to as a reason voters might want to choose their candidates. 

What did I learn?  No more money for piecemeal contributions to individual candidates, trying to leverage close races (my miserable $5-$10 bits, spread around too widely, were drowned by megabucks, even if they added up to more than 1 or 2 ninety-millionths of that $4 billion in wasted money, 90,000,000 being the approximate number of voters in the elections); almost all of the candidates I backed lost (and it is stupid to try to improve that percentage by only contributing to candidates who are going to win, at my level).   It was like throwing a coin to a few selected beggars who were all crowded around me;  there were always more of them, and even the ones who received my pittance immediately came back for more.

Although President Obama will continue to labor tirelessly for us ingrates, I don't feel there is much he can do or could have done this time around.  What, exactly (without getting into name-calling), is the problem with him, anyway?  (That's directed to those who "disapprove" of him.)  To give just the most obvious example,  the economy was in shambles and falling into a deep Crater when he came in; his policies helped get us out, and onto a reasonably healthy basis.  How much credit did he get in the campaign for that?  Similar things could be said about healthcare, diplomacy, involvement in wars.  And Ebola?  Please.

I will never draw the lesson that politics, the art and science of large-scale human interaction through the advocacy and administration of public policy, doesn't matter in this country (a conclusion many seem to have drawn);  it is among the things that matter most, in the long-term view of a society which is critical for the future success of the human experiment.  I will say that this election's failure will have effects that are mostly transitory (loss of opportunity), because I expect them to be washed away in two years by a larger wave, in an opposite direction, by leaders with a plan and a new organizational approach to win elections.   We'll just have to muddle through a couple more years of asinine Congressional behavior,  with some of the leading protagonists being the donkeys who just won their elections with their dirty money.