THE MONEY IS WORRIED

Well, well, Mike Bloomberg suddenly emerges from seclusion to put his name into the first-deadline primary in Alabama.  Then word emerges that Clinton loyalist Eric Holder is dipping a toe in the water.  So long as Good Old Joe was topping the polls by double digits, the money slept easy, but once Joe started to slide and Elizabeth and Bernie hung on or even surged, sensible no-nonsense types began to worry that the party was moving "to far to the left," which is code for "Help!!!  Someone wants to tax our piles of dough."

Meanwhile, desperate Republicans have hit on a strategy to save Trump:  throw Rudy, Mike, and Gordon under the bus.  All of which has created a new on-line betting game, Who Will Flip on Trump First?


Life is not all bad.

THE MORNING AFTER

True to my nature as a voting results junkie, I stayed up way past my bedtime [i.e. past nine p.m.!] to watch the Kentucky results.  I went to sleep happy, even though I had never heard of Beshear before last night.  I found the results enormously reassuring despite my low level of involvement with Kentucky politics.  First, the Democrats’ conquest of the suburbs continues.  Second, and much more significant, turnout was enormous.  This was an off-off-year election, and yet total turnout was almost 50% above what it was in 2015 when the last gubernatorial election was held.  I have repeatedly offered the opinion here that the key to a Democratic victory next year is the sort of record turnout we saw last year when we took back the House.  I remain convinced that impeachment will outrage and fire up Trump voters until it fails in the Senate, at which point the energy will drain out of Trump’s base months before next November.  Meanwhile, the failure of impeachment will infuriate our voters, and that fury will not die away in the late winter, spring, summer, and early fall of 2020.  Instead, it will inspire huge numbers of low-likelihood voters to go to the polls as their only way of expressing their disapproval of Trump. 

On another matter entirely, I think this wretched man Sondland is fatally weakened by having so off-putting a face.   Now, I am aware that looks are deceiving.  One of my heroes, David Hume, had a face like a suet pudding and a body to match, and yet he had the most agile, powerful, penetrating intellect of the 18^th century.

But still.

COOL!

I just discovered that Gabriel Zucman, the junior partner in the firm of Piketty, Saez, and Zucman, is an adviser to Elizabeth Warren.

PERSPECTIVE

Faithful readers know how proud I am of the 110 thousand views my first Kant YouTube lecture has garnered.  For idle amusement, I just watched an SNL clip of Melissa McCarthy doing a Shawn Spicer press briefing.  It has had a tad fewer than 35 million views.  I think we can agree that Americans have their priorities right.

AND NOW, BY POPULAR DEMAND

In the slang of half a century ago and more, I am easy.  If two or even three comments on this blog express a desire for me to post a lecture on YouTube on some subject or other, I start turning the idea over in my head.  Recently, in an unguarded moment, I floated the idea of a series on the philosophy of David Hume.  Several people, as they say nowadays, “liked” the idea, including one new viewer from 8000 miles away [Australia?].  This despite the fact that some years ago I posted on this very blog a 27,000 word essay on the Philosophy of David Hume.  [You’ve read the book, now see the movie?]

But where and when to record the lectures?  The where is easy – a room in Caldwell Hall, the home of the UNC Chapel Hill Philosophy department, virtually right around the corner.  But when is more difficult.  I cannot start them now, so near the end of the semester.  No one will show up, and my first experience with YouTubeing, the ten lectures on Ideological Critique delivered to no one at all in my home study, persuaded me that I need at least someone listening in person to keep me from going all freaky and self-referential.   UNC this spring?  Well, I am already booked there to teach Karl Marx’s Critique of Capitalism starting in January, and there is clearly a limit to how much Wolff a department can stand.  This summer?  Caldwell Hall is a morgue once exams are over.  Maybe next fall, though if I am again teaching at Columbia, that would be a bit of a heavy lift for someone who will by then be eighty-six. 

Still and all, my public calls, all four of them.  I must think on it.

GREAT MINDS THINK ALIKE

Well, after I huffed and puffed and explained here that a large share of the cost of universal health care would come from the companies now providing health insurance to half of all Americans, sure enough when I looked at some of the details of Warren's newly released health care plan, I found that almost half of its cost comes from taxing those companies for what they are now spending on health care.  I should have known this would occur to her.  :)  

CRYSTAL BALLS AND HALF FILLED GLASSES

I am a politics junkie.  On election nights, I sit glued to the TV set, watching mesmerized as 1% of the votes come in from a state whose ultimate choice is a foregone conclusion.  I loved Chuck Todd as long as he was the numbers guy on MSNBC and promptly fell out of love when he was promoted to Meet The Press, transferring my affections to Steve Kornacki.  I recall once – I think it was in 1965 or 1966 – when I was on my way home from a conference in Italy, I stopped in England to see Ernest Gellner, whom I knew from his time visiting Harvard [he briefly dated my sister.]  Ernest and his family lived in a country cottage south of London.  It turned out to be election day in England, and even though I had neither interest in nor knowledge of English politics, I sat fascinated in the little living room watching the results come in.  All of which is to say that I stared at my kitchen TV set until the very last vote was tallied yesterday in the House.

As I have often remarked, there are two sorts of people, Eeyores and Tiggers.  I am a Tigger.  Show me a glass slightly damp from the dishwasher and I will describe it as half full.  So I will now offer a wildly optimistic series of predictions.  Like all of my predictions, they are worth no more than the few thousand bytes it takes to record them, save for the last of them, for which I have evidence.

1.         The House will impeach Trump, probably before Thanksgiving.  In all probability few or no Republicans will vote to impeach.

2.         The Senate will hold a trial whose perfunctoriness will probably be determined by whether John Bolton complies with the subpoena soon to be issued.  If Bolton testifies, and if his testimony is damaging to Trump, McConnell may be compelled to hold a real trial in the Senate.

3.         In any case, Trump will not be convicted by the Senate.

4.         Trump’s supporters will be energized and outraged by the trial, but that will subside well before the election, since Trump will still be in office.  The failure of the Senate to convict Trump will outrage our supporters, and that outrage will build, not subside, as we go through the Primary season and into the election.  Democratic turnout next year will be enormous, as it was in 2018.

5.         Trump will be beaten by a progressive Democrat [not by Biden], we will hold the House, and we will take the Senate.

6.         Trump will not go quietly, and for years to come we shall be dealing with the deep-rooted resentments he is mobilizing, not creating, in scores of millions of Americans.

7.         Some time around Inauguration Day 2021 my first YouTube Kant lecture will hit 150,000 views.