04 March 20
RSN: Ronnie Dugger | Down With These One-Minuters, Out With "Don the Con"
Ronnie Dugger, Reader Supported News
Dugger writes: "This is not just another four-year election."
Ronnie Dugger, Reader Supported News
Dugger writes: "This is not just another four-year election."
The American Presidency now gives only one of our citizens much more power than any of us to accept the climate change that will soon determine our earth’s livability and, even more dangerously, gives that same single citizen total one-person control and command over the exploding of our nuclear-weapons arsenal that can totally destroy humanity. The 2016 election outcome gave the safety of life on earth to Donald Trump. The deterioration of the Democratic candidates’ press-seized TV “debates” must be fixed fast if the still-standing candidates for the nomination against Trump are to produce for the people a fully and fairly heard nominee. Every one of these events should be real debates instead of the one-minuters the press networks conduct.
As demonstrated again last week in the chaotic snarl on TV among the candidates for the Democratic nomination, the press conducts these events in pluralized press conferences that insult the candidates and the American people and blur the case for a new president. The press is almost totally controlling what the candidates talk about before tens of millions of us. After firing their often bullet-like questions, the five questioners last week, CBS the major sponsor, gave the candidates only one minute and 15 seconds to answer each question — 75 seconds! If a rival crossed a speaker the questioner might, might, allow 45 more seconds, but only 45, for a refutation.
No candidate was permitted more than a minute or two on any subject, health care, foreign policy, taxes, climate change. Even while one was speaking, some of the others on both sides of him or her rudely raised and kept their arms high, begging to be called on next. Foreign policy? One of the candidates touched on her plans concerning half a dozen different nations in her one minute 15 seconds! The press deciding and thus controlling what’s discussed within their own time-limiting so jams together and rushes the candidates that most of them seem to speak at 60 miles a minute. Several times this week candidates were yelling at each other, once all at once — it was quite a seizure. The millions of people around the country, of course, often losing track watching a jumble of subjects and ideas so speedily sloganized, get little or no time to think clear-mindedly as they watch and listen.
The half dozen or so candidates challenging Trump who are left on civic TV (and thus radio), out of respect for themselves, each other, and the American people, ought to meet together privately and take back, plan, and insist on controlling together the rest of their own debates. In any such occasion on nationwide TV and radio the candidates, not the press, are the subject. Each candidate is owed, needs, and deserves 10, 20, or more uninterrupted minutes for his or her own thoughts, proposals, and values. Each should also have ten or 15 uninterrupted minutes for refutation. When down to two candidates, each of course should have at least one or two hours total. Most of all, the people, before choosing our one life-controlling and death-controlling president, are greatly entitled to the candidates’ sufficiently long and serious thinking and their sensibly-timed presentations. Anything like this is altogether absent from these one- and two-minute brain flashers. The TV networks, putting themselves first, in fact are reducing the informedness and intelligence of the entire American people on our one biggest decision. The candidates could wisely implore the League of Women Voters to preside over real debates as long ago they used to so fairly and well. The League could for example consult, later on, with Trump and his people. Surely networks, presented the candidates’ own rules for their own debates, would compete for the media honor and, if commercial, for the profits of airing them.
The few (is it three?) candidates left running against Trump on civic TV (and thus radio) have been roughly divided between the leading liberals Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren along with billionaire Tom Steyer and the several centrist moderate Democrats, led by Joe Biden in most polls until recently. Concerning the two billionaires, Steyer, who dropped out of the race last weekend, is firmly liberal, even campaigning for reparations for African-Americans because of the criminal slavery whites did to them. Michael Bloomberg, who withdrew Wednesday, though a financer for some important liberal campaigns, is also somewhat right of center; for example he has opposed raising the minimum wage, and he supported a Republican candidate against Warren in the election for the U.S. Senate seat she holds.
Sanders and Warren are of course competing against each other as amicably as they can, and so are the remaining centrists. Trump has signaled his readiness to slam his lies and slanders into the face and heart of the Democrats’ nominee, but given his famous identity as a deliberate and chronic liar, the thrust of his campaign attacks cannot be reliably anticipated. The prospect of a bitter Democratic national convention, especially given the opposition to Sanders now more obviously attributed to the “Democratic establishment” (including presumably most of their 77 convention “superdelegates”), suggests it’s likely that the anti-Trump candidates will resume trying to work together more pleasantly with fewer Trump-usable damnings of each other even as each seeks more support until the one nominee is chosen.
Two situations might suggest the leading Democratic candidates’ present problems.
During the Senate trial of Trump’s impeachment (all of which but one day I covered via TV), Trump clearly displayed one of his campaigning intentions if his often-targeted Biden becomes the nominee against him. The impeachment charged the President with corruptly coercing the newly-elected President Zelensky of Ukraine with extortion (arguably by threatened bribery) to get Zelensky to publicly announce that Ukraine would investigate Trump’s then leading opponent Biden and his son Hunter. The investigation was to concern Hunter Biden’s having become a board member of a corruption-accused company, Burisma, a natural gas firm, that belonged to a corrupt oligarch. Trump ordered the withholding from Ukraine of an almost $400 million grant already appropriated by Congress to help our ally fund its war against its invasion-supporting neighbor Russia. In the whistleblower’s document that caused his impeachment, Trump is quoted telling Zelensky he thought the case involving the Bidens was “a horror.” Trump let Zelensky know that if he didn’t make Trump’s by-then-required announcement against the Bidens the annual grant to Ukraine would stay withheld.
Joe Biden has bragged that, when he was vice-president, he forced a certain Ukrainian prosecutor to quit within six days or else Biden would withhold a billion dollars of (presumably U.S.) money from Ukraine. The prosecutor did quit, but the facts on the meaning and implications of that event are controverted. During Trump’s lawyers’ defense of him against his impeachment, two of them specialized and focused on national TV for about an hour charging Biden and his son Hunter of corruption in this matter. One of Trump’s lawyers, Eric Herschmann, alluded to Hunter’s income from the firm as “millions of payments” to Joe Biden’s family, and he exclaimed that “his own son corrupted a corrupt oligarch.... What was going on?” When asked about this matter on MSNBC, Joe Biden called these charges “a total lie,” but he has not been quoted on the matter extensively. Hunter Biden under interview has conceded that his being the son of his father has affected most of his life, and he refused to say how much money he was paid as a result of his Burisma board membership.
Hunter Biden has conceded “poor judgment” in taking his role with Burisma. In a feature concerning him in its society section last Saturday, The New York Times reported, “There has been no proof of any wrongdoing by Mr. Biden related to his business dealings in Ukraine,” but that Hunter “declined to answer questions” about his five or so years with Burisma. He joined the company’s board of directors in 2014 when his father, as the vice president, was leading Obama administration actions against corruption in the energy industry in Ukraine. Hunter now paints and lives in a rented 2,000-square foot house in Hollywood Hills, which, its owner told the Times, was leased last June 15 for $10,000 a month. “Democrats worry,” the story said, “that [Hunter’s] curious overseas dealings could pose a threat” to his father’s campaign for president. In 2015, also according to the story, Hunter began working for “a Romanian oligarch ... who was facing corruption charges,” but this fall he quit working for a Chinese firm and said “he would not work for or with any foreign-owned companies if his father became president.”
Healthcare evidently was the most decisive factor when Democrats won back a majority of the House of Representatives in 2018. The sharp dispute on healthcare between the candidates’ liberal and central groups is important now. Among the candidates, Sanders has been the most ferocious and compelling champion of expanded “Medicare for All,” extended to all U.S. residents, eloquently joined on that by Warren. The most recent 100-page bill Sanders introduced for “M4A” last year is interpreted, after a three-year transition from present health law and private insurance onto his M4A, as effecting the abolition of private, profit-making medical insurance.
The national health insurance systems in the world’s major nations (except the U.S.) are so various they obviate a general description. Clearly they all do result in most of their peoples’ acceptance and strong appreciation of their cheaper government-paid healthcare. However, most or all of their systems also let citizens who want to do it instead go on paying for their private, or some private, health insurance. Socialized or profit-only care, take your choice. In England, when I was in school there, I knew a couple who lived on the English Channel who chose instead to just keep on paying for their private insurance, and who cared? In Germany, as of 2015, about nine million Germans are still using private for-profit insurance. Sanders is being challenged to follow that pattern instead of killing private insurance. One even hears the accusation that the Democrats want to take 160 million Americans' health insurance away from them. Warren, of course aware of all this, has modified her Medicare for All plan, now starting it off if she's elected with only a partial “public option” and finalizing it only after her own, but new to her plan, three-year transitional period.
Perhaps both Sanders and Warren or just either one of them might decide, while carrying forward for single-payer public health insurance, to okay what would then be, one could say, “the private option.” The candidates against Trump might be able to stop barking repeatedly at each other and be unarguingly for Medicare for All, and Trump and the health insurance companies would be mostly pushed back on the issue other than Trump’s charge that even democratic socialism in Western nations is communism. If not, however, one of them, if the nominee, favoring abolishing private health care entirely would surely be in for blasting on this from Trump as the American people may be deciding the future of the earth and our species.
Ronnie Dugger, winner of the 2011 Polk Award for lifetime journalism, is the author of presidential biographies of Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan, books on Hiroshima and on universities, articles and essays in Harper’s, The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Progressive, The Texas Observer (of which he was the founding editor), and other publications. In November 1988, with necessary disregard of covering-up local election officials, he wrote, published in The New Yorker, a 26,000-word essay exposing the truth that counting elections in computers endangers even presidential elections being stolen unprovably by, for example, computer equipment companies’ paid machine programmers. He lives and writes in Austin, Texas.
ronniedugger@gmail.com
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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