Month: March 2020

The Nomination

Come June 2 New Jersey had been scheduled to hold the last major primary. Now at least 6 more states have postponed primaries to June 2, no longer the last big date on the primary schedule but, as things stand, But now the biggest date of the primary season.

June 2 will be Super Tuesday Redux.

Thus far 10 states and Puerto Rico have postponed voting from March and April. Kentucky has put its primary off to June 23, a date also under consideration by hard-hit New York State.

Other states are making other arrangements. Ohio, whose primary was postponed from April 3 when Illinois, Arizona, and Florida delivered massive wins to Joe Biden, is now operating a rolling election by mail that will conclude probably with in-person voting in late April if that is possible although the best guess is Ohio will have to declare its primary over when the mail-in deadline arrives.

But even if and when all primaries can be conducted  – how will the Democratic Party actually confer its nomination on Biden? Every new day makes it more and more likely, in fact, more and more certain the party’s national convention, scheduled to kick off July 13 in Milwaukee, will be, will have to be canceled.

A gathering that brings together 25,000 people including 4,500 delegates, all Democratic U.S. Senators and House members, all non-incumbent  Democratic candidates for those offices, half the nation’s governors, and as many as 10,000 from the media along with all numbers of support and service staff simply is not going to happen.

Traditionally any Democratic Speaker of the House would preside. Not a good idea to risk 79-year-old Nancy Pelosi in what would be a Covid-19 stew. Or to risk anyone else, including of course the nominees for president and vice president, especially when we assume the nominee will be a 77-year-old man with a pre-existing condition.

How can this be done then?

Well, that is up to the Democratic National Committee. It would have to change the rules to give itself the authority to confirm the candidate with the most delegates as the nominee — whether or not – whether or not –  all primaries eventually and actually take place.

Such a plan could be facilitated if a man who is so caught up in his ambition as to be out of touch with reality, Bernard Sanders, would quit the race and call on the DNC to confirm Biden now as the nominee.

That is unlikely. Sanders is consumed by Sanders. We know one day he will have his page in American history. How it will portray him at its end is up to him.

Andrew Cuomo

New York’s governor has demonstrated presidential leadership and management qualities and skills in ways more certain and defined than anyone has or could in campaign debates, on the hustings or in any prior public office. Indeed more-so than he has in his prior eight years as governor, albeit he is a take-charge man.

He is 15 years younger than Joe Biden. You and millions of others lately have said to themselves, to friends, to the family – he should be the Democratic nominee and pondered if that could happen?

Not in any circumstance we know.

For it to happen would call for an even greater gesture toward history than the one mentioned as to Sanders. It would call on Biden to call for that. Don’t imagine that will happen, and for it to happen so much more than we foresee now would have to happen with regard to the severity of the Covid-19 catastrophe.

In politics, keep your eye on the possible, the likely and the seemingly inevitable. It is very much the most that usually happens.

Short of declining a nomination he has all but won, Biden could retract his pledge to choose a woman to be his running mate in favor of a man who demonstrates every day what a president looks like, sounds like and does.

But that is fraught with all kinds of political drawbacks and pitfalls so it is no more likely to happen. Half the Democratic world would hail such a momentous decision and half would decry it while all Republicans would be cheered by the dissonance and disorder it would create for Democrats.

Cuomo, who like his father almost certainly aspires to the presidency, has emerged in this as a man of presidential timber and quality. He has always been an abrasive, contentious figure, not well-loved but respected and yes feared in politics in his state. He has in this crisis transformed the public’s understanding and appreciation of him. He has their back and they know it. The whole nation knows it and the comparison with the creature in the White House is stark.

Will Cuomo be president one day? Perhaps. But right now, many wish he was and could be and it is politically very hard to see how he can or could become so in 2021.

Trump

What is there to say that has not been said?

Our language can no longer be polite when talking about Trump in this grotesque moment in history. He is profane. The language must be profane.

So, this:

The fucker cannot stand being upstaged. He is outraged — outraged — that the virus has upstaged him

How dare it? How dare anyone or anything, even a worldwide pandemic, dare to upstage him? He, reality star of the universe.

And so he attempts each day to bend it – the virus and its historic emergent moment – to him.

Thus, in defiance of science, he decreed the country must “open” on Easter.

Well, whether or not Jesus rises on that Sunday, the economy must, we must – we must rise and work.

He wants, if we are crucified on a viral cross, it not be in His name but in his name.

Multiple Choice Question:

Since clearly1,000 deaths have not, it will take what number of Covid-19 deaths in the U.S.A. to convince Trump’s horde that he lies?

A) 2,500

B 10,000

C) 25,000

D) 50,000

E) They will never, ever believe he is ever wrong until someone they love dies.

Answer: E

Why?

Because they believe only him, receive everything they think they know from Fox and its ilk in the right-wing media and never look outside those channels.

He speaks to them through Fox, through his tweets and daily viral briefings. They take him as gospel.

Red States

The Kerner Commission appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to examine the causes of  urban riots in the late 1960s (chaired by Otto Kerner the then governor of Illinois and one of the many to hold that office who ended up in federal prison) is famous for saying this in its report:

“We are two nations … separate and unequal.

Today again the United States is two nations, separate and unequal.

We are blue states distinguished by high levels of education, income, the high tech industry, and service economies; by better health care, higher penetration of health coverage; valuing the arts and culture; states that are much the more cohesive societies with major urban and suburban population centers and mobile populations and, in this grave moment, distinguished by enlightened leadership, witness Governors Andrew Cuomo, Phil Murphy, Larry Hogan, Tom Wolf, Gavin Newsome, Jay Inslee.

Then there are red states distinguished by poor educational attainment, failed industries, lower incomes, higher uninsured immobile populations, worse health care systems, dreadful health outcomes, rural majorities overcome by drug epidemics, and low and very lowest ratings across the gamut of socio/economic factors that measure the health and well-being of society.

In Blue states very much the most receive information from MSNBC, PBS, and CNN; from traditional, valued, trusted print organs like the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal (news pages only) the LA Times and from their own regional and local newspapers like the Boston Globe, Denver Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Baltimore Sun, Richmond Times Leader. The list goes on and it adds venerable national influential magazines like The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and Harpers.

Red state audiences predominantly watch Fox News except when they are watching local news on a Sinclair Broadcasting outlet and receiving from them distorted coverage and stilted, stulted far-right opinion disguised as fact. Those audiences look not to the established daily newspapers that their grandfathers and grandmothers read and rightfully trusted but to a mélange of malicious, fallacious right-wing web sites masquerading as news outlets – the likes of Breitbart, Drudge and even worse and worse.

Red-state white citizens of the right are immune to facts, history, and truth, and demonstrate the metastatically pure evil of a far-right media machine that alone informs the white populations of the red-state world.

At least in an allegorical sense all the Fox creatures like Ingram and Hannity, or on the radio like Limbaugh, Beck, and their ilk, or on-line via Breitbart and Drudge are guilty of murder  – the murder of truth, government and of a civil, informed society.

Say Thanks

To those still going out to do their marketing and such like chores, when you do go to the supermarket be sure to give the people working there a special thanks for the simple fact that they come to work.

They have become the first line of the first responders, dealing with the public with little protection while keeping order, sanitation, and FOOD in their markets.

When you stand opposite a cashier the distance is maybe two feet or less. You do it once that day, every few days.

They do it all day long, every day across from hundreds and hundreds of strangers making them more at risk than police or firefighters these days. Thank them for doing their jobs, this is not something any of them ever signed up for.

Musings on the Presidency:

Trump has been meeting with this industry and that industry. The meetings, in so much as we are told about them, go like this: Industry executives bow and scrape, tell him he is indispensable, tell him they could not do it without him, that they look to his incredible leadership and then ask for billions of bucks.

He tells them they are all great and he’ll get the money for them and they should keep working and we’ll all get through this.

And that is pretty much a Trump meeting with anyone about anything except if he is bullying someone into doing something wrong.

What should a presidential meeting be? In the context of a meeting with an industry’s leaders, its CEOs?

It begins with a thoroughly researched memo to the president — a memo he actually reads – identifying each participant with bio, describing in detail their companies and their situations in general vis-a-vis the emergency.

He should know where they were born, who they married, divorced if they did; where they graduated from and the arc of their careers to the front offices of their corporations as well as how they get along with their peers, the inter-industry relations that might help set the tone of a White House meeting.

Were it a meeting with auto industry leaders to talk about shifting to ventilator production it would be based on a memo that reports as well the immediate, current contacts with the companies concerning plants they could convert, how long it will take, when they can start to deliver ventilators – and defines ways to set in motion a handoff establishing factory quotas, supply chain transport, allocating products by region and state, etc. That is how we went from producing 4,000 military aircraft in 1940 to 96,000 in 1944.

The meeting is not to congratulate the president. It is for the president to inspire and establish an agreement to production terms, quotas, etc. and then to handoff implementation to someone he has appointed production czar, not unlike Jimmy Byrnes when he ran FDR’s War Production Board for nearly three years during WWII.

That’s how you do being president, instead of lying, winging it, listening to your asshole buddies or your son-in-law and his buddies who know nothing, have no expertise and are playing you every day with eyes on a fast buck.

No, what you do when you are president is read your briefing books, talk to the experts, defer to them and you don’t – you don’t go out every single day to lie and talk with certainty about things of which you know nothing.

226  days to Election Day, 299 Days to Inauguration Day

 

 

With homage to Daniel Defoe, random thoughts because today all thoughts are random.

Martial Law

Will it take that to keep tens of thousands of fools off the beaches in Florida, from exercising in public spaces in close proximity?

This is not China, where a despotic government can lock down regions or the entire country or South Korea, where close order drill is the way of a homogenous society.

China tonight reported its first full day without a new case. Can we get to that if thousands of people are going to go to beaches and find other ways around the kind of lockdown China imposed, that Italy, a far more cohesive nation than us, is managing?

No, we can’t. We are The Americans, the people of Conestoga wagon trains, the open road, no internal borders, no internal documents — except in liquor stores and bars.

What could it take if we keep misbehaving to get us to understand that stay home means stay home?

It could take martial law and suspension of Habeas Corpus, the latter of which we have not seen since Abraham Lincoln dared to do it during the Civil War. Do we want that under Trump? Shudder.

What’s the choice then? Don’t go to the beach, stay at home.

Don’t bet against it, martial law that is, if this is not done by June.

And the Candidate Is? Part XVI

Joe Biden.

Everything yours truly wrote about the potential for a contested convention was true except there came a moment, an exact moment, that being the moment James Clyburn endorsed Biden, a moment when Democrats everywhere realized there was a way out of their deep despond.

They realized it had to be Biden or it would, in fact, go to a fractured convention with no telling how that would end except probably badly and with Bernie Sanders the nominee; and that if it ended with Bernie as nominee it would bring a down-ballot debacle.

It was as if the same thought suddenly occurred to about 30 million people. They all realized, at the same moment, it has to be Joe Biden and that’s that and everyone else, get out. And Bernie? They universally decided, 65% of them that Bernie? Bernie, for Pete’s sake Bernie, either give it up or get run over by us, the Democratic Party’s voters.

Bernie stayed in. Now, he’s been run over and will be out shortly.

Vice Presidential Candidate

He said a woman. So the only question is which woman? One who ran for president and lost? A black woman? Someone we don’t hardly know? Someone no one is thinking about but maybe should?

So, quickly, no, not Kamala Harris. If black voters had thought of her as – had seen her as a black woman she would be the nominee. They did not see her or Corey Booker as their favored candidate, as one of them, speaking for them.

They saw and see Joe Biden as that person because no one but him is the choice of Barack Obama. How do they know he is that choice? Because President Obama already chose him, choosing him 12 years ago.

So, obviously, they see Joe Biden as their candidate. And that means? That means it does not necessarily have to be a black woman in the Veep spot.

What if it is? Who could it be?

Well, everyone agrees on Stacy Abrams except if you get down to it, she doesn’t have the political background. She is a great communicator but…but it’s problematic because we don’t know enough about her and there is not time enough to vet her the way a national ticket candidate should be who is largely unknown.

After all, George W. Bush didn’t know until it was too late that Dan Quail was not very sharp. And then there was the unvetted Sarah Palin.

Congresswoman Val Demmings of Florida is being talked about. Right, mostly you haven’t heard of her. In this woe-begotten time is there time to introduce an unknown? Again, time to really, really vet her. Common sense, as well as political sense, says, NO, there is not..

Who then? Elizabeth Warren? No, she and Biden are not on the same page, never will be and she brings strengths but also infirmities. We know too much about her, she is too vetted, too much a lightning rod to electrify opposition.

Of the other women who ran who perhaps then? Amy Klobuchar perhaps. She was moving up,  wasn’t going to win but was impressing. She has a problem with black voters? Yes. What’s the problem? They had no idea who she was and, by the same measure, she had no idea who they were/are. But as Biden’s choice that would begin to be cured and she is a fast learner.

Someone from out of political left field but known to liberals and Democrats and women in the suburbs? Maybe, but who?

Cecile Richards, a most, a very much most impressive person who, as the former head of Planned Parenthood, would galvanize the woman’s vote, and as the daughter of Ann Richards could perhaps turn Texas blue and if Texas turns blue, the deal is done. I agree, she is an unlikely choice but one not beyond imagining.

What is perhaps the over-riding consideration in his choice of a V.P. candidate?

This. Joe Biden will be 78 on inauguration day. Even If he lives out the term he will be elected to, even if he cannot say it without making himself a lame duck, he is likely to be a one-term president.

So who he chooses is more than just a typical balance-the- ticket choice. It is the choice of someone who more likely than anyone else in the nation right now will be president within five years. That makes it an entirely different choice.

Baseball

I miss it.

Donald Trump

Unfit, unprepared, misbegotten, miserable miscreant. And worse.

Stimulus Packages (Or is it Stimuli Packages?)

Should be paid for now because the Congress will never get around to that if and when this ever recedes into some kind of new normal.

How pay for it?

Reverse much of the Trump $1.9 trillion tax cut, raise the top marginal rate to about 75%, close the hedge fund loophole called carried interest – in fact, close all the loopholes and dodges that famous top 1% uses to evade taxation; attach a 10% surcharge to all income taxes paid on all incomes of $1 million or more and adopt a wealth tax modeled on that proposed by Elizabeth Warren. Raise the capital gains tax to 28%.

Do all of that for at least three years and then revisit it.

The way to save capitalism in the present catastrophe enveloping it? Tax capital and the highest incomes it produces and the wealth it accumulates to finance the financial rescue of American capitalism’s economy. It will come back to everyone, including the wealthy, in spades in several years.

But we cannot add $5 trillion in debt without stepping up by matching it now  — NOW -with substantially equivlent revneue and, by the time this is over. $5 trillion in stimuli packages is not inconceivable

That would be equal to one-quarter of the present national debt.

Any good Republican will tell you that it is not sustainable if you want something like the U.S.A. that you know and remember from just two weeks ago to emerge from this in tact in a few months or many months more.

 

 

 

$1,000 for every adult, defined I suppose as everyone 18 years old and older?

Stupid idea. Why?

Because no one needs $,1000 right now

Some people need $10,000. Some need $20,000.

Some people don’t need more money right now.

And some need to pay a surcharge valued on their 2019 income taxes to pay for what needs to be done.

And some, if in fact, they are so wealthy they are able virtually to avoid taxation, need to be assessed in some other way to help pay the fiscal stimulus to counter this most consequential event.

There has to be a way to differentiate between people laid off or forced into layoffs by business closures and those able to continue to work and thereby able to continue to receive wages and salaries; and between those rarer people, the rich, the wealthy and the super-wealthy who need nothing because they have more than anyone needs.

The former need cash assistance, the latter doesn’t. Most retirees need assistance, but lots don’t.

A payroll tax reduction or elimination is a disguise to wreck Social Security and/or Medicaid. If that is done it is not repairable. When he signed the 1935 Social Security Act into law FDR said, “let no politician mess with my system of Social Security.” A strong caution then, an even stronger one now.

There seems to be a lack of critical thinking about how to structure a stimulus but it ought to contain this thought – that this fiscal stimulus should be designed to rescue those stranded by the vast shutdowns across the economy.

The money they need now is not for discretionary spending because — because that is precisely the kind of spending that has been shut down putting them out of work as waiters and waitresses, cooks, chefs, hotel cleaners, hotel maintenance men, taxi drivers, ticket sellers, ushers, casino workers, cruise ship workers, airport and airlines workers – on and on and on and on.

If you gave upper-middle-class earners $1,000 today what would they do with it? What could they do with it? Buy a set of golf clubs they can’t use now? Take the family to see a Broadway show that’s closed? Go out to an expensive dinner? In what restaurant, where? Buy airplane tickets and book a weekend resort getaway on a plane not flying to a resort that closed yesterday? Buy a new Mac at an Apple store that’s closed?

$1,000 is discretionary for those who don’t really need it but it is a tease and an insult to those who need a great deal more right now and who will need much, much more in the months ahead – especially when we know studies say a substantial majority of Americans haven’t got so much as $400 in savings for a bad time.

This fiscal stimulus package ought to direct spending to make sure those forced out of work by the current public health emergency can pay for necessities — for shelter, food, health coverage and care, some child care if they need it and can arrange it.

The wrong spending in this situation is through any tax decrease. The right kinds might very well include cash grants – but ones made with well-conceived standards and a clear focus on who needs them now and why they are in need?

Grants should be designed to understand the part that maintaining necessary necessity spending will play in maintaining social and civic order before want dissolves into panic and panic, in turn, sets loose chaos and disorder.

But, sadly, public policy too often is not something we make but something that happens to us caused by people who don’t think about consequences or have no experience with understanding how to identify public policy objectives and then design responses to meet them.

There is no evidence that Trump, Mnuchin, the economic midget Kudlow, Kushner, Meadows, any of these benighted characters understand any of this, much less will even think about these kinds of things, weigh them in the balance or look ahead to how what is done now will affect us in July, next September, a year from now.

Why? Because they do not know how to govern but someone has to, someone must. So governors are as best they can but even they do not have the single most important power to be exercised now, that of the federal purse.

 

 

In case you are wondering, the Dow was at 19,827 on Jan. 20, 2017 – Trump’s Inauguration Day. It had bottomed out at 6,495 in early 2009 after the 2008 bank crash that happened when George W. Bush occupied the White House, whose deregulators let the housing mortgage bubble, and bubble and bubble into turmoil and trouble until finally it burst, exploding into the Great Recession.

 

During Barack Obama’s presidency, the Dow gained more than 13,000 points. Donald Trump inherited a market approaching Dow 20,000 and decided he owned it.

 

So yes, you Trump idiots, the bull market was, to the degree we attribute these things to presidents, an Obama market, built on his administration’s stimulus and auto bailout packages (and the ACA which substantially rationalized the economics of the health care component of our economy, which is, after all, don’t you know and you should, 20% of GDP).

 

And, not inconsequential to economic confidence, was the confidence inspired by a sane, rational, competent and excellent presidency.

 

Today, March 12, 2020, the Dow closed at 21,200. It has lost nearly 8,000 points in the past three weeks. It is no longer nearly 10,000 points higher than when Trump took office. That margin is down to 2,300 points and tonight, as this is written, futures are down a further 500 points. At its present pace, the market will be back within a week to where it was when Trump was inaugurated and then likely recede from that.

 

Were a competent, empathetic person president, the DOW drop would have been but half what it has been. The double down on the drop is all Trump and that Wall Street, not necessarily a smart or disciplined neighborhood in the best of times, at last, has recognized that he is incapable and that we have 10 months before Joe Biden becomes president and begins – begins, begins to restore responsibility, sanity, intelligence and civility to the most important public office in the world — in the world: The American presidency.

 

What party held the presidency in the market crashes of 1929, 1987, 2008 and now this one, 2020? Why the Republican Party, of course, the party that says it is the party of business. You know, sleepy old Calvin Coolidge who declared, “The business of America is business.”

 

What party left a balanced budget and/or declining federal budget deficits in 2000 and 2016 to incoming Republican presidents? The Democratic Party of course.

 

What party has driven the national debt up by hundreds of billions until it is now $2 trillion, nearly equal to GDP? Why the Republican Party, of course, the party that says it is the party of “fiscal responsibility”. Oh well, so much for truth, justice, and the American way.

 

See a pattern here folks? To quote Harry Truman, “Had enough?” Had enough of Republican fiscal and tax stupidity, rascality, lying, cheating, hypocrisy, wooly headed imbecility? It’s about time you all figured that out. it is long past time you smelled that out because as they say, the corpse stinks from the head and who is the head of that party now? Yah, Donald John Trump.

 

When Dwight D. Eisenhower became president the highest marginal income tax rate was 91%. When some of his economic advisors came to Ike, a very, careful, honest traditional conservative, and suggested that the top marginal rate should be reduced substantially, he said no. He said the people who earned it in those days — corporate executives mostly then in a time before Hedge funds and that sort of banditry — Ike said they could well afford it and let them pay it (adjusted of course on their returns).

 

In fact, the 91% top rate was reduced to 71% in the 1961 tax overhaul of what president? John F. Kennedy, a Democrat I do believe. And that was deemed radical. Today, negotiated back and forth between Republican and Democratic congresses over the past 40 years, the top marginal rate is now at a Republican low of 35%. What should it be in the interest of that Republican standard, fiscal responsibility? About where JFK had it 60 years ago. Oh yes, as Ike would have agreed, Jamie Dimon, poster boy for the top tenth of a percent, can well, well, well afford it and should have to pay it as a patriotic duty.

 

Four Republican presidents since 1980 have presided over and pushed their party’s lemming-like insistence that massive tax cuts grow the economy, with 90 percent of those cuts going to the top 1 percent of wealth holders and income earners, notwithstanding that  90 years ago John Maynard Keynes explained that what grows economies is public spending and investment.

 

And every time, every single fucking time, Republicans have pushed massive tax cuts. For 40 years now, ever time, without fail, that has resulted in massive deficits, piling up the national debt, creating one economic bubble or another – the savings and loan bubble, the market bubble, the housing finance bubble and now the sheer incompetence and stupidity bubble.

 

And every one of those bubbles burst, every one of those tax-cut infections has burst like a pestilential sore, spewing economic pus and corruption everywhere.

 

And each and every time a Democratic president has inherited the mess and been left to clean up the mess, to do what Republicans run on, proclaim and then do the opposite of – achieving fiscal responsibility, reducing deficits, controlling the national debt. Who has done, had to do that in the past 40 years? Democrats. Who has made the mess they rail against the past 40 years and then make all the worse? Republicans. And when one Republican, George H.W. Bush, undid some of the damage with a tax increase, his own party turned on him. After all, they had read his lips, the ones that had proclaimed no new taxes.

 

This is not partisanship, it is a fact. It is the undeniable, actual fiscal history of the past 40 years of the United States.  That needs to be repeated.

 

It is the undeniable, actual fiscal history of the United States of America that for the past 40 years Republicans have spilled red ink all over everything,  leaving Democrats to blot it up.

 

Well, now, to the degree this Republican imbecile,  Trump — and yes the Republican Party which owns him lock stock and barrel as he owns it — to the degree, Trump thinks the market is the economy, his economy is going, going going, GONE.

 

As Nevada Democrats caucused (remember that, ancient history by now), Bernie Sanders declared neither the Republican or the Democratic Party establishments could stop him. Lately, as he focused his attack on his last rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, he makes it a point every time to say he is running against the political establishment.

Actually not Bernie, You are running to win the nomination of a major piece of the political establishment, the oldest established political party in the nation, the one with roots in the faction led by Thomas Jefferson that formalized itself as a political party during the time of Andrew Jackson – the Democratic Party.

In the now very unlikely event Sanders becomes the Democratic party nominee for president – in the more unlikely event of his election as president, how exactly does Bernie Sanders propose to govern and with whom?

How exactly does he propose to govern without the Democratic establishment? Because you see, what all this is about — this infernal two years of stupidity called the American presidential election campaign — is about governing.

Four years ago two New Hampshire Newspapers, the Concord Monitor and the Keane Sentinel published a piece I wrote in which I asked this question:

When you vote for president, how many people are you voting for? And then I answered the question with the observation that very much the most people would say they were voting for one person – and further observed that was entirely incorrect.

And that remains so today.

Why? Because when you vote for president you are not voting for one person. You are voting, by various sourced estimates, for 4,000 people the president will appoint across the executive branch of the federal government.

He will appoint them to staff the White House, his cabinet reaching down to the level of assistant secretary, and those he will name to run the entire A to Z gamut of federal agencies, boards, commissions and the like from the SEC and the FCC to the FDA and the CDC/Centers for Medicaid and Medicare — down to the most obscure government offices.

Of those 4,000 presidential appointees, sources say 1,250  or so will need to be confirmed by the United States Senate.

How do presidents find those people? They find them within the long-standing and ever sustaining, rejuvenating, experienced government and political cadres of their parties, the Democratic and Republican Parties because those are the only two parties that get to govern us.

Both major parties have cadres of candidates for those 4,000 positions. They are of course senators and House members, though no president should want to reach into the Senate because those seats are rare.  But the 4,000 are also from academia, business, capitol hill staffs, governors and former governors, statehouses across the nation, policy organizations and think tanks, and more.

Whether you liked George W. Bush or George H.W. Bush or Ronald Reagan; whether you liked Bill Clinton and Barrack Obama, those men and their presidencies were able to draw on their respective parties’ trained, informed, educated, experienced cadres – their experts, their governments in waiting.

If you are a Democrat you didn’t like the people or their policies, programs, legislative agenda, foreign policy and management of government by Republican presidents and their choices to populate the executive branch or if you are a Republican you did not like some or all of them under Democratic presidents.

But – but at least you could understand that the people put into those positions by presidents of either party were, in the main, qualified, able and experienced, especially in the top 500 positions – the ones we read about day in and day out: The cabinet secretaries and their assistant and deputy secretaries, the CIA, the FBI, the NSC, the DNI, the prominent and not so prominent federal boards and commission. Current example? The CDC and its several parts.

Among the reasons the Trump administration is the worst thing to happen to the United States of America since Pearl Harbor is that by and large and for the most part — and really overwhelmingly the Republican cadres – that party’s human infrastructure of government-ready policymakers and managers — stayed out, estimating correctly the career-ending catastrophe this administration would be.

They knew what was coming. They wanted no part of it. They were right and so instead we have Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, and their ilk.

The Republican Party’s personnel infrastructure did not know Donald Trump. He did not know them. He made it clear he didn’t care to know them.

He could, as he said, do it all alone or nearly so with his scrum of toadies, incompetents, screaming meemies like Steven Miller, other assorted henchmen, and lest we forget, his gangster family.

Shortly before Trump was elected Chris Christie, then governor of New Jersey was tasked with managing the transition. He put together the top of a government in waiting and more that goes into a sensible transition. Hillary Clinton similarly had a detailed transition in progress.

Trump threw out Christie and his transition planning because his nasty son-in-law has it in for Christy because Christy prosecuted Jared Kushner’s father, Charles Kushner,  for setting up his own brother, Jared’s uncle, to be blackmailed with a videotape of the uncle with a hooker that Charles had sent to his sister-in-law. Nasty people.

And so Jared’s pique killed what slim chance there was for a reasonable transition. Instead we got this misshapen, malformed administration populated by misanthropes, gangsters, hangers-on, lobbyists, and a general assortment of know-nothings. For very much the most part, the Republican government in waiting stayed out.

Fast forward now to Bernie Sanders. He is not a Democrat. He has never helped the Democratic Party. When he runs for the Senate he files as a Democrat, thereby assuring no one will challenge him in Vermont. He wins on the Democratic Party line and immediately after being elected he resigns from the party.

He hurt the Democratic Party in 2016. He is hurting it again. He has extorted if for position in the House and Senate for more than 30 years. He seeks the Democratic nomination for president while making it clear he is not a Democrat and disdains the Democratic Party.

He has a fervent following and yes, it is young. Its masses believe he will erase their college debt, give them a new system of free universal medical care and more and that he can, as Donald Trump said, do it alone. He can’t of course.

Reading back into the New Deal, looking at how FDR’s Brain Trust and cabinet members like Harold Ickes and Francis Perkins assembled the legislation that became the hallmarks of the New Deal, especially and above all the Social Security Act of 1935, to this very day — to this very day — the single, most far-reaching socio-economic program ever enacted by the United States of America, we understand that it takes more than rhetoric.

It takes more than good intentions, even best intentions, to achieve broad social and economic progress and fairness. It takes political know-how and an experienced political cadre to get it done. It takes a party and its human infrastructure.

FDR above all understood that and constructed even from his time as governor of New York State what has become the ongoing, renewable and renewing generational infrastructure of political and policy architects and makers of the Democratic Party.

Bernie Sanders has been the foe of that Democratic infrastructure virtually his entire adult and political life. He does not come from or have access to what he calls the Democratic Party establishment that is, in reality, the foundation on which the Democratic Party constructs national governments when it is chosen to lead them in the White House.

Would that Democratic core of experienced policy, political and administrative people work for Sanders any more than the Republican version was willing to work for Trump?

It seems unlikely they would and, without them, Sanders could not govern and certainly without them he would absolutely not have the trust of the House and Senate if both come into Democratic Party control next January.

Do Sanders voters understand this? Do they know the right answer to the question, how many people are you voting for when you vote for president? Or as Trump declared, do they believe that Bernie and Bernie alone can do it?

He can’t. No one can.

In the American republic, in the systems to govern our republic that evolved from when Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton in their differences confirmed our division into what their boss, George Washington, called “factions”, we have seen presidencies incorporating the political parties come and go, rise and fall.

But always, until this presidency, presidents have looked to and been able to look to well-formed party infrastructures to populate their governments to carry out their policies and provide the polity of functional administrations.

Bernie Sanders makes it clear he is not a Democrat. Could he govern without the Democrats whose nomination he asks for but whose political party he disdains?

Not likely. Very unlikely. Highly unlikely.

With Super Tuesday’s count is in progress, its muddle slowly clarifying with hours before California begins to come in and days before all of it will be tallied because there are 2 million early votes in the Golden State to be unsealed and counted in the days ahead, what can we deduce?

First, enormous turnouts in most states, maybe all 14 of the Super Tuesday states that portend?

That portends if you are a Republican you better wake up and smell the roses or, more likely, reach for the smelling salts because you are headed to a catastrophe come election day in November alike to your party’s 1964 debacle, the year of Goldwater and the daisy ad. And you must know if you have any sense, why it is going to happen and that it will be entirely well deserved.

Nothing should more alarm Republicans than a galvanized, aroused, unified black vote combining with an alarmed, aroused united, new Democratic white suburban women’s vote. That may be a political oxymoron but whatever else it is, it is a hard left/right hook tattoo in politics.

What could that mean? Joe Biden in the White House; Democrats gaining 10 to 20 seats more in the House; and winning Senate seats in Colorado, Georgia (not one but two there),  and in Arizona, Maine, maybe Iowa and, crazy as it sounds, Texas and South Carolina, producing — net of the loss of Doug Jones’s seat in Alabama (got to be realistic) — a 52-46 Democratic Senate.

If no one in Washington would give you odds on that tonight (and they wouldn’t.) I would.

If it’s Sanders, the result likely is the reverse: Trump in the White House, McConnell remaining majority leader of the Senate and, worst of all, Democrats losing the House. That is not a possibility. In politics numbers are immutable. It is a likely certainty.

So the likelihood of a big Democratic year is one of two things emerging even early on Super Tuesday night.

The other is that we will all know March 18 whether Biden can win this outright on the first ballot or if it is going to a second ballot and perhaps beyond.

Why? Because even now this early as it is shaping up, the Democratic contest does not point to anyone getting to 1,991 delegates on the first ballot but very probably to a first-ballot leader topping out at about 1,700 if Bloomberg and Warren win delegates and stay in the contest.

Understand too that next Tuesday, one week from now, six more states, among them Michigan and Missouri, hold primaries and that just two weeks from now, March 17, St. Patrick’s Day, four more hold primaries including Illinois, Ohio and Florida – Florida the third-largest state with 25 million people.

By the close of voting March 17, 60% of the Democratic 1st ballot delegate vote will have taken place and 60% of 1st ballot pledged delegates will be chosen — chosen by voters not by some mythical establishment out to thwart Sanders.

One thing for certain is that a black voter in South Carolina is not a member of any establishment. She is most likely a church-going, hard-working socially moderate, economically disadvantaged woman and to accuse her of being part of an “establishment” plot to deny Sanders the nomination is disqualifying foul.

Then if by March 18 no candidate is within reach of closing out to 1,991 delegates, assuming four candidates continue, then it will be all but mathematically impossible for someone to win on the 1st ballot given the 15% proportionality in district, at large and PLEO delegate slatings under Democratic Party rules – rules Bernie Sanders pressed for after 2016.

So the bottom line, the takeaway, whatever cliche you want to use is that what is shaping up tonight, albeit with California yet to come and Texas still taking shape, is this: If four candidates have delegates and stay in the contest, it will go to the convention where, in the end, Bernie Sanders will not be nominated and Joe Biden will be (providing they stay alive at their respective ages of 78 and 77).