Author: carlzeitz

Dear Editor

Is there a two-party system still in the United States?

Virginia

-0-

Dear Virginia

Yes Virginia, there is still a two party system in the United States but it’s different now.

One party is called the Moderate Democrats and the other is called the Progressive Democrats.

Editor

-0-

More than anything the ongoing White House and congressional meetings and negotiations concerning the two centerpiece bills on physical infrastructure and human and economic infrastructure (reconciliation bill) reveal that this nation stll has two effective parties – except both are now under the umbrella of one party, the Democratic Party.

The former Republican Party is now a fractious backward-looking faction, but one that still controls levers like governors’ offices and state legislatures though reduced to a cult of personality. It is a political megaphone through which shouts a squabbling, easily malleable collection of angry white obstructionists who are increasingly disconnected and disaffected from the majority by lack of education, disbelief in science,hostility borne of racial anger and suspicion, economic despair, and life-failure. If once it was the party of Wall Street, today the Republican Party is that of boarded up two-story Main Street.

This is the state of American politics in the most dangerous moment the world has known since 1938. Different but equally ominous forces are at play today in the world and, most assuredly, in our country.

We must resolve problems like the vast chasm between the developed world and the under and undeveloped worlds, including at home in the economic dissonance between 1 percent of us and the next 19 percent and then of that combined 20 percent and the other 80 percent.

Also needing to be regulated and ordered throughout the world and at our borders are the shifts of population and movement of refugees, of destitute and desperate people from the former colonial world moving inexorbly toward and to the former colonialist world.

Above all to be regulated and ordered is climate change, that force consuming the world and now visible in extreme weather and the present pandemic -itself a reflection of nature going wild in a world with too many people to sustain in the present global economic configuration.

With all that staring us, staring the United States in its face, the Republican Party has neither a plan or program much less the least acceptance or understanding of the issues that make this the dangerous moment it is.

The Pandemic is not likely to be solved this year or next or in the next 10 years. It or the next pandemic and the next could well be a permnent global condition.

How could it not be on a planet that cannot now sustain total population of nearly 8 billion people?

In 1939 at the outbreak of WWII total world population stood at 2.2 billion. The war killed 60 million people. Its end brought upheval and population growth that has us in a world headed for 10 billion or more human beings sharing the planet by mid-century with growth overwhelmingly concentrating in Africa, Asia, Central and South America. Population on those continents is surging. In Europe and North America population growth has fallen below replacement.

All that and more on a planet being burned, flooded, wind blown, defrosted and de-iced by the change in climate which is now unstopable and relentless. Nations make pledges, convene conferences, negotiate treaties and do – do fundamentally nothing to reverse what approaches. What approaches is climate Armageddon

All of these problems and so many more need, deserve, demand functioning government. And nowhere mores so than in the nation that necessarily assumed world leadership at the end of WWII, having led the coalition of nations that turned back the greatest evil in history and emerged uniquely and solely positioned to offer that leadership.

Has the United States exercised that leadership perfectly? Hardly. We made eggregious errors in Latin America, Central America, Vietnam, in Rawanda, lately in Iraq and Afghanistan, at home in many ways but then too we are the force that established and sustains the U.N., its food program that yet stands between billions and starvation, the World Bank, the IMF, the Marshall Plan that birthed the movement that became the EU.

At home we built a national highway system, statutorily resolved civil rights – not racism, but the de jure illegality of it -expanded our social safety network with the Great Society built on the foundation of the New Deal, including Title 9 that gave legal force to the movement reflected in feminism, women’s liberation and the never-ending, ever-lasting effort to achieve balance of rights and expectations in gender – in all ways for all kinds of genders because we have learned there are more than two.

Almost all of that, believe it or not, was accomplished with some or a lot of bipartisan cooperation with a bipartisan world outlook in which two parties shared the successes and shared responsibility for what went wong on their watches.

Yes, it took Republican votes, a sizeable number of them, to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Without those Republican votes, neither would have overcome the southern Democatic opposition that afterward morphed into sourthern Republican opposition so that both parties now have histories stained by sordid southern racism. Let’s acknowledge too that back in 1965, Republicans gave some of the votes for Medciare and Medicaid.

Then they began to change until today they are what they have become and we have what we have – a political civil war.

The constructive give and take, the necessary ingredient in democracy, the uderstanding that government is organic to democracy, is no longer seated in two parties in the United States. It is seated in but one, the Democratic Party.

Whether in or out of power the Democratic Party is forced to govern or attempt to govern alone, which exposes, exagerates and exasperates its own internal differences because it is the nature of politics to be built on different views and understandings.

When one party has but one answer – NO – it falls on the other to negotiate internally to find the center within itself rather than the middle ground between two parties.

Thus we now have one-party government because the once other party will not participate, cannot or willfully refuses to understand the dimensions of the issues and problems, will not respond with answers and solutions or, far worse, cynically understands it all but sees its own profit at the polls solely in nihilistic accusation and denial.

The Republican “NO” speaks deliberately, purposely to a shrinking, selected, fearful, less educated, older, rural, substantially white constituency – a constituency that today with great irony is the largest beneficiary of the network of social progams created by the Democratic Party over the past 80 years.

Example:

If Mitch McConnell is the symbol of the most cynical constituent manipulation, then his constituents are emblematic.

With a Democratic governor replacing a Republican governor in 2019, the state kept the Medicaid expansion the last Democratic governor had instituted afforded by the Affordable Care Act with a 90/10 split between the federal and state cost shares.

Today 25% of 4.5 million Kentuckians, receive health coverage through Medicaid, double the number before Democratic governors created the ACA Kentucky Care program. The state has added up to 10,000 people a month to the Medicaid rolls during the pandemic. Who are the overwhelming majority of those beneficiaries of Obamacare in Kentucky?

The same white voters who sent McConnell back for a new six-year Senate term in 2020 – the same man who for 10 years fought to overturn, repeal and undo the ACA – to blow up their health coverage.

So all of this tells us what?

It tell us that in the ongoing historic realightment of American politics, comparable to that of the 1840s and 1850s, the one that saw the Whig Party disappear and the Republican Party rise, that saw the Whig Abraham Lincoln become the Republican Abraham Lincoln – a comparable political realignment has been happening for at least three decades.

It rocketed forward during and because of the malgnant Trump presidency but the fundamental is that the United States has been moving and continues to move from a slightly right of center nation to one slightly left of center.

We are not a radical nation. The first great attempt to make us so led to a Civil War. The second ended with Trump’s 2020 defeat. Otherwise, we Americans live, prosper and progress at the center.

But the center is moving a tick or two to the left and the resistance is fierce and primal from a faction that believes it is a radical shift. It isn’t. It is simply one cognizant of a changing world, a changing economy, a changing national demography produced principally by another Great Society measure, the Immigration Act of 1965.

It tells us something else given that the entire debate in Congress about the elemental equation of government, how much to raise, how to raise it, how to spend it, and how to carry it forward is a debate exclusiely within the Democratic Party.

Yes, we remain a two-party system because that is all the American democracy can allow within the construct of our constitutional republic. The U.S. Constitution’s compromised creation even before its ratification gave rise to the first factions, who were for or against the allowances the document made in favor of and for the slave states: Allowances that continue to this day from the unequal proportion of Senate seats to population and the document’s instruction that each House of Congress is empowered to make its own rules – be they democratic or undemocratic – like the filibuster.

It is not fit even if one house of the national legislature is equally proportioned (ignoring gerrymandering) but the other gives equal weight to a senator from Wyoming who represents 590,000 people and a senator from California who represents 40 million people, a 68-to-1 imbalance. When the foundation is so unbalanced, the structure teeters in danger of falling.

You and I, citizens of this nation do not make the rules of the Senate nor does the Constitution. The Senate does, which is to say Sen. McConnell, a man who out-Caesars Caesar, has.

But while he wiles his will propped up by these Constitutional ironies, the other party is left to govern.

Necessarily as happens when people are left with responsibillity there are differences. Just as the Republican Party divided over abolition during the Civil War, only finding the resolve to complete the project of abolition late in the war, today’s Democrats are divided over how much and how far and fast to undertake changes in the governance equation to take the nation forward.

They are defined, these factions, as the moderate Democrats and the progressive Democrats. They are the factions from which it is possible to envision two major parties take shape that will compete and govern later in the 21st Century. There is a home for the Lincoln Project former Republicans with Democratic moderates. There is no home for them with their former party.

That is all in the longer term. In the immediate, the differences reduce to bridging the two bills. Notwithstanding the angst, sturm and drang of the media, it’s a reasonable guess both will pass with the price tag of the disputed reconciliation bill reduced from $3.5 trillion to $2.6 or $2.2 trillion, but more important than the number, preserving the policies it contains.

Why? Because the Democrats know if they don’t pass both very, very soon they will lose in 2022 and that will be that for many years to come. And because, above all, the bills are opening investments to check climate change, which cannot be reversed at all if checking and reversing it is not started right now. Not 10 years from now. Right now. The legislation will make controlling climate change national policy more definitively than executive direction.

Out of the bubbling cauldron of Washington, out of the naysaying of the commentariat, the second-guessing and grousing all day, every day on cable television news, despite the sowers of doubt in the press and in the online ranks of Politico and its like, it is more likely than not that the bill will pass and in coming decades expand with larger things to follow.

Democrats’ are not divided about what needs to be done but about how much and how soon with a common understanding that these things must be done by the only U.S. political instrument now capable and with understanding that they must be – the Democratic Party.

For more than a decade we watched right wing zealot Zombies in the Republican Party eat its flesh, bore from within until – until the only result could have been Trump, until it became the thing it has become.

Now we see the “progressive” lumpen left proles of the Democratic Party gorging and gorged bloodily on their coveted cable television interviews as they turn a governing majority into a century-long failure.

Democracy cannot suvive zealots. Democracy lives at the center and Democrats lately have moved the center but still, that is not enough for its Zombie zealots who do not understand and do not care that democracy dies at the far extremes.

If the House “progressives” want to force Sinema and Mancin to choose sides and move toward the President then they need to get both bills passed now, right now. Passage of both will give the President and Schumer the leverage they need to press Sinema and Manchin.

Anyone with the least understanding of politics knows that.

To get something, you need something else. Right now the president and the speaker and the majority leader have almost nothing when they try to get the two recalcitrant senators to yield something.

But if they can hold two House-passed bill over the heads of the senators from Arizona and West Virginia they’ll deal. They’ll have to deal. Especially Sinema because she has to know if she does not she will get a primary and she will lose it. Before she can run parse the center in Arizona she has to give her state party what it wants and expects from a Democrat: Or Arizona Democrats and tens of thousands more around the country will take her out.

Manchin? He’s another deal. He’s from woebegotten West Virginia. He understands the place and knows how far he can go and yet keep the chance of going back to the Senate, where he knows Schumer has to suffer a lot of his being Joe Manchin to get his vote to maintain the majority.

But even Mancin can still go a long way if he has to but; but he just does not have to as long as there is no leverage against and over him. As long as his progressive party fellows do the lifting for him. If they won’t suport the president and the legislation, well then why should he? Why should he risk walking the plank in West Virginia?

Without two House-passed bills there isn’t and won’t be any leverage to use with Maching. Without the House passing both post-haste it is not his fault, it is the fault of the House “progressives.”

But House Democrats are being consumed by the disease of extremism and they will take the nation and its future with them unless – unless Ms. Pelosi, perhaps the greatest speaker in the history of the House, can save us from them and them from themselves and from the wrath of Democrats later.

I believe she will succeed this one last time. If she does not, it will not matter for another 30 years.

And I, like so many I know, will be long dead.

But my grandchildren, and yours, will be left to live in the rubble that AOC and the rest of her buddies will dance on, being interviewed on cable TV, which clearly is more important to them than getting this done.

They are far, far, far worse and far, far, far a danger to the future of the United States than Trump and his looney legions.

Those people are ignorant, stupid and failed. The Democratic progressives?

They are willfully arrogant and bent on political and governmental self-destruction because – because they do not understand politics because they come from places where they do not need to learn to understand it, because they have no sense of responsibility and – and because they would rather be on TV than actually get done what they holler about must be done.

After all, if you get it done, cable hosts don’t really need you anymore. Do they? No, they don’t.

And then – then you are a political Zombie.

Ford Motor Company has announced it will make the largest investment in its history, $11 billion to build three factories that will create 11,000 jobs to build electric cars.

It is part of the company’s plan to manufacture only electric vehicles by 2035.

That’s a good idea, in fact an essential industrial program motivated by the need to level climate change and provide the cars the public will come to expect to get going on that project of the century.

But there’s a catch or two right now – big ones. Where are you going to charge your electric car when there are multiple times more of those than gasoline powered cars like the one you drive now? And how long will it take to charge it?

At a charging station, right? But where are the charging positions to fuel tens of millions of vehicles in the United States every day?

Actually, they do not – do not – exist.

Depending on the source, there are about 165,000 gas stations in the United States.

Given that some have two gas pumps, some have four and some have 20 if we take an average of 10 at each station that would mean 1,650,000 gas pumps in the country.

The real number is probably far higher but let’s use that.

Depending on sources, there are fewer than 50,000 electric car charging positions in the U.S. and they are mostly of a kind that charge slowly, very slowly in fact compared to the time it takes to fill up a gasoline tank.

Do the math. If gasoline pumps and current electric fueling positions were comparable, and they are not for now because of technology, the deficit is 1.6 million positions. Let’s leave it to experts to come up with the actual figures but the illustration gives us a good layman’s notion of the gap.

Example: In New Jersey the law says if you sell gasoline to anyone, you have to sell it to evryone. That ‘s why a Costco gas station plaza in Mercer County New Jersey has to sell gasoline even to non-Costco members. That plaza by observation fuels thousand and thousands of vehicles every week. It has about 20 gasoline pumps. It does not seem to have an electric charge station.

Clearly, we are several million fast-charge positions away from what we will need in a very few years. nThe second big problem with electric car charging is time. By all estimate current technology can fully charge a car at a charging position in about 20 to 30 minutes. But if you are used to a two-miute gasoline fill-up, that does not fit your busy life.

Even if we reach a point in an unknown future when many if not most auto owners can fully charge their cars at home, then estimates say it now takes six to as many as 12 hours to do that. That’s not just not ideal, it’s no good. Advancing the technology has to move with the development of charging positions.

The pending infrastructure bill must be passed to encourage and provide support for that investment, one that in turn has to be made by the oil and auto industries with the kind of public incentivation provided by the infrastructure legislation.

It contains an initial federal contribution of $7.5 billion for charging positions. But measure that against an estimate from one source that puts the total amount needed to build a large enough national network of charging positions at $50 billion.

Ford can make all the electric cars it wants as it takes forward its plan to transition in 15 years to manufacturing only electric vehicles.

But can it sell electric cars if the charging stations to fuel them are few and far between and if the technology has not been advanced to make them reasonably comparable in efficiency to gasoline pumps?

With other automakers, like Tesla which already bulds its own, Ford will have to invest in electric charging stations.

We need the infrastructure bill now – right now.

Yesterday in fact and, if anything, we need more of it.

It is now illegal to be a woman in Texas.

If you see a woman in Texas, call a Republican.

Meantime, while everyone is rightfully worried about girls and women in Afghanistan, the Taliban has taken over Texas – and very probably the U.S. Supreme Court.

Will Rogers said, “America has never lost a war or won a peace conference.”

This time we did both.

AFGHANISTAN

Afghanistan is where empires go to die.

I am old enough to remember the scenes shown on television outside Little Rock Central High School at the start of the 1957 school year.

This is exactly the same. The only thing diferent is that 65 years later these ignorant rednecks have changed parties.

Where once they were Democrats they are among the Republicans who have turned Tennesse crimson red.

Read this, watch the video and understand how hopeless these hateful, hating, ignorant southerners are, just the same as every gerneration in the south. Hopeless, hopeless,hate-filled, frightened animals.

As much as things change, they remain exactly the same and nowhere more so than in the American south.

Ths is how they fry the chicken now in damned Dixie. We can’t fix this country until we fix the south and it defies fixing.

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/anti-mask-crowd-uncontrollable-tenn-school-board-meeting-florida-texas-schools-mask-mandates-181606106.html

ANYONE WHO CANNOT AND WILL NOT SHOW OFFICIAL PROOF OF VACCINATION SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED INTO OR EVEN NEAR ANY SCHOOL ANYWHERE IN THE UNITED STATES FOR AT LEAST THE NEXT YEAR.

And that’s all there is to say about that.

Anyone who says different is a damned fool or – or a Republican.

At ShopRite supermarkets this week if you spend at least $10 you can buy:

A gallon of whole milk for $4.06

A loaf of store brand white bread for 74 cents

20 pounds of store brand white rice for $9.89

A 15 ounce can of store brand red kidney beans for 61 cents.

A pound of 80/20 chopped meat for $4.06

With the right coupons you can buy:

A picnic pork shoulder for 99 cents a pound

Chicken drumsticks or thighs for 99 cents a pound

A can of Maxwell House Coffee for $1.99

4 cans of Progresso Soup for $5

A head of iceberg lettuce for 99 cents.

If you have a young child this week you can buy her six pairs of Haines white socks for kids for $4.49. You can buy two 15.5 ounce containers of Purex laundry detergent for $4 to wash them with -when you can afford the laundromat.

Now, suppose you are a single mother with two children, let’s say a 9 year-old boy and a 7-year old girl, you somehow manage child care and you work 40 hours a week paid at the $7.25 an hour federal minimum wage.

Your gross weekly check is $290, $15,080 a year.

After the mandatory 7.65 percent FICA deduction for Social Security and Medicare your net weekly check is $268, $13,936 for the whole year – assuming no deductions for federal or state income taxes or for state unemployment/disability insurance, though of course there will be.

Somehow on less than $14,000 a year, even with food stamps, federal chilren’s health insurance and maybe some rent assistance you have to feed, house, cloth and provide medical care for yourself and two children, while you keep the lights on and the heat working.

You have to manage to do that in a country that says you are officially poor if the annual income for a one-person household is $12,880, or $17,980 or less for a three person household like that of our working-mother and her kids.

The 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act established the federal minimum wage. It took effect that year at 25 cents an hour. It reached $1 an hour in 1956, $5.15 an hour in 1996, and $7.25 an hour in 2009 – and there it has stayed.

In its first 71 years, the federal minimum wage increased 29 times, on average of about once every two and a half years, about every 30 months. By this historical measure it should have increased in 2011, 2013, 2016, 2019 and now, at the start of 2021.

It should have increased at least by a few pennies five times. It hasn’t budged in 12 years.

In the 12 years since a Democrat House and Senate last raised it, the minimum wage has remained unchanged with Republicans in control of at least one house of Congress or both. They remain opposed to an increase now.

The buying power of $7.25 in 2009 today is $5.97, while keeping pace even with that low wage would put it at $8.64 in today’s dollars, notwithstanding very modest inflation the past dozen years.

The federal minimum wage covers most workers but not all and so every state has its own wage law even if it is simply to peg it to the federal level or to assure that minimum wage workers are better paid than at the federal rate.

According to the New York Times the actual federal minimum wage is earned by 1.1 million workers, bad enough except tens of millions more earn wages suppressed by the artifically low federal hourly wage floor.

The highest state minimum wage this year is California’s, $14 an hour for businesses with 26 employees and otherwise $13 an hour. The highest universal state minumum wage is that of Washington, $13.69 an hour.

The lowest state minimum wages are those of Wyoming and Georgia, $5.15 an hour. Imagine that. In the year 2021 the state minimum wage in those two red legislature states is what the federal minimum wage was in 1997. Choose your word for that – cruel, stupid, mean, barbaric. How about all of them?

Seveteen states, including Pennsylvania, set theirs at the $7.25 an hour federal level. In all 17 Republicans control the legislatures. Most also have Republican governors.

As a matter of interest, state rates this year in New Jersey are $12 an hour, $13 an hour in New York and $13.50 an hour in Massachusetts. The New York Times reports that 20 states and 32 cities have or will move the minimum wage to $15 an hour over the next few years. No state is there yet.

In the private sector the retail behemoths Amazon, Walmart and Costco, with conditions and caveats such as excepting part-time workers, exceed all state statutory minimum wage levels. The first two are at or moving to $15 an hour while Costco just announced a move to $16 an hour.

Opponents of minimum wage increases – Republicans, the U. S. Chamber of Commerce – always contend that small businesses cannot afford hourly wage increases. Always that is not the case. Always the economy grows, the demand for lower wage workers increases and businesses expand revenue and profit.

As cited this week in the New York Times, a study by a University of Massachusetts economist examined 55 minimum wage increases including 36 in the U.S. In every one it found only a negligible short-term impact on employment.

Opponents always say it is inflationary to raise the minimum wage. Too much money chasing too much and too many goods and services is classically inflationary. But bare minimum wage earnings are not, are never too much money. If massive tax cuts are not deemed inflationary, how can nominal increases in the minimum wage be?

There is broad agreement among economists of every political persuasion, notably and especially at the Federal Reserve, that present low interest rates will prevail for a very long time.

Even at 1.4 percent as it was last year in the pandemic-slowed economy, $1 in 2020 is worth but 98.6 cents today. Still, low inflation is cumulative. It has reduced the dollar’s purchasing power about 18 percent since 2009.

If the federal minimum wage increased to $15 an hour, our working mother would go from a weekly income of $290 to $600, from an annual pre-tax income of $15,080 to $31,200, substantially above the federal poverty level at which she and her two children cannot now subsist much less exist.

Two children would be lifted out of extreme, cruel poverty. They would just be very poor instead of being in the most terrible, dire need.

It’s uncertain, unlikely even that having a hot dog at a July 4 picnic unites this country anymore.

You know there is the mustard v. ketchup issue. Everything is an issue.

So when President Biden speaks to national unity and its expression in Congress through bipartisanship, we hold our breath and wait to see what can happen, what will happen – with small expectations.

Continue reading “Bipartisanship? Don’t Hold Your Breath”

I told a friend tonight, who asked me to post something positive, that I would, and I will I told her, I have something in mind, and I do.

This is not it, it will come soon enough, in a day or two. It is being written in my head as most things are before I set them down. The thought comes. It becomes an idea and then the idea is put into words. So to my friend, it is now a thought that has become an idea that will in a day or two be put in words and posted here.

But meantime on this day of celebration and reflection, a day on which the below haunting anthem was invoked(I think by President Biden and how grand it is to say that title and name together) I got to thinking as we all got to thinking.

One of the things I thought about is that among the many I know from my time,I am one of the few who did, who served. No, nothing heroic, not close, not hardly. Got lucky, got orders for Panama after basic and infanty training at Ft. Dix.

I ended up working in an office at USARSO, which stood for United States Army Southern Comand – all of Latin America. I wore a USARSO patch on my uniform as I spent my 17 months at Ft. Amador in the then Canal Zone, safely ensconed in an office clerk’s job with a permanent pass in my pocket and Panama City a very few miles away, and at the end went home safe and sound — even as casualties mounted in Vietnam.

But, I do not regret it. I do not regret that in these oh so fraught times I can say this: I don’t know about you, but I served.

And in serving I learned a lot that I took with me these 50 years since about people, about the people who do.

So I know how little soldiers really could know when first they are sent into battle. I know – absent extraordinary luck – I would not have had the reflexes to survive. I have always known that, known it since basic training even when I was young and quick.

But I didn’t get called to do that, didn’t have to and so I have lived all these years since and thought about a few in my basic company and then my infantry training company and wondered, wondered if they made it out. Did you make it out and home Willis? I wish I knew.

But – but I’ve lived ever since with a sense of what it could be like, and how much so, for anyone to whom it ever fell to be called to battle for this country of ours, to be called in the words of this anthem, to give their best.

Listen now to that “American Anthem” because part of bridging the gap,ending the “uncivil war” as the president correctly called it today, is to end indifference or, worse, diffidence for those those who do.

And so it came to pass that without a national federal plan there is near complete frustration, anger and,for some, panic as to if, when, where or how they will get their first Covid-19 vaccinations.

The urgent need for that (again, identified by this Blog 8 months ago and then again last month) comes into sight with the start of the Biden presidency as President-elect Biden has addressed it and put an experienced, competent, capable executive phalanx with great depth of public administative experience in charge.

But, but two things.

First, it is clear the new administration inherits a mess it will need to sort out before they can get on with a rational, fair, nationwide vaccination program. They don’t know exactly what they’ll find because the disastrous out-going administation won’t tell them everything about its hand-it-to-the states vaccination foul-up.

Second, it is clear that if governors like New Jersey’s Phil Murphy cannot be blamed for the failure of the mess handed to them by the Trump administation, they can be blamed for failure to do the one simple, basic task of effective government – communicate.

I look to New Jersey for an example given that it is my state.

New Jersey established a universal official online vaccination registration site. I found it by word of mouth and passed that word on to others I know. Social media however is full of complaints about the registration site working only with difficulty or not at all.

On a personal but important note, in my time as an AP reporter at the New Jersey State House, granted that’s a long while ago, there were by recollection at least 22 daily newspapers in the state of which a third have since folded or combined with others.

Back then of those 22 a full dozen maintained full-time reporters at the State House as did the Associated Press (three of us) and the now defunct United Press International, as well as four major out-of-state papers including the Philadelphia Inqurier and the New York Times. On Press Row at the state capitol 35 reporters went to work every day, numbers that swelled to 50 on legislative days.

With that many reporters covering and looking for news every day, problems like the vaccination registration site’s limitations were exposed quickly. With so large a competitive press corps, the Murphy administation would have been hounded with questions and pressed every day to provide the answers and fix the problems. Then every paper would have a story every day about the registration site with information on how to get to it and use it, doing a major part of the job of informing the public.

But like all recent governors, this governor has no idea, not really, not hardly, what it means to deal with a real press corps, especially in a crisis. And the hard-of-hearing, insular New Jersey Legislature knows even less.

Today the State House press corps is a shadow of that of those bygone years, diminished not by the quality of reporters but by the lack of them as newspapers failed financially and reduced staff. For example, two large newspaper chain, Newhouse and Gannett, between them own a dozen New Jersey newspapers with homogenized capitol coverage from their respective, diminished skeleton State House bureaus.

Yes, state and local news is available on-line but no, it does not have the same impact when it does not arrive on your doorstep every morning or afternoon. A New Jersey governor today does not see 30 reporters or more arrayed before him at a regular news conference. It would take shutting down the George Washington Bridge for days on end to get that big a media turnout anymore and, after all, what governor would ever do such a thing?

Well then, what can Gov. Murphy do now to keep the public informed even if the information is only what I heard him say in an MSNBC interview two days ago. He said the state does not have the vaccine supply it needs. We know that governor but you need to explain that and more every day until you do, until we do.

How? How then for him to communicate with us citizens (us voters)?

The vaccination registration site operated by the State of New Jersey asks every registrant for an email address and phone number.

These are the means to communicate. Send out an email every day governor that reaches every registrant to keep them informed, use the mobile numbers the state collected to text us. Tell the public what you know every day even if it is to say we don’t have the supplies yet, we are working on it, we have a plan to give you a schedule and a site at which to get your shot when the supplies come.

This is not rocket science. It is not preening before the camera as Murphy is want to do – no particular blame there, he is after all a politician and politicians are actors who can’t sing and dance but love the stage (Murphy by the way can – he can sing well). That’s part of the attraction of politics and part of the job. No politician loves another voice nearly so much as he or she loves his or her own. We get that.

The governor doesn’t have to do more than approve a daily message script and have someone hit send.

But neither he or his staff have figured it out nor apparently has staff told him it needs to get done, which suggests his people don’t know it. How do I know? Because they haven’t done it.

I, you, we in New Jersey who have registered have not had one message back from the state. Not a one.

This is a re-elect year for Murphy, a resonably popular man who is an enormous favorite to win a second term, facing as he does a wrecked, diminished Republican Party in a decidedly blue state.

But…But letting this get away from him, letting confusion, panic and despair increase about when how and where there will be vaccinations is just the kind of failure that looks for blame.

You don’t want to be the man or woman in charge when the public looks for someone to pin the blame on for that. You don’t want to be blamed if the public decides the distribution is fixed and unfair, and it will if it doesn’t get information.

Is Murphy the only governor in this box? No, it is clear from reporting around the nation that many other governors are and that they too are failing to communicate well. An occasional 2-minute interview on CNN or MSNBC is in no way an ongoing effective communications/PR effort or, as they call it these days, Comms (sounds so much better than public relations).

The only governor in the country up for reelection this year is Murphy (Virginia also has an election for governor in 2021 but it is a one-term state so it will not have an incumbent governor on the ballot).

Given that fact, Murphy needs to get this right and do it fast or face a lot of trouble in this, his re-elect year and become a caution to other governors.

So, Phil, love to hear from you. Send me an email. Send us all an email.

“Our plan is going to focus on getting shots into arms, including by launching a fundamentally new approach, establishing thousands of federally run or federally supported community vaccination centers of various size located in places like high school gymnasiums and N.F.L. stadiums,” Mr. Biden told a radio station in Columbus, Ga., on Friday (Jan. 8).

As noted, this was and is a federal project to be done at major sites available to the public not a scattershot state effort in drug stores.

People who now how to operate government will be running the government -and making it work.