Gary Hart's Political Campaigns, Conclusion: Hart's Real Political Legacy

 

As I wrote when I dealt with Gary Hart many years ago and restated at the start of this series there are so many fallacies behind Hart’s fate in 1987 and beyond. In the three previous Presidential elections between Hart’s entry into Presidential politics in 1972 and his exit in 1988 Jimmy Carter had earned first the Democratic nomination and then the Presidency by being deliberately fuzzy on what positions he held. This was followed by Ronald Reagan’s two consecutive landslides involving a long career of simply making stuff up and winning the two biggest electoral victories any Republican running for President ever has. The idea that the electorate was hungering for a candidate who was both intellectual and had good ideas is inconsistent with those facts and the idea that Hart could have stemmed, much less turned the tide back towards that kind of politics is at odds with the rise of cable news that was beginning just as Hart was starting his final run for office.

But Gary Hart did leave a lasting legacy on Presidential politics that, intentionally or not, has been one of the greatest hindrances to the Democratic Party over the last half-century. And it remains genuinely unclear if the Party will ever be able to overcome it.

Hart’s role as the chief strategist behind George McGovern’s insurgent campaign for the nomination was notable for what was by far the most leftist nominee of a major political party in perhaps the history of elections. And sadly there are far too many similarities between the young members of McGovern’s campaign and so much of the young electorate of this generation. They are true believers when they are on a college setting but to the rest of the electorate, including the Democratic base, their ideas and rhetoric appeal to almost no one. They are superb at organizing in the smaller, caucus states but they can’t win in the larger more urban ones – save California and New York. They reject firmly the idea of politics as usual and argue that because they have won the primaries they have no need of the Democratic establishment to win election. On the contrary, they argue the idea of accepting the help of the establishment is anathema to what they stand for. They believe very much in diversity and representation at the expense of the rank and file Democratic politicians. And they firmly reject the blue collar voters – then represented by George Wallace and throughout the South in particular – as someone they should even talk too, much less moderate their campaign for. As I’ve stated Watergate did much to whitewash the horrible inadequacies of the McGovern campaign from the moment of the convention in Miami to every aspect of their fall campaign. All of the groundwork they might have done for future Democratic coalition doesn’t change the fact they lost 49 of 50 states and suffered the biggest loss a Democratic nominee for President has ever gone through in the history of the Republic. The Democratic Party was absolutely right to reject McGovern’s campaign strategy for the next several Presidential campaigns; they were fortunate that they were able to recover from that debacle.

Hart brought that same kind of insurgency to his run for the Democratic nomination in 1984 and showed that he had fundamentally learned nothing from it when it came to his own branding. The Hart campaign mirrors the McGovern campaign when it comes to its success: doing well in small caucus states, doing horribly in the South and the larger urban states, again with the sole exception of California. Mondale was, in my opinion, a far superior candidate than Hart both in the primaries and indeed in the general and the brand of liberalism he fought for is infinitely superior than the kind of progressivism McGovern and Hart represented – and that we see on display today. Mondale might very well have been backed by more of the establishment than Hart was but he was also a better campaigner and made almost no blunders compared to those Hart made during his run. That his brand of liberalism was destroyed in another 49 state landslide does not make Hart’s approach superior. We know only that Hart might have done better in the fall because it would have been impossible to do worse – though as history shows Hart’s last attempt to lead a campaign had in fact been rejected as soundly by the electorate as Mondale’s was. Hart could no more have won the Presidency in 1984 than Mondale could have.

Both of the campaigns Hart led may not have been that of progressive ideals but the fact that Hart chose to view them as victories for the cause shows the kind of moral fuzziness that I’ve come to expect from the left in my experience of following them over the years. In neither of those elections did Gary Hart win anything: the establishment resoundingly rejected McGovern in 1972 and primary voters did so in 1984. But Hart and his followers view them as successes because they were ‘moral victories’. As I’ve written before those are the only kind the left seems to recognize – which is to be expected since they manage so few real ones.

And the fact that Gary Hart has been so willing to embrace the mantle of martyr – a title the left prefers – may very well be why he’s held in such high regard today. It hides the very real fact that Hart resumed his campaign for the Democratic nomination after ending it and was resoundingly rejected by the Democratic voters. Regardless of what Hart says then or now, the public did have an opinion on his behavior and they made it emphatically clear to him. But just as with his previous rejections by the electorate Hart has managed to absolve himself of responsibility for his electoral defeats and place the blame on everyone else. This is part and parcel of the modern progressive and it is a different kind of election denialism which is more insidious. There wasn’t voter fraud but the voters themselves were either misinformed or not smart enough to understand what we stood for.

That kind of moral behavior stands as a stark contrast to the three Republicans who won election in all three cycles Hart was a part of – and, in case you’ve forgotten as Hart’s followers have, they didn’t win by small margins. Nixon got 60 percent of the popular vote and every state but DC and Massachusetts; Reagan just over 58 percent and every state but DC and Minnesota, and George H.W. Bush defeated Michael Dukakis, the eventual winner of the Democratic nomination, with 426 electoral votes. If there is a commonality between all three Republican campaigns, it’s that in all three cases they were more than willing to make the election about character and didn’t have any problem with the high-mindedness that Democrats were willing to do. To be sure all three men campaigned with a fair amount of negative advertising and often racist rhetoric that Democrats and the left look down on to this day. But strictly looking at the results it was a strategy that worked for them and still does.

Another perhaps unintentional legacy of Hart and his followers is the frustrating high-mindedness of almost every Democratic Presidential nominee in my lifetime. Wittingly or not with the sole exception of Bill Clinton and perhaps Barack Obama, they have been more than willing to let Republican attacks on their character go unanswered, treating even engaging with it as beneath them. There’s the certainty that if we make the campaign about ideas and refuse to deal with these issues the electorate will either out of admiration or because they prefer them choose the Democratic nominee over the Republican. Well we saw how that played out with the White House between 1968 and 1988: the Republicans won the Presidency five times out of six, all but the first time in electoral landslides. And the pattern repeated itself during Al Gore and John Kerry’s run for the White House in 2000 and 2004: both times Karl Rove and the Bush campaign chose to make the election about the ‘lack of character’ of the Democrats, both times the nominees didn’t engage and both times they (narrowly) lost. (I’ve dealt with 2000 in a previous article, so express your comments there.)

This approach of winning on morality was perhaps best encapsulated in Michelle Obama’s famous line at the 2016 Democratic Convention: “When they go low, we go high.” It was met with tremendous applause – but both at the time and in hindsight, it was one of the dumbest things she could have said. How well has going high ever worked for the Democratic Party in the past? Of course the Republicans will go low. Even before Trump became their perennial nominee going low was not only their strategy but an effective one. The left has always been above politics and tends to hold itself in a kind of moral universe. But that kind of world only works if everybody plays by the same rules. The rest of the world isn’t bound to play by the rules the left does and the Republicans never will. Why should they? It works for them. You want to argue that negative campaign lowers the tenor of political discourse? Fine. I’d argue that’s basically all political discourse but you’re entitled to your opinion. But the fact remains negative and unpleasant campaigning is almost always effective. LBJ proved that point in 1964 and it helped him win a landslide. Moral victories are meaningless in a world where you have to win elected office in order to get anything done. The right has always understood this reality. The left, even after two hundred years, seems unwilling to acknowledge it exists/

Gary Hart was like so many progressive candidates over the decades: he wanted to define what his campaign was about and any other interpretation was beneath him to even acknowledge. This is a horrible approach to take even if your private life is beyond reproach; when it was messy as Hart’s was leading up to his final campaign, he was practically asking for what happened to him. And he took no responsibility for it at any point leading up to it, when he withdrew from the campaign for the first time, and decades after the fact. He didn’t fail: the system failed. It’s kind of terrifying that so many intelligent people still feel this way after nearly forty years.

And his legacy lives on in other ways that not even he could expect. When Cori Bush was elected to Congress, she took on a far left campaign and refused to do anything the establishment wanted. She proudly called her first run ‘an insurgent campaign’ and when she was elected she made it very clear after  the attacks on October 7^th that she was as radical as so many Democrats thought McGovern was in 1972. They were wrong about him, but they were right about her.

The Jewish community locally had viewed her with skepticism along with her associations with people with anti-Semitic views. But rather than engage with Jewish community leaders, Bush ignored them, meeting with them only once after four years in office. Numerous organizations made requests for her time  and Bush’s response was glib “my trick to dealing with groups with whom (I) disagree is to simply ignore their calls.” Even after Bell emerged as a challenger against her, Bush continued to double down on her rhetoric, equating the Middle East to her own actions as an activist in Ferguson. And after she was defeated in her primary by Wesley Clay, she made it very clear she hadn’t lost: “The one thing I don’t do is go away,” she said after the results were in. “They thought this would be…They thought I was radical before. I’m going to be more radical now.”

That is hardly the sound of a gracious loser. I wonder if Gary Hart sent her the same kind of letter that Nixon sent him once.

The Contrast Between the Political Histories of Jules Witcover And Theodore White Speaks Volumes About Political Journalism

 

 

You couldn’t show a more deliberate contrast on how Theodore White and Jules Witcover view covering politics then in the opening segments of what would be the last campaign each officially covered for their readers.

In the 1972 edition of The Making of the President White chooses to open his book with a prologue called ‘The Making of the Post-War World’ . The first twelve pages of his book deal with one of the most historical moments in the twentieth century: Richard Nixon’s visit to Communist China and his meetings with Chou En-Lai and Mao Tse-Tung. Nixon was the first President to visit Communist China and it was the standard of what he referred to as ‘détente’, a policy that was the first thaw in the Cold War and one that the conservative wing of Nixon’s own party as well as many Democrats, considered a betrayal. White does acknowledge the significance of what may come. He tells us that as he writes the book: two former cabinet members await trial as well as the beginning of the pursuit of Watergate which he covers extensively in the volume. But he makes it very clear that what he considers important is how much the world before him has changed since end of World War II and that there was, as of yet, no new system to replace it. He recognizes the collapse of the ideals of the Great Society and the end of the liberal order that started under FDR. And only at the conclusion does he deal with how the Presidential election ended: how Richard Nixon would defeat George McGovern by a margin of nearly 3 to 2 in the popular vote.

By contrast consider the opening of Witcover’s last volume (co-written with Jack Germond) Mad as Hell: Revolt at the Ballot Box, 1992. Witcover chooses to start his narrative in the second Presidential debate, a town hall meeting involving George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Ross Perot. He deals with the nature of the debates and how, yet again, they have resulted in name calling and character debasement. For him the most significant problem of 1992 has nothing to do with the various problems facing society (some of which I’ll touch on below) but on how out of touch Bush seems to be with the American public. And what he considers most important is that infamous moment while he was being asked a question Bush glanced at his watch, apparently bored with the whole process.

To be clear politics had changed immensely in the twenty years that had passed between these volumes and Witcover’s approach reflected a change in the media. But it’s hard not to notice that the tonal difference. White in the prologue is trying to paint a grand picture, not merely of the political landscape but the global one and the American one. None of that is apparent in Witcover’s prologue – or indeed much of the volume that is to follow. Witcover’s view is limited only to seeing everything through a political lens. White is trying to see a much larger narrative before him. Witcover views the entire process with cynicism and barely veiled contempt. White remains objective and tries to shows respect for the Presidency even considering the scandal before it.

 And  most importantly is that concept of objectivity. White clearly is – he deals not only with the horrible scandal that will befall Nixon but everything involving him with a neutral tone and looks at McGovern’s problems in the same lens. In a way you could argue Witcover is objective as well, considering that he treats both the Democrats and Republicans the same – he clearly loathes them both equally. He shows the same contempt for the political consultants, anchormen, chief of staff and almost every aspect of the process involved. There’s an irony in that at one point Witcover remarks about Bush’s inability to have a greater vision; Witcover clearly has a front row seat to nearly as big a change as White was observing – and all he can focus on is how this affects the political landscape.

Witcover clearly has access to so many of the biggest political insiders in the Bush administration. And lest we forget during Bush’s term the world was changing even more significantly then during the era that White covers in his final book. The Berlin Wall comes down and not long after the Soviet Union collapses, ending the Cold War. There are the riots at Tiananmen Square in China that the government clamps down on before live TV. The beating of Rodney King and the acquittal of the LAPD inspires mass rioting in LA. And there’s Sadam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait that leads to the first Gulf War.

Witcover remarks on all of these significant events only through the lens of the Bush White House and only to show his contempt for how Bush handled it. As I wrote in my first article on Witcover there was a view that Bush was unsuited to be President in 1976. Twelve years later he managed to win the White House anyway. Witcover covered the rise and fall of Bush as extensively as White covered Nixon but where as White remained objective about the most polarizing figure in politics to that point Witcover never stops being contemptuous of him and everything he does. I don’t know what personal feelings Witcover has towards the 41^st President but in his writing everything that happens in the world is just a reflection on Bush and how badly he handles it. His dialogues with China, his recognition of Gorbachev’s resignation, even the riots in LA (which get a grand total of four pages) are only there to show how badly Bush is lacking. White would have devoted several pages on each one of these in order to explain the significance of them. Witcover only sees them as a mirror in which he can show how horrible the President is. Even everything involving Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas barely seems to matter to White. He acknowledges that the Senate is an ‘old boy’s club’ but he looks at the ‘Year of The Women’ which was to follow with something very close to the sexist patronizing that unfolded.

But Witcover has little use for Democrats either. It’s not just that he has very little respect for Bill Clinton (he’s another Southern governor and Witcover’s views clearly haven’t changed since Jimmy Carter wouldn’t give him and his reporters the benefit of letting him trap them into contradictions) but he doesn’t have any real use for the Democratic challengers during this period. He doesn’t think much of Paul Tsongas or Jerry Brown and his opinion of Douglas Wilder (the first African-American elected Governor) is that his decision to run for President is premature. “There is no evidence the electorate in general was prepared to accept a black nominee,” he tells us with all sincerity. You really wonder whether he’s speaking for himself in that sense.

White had his own prejudices to be sure – he viewed Adam Clayton Powell, the first African-American Congressman as something of a thug – but whatever opinions he had on the candidates running for office he did his best to keep them to himself or at the very least, only talk about it in regard to their campaigns. He always had a great respect for Hubert Humphrey – in his final book America in Search of Itself, he makes it clear Humphrey would have been a great President – but he also understood the mood of the electorate. In his final book he acknowledges Humphrey will likely be considered one of the greatest Senators in history (true) but that by 1972 the young still viewed him as LBJ’s Vice President and a man of the establishment (also true). He never quite liked George Wallace but he acknowledged the phenomena and was more than willing to give him the benefit of being smarter than he appeared. And when it came to George McGovern he was more than fair. He was impressed by many things in his character and his organization but he also thought that there were flaws in both that were going to undercut him with the electorate.

Witcover by contrast doesn’t even bother to hide his contempt for everyone in the Bush White House; you’d think they were far worse than the men in Nixon’s administration who were about to go to jail. It’s not just Atwater who he views with loathing – though in his opinion Atwater’s crimes are not negative and racist campaigning but the way he ‘transparently pandered to the right’ to make Bush acceptable to them. Sununu is contemptuous, Jack Kemp a fool, Pat Buchanan a buffoon. Witcover has a real story here – the way the conservative wing of the party has decided to make it very clear how any deviance from Republican policy is betrayal – but he only sees it as a flaw of Bush himself, rather than the entire party. Witcover has a very clear problem for not only seeing the forest for the trees; he doesn’t even see the trees that well.

As far as Witcover is concerned the reason that George H.W. Bush lost was because he reneged on his pledge: “no new taxes” which caused the conservatives to turn on him, leading to Buchanan’s primary challenge. But not even the economy itself really interests Witcover that much: for him the very concept of Carville’s famous slogan – ‘it’s the economy stupid’ – is just an excuse for the vote that led to Clinton’s election and not an iconic note in political history.

There is something significant in the book which Witcover does note in his final chapter:

As a practical matter, only a handful of Americans were actually able to talk directly to the candidates. But the difference was…that people just like themselves were questioning the candidates – were in fact surrogates for the average voter. Watching Clinton, Bush and Perot in that Richmond debate, anyone could imagine being the one asking the questions and influence the process directly. It was no longer the sole province of journalists, whom they saw as part of the distant establishment rather than as their agents.

Witcover notes the  voter turnout – the largest since 1960 – as significant yet even then there seems to be a sense of pleasure in Witcover’s announcement that it pales in comparison to Western democracy. The people don’t care that much, you can see him thinking. Looking at the paragraph above I wonder if Witcover viewed this not as a positive step forward but a threat to his own livelihood.

In the mind of Witcover and Germond, he was part of that ‘distant establishment’ but it’s clear he didn’t see any connection between his attitude and part in it. As far as he was concerned all of the candidates involved were just as flawed as when he started doing his columns and by his view didn’t deserve to worthy of the Presidency. Did he think that this rebellion was a reaction to how he himself had been covering politics all these year, that his province as the gatekeeper was being threatened by the public?

I can’t say. What I know is that Witcover in all of his volumes views every aspect of the political process with more cynicism bordering on visceral contempt then Theodore White ever did. His final pages of the 1972 volume talk not of the failures of Nixon but rather the fact that this election is one of the most significant because it offers a true contrast of views of how the government should work. In his opinion the most significant he lived through were in 1932, when FDR defeated Hoover and believed in the New Deal, 1936 when FDR’s landslide confirmed its place in society and 1964 involving Goldwater and Johnson. 1972 was a similar difference in ideas. He clearly sees that Nixon’s landslide was a complete repudiation of the past forty years of Democratic Presidents and a groundswell for the new conservative order, even though it is still not fully formed. He acknowledges respect for Nixon in their final interview, which took place mere days before the Senate hearings revealed Magruder and John Dean’s role in planning it. Not long after Halderman and Ehrlichmann are forced to resign and John Mitchell is indicted. Yet even then he tries to explain how Nixon rose and fell and even then shows that even if Watergate is a repudiation of Nixon, the mandate for what he stood for will not disappear. “The Republican Party is a place where people vote when they want to go slow and I think they want to go slow now,” White quotes one of McGovern’s speechwriters. Considering the rise of Ronald Reagan, it's hard to argue with this basic concept half a century later.

White’s books are more remarkable because they also offer snapshots into some of the most significant moments in history. Sometimes White doesn’t know it yet – as in 1960 with the revelation of the U-2 program – and other times he knows what he’s witnessing. This is true not just in 1968 but when we see how the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed and the fall of the Southern Democrats which White witnessed almost in real time and in 1972 when we learn the circumstance as to how and why American went off the gold standard. (Republicans should direct their blame at Nixon, by the way.) White also goes out of his way to capture both the makeup of America, using the census data available to him and the patterns of the electorate and how they were shifting – and in context, the country. It’s clear reading White that in his books he’s trying to tell a narrative about America and the race for the Presidency is just the means.

When Witcover picked up the mantle from White in 1976 he was living through a bigger change in American politics and world history. But Witcover is fundamentally uninterested in seeing any of the events that happen in the world – and even America – throughout anything other than a political lens. That would be forgivable if he could manage to maintain the tone of neutrality White does. Instead what you get are hundreds of pages of details of political campaigns which Witcover views at best as trivial and at worst read as a repudiation of every aspect of the process, including voting itself. With White you get a sense of respect of what he’s doing and its significance. With Witcover you get the feel of a cranky old man who’s fulfilling a book deal he made and doesn’t have the energy to get out of, so he takes his frustration out on the reader.

Maybe that’s the real reason why, even though I have and will continue to you use both men’s work as primary sources for my articles on history, I will always prefer reading White’s books to Witcover’s. White does seem to care about the process. With Witcover it seems like he’s  always looking at his watch, counting the minutes until he can move on to something more interesting.

 

Five Weeks Into The New Season of Jeopardy We Have Two Qualifers for The Next Tournament of Champions

 

As I mentioned quite a few times in my last article about Jeopardy while we haven’t had the super-champions that have existed in the post Alex Trebek era throughout the start of regular game play in 2024 we have had a steady stream of qualifiers for the Tournament of Champions. In the seventy-eight games of regular season play during Season 40 seven players qualified for the Tournament of Champions a remarkably consistent pattern unmatched during the last four years.

Now in only the first five weeks of Season 41, we have had back to back qualifiers for the next Tournament of Champions. In fact they’ve both qualified in just the last two weeks. To be fair only one has ‘officially’ qualified but the Jeopardy archive the online history of the game (and your humble scribes main source) says both players have qualified so for the purposes of this article I will take it as gospel.

Last Monday Ryan Manton, a systems administrator from Columbus Ohio had one of the most dominant games of the season so far: 29 correct responses and only two incorrect ones. His runaway score of $22,200 is all the more impressive because the two clues he got wrong were both Daily Doubles, each of which cost him $5000. Nevertheless he won his first game in a runaway and warmed the hearts of Jeopardy fans everywhere when he wrote down in his first Final Jeopardy: “What is I Love you Lauren?” This is heartwarming not just because he shows his love for his wife but because the then Lauren Menke appeared on Season 37 of Jeopardy in what was the last game Ken Jennings appeared on in his first stint as guest host. (Sam Stapleton who won the game went on to win two games and qualify for the finals in Champions Wildcard Spades.)

Ryan managed two more runaway victories (and each time told Lauren he loved her) and in the third game managed the narrowest of wins. (Scott Tcheng who just barely lost to him, will no doubt be invited back to the Second Chance Tournament) That  Friday he had a chance to officially punch his ticket to the Tournament of Champions. Then he ran into Mark Fitzpatrick and Anne Singleton.

In the Jeopardy round Anne seemed to have the advantage ending it with $7000 to Ryan’s $4000 and Mark’s $1800. The Double Jeopardy round that followed was the most exciting of the season. Mark shot to a big lead when he found both Daily Doubles back to back and got both of them right netting $8000 and taking a huge lead. But neither Mark nor Anne surrendered. Ryan got 20 correct responses and didn’t make a single mistake, finishing with $15,200. Anne managed an impressive third with 10,200. So even though Mark had the lead with $23,400, the game was far from out of reach for either of his opponents.

It came down to Final Jeopardy. The category was LITERARY CHARACTERS: “A fragment from a nautical tool found on a Chilean island in 2005 was likely left by the Scot who partly inspired this character.” Anne wrote down: “Who is Wallace?” and lost $5200. Ryan couldn’t come up with anything but assured us he still loved his wife. It cost him $5201 leaving him with $9999.

That left Mark. His response was revealed: “Who is Robinson Crusoe?” and that was the correct response. (For those of you who don’t know – and I suspect only true Jeopardy fans might – Robinson Crusoe was inspired by the real life exploits of a stranded Scottish sailor named Alexander Selkirk. Type in the line “I am the monarch of all I survey’ on Google and you’ll find the connection.) Mark had wagered $7001 to make him the new champion with an impressive $30,101.

Ryan put together an impressive run during his four games, winning $83, 179 during the course of them. This is at the level of Grant DeYoung, who qualified last year and considerably more than Amar Kakirde who ‘only’ won $55,899 in four games last May. And it is considerably more than Ben Goldstein won in five games back in Season 39 and at least four or five other players who qualified for the 2021 Tournament of Champions. Ryan will be more than up to the challenge. And given how well she played against two men who are now in the Tournament of Champions Anne Singleton will definitely be in the Second Chance Tournament and deserve to be.

Now on to Mark Fitzpatrick. Mark was a better player than Ryan in that he won more games and had two runaway victories but like Mark he struggled with Final Jeopardy, eventually getting four out of six Final Jeopardys wrong. This is not necessarily a flaw limited to Mark; Final Jeopardys have been particularly challenging for the contestants – and I must confess to me at home. Credit to the writers who have clearly upped their game as Season 41 progresses, though I shudder to think what we’ll get in the Tournament of Champions. (I may save that for a different article later on.)

A prime example would come in Tuesday’s game which he spent much of Double Jeopardy fighting off the challenge of Gino Montoya. At the end of the round he had a narrow lead with $21,200 to Gino’s $17,400. The third challenger Andrew Miller was alive with $4600.

The Final Jeopardy category was not one to inspire confidence WORLD FLAGS: “The 12 stars on its flag symbolize perfection, not geographic or political units.” Andrew guessed Australia, Mark Liberia and Gino couldn’t come up with anything. Ken admitted it was tough because “it’s not actually a nation of the world; we’re talking about the flag of the European Union, those 12 stars in a circle.” Gino lost everything. Mark lost $13,601 but that left him wit $7599, enough for his third victory.

On the game that he officially clinched his spot in the Tournament of Champions he spent a great deal of time going back and forth with Mike Obstgarten for the lead, finally pulling ahead for good when he responded correctly on the last Daily Double. He led with $18,600 to Mike’s $12,800. The Final Jeopardy category was MOVIES: “More than 25 cast members from this 1990 film drama would later appear on an HBO series with a similar theme.” Both Mike and Mark knew the correct film: “What is Goodfellas?” (For the record I knew there were a lot of actors who were in that film on The Sopranos; I didn’t know Michael Imperioli was one of them.” Mark won $25,601 to cross the $100,000 threshold.

However Friday Mark suffered from what had been his great strength to that point in his run: the Daily Double. In the previous five games he’d found thirteen of the fifteen Daily Doubles and had done extremely well on them getting eleven correct. However when he found the first one on the second clue of the Jeopardy round he was already at -$1000. The category was 18^th CENTURY HISTORY: “This North American colonial empire seen on 16^th century maps as Gallia Nova ended with the fall of Quebec and Montreal.” Like Mark I had never heard of New France. It is credit to Mark that at the end of the Jeopardy round he was on the positive side; at one point he actually had -$2600.

In Double Jeopardy it looked like he was turning things around quickly when he got the first three clues correct on the bottom of the board and jumped up to $5800. Then he found the first Daily Double and wagered everything: “You can breathe easier knowing that Terry McMillan wrote a sequel to this novel called Getting to Happy.” Mark didn’t know this referred to Waiting to Exhale and went back to zero. Around that time his challengers Eamonn Campbell and Dot White began to get hot and Mark was in a distant third with $2800 when he found the third and last Daily Double in TERRITORIAL GOVERNORS. This time he had no choice but to bet everything: “Frank Franz served as an Indian agent of the Osage Agency before becoming this territory’s last governor in 1906.” Mark knew it was Oklahoma and doubled his score.

But he couldn’t turn the tide on what had been a dreadful game: he managed fifteen correct responses but eight incorrect ones. Despite that he was still in contention at the end of Double Jeopardy with $4800 to Dot’s $10,400 and Eamonn’s $12,200.

It came down to Final Jeopardy. The category was a tough one: WORLD POLITICAL HISTORY. The clue even more challenging: William Whitelaw and John Peyton were also-rans in a 1975 leadership vote with this victor.” Mark had no clue and wrote down: “What is thanks for a fun day?” However he lost nothing, so he was still alive. Dot was next and couldn’t finish her response: “What is Washing?” But it cost her just $599. It was all on Eamonn. He wrote down: “Who is Thatcher?” That was the correct response. After Edward Heath lost the 1974 election for the Conservatives, there was a leadership vote that made Margaret Thatcher head of the Party and that set her up to become Prime Minister four years later. Eamonn was already going to win and he added $1500 to his total, making him the new champion with $13,700. Mark went home with $107,201.

That means that as of this writing nine players have officially qualified for the Tournament of Champions. (Ten if we include Lisa Ann Walter and we all know we will going in.) As of this writing Mark is exactly in the middle in terms of money won, right between Alison Betts with $121,500 and Amy Hummel with $100,994.

I think the term of the roster of the Tournament of Champions right now is solid. We’ve been spoiled the last two years by having so many super-champions that we’ve forgotten that the average Jeopardy champion is just very, very great. All six players who have won 5 games or more have won at least $100,000 which for those of us who’ve been watching Jeopardy in the last 20 years is well above the norm for most of our winners. The rosters already at the level of the 2021 Tournament of Champions (the last under the old rules) and that one only had seven contestants who’d won at least five games.

Then too there is the fact that in little more than a hundred games since the Season 40 ‘postseason’ ended we already have a very good roster of contenders and as I mentioned quite a few three game winners who will either be in the Tournament in some form, via natural or Wild Card. (We’ve actually had one more possibility join the roster but I’ll save him for later this season.)

We may not be in quite the era of Peak Jeopardy any more, in the sense that there has yet to be a contender the likes of Cris Panullo or Matt Amodio. But given the increased caliber of the writing so far this season and the listing of champions we already have, I doubt the show will start to lose fans or complain any time soon. I’ll be back when the next qualifier for the Tournament appears.

 

Found Returns for A Scorching Season 2

 

 

There were few people more enraptured then me by Found, NBC’s scorching new thriller that debuted last September. It resonated with me from the first minutes of the episode and it made my top ten list of 2023. For the last ten months, like all the viewers I have reeling from the last minutes of the season finale – when Gabi Moseley (the peerless Shanola Hampton) finally revealed to her team what the viewer has known since the pilot: that she has been holding Sir (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) the man who kidnapped her and held her prisoner as a child twenty years ago as a captive in her basement for almost a year, and worse that she has been using him to help mind the missing persons they’ve been finding all this time.

The betrayal was immediate: everyone (except Daan, who’d helped track him down in the first players) walked out feeling utterly betrayed and more broken then they’d been since Gabi found them. But Gabi couldn’t deal with that for long: she knew very clearly that Sir was going to punish her team, which meant trying to kill them all and track down Lacey, the other young girl he abducted and who he blames for everything going wrong between himself and Gabi. The episode ended with Sir in Lacey’s closest while she ignored calls from Gabi trying to warn her.

The Season 2 premiere takes places seconds after Season 1 ended and Sir has followed through on his threat: he attempted to poison every member of Gabi’s team and he has gone to Lacey’s house where a violent struggle has taken place. The team has now reassembled trying to find Lacey.

But the crisis has done nothing to ease either the anger or feelings of betrayal. If anything they’re far worse. Margaret (Kelli Williams, magnificent as always) is not only sickened by Gabi’s betrayal, she knows Daan’s part in it and she loathes him as well. When he confesses that he did so because he believed Gabi was going to kill Sir, it does nothing to alleviate her rag and she has no use for his moral calculus. If anything, the fact that Daan himself was held prisoner for three years makes her think that he’s a bigger hypocrite then her. And Zeke, the agoraphobic tech who was poisoned by Sir during the opening moments is quieter but not less betrayed. When Dhan went to his apartment where he has secluded himself since his abduction, he found a letter of resignation typed in his computer. He deleted it based on the justification that he didn’t want Zeke to make a rash decision but when Zeke heard it he was angrier than we’ve ever heard him.

But the biggest betrayal came from one I genuinely didn’t think was coming. Over the first season Gabi and Trent (Brett Dalton) relationship has gone from adversarial to friendly and nearly romantic. This couldn’t hold as long as Sir was in the basement but I didn’t know if Gabi would tell. However in the season opener her hand was forced when Trent sensed the division in the team and knew it was hurting the manhunt for Sir who’d been spotted. Gabi told him – and his rage topped all the others. Now he is questioning everything he thought he knew about Gabi and she is in no position to defend herself because her position is indefensible. She managed to stave him off temporarily because she believes she can still find Lacey. But it’s clear that Trent now views Gabi with even more loathing then before.

Perhaps the most shocking thing of all involving Gabi is that there’s still a part of her that can’t really tell how deep the damage she’s done is. During the season premiere she managed to figure out clues to find how to reach Sir and rather than tell anyone she went there on her own. Even now a part of her is still trying to justify everything she does with Sir and no matter much she hurts everybody around her doing so, there’s a part of her that won’t accept how much pain she’s caused. In last night’s episode the team attempted to find a newborn who’d gone missing from a hospital and it was essentially a disaster. Margaret’s ‘ability’ to read people was broken after everything that happened the last few days and she made no secret telling Gabi such. When Gabi made her do a press conference – in part because she was trying to follow a lead on Sir – and it was disastrous for Margaret, she nevertheless chose to blame Margaret for what happened. She then said she needed to follow the lead on Sir and Margaret had no quarter when she made it clear the sick hold he still has on her. When Gabi tried to interact with Trent, he utterly closed off from her and she doesn’t seem able to understand why. When the baby was found and she tried to use her old way of explaining why the culprits didn’t deserve punishment, Trent said icily: “You don’t need to tell me how a monster thinks.”

At this point the only person who doesn’t blame Gabi for what happened  is Lacey’s mother. The flashbacks in Season 2 now involve Lacey as a child after the rescue and its clear she was more scarred than Gabi was, unable to talk to her mother. But there was a good reason for that: she saw Sir everywhere – and he was actually there. As we learned in the horrible end moments of the first episode Sir has been following Lacey all her life because he was sure he would lead her to Gabrielle. He claims that he isn’t a killer and that he has no intention of killing Lacey until he gets what he wants. But Sir is a sociopath and a psychopath and he knows how Gabi thinks. He knows that as long as he hold a carrot in front of her, she will chase it and right now he has the biggest one of all.

The wild card this season is Christian Evans, Sir’s younger brother who we met for the first time last night. Trent believes, understandably, that Christian has been helping his brother all his life. Christian has been trying to prove his good intentions and he went to Moseley and Associates to try and help. Margaret thought he was helpful and genuine and he did lead them where Sir was hiding. It’s worth noting that when Sir saw him in the footage of the press conference, he looked genuinely afraid and upset for the first time since we met him – something that nearly led to Lacey escaping.

 But is it because Christian is his weak spot – or is it because the apple didn’t fall far from the tree? We’ve already seen that Sir’s mother was an abusive parent and that was a key factor in Sir becoming who he was, even if it’s not an excuse. Christian is a grief counselor which is a position that can be a caregiver or used to study human emotion. As we learned last season Sir was Gabi’s teacher before he abducted her and spent months manipulating her. Could Christian be playing a long game of his own? I suspect that will be part of the backstory of Season 2 as well.

At the start of its second season Found is everything it was last year and more so. It is conceivable this situation will be resolved in the next few episodes, but there will be no going back to the status quo. It may not even possible for the show to do so given how much the foundation was ripped away at the end of last season and looks no closer to being put back together. That’s one of the most fearless things I’ve seen on network television: hell on any service in the last few years. Even the greatest dramas in recent years have a certain formula to them that they are willing to stick too and only change the closer they come to the end (Succession is the most famous recent example). Found has already torn up its foundation twice in the course of just fifteen episodes and it very well may do so in the next few again. This may not be groundbreaking television but it is bold and fearless. When you combine the superb nature of the writing, directing and acting Found has all the makings of a masterpiece.

My score: 5 stars.

 

What Numbers and History Have Taught Me About Elections Senate Edition, Part 1: How The Democrats Won A Whopping Majority and Squandered it in Just Six Short Years

 

Those of you who read my columns know I spend a seemingly inordinate amount of time trashing the left, and I’m going to have to start this part of my series doing the same thing this time. However there’s a purpose to it this time. So bear with me.

According to the left wing of the Democratic Party, the one that seems to exist in academic journals and Hollywood, America is a progressive nation from coast to coast. They’re right – you know, if you only count the states on both coasts and leave out  that pesky section in the middle. (I know, there’s method to my madness this time.)

America believes in racial and gender equality, gun control, raising the minimum wage and taxing the rich by an overwhelming majority. And they’re right – if by ‘overwhelming majority’ you mean somewhere between 53 and 58 percent of all Americans in a given poll. And the Democrats not only believe in these ideals but they are held by large parts of America’s population – African-Americans, LatinX, women, LGBTQ+, college educated and the young. The only people who might not share these opinions are white working-class voters but as progressives have considered them all racist and homophobes decades before the term MAGA was coined, they never count them.

And the only thing standing in the way of passing the complete progressive agenda is the antiquated way the founders designed the Constitution back in the 1780s. And because they were all white men who were willing to let slavery be part of our republic, we should disregard their intentions. (They also couldn’t have foreseen the internal combustion engine, the telephone, air travel, radio or television but somehow that never gets mentioned by Gen Z as their fatal flaws.)

Essentially the only thing that has allowed the Republican Party, the party of white supremacy (since the Democrats abandoned it  in the 1960s), corporate billionaires (except the ones who give money to Democratic campaigns) and a group of token minorities to have any power at all is because of the three flawed elements of are ‘democracy’. (I paraphrase the pure leftists and not the ones tied to the Democrats, though they do sometimes sneak in.)

1.        The electoral college, a broken system that subverts the will of the people and broke down in 2000 and 2016 to allow a Republican to become President without winning the popular vote.

2.       Republicans ability to gerrymander districts to the point to give them a disproportionate amount of influence, particularly in the smaller states

3.       The Senate which gives far too much power to small states and not enough to the big ones.

 

If you read the last article in this series you’ll find the first point is built purely on sand and the entire idea of the big blue states overwhelming the smaller red states where, as we are told over and over, ‘no one lives’. The second point has some teeth, I acknowledge, though I should be clear that given the opportunity the Democrats can redistrict the hell out of some areas as much as Republicans. But the third point demonstrates, yet again, what an incredibly short memory this supposedly academic field of the left has.

And I don’t just mean in terms of the long history of our county. I mean that as recently as fifteen years ago the Democratic Party had a considerable presence in many of those small red states in the deep red south and flyover country where apparently some Democrats lived. They were in fact central to the overwhelming majorities that Obama had when he won the Presidency in 2008 and the Democrats gained control of both houses of Congress by huge numbers. And while one can and should blame the Tea Party for the loss in the House of Representatives, that same loss in the Senate doesn’t hold water. Because while the Democrats were able to win the House back in 2018 after spending the rest of the decade in the minority they have never come close to enjoying the majority they had in Obama’s first years in office – and unless they are willing to learn some hard lessons, it may be a long time before the Democrats hold it again.

It will clearly not happen in this November: the map for Democrats is not a good one this cycle. But if the Democrats are going to be able to be competitive in the Senate at any point in the future, they have to relearn the lessons that they have clearly forgotten in the last decade. So in this series I’m going to discuss the Senate: how the Democrats managed to find their way back to the majority only to fritter it away, how the left has decided it is a loss worth taking even with the most substantial problem of another branch of government hanging in the balance, and the path both the Democrats – and maybe the Republicans need to take in order for our country to move forwards, regardless how the race for the White House turns out this fall.

I’ll begin my story at the end of the 2004 election, when it truly looked like the Democrats were headed towards extinction. Not only had they narrowly lost the President to George W. Bush that year but they continued to show no signs of making any progress in regaining control of either House of Congress. They’d managed to ‘only’ lose 3 seats in the House but they’d lost four seats in the Senate. They’d lost seats in Georgia and Florida, John Edwards run for the Vice Presidency had cost them their seat in North Carolina to Richard Burr and in the crowning insult Tom Daschle, the minority leader had been narrowly defeated for reelection by John Thune. Only Barack Obama’s victory in Illinois was a resounding triumph for the Democrats.

The savior of the Democratic Party came from the most unlikely of sources. Howard Dean of Vermont had been a front-runner for the Democratic nomination but after a disappointing third place finish in Iowa and a notorious scream upon defeat, his campaign dropped to zero. The Democrats elected him Chairman of the DNC in February.

Dean believed for the Democrats to go forward as a party they had to do something radical. He unveiled a ‘fifty state strategy’ in order to make an attempt for the Democrats to compete in the conservative states that the party had spent much of the last twenty years dismissing as ‘Solid Red’.

His leadership was opposed by the then minority leaders in Congress, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid but he promised to focus on fundraising and campaigning rather than discuss policy. His model was, ironically, enough built on the Republicans of the mid-70s after Watergate. He intended to seed the local level with young and committed candidates, building them into state candidates. He traveled across the country, including Utah, Mississippi and Texas. He shrunk the Democratic Party platform to make it compact. And most importantly he engaged in a grass roots and online fundraising campaign that was unheard of.

In the 2006 midterms the results paid off. While their was clearly fatigue with Bush’s handling of the Iraq War, the Democrats gained 32 seats in the House. For the first time since the GOP had been founding 152 years earlier it didn’t win a single seat held by a Democrat and didn’t defeat any Democratic incumbents. It was the largest gain for the Democrats since 1974, when the turmoil of Watergate a new wave of Democrats into the House. The Democrats were just as successful in the Senate, taking out six Republican incumbents. Jon Tester narrowly won in Montana, giving the state two Democratic senators along with Max Baucus. Claire McCaskill won in Missouri, Sherrod Brown overwhelmed Mike DeWine in Ohio and Pat Casy defeated Rick Santorum in Pennsylvania. Sheldon Whitehouse was elected in Rhode Island and Jim Webb narrowly beat George Allen in Virgina. Combined with the two independents in the Senate – Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Joe Lieberman in Connecticut – the Democrats had taken back the majority there too.

Dean’s strategy was on full display in Obama’s landslide victory in 2008. The Republicans were defending 23 seats in the Senate to the Democrats 12 and early on they conceded that they wouldn’t be able to regain the majority. But not even they expected what was going to come.

The Democrats gained eight seats in the Senate while not losing a single one in contention. Their victories came not just in blue states like New Hampshire and Oregon but states that were trending blue such as Colorado and New Mexico. Elizabeth Dole lost in North Carolina to Kay Hagan. Mark Begich defeated six term Alaska Senator Ted Stevens. By the time Al Franken finally won in Minnesota the Democrats had won 58 seats and for the briefest of periods a supermajority in the Senate.

In just four years Howard Dean had built the Democratic Party back in control of both the White House and both houses of Congress. Obama had become the first President since 1980 to gain seats in the House – and as of this writing, the only President of either party to do so. The Democrats had effectively erased all of the gains the GOP had made since Gingrich led the revolution in 1994.

But the man who helped bring it down was  literally calling from inside the House. Rahm Emmanuel was the head of the DCCC and constantly clashed with Dean over strategy. He favored a tactical approach focusing on key districts. And when it came to recruiting candidates he favored right-leaning candidates and former Republicans. Many of the Representatives he recruited voted against much of the Obama administration’s policies including stimulus, banking reform and health care. This strategy was short-sighted and led to the start of the massive losses in the House majority. Added to his role as Obama’s chief of staff, he eventually had to leave prior to the 2010 midterms.

Because of Emmanuel’s clashes with Dean, Dean was pushed out after Obama’s election as head of the DNC. Tim Kaine the new chair, abandoned Dean’s 50 state strategy and no Democratic chair has tried anything like it since. The party has clearly suffered from it ever since.

It wasn’t clear in 2010 that the repercussions of abandoning Dean’s plan had been responsible for Democratic losses in the Senate, mainly because none of the candidates were up for reelection. There were troubling signs to be sure: Blanche Lincoln was soundly  defeated in Arkansas and Bryan Dorgan and Evan Bayh’s retirement had cost them seats in North Dakota and Indiana, respectively  but the Democrats had also suffered in what had been solidly blue states as well: Russ Feingold lost to Ron Johnson in Wisconsin and Pat Toomey had inched out Joe Sestak in Pennsylvania. The Democrats were counting themselves lucky that they still were in the majority at all.

Obama’s reelection two years later made it seem like that might very have just been a hiccup. Because in large part due to the superb work by Dean in 2006, the Republicans had a better opportunity to reclaim the Senate. The Democrats were defending 21 seats, the Republicans only ten with one Independent and one Independent Democrat up for reelection.

But Obama managed something no Democratic President had done since FDR’s second term: he added seats to the Senate majority in both his runs for the White House. Much of this was due to the groundwork Dean had done: all seven Senators who had won election for the first time under his stewardship were reelected with only Jon Tester facing what might be considered a close race, winning by less than four percent over his Republican challenger. But the Democrats also managed to take back the seat that they had lost to Scott Brown in 2010 when Elizabeth Warren managed to win and Chris Murphy took over the Independent Joe Lieberman’s seat in Connecticut. Joe Donnelly managed to win over Richard Mourdock in Indiana (after the latter made some terrible comments about abortion that he never recovered from) and Heidi Heitkamp managed to (narrowly) hold the Democratic seat five-term Senator Kent Conrad had vacated. Even the retirement of Jim Webb in Virginia didn’t cost the Democrats as Tim Kaine defeated George Allen.

In addition there were promising signs in the Sun Belt. Shelley Berkley had narrowly lost to Dean Heller in Nevada and Richard Carmona only barely lost to Jeff Flake, who took over Jon Kyl’s seat in Arizona. Only Deb Fischer solidly winning Nebraska after Ben Nelson retired put a damper on the night.

But in 2014 the Democrats finally paid the price for rejecting Dean’s plan. The Senate elections were devastating as the Republicans took nine seats that had belonged to the Democrats, the largest gain by either party since 1980. Three of the losers were winners from 2008: Kay Hagan lost to Thom Tillis in North Carolina, Mark Udall lost to Cory Gardener (by a  nose) in Colorado and Dan Sullivan defeated Mark Begich in Alaska.

2014 also removed three of the last Senators in Dixie; Mark Pryor was flatted by Tom Cotton in Arkansas; Shelly Moore Capito became the first Republican in seventy years to win in the Senate in West Virginia; and Mary Landrieu lost in a runoff in Louisiana to Bill Cassidy. The Democrats also lost their other Senate seat in South Dakota and Steve Daines became a freshman Republican in Montana.

All of this was bad enough but after Trump’s upset victory in 2016 the Democrats would compound the error when they ended up embracing so much of Bernie Sanders and the Justice Democrats as their standard bearers after the primaries of 2018.

The Justice Democrats, as I wrote in an earlier article, had a disastrous run in their initial rollout, particularly when it came to the Senate: all four of their standard bearers had been flattened in the primaries that year. They hadn’t even come close to a fifty state strategy, particularly in states were until fairly recently there had been Democratic Senators. In Indiana, Iowa and North Carolina they had been unable to win a single primary; both of their candidates in Missouri would not win their seats and they’d done worse in Utah than Dean had twelve years earlier.

But the Democrats chose to make AOC and Rashida Tlaib the voices of the party. Admittedly the Democrats were facing, if anything, a tougher map in 2018 then they were in 2012 they were now defending 26 states to the Republicans 8. It is a credit to the Democrats, in some respects, that they did as well as they managed too, managing a net loss of 2 seats. Jacky Rosen managed to defeat Dean Heller in Nevada and Krysten Sinema managed to win narrowly over Martha McSally in Arizona.

But the root of the Democratic defeat came when Claire McCaskill lost in Missouri to Josh Hawley and two red state Senators from 2012 – Joe Donelly and Heidi Heitkamp lost. Had the Democrats spent some of the money they shoved into Florida to keep Bill Nelson afloat and in Texas for Beto O’Rourke, it’s not impossible that either Senator could have kept their seat. (Donnelly’s margin was one of the closest of the races that were being contested.) But this was not the standard to be fought for by a party that was increasingly looking at Joe Manchin as a DINO and Paula Swearengin (who’d only gotten 30 percent of the vote in her primary challenge) as the future of the party.

As of this writing only five of the Democrats that Dean helped get elected to the Senate during his tenure are still in the Senate. Two of them Sheldon Whitehouse and Amy Klobuchar are all but assured reelected. Sherrod Brown and Bob Casey are the narrow favorites to win and as of this writing Jon Tester’s prospect for reelection are increasingly bleak. The Democrats face an uphill battle to hold the majority this fall defending 23 seats to the Republicans 10. And it is telling that the Democrats have focused all of their energies on Florida and Texas – large electoral prizes with a huge urban base – rather than even attempt to make  a run in any of the states they held Senate seats in as recently as ten or even six years ago. Indeed it tells you everything you need to know about so much of the Democratic Party today that their plan to control the Senate involves creating new states rather than trying to win back the ones they had.

(And for the record, I’m all for DC and Puerto Rico becoming a states. It doesn’t change the fact that the entire idea behind it is built on a Catch-22: these states are the key to breaking the imbalance the Republicans have with their small states but in order for it to happen in the current system, some of those Republican small states will be needed to sign on.)

By far the most symbolic loss in 2024 will be when Jim Justice wins Joe Manchin’s seat in West Virginia. This state was once the most reliably Democratic in the nation and as late as 2014 still had two Democratic Senators. To the far left Manchin is a Democrat in Name Only because he didn’t endorse the Social Democrats platform. The fact that it is a non-starter for any Democrat seeking statewide office – as Paula Swearengin found out twice in two years – is irrelevant to the left who has demonstrated time and again that they would rather lose horribly with a full-throated progressive then win with a moderate Democrat.

That’s the difference between the Justice Democrats and the Democrats under Howard Dean. The Justice Democrats can only win in deep blue states. Under Dean’s strategy the Democrats were capable of winning everywhere. A political party needs to let as many people in as it can to have influence. The left has made it clear who they want in their tent and it doesn’t include anyone in the flyover states where nobody lives – but until fairly recently some voters were willing to elect Democrats and still might be if they didn’t have to embrace every aspect of the progressive platform. The left hates Republicans and the deep red states so much that they don’t want to help the Democrats who are in it, if it involves compromise.

In the next article I’m going to make it very clear how the people who scream the loudest about the Supreme Court for the last eight years clearly never let it influence how they voted until eight years ago.

 

Kaitlin Olson Has High Potential - And So Does This Series

 

 

If the era of Peak TV has been about dramas with Difficult Men at the center, then the comedies of Peak TV have centered on what could be called ‘Complicated Women’. And most of the best ones have been an interesting measure of comedy and drama that have made critics – and Emmy voters – keep questioning whether the metric for comedy should be the same as it was in the 1980s and 1990s. Don’t get me wrong; some of the best network comedies have had the Liz Lemons and Leslie Knopes at their center. But ever since I started savoring the work of all three of the Showtime drama-comedy mixtures such as United States of Tara, Nurse Jackie and The Big C I’ve been in awe of a special brand of very messy – and Emmy winning – actresses who are messed up in very special ways.

During  the 2010s we saw an interesting trend as so many of the great comic actresses began maneuvering into dramas and vice versa. Niecy Nash-Betts, who’d engaged fans with her rollicking work in Reno 9-1-1 earned her first Emmy nominations in Getting On, an underappreciated HBO comedy where she played a nurse working at an elder care facility with some difficult patients and worse staff. From there she became the lead on the brilliant crime drama Claws and has since worked far more in drama than comedy. Rachel Brosnahan had a brilliant guest role in House of Cards and a dark turn in Manhattan before finally finding the role of a lifetime in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Olivia Colman has worked between both genres effortlessly as have Sharon Horgan and Aya Cash. And throughout the end of the decade we saw such pioneering supporting talent as Merritt Weyer and Betty Gilpin play groups of women who were always complicated.

Katlin Olson would seem an unlikely addition to this mix but anyone whose watched her brilliant brand of comedy for the last fifteen years knows its always had a dark edge. It’s always under the surface in the iconic It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. In her extraordinary work as DJ on Hacks – which has already earned her two Emmy nominations – being the daughter of a legendary comedienne has brought her numerous addiction, crippling anxiety and mother issues she’s still working through. In High Potential she plays Morgan who as she describes herself in the teaser is “a cleaning lady, a single mom with three kids and an IQ just under 160.”  Ostensibly High Potential is a crime drama but you can see the dark comedy that Olson has been front and center from the moment we meet her.

In the last year we’ve been fortunate enough to see some  extraordinary comic mysteries with amateur female detectives as their leads. In February of 2023 we were blessed with Poker Face where the incredible Natasha Lyonne plays Charlie Cale, with a gift for knowing when people are lying and running into murderers no matter where she goes. Last February Carrie Preston recreated her Emmy winning role in Elsbeth where she played the  iconic ditzy attorney we’ve loved across two different Robert and Michelle King dramas, now helping the NYPD solve murders and actually feeling sorry for the criminals she locks up on a weekly basis. Both Preston and Lyonne already had superb chops for mixing comedy and drama (Lyonne on Orange is the New Black and Russian Doll; Preston not only on The Good Wife but on Claws) and High Potential is very much in their bandwidth.

Fans of Criminal Intent will see shades of the detectives that Vincent D’Onofrio and Jeff Goldblum played throughout its run but unlike Goren and Nichols, who just seemed to know everything under the sun with no reason, Morgan actually sees the ‘gift’ she has  as a burden. She can’t turn her brain off and has spent her entire life as just short of the poverty line. When she ‘helps’ the detectives in the opening case – telling them the suspect is a victim – she makes it clear that her brain demands order and doesn’t like messes. As someone who has dealt with this kind of condition much of his life I can’t help but empathize with Morgan a lot.

Morgan is very hyper and clearly has been brought up on cop shows: in the first episode she has to be told that in interrogations you don’t get to yell at a suspect or hit them with a phone book and the constantly put-upon Detective Karadec (Daniel Sunjata) is very annoyed that she just doesn’t understand you can’t take evidence home with you or yell at suspects. It doesn’t help that the other detectives on the squad take a shine to her and the Lieutenant who hired her (Judy Reyes, also good at maneuvering between comedy and drama) is insistent she work with them to “Find the things my detectives miss.”

And Morgan is not a machine in the way that counts because she isn’t a cop. The father of her two youngest children children Ludo (SNL veteran Taran Killam) is still in her life but their relationship is politely strained. The eldest Ava (Amirah J) has constantly feuded with her mother, in part because her siblings clearly have must the same intellectual aspects as her mother and she doesn’t. She’s also still dealing with the fact that her father has been missing her whole life and Morgan has never been able to explain why. One of the reasons she agrees to work with the unit is because she wants to find out what happened to her first husband who disappeared going out for milk and has never come back. The police believe he’s dead; she’s convinced he’s alive. We’re not entirely surprised to learn there’s more to his disappearance then meets the eye but it’s hard to know where this will go.

Morgan also is resentful that for all her gifts she hasn’t been able to get very far in life: this is the first paying job she’s had as well as the first time her brain has actually been good for something. She also has a habit of shooting from the lip and far too often that hurts the people she cares about. And she’s not used to seeing dead bodies the way her detectives are and she takes the losses much harder than the detectives do.

One of the things I like about High Potential is that none of the characters is either stupid or one-dimensional. Karadec clearly has knowledge old cars as well as whiskey and can follow Morgan’s logic when he has too. Daphne and Oz are very good at following up on financials and videos and can keep up with certain parts of Morgan’s theories when they get there. Selena (Reyes) is clearly a capable detective and has a decent back and forth with Lieutenant Melon of robbery-homicide (Garret Dillahunt, another skillful genre mixer) who while single minded is very good at his job. The series has a breezy back and forth, going between darkness and light in a way that I’m more than used to and happy with so many good ABC procedurals, be they The Rookie or Will Trent.

I’m not shocked that the early reviews for High Potential have been generally positive and the ratings rather superb. Indeed, I’m actually beginning to think that network television is moving in an interesting direction as we reach the mid-point of the 2020s. Yes we do have our fair share of procedurals, among them the soon to return Tracker and The Irrational but we also have some fascinating more interesting darker shows such as Found and Accused which are breaking ground in a ways I honestly didn’t expect TV, much less network, to be capable of. (Many of them will be reviewed in the days and weeks to come.) Television is moving into an interesting phase in its development and High Potential shows that networks, if they try, can keep up with cable and streaming. I hope this show continues to find its audience so we can enjoy this intellectual dynamic for years to come.

My score: 4.25 stars.

Constant Reader October 2024 YA: I Kissed Shara Wheeler by Casey McQuiston

 

On the surface level I Kissed Shara Wheeler is an often hysterical, frequently moving, story about being LGBTQ+ in the most conservative school in the buckle on the Bible Belt and that you can find love and your people in the worst possible place. On a subtler level I think there’s a deeper message about our polarized society, how the culture shock from going deep blue to dark red in this country can blind us even if we don’t know it and how we can be so fixed on both our vision and our present that we can miss signs that America is more purple then it looks.

Casey McQuiston, most famous for writing the novel that became the inspiration for the hit TV film Red, White & Royal Blue makes it clear in the acknowledgements that even though she was born in Louisiana and now lives in New York City and even though she is proudly out “I am not Chloe Green and Chloe Green is not me” and that Chloe’s story is by no means autobiographical. She makes it clear she identifies with all of the queer characters she writes about proudly and with great affection in this novel. She wants them to know that they are not alone and in parentheses she adds “And also because you deserve ridiculous, over-the-top, high school rom-coms about teenagers like you, just like the straight kids have!”

The reason I Kissed Shara Wheeler works at this level is because Chloe, the central character of the novel, not only doesn’t know she’s in a rom-com you get the feeling she loathes the idea of any of them, LGBTQ+ or straight for most of the book. She has spent her four yours at Willowgrove Christian Academy with one goal in mind: winning. To Chloe that means becoming valedictorian, giving a huge middle finger to the entire student body in her speech (we see several rejected drafts in the novel) and then getting the hell out of False Beach, Alabama where she’s clearly resented every minute since she and her two moms had to move her when her grandmother was dying and have never been able to leave. The only thing standing in her way is Shara Wheeler, who is not only her sole rival for the title of valedictorian but the son of the principal of the school and who has been her enemy ever since she was forced to enroll.

To Chloe Shara is a symbol of everything she hates about Willowgrove: her picture is on the billboard welcoming students to school every day. She is beautiful, she is smart, she’s the homecoming queen who dates the quarterback, she gets whatever she wants. In Chloe’s mind she’s Regina George personified even though she never bothered to get to know her. Which is why it comes as a shock to her that half an hour before the end of prom, Shara corners her and kisses her.

Chloe wants answers and drives to the Wheeler house when Shara’s a no-show in class the next day. She then ends up breaking into the house and finding Shara isn’t there either. When Rory, Shara’s neighbor with a crush ends up entering Shara’s room for the balcony, he’s stunned to see Chloe here and just as stunned to learn that Chloe was kissed by Shara – so was he. She also gave Rory a mysterious pink card, telling them to see Smith, Chloe’s boyfriend.

When Rory asks the obvious question as to why Chloe drove across town and broke into Shara’s house to find her if she barely knew her, Chloe tells herself this is why:

“The only thing Chloe has ever wanted as much as (being valedictorian) is the satisfaction of knowing Shara Wheeler can’t have it…Because if Shara’s really gone, that’s a forfeit, and Chloe Green does not win by default.”

She then hides the fact the kiss caused her to forget an entire semester of French and she doesn’t know why. If Chloe was as smart emotionally as she is intellectually she would have saved herself almost the entire book. But whereas the rivals turned lovers trope is familiar in many YA novels, in McQuiston’s narrative there is a far more darker subtext. Shara Wheeler has everything that Chloe doesn’t.

When they moved to False Beach, one of Chloe’s mothers made it very clear to her how horrible this place was. (Her mother was a student but there was a far darker subtext which the novel doesn’t reveal until its almost over.) The Wheeler’s had moved to California years ago and Chloe grew up Her mother was an opera singer but when their grandmother got ill they moved to False Beach to take care of her. At the time Chloe was a fourteen year old Goth, which makes you wonder how happy she was in the grand old world of LA.

Willowgrove makes it very clear what it is:

“Four years since she asked a girl in Freshman bio why the chapter on sexual reproduction was taped shut and met Georgia…Three and a half years since she ditched her goth phase and Georgia started keeping their five year post-Willowgrove plan posted up in her locker. This year, Chloe and Benjy finally bullied the choir teacher into choosing Phantom of the Opera.

Shara’s had a contempt for False Beach since moving her, and to her credit there’s a lot about False Beach to hate. We get a rewritten version of the student manual and its everything you expect: no smoking, drinking, dancing or having sex, you must take responsibility for any and all smear campaigns against your character (of which Chloe is the prime witness) and there aren’t even any dances for the student body. The final rule is “Love God first, love Shara Wheeler second.” Chloe is the best student at Willowgrove but the teachers never use her work as an example for the class, the student body makes horrible jokes about her mothers and the girls refuse to change in front of her. Wheeler has spent four years involved in a campaign of microaggressions directed at her clearly designed to get her kicked out and she’s never broken. Before Chloe went in she told her mother confidently there was no way the school could be the same as it was when she was growing up and if anything it’s clearly worse.

No as long as she can go home at the end of the day and see the two women who raised her sitting on either side of the kitchen table she knows that its not true (that she is a blasphemy.)

But that’s not counting the time in between.

Chloe has clearly put up a mask and a front of pure range and determination to prove that Willowgrove will not beat her. That is why she’s determined to become valedictorian and that’s why she tells herself she needs to find Shara Wheeler. In her mind Shara Wheeler is a fake and she is the only one who sees it. As it turns out she only half right: as we find as the search for her goes on, Shara has been putting up a front.

But the thing as she ends up searching for Shara, she convinces Rory and Smith that they need to find her too. In her mind, she needs to prove to the two young men who have spent their lives devoted to her that she’s been lying to them all this time. Smith seems reluctant to do so from the start and Rory seems determined to do so just in a way to show off. Only Chloe follows through with devotion in order to find all of the pink cards she left the three of them. She doesn’t notice that Shara’s cards to her are not only longer but far more intimate then to her actual boyfriend: as far as she’s concerned Shara recognizes how smart she is and is making it more intricate for her.

And as the search goes on Chloe spends less time with her actual friends, most of whom are the few openly LGBTQ+ people at Willow Grove (this includes the choir teacher who everyone is convinced is in the closet) and increasingly hanging out with the more popular kids who she and her friends have cast stones at over the years. Against her will she ends up going to parties and events and finding out that there are more layers to these red-state teens that they don’t want to share. Sometimes its subtle – Rory denies he ever saw Ocean’s 8 before whispering “I’m Rhianna”. Other times it becomes more direct. When Smith, who is African-American is asked why he tolerated Dixon Wells, the prime model of the homophobic racist, he tells Chloe: “I have to pick my battles” something that the white Chloe has never considered before. She learns that Ace who ended up crashing the production of Phantom actually wanted to audition for it but was embarrassed by the idea of a jock taking part in musicals. And the reason that Shara sought out Rory and Smith is more complicated then Chloe thinks – and that the two of them may want to admit.

And Chloe has missed similar symbols by her best friend. As the novel continues she neglects Georgia and eventually learns that her fellow lesbian is dealing with issues of her own. Her family owns the one truly fancy bookstore in town and its been struggling for a while. When Chloe learns that Georgia is going to Auburn she takes this even harder than Shara’s disappearance, mainly because she can’t comprehend why anyone who want to state in False Beach. Later in the book Georgia reveals she’s been secretly dating someone at school (I won’t reveal who) and when Chloe asks how it fits with Christianity Georgia tells her that the church believes “Jesus is a brown socialist, then the whole eternal damnation thing.”

Chloe feels her eyebrows go up. “I didn’t know that variation of Christian existed in Alabama.”

“That’s because you’re not from here,” Georgia points out. “All you’ve ever known of Alabama is Willowgrove.”

Chloe is struck dumb.

She’s never been to a church cookout or met a practicing Christian who was also gay. She’s never even stepped inside a church where she felt safe. Maybe if she had – maybe if her mom hadn’t been burned so bad that she never brought Chloe near Jesus until she absolutely had to – she’d feel different.

It's understandable that Chloe is an angry as she is and that she’s focused only on the horizon, never around her. But because of her vision – which may very well be based on being a California native and having a deeply biased opinion of all things Alabama before she moved there – she has spent the last four years refusing to acknowledge that everyone else might not only feel as resentful towards Willowgrove as her friends do – they just didn’t know how to put into the words. Throughout the novel many of them start making an effort to reach out, talking about pronouns, trying to deal with their hidden identities, realizing that Willowgrove has a very specific way of wanting you to be.

It probably won’t come as a shock that Shara herself is deeply closeted. What is a bigger one is that is only the first of the secrets that she’s been keeping all her life. Late in the novel we see a draft of Shara’ journal in which she makes it clear that she’s never liked the pedestal her parents have put her on, let alone being the face of her father’s school. Late in the book Shara tells Chloe: “If you think he’s hard on you, you should come to dinner sometime” and it shines a light on her that reveals everything she’s had to live with her entire life.

I won’t reveal how Chloe finds Shara, why Shara disappeared (which isn’t the real reason) and how many battles that go on between her and the hierarchy of Willowgrove. They are the real story of I Kissed Shara Wheeler rather than why Shara kissed Chloe and if you can’t figure out why, well, this is a rom-com after all.

I will however mention one thing. Throughout the novel we get insights into not only Chloe and Shara but the entire student body in sections that are labeled only “From the Burn Pile.” It’s not until the final chapter we understand what that means. When the final chapter takes place they are following a grand Willowgrove tradition but one that the new class has managed to reclaim as their own. In it they are saying goodbye not only to the school that was pretty much a prison to most of them but perhaps an entire way of life and a better future for not only their younger siblings but for generations of False Beach students to come. This may be more of a fantasy then the romances we see unfold, but aren’t dreams what the end of high school – and rom-coms – all about?