Suggestions for A Post-Trump America: The AOC Effect - What It Really Is and What It iSN'T

 

Ever since she burst on to the political scene in 2018 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been arguably the most polarizing figure in politics, perhaps even more with the Democratic Party then the Republicans.

To her followers (and that is a deliberate choice of words considering how much of what she does is for social media more than anything else) she represents the future of America and is a bastion of what every elected official in the country should be. To many in the establishment, she is a figure who could well represent the salvation of the Democratic Party but just as easily bring it to electoral destruction.

For that reason leading Democrats have done everything in their power to handle her carefully. She is a Schrodinger's Cat of Democratic politics and many are very reluctant to let her out of the proverbial box to see what she will do if she becomes the national figure she will very likely do, perhaps as recently as the next election cycle.

The bigger problem with AOC I have is because unlike the millions of neophytes who cheer her online and on college campuses I have a greater awareness of how she managed to come to power and what the ramifications have been in the six years she has been in Congress. Part of this is due to my residence in New York but much of it is due to my knowledge of both recent and more long-term American political history. And as its very likely a Post-Trump America is going to feature her as a major representative of the Democrats in some form, I think we need to take a closer look at her career so far: both the circumstances of her rise, why it represents far less than it actually seems and the prospective problems that are already obvious even at this point.

So much of the left's ideology when it comes to electoral politics is based on their own belief system which can be just as delusional and ridiculous as the far right's. It has become even more absurd in the last decade in particular but the basic theme hasn't changed that much.

In their belief system America has always wanted candidates with pure leftist leanings. This is not based on the success of left-wing politicians in America rather than the idea of their absence. In their mind the reason a significant part of the population does not vote is because there is no true candidate running in either party that represents progressive values. This is in direct contradiction with their argument that Republicanism is essentially fascism (the narrative for that takes a form I will litigate in a later article) but the left is just as good at cherry-picking their arguments as conservatives are. In their mind, the reason that they do something is the reason everyone else does something, even if that's in contradiction with such things as the historical record and election results.

The first direct factor that led to AOC coming into politics was based in what was in part the Big Lie of left-wing politics of the past decade. That lie is that Bernie Sanders would have been able to not only win the Democratic nomination in 2016 had the race not been 'rigged' but defeat Trump in the general.

I've always believed that Sanders's surprising success in the 2016 primaries was far more to due to the lack of concrete opposition to Hilary Clinton in it than Sanders' appeal to the primary voters.  More to the point the success that Sanders had during the Democratic primaries at the time did have a ceiling. Sanders overall did better in caucus states then primaries, did poorly among states where the majority of Democratic voters were part of the traditional bases and only one won of the states that was among the biggest electoral prizes in the general: Michigan.  Even the idea that the DNC was working to undermine Sanders' campaign – something that became gospel after Wikileaks published a series of emails before the convention – can't disguise the fact that Sanders' appeals was essentially limited to the kind of college age, white voters that tend to be more leftwing than so much of the traditional base.

In the aftermath of Trump's first upset electoral victory there was a lot of soul searching through the nation. The progressive wing reached the conclusion they do after every election, regardless of who wins: it was about them. If a Democrats wins, it was because the voters agreed in leftist principles; if a Republican does, it's because the Democrat wasn't sufficient enough to the left. Ignored in this of course were the 11 percent of Sanders voters who would admit to voting for Trump or the roughly 2 percent who voted for Green Party candidate Jill Stein.

The Sanders' campaign was the first failed strategy that led to AOC's rise. The second one started three days after Trump was sworn in. Two leaders of Sanders failed  campaign as well as two relatively left-wing commentators formed the Justice Democrats. It was based on the idea to 'elect a new type of Democratic majority in Congress' that will 'create a thriving economy and democracy that works for the people, not big money interests." The Justice Democrats said that they would only candidates who pledged to refuse donations from corporate PACs and lobbyists.

From the start the Justice Democrats were operating with both hands and both feet tied behind their back with their determination to stay loyal to this principle.  Wanting to not take money from corporate donors is noble but like so many other leftwing principles it only works if your opponents choose to play by the same rules. That was before they announced a platform that was so left wing that it wasn't going to play with a lot of people, including ending the practice of unilaterally waging war except as a last resort to defend American soil, pardoning Edward Snowden and prosecuting CIA torturers, abolishing Ice and reforming police. These are principles that were only going to play with a very limited part of the population and most are far beyond the left of the Democratic party.

So in 2018 when the Justice Democrats had their biggest group of candidates: they were able to endorse 76 new candidates to run in primaries: five gubernatorial candidates, three Senate Candidates, one lieutenant governor and the rest were in the House. The results were a fiasco by any logical standard. Only two gubernatorial candidates and 22 congressional candidates were able to win their primaries at all. The only ones to win their generals who weren't grandfathered in were Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley  and Rashida Tlaib. Ocasio-Cortez's campaign was considered the most notable for two reasons. She had defeated Dan Howley, one of the major figures in Democratic leadership and just as importantly she was one of four female Democrats featured in a 2019 documentary Knock Down The House.

This was done by Rachel Lears, who went out of her way to search for 'charismatic female candidates who weren't career politicians but had become newly galvanized to represent their community." That AOC was the only one to win made her seem even more significant then she was and more cinematic. The fact that the movement that had launched her had been a disaster was left on the cutting room floor.  AOC had in a sense failed upward but the legend was on the silver screen.

Ever since 'The Squad' took office in 2019 there has been a remarkable dissonance between Democratic leadership and the movement that 'swept' her into office. The original founders had all since left the group by that point, in large part because they believed it had failed in its principle goal of cultivating a unified cohort of legislators who could champion its bills. Cenk Uygur would run for the House in 2020 but made it clear he wasn't going to run as a member of the organization he founded. In 2020 Bernie Sanders, whose campaign ideals had been the inspiration for the movement, made it clear he would not accept their endorsement when running for the Presidency again. And the writing was clearly on the wall for how much faith people had in going down the same road with no results: in 2020 only eight new faces were willing to follow their standard, all but one of them in the House.  For that matter four of them had been down this road before with the Justice Democrats and Kara Eastman did no better running as Justice Democrat in 2020 than she had in 2018.  There was some improvement to be sure: three new Representatives were elected, Marie Newman of Illinois, Cori Bush of Missouri and Jamaal Bowman of New York.

But the general results for the Democrats at a Congressional level in 2020 was dismal as they lost thirteen seats in the House. Furthermore it was clear where the weakness for Joe Biden had been: he'd only carried 37 percent of the white working class vote. By that point the self-division within the Justice Democrats was clear in the California 53^rd.  Georgette Gomez lost when she chose to accept an endorsement from Democratic Majority for Israel. Sara Jacobs, another Democrat beat her.  It helped that Jacobs received most of her money from her own grandparents and didn't play by Justice Democrat rules.

At this point it was becoming clear to any impartial observer the limitations of the movement AOC founded. It could only play in the bluest districts in America and not even the bluest states were willing to go along with them. This trend continued when Marie Newman lost her primary in the Illinois sixth and Kina Collins lost her in the Illinois 7^th. Odessa Kelly ran unopposed in Tennessee's 7^th Congressional District and could only get 38 percent in the general. Summer Lee and Greg Casar managed to win.

For the first time since their inception the Justice Democrats only endorsed incumbents in 2024.  And it was here we saw yet again the limits of 'the AOC impact'. Jamaal Bowman had won election to the New York 16^th in 2022. By this point he had become known as too much for other Congressional Democrats to handle and his position on Gaza was only the final straw. He was challenged by pro-Israel candidate George Latimer in what became the most expensive House of Representatives primary is US history. AOC and Bernie Sanders did everything they could to rally for him in that race but he lost to Latimer in a landslide, losing by more than 17 percent.

After six years in the House AOC is the biggest success story of a failed movement, the most well-known representative of a caucus that has in six years only managed to reach double digits in representatives in 2022 and has been contracting since. And yet against all the trends that recent elections have made clear, many major Democrats still believe that both she and the movement are the direction for the party to go in.

That is a remarkable conclusion given that one of the major reason Harris lost is that so many parts of the multi-racial coalition Obama appeared to have built in 2008 went to Republicans in near record numbers this past year. African-Americans, LatinX and women voters made a clear decision to go to the right. The argument that one can win them back by going away from where many of them went would seem to be ludicrous were it not for the fact that it is the natural decision of the left at the end of any election as to why Democrats lost.

The left has spent far more time in the last two decades trying to either explain or dismiss the conservative movement. It is either an aberration of history or the fact the average voter has been brainwashed by the right; it is led by a relatively few group of oligarchs and the people who vote for it are misled; it is a product of white supremacy and toxic masculinity that are either what America truly is or what it really isn't, depending on the time of day you catch them in. None of these arguments ever seriously consider even the possibility that the left's point of view is out of touch with the rest of the country or that there's something about conservatism that appeals to the masses. There is certainly infinite evidence based on the results of elections, both in the recent past and the present, that argues that both are true. But extremists on the far right aren't the only ones who can deny reality.

The Justice Democrats movement demonstrates how ideological purity is the biggest obstacle to the left's being able to manage a takeover of the Democrats the same way the conservative's have effectively taken over the GOP. To run on a platform this far away from where establishment Democrats are is difficult enough; to do so without using the money and methods they will has been proven nearly impossible.  And one sees with other candidates that their unwillingness to relent and even double down on issues that will end up hurting them with the voters has come back to bite them multiple times.  Yet the left honestly prefers losing horribly and staying pure than compromising and getting a chance to put your policies in the action.

And that's before you consider that so much of the Justice Democrats doctrine – an unwillingness to compromise, a preference for activism and making noise rather than governing responsibly – is nothing more than the mirror image of the Freedom Caucus. Indeed the only real difference between Marjorie Taylor Greene and Ocasio-Cortez is that Greene is closer to where most of her party is at the moment then where AOC is right now with the Democrats.

The idea of AOC being a successful national candidate is ridiculous when you consider that none of the members of her caucus are in districts that are even close to purple and that those few that have tried to won in red states have been resoundingly defeated.  Even the idea of her being able to win a Senate seat is hard to believe as a native New Yorker: I suspect she'd do well in the urban areas of Manhattan and Brooklyn but suburban areas like Long Island and the deep red districts of Utica (represented by Elise Stefanik, once third in Republican congressional leadership) is laughable. New York State is not Brooklyn, something that many progressives refuse to acknowledge.

And that's before you consider another problem: since she was elected to Congress, AOC has spent more time on college campuses in other states than she has in her own district. Her most famous return to New York was at the 2021 Met Gala where she famous wore a dress that said: 'Eat the Rich'. How this was supposed to help the voters she represents economically or politically is unclear to the rational observer. I'm reminded of how Nancy Mace wore a Scarlet A on her shirt not long after she voted to remove Kevin McCarthy as Speaker in 2023. (Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and the Squad voted with her to do so. That's not the kind of bipartisanship I think many voters are looking for these days.)

Six years in, there's no sign of any kind of AOC effect. We have yet to see a huge influx of young people running for office under the principles she founded and fewer examples still of any getting elected. We have seen the Democratic representation in the House drop from 235 to 214 in the six years since she was elected as well as the reelection of Trump last year.  If she and the Justice Democrats speak for the people, as they often claim, then she's clearly not listening to them or at the least, ignoring the messages that they are sending to the party in the last three elections.

Those who believe she can become the voice of the Democrats are basically still making the same argument they always have: that there are masses waiting for a true voice of progressive standard bearer. Those who doubt it can argue the record, which includes the 'movement' that launched her and the fact that nationally the electorate has been going to the right ever since.  There's an argument that when Republicans make arguments they do so because they think is the right thing to do and when Democrats do its because they feel it is. I don't always hold with it but in the case of AOC and her national ambitions I think the record shows how little chance her movement has of national acceptance and I feel if Democrats dismiss it they will lead the party to true disaster.

 I know that I will be told in the strongest possible terms with the worst possible names that I'm wrong. But I'm not a progressive, I'm a Democrat. I want to win elections more than I want to win a purity contest. Last I checked, only the former counts to getting things done.

 

 

The Bachman Books Part 2: The Running Man (1982)

 

There's no shortage of horrible film adaptations of Stephen King, particularly during the 1980s and 1990s but by far the one that barely deserves the term 'adaptation' is the Arnold Schwarzenegger-Richard Dawson film of The Running Man in 1987.  Regardless of its overall quality (and even by the low metric of 1980s action films its pretty close to the bottom there)  it bares no similarity in plot, has only the names of two of the characters (and one is completely taken out of context of where it's used in the novel) and even completely messes up the point of the game show that is the center of the original novel.  I suppose the only reason King doesn't consider it the worst version of any of his works is that technically it isn't one of his works.

The irony is that there was a perfectly filmable and brilliant story in the original plot of The Running Man which it's looking from the trailers that Edgar Wright has basically gotten exactly right in the lead-up to the November release. He's certainly done a better job by casting his leading man as Ben Richards: Glen Powell definitely has far more of the everyman quality that Ben Richards is in the book and while he may have leading man looks he's definitely not the muscle-bound fighter Ahnold is.

According to King he wrote the original novel in a period of roughly seventy two hours and it was published with virtually zero changes. If that's the case it's even more remarkable that such a brilliant, finished novel seemed to spring ex nihilo out of the head of King this quickly and efficiently. The Running Man very well could take place in the same world as The Long Walk (even though it is set in what was the far-off and distant year of 2025) but whereas few details of America or the world were clear in that book, Bachman manages to give us a very vivid snapshot of this future time. It may also be the most prescient novel either King or Bachman ever wrote.

It's not just that the title game is very much the kind of thing that reality TV does in a big way: it's that the entire world is fixating on the kind of game shows of which The Running Man is just the biggest. There is only one channel in the entire world: Free-Vee and it is always on somewhere. And so many of the games seem like the kind we would eventually get in this century.

In the opening page of the novel Treadmill for Bucks is playing:

They accepted only chronic heart, liver or lung patients, sometimes throwing in a crip for comic relief. Every minute the contestant could stay on the treadmill (keeping up with a steady flow of chatter with the emcee) he won ten dollars. Every two minutes the emcee asked a Bonus question in the contestant's category…which was worth fifty dollars. If the contestant, dizzy, out of breath, heart doing fantastic rubber acrobatics in his chest, missed the question, fifty dollars was deducted from his winnings and the treadmill was speeded up.

By the time the first chapter is over the contestant has both missed a question and had a heart attack and the audience applauded. Remember the early 2000s when we had such game shows as The Chair, The Chamber and Fear Factor?

The Running Man which Richards qualifies for is the biggest game show. A contestant must avoid the captivity of the Hunters for thirty days. Every hour he eludes them he earns one hundred dollars; if he makes it the whole thirty, he wins one billion dollars. The all-time record, as we learn late in the book, is eight days and seven hours.

No one is rooting for the title  contestant. Indeed they are given rewards for tipping off the Hunters with a bigger one if it results in the contestant being killed. The contestant is set up to be a villain; his family monstrous; evil incarnate. The film has the studio audience rooting for Schwarzenegger to be killed and they are appalled when he manages to kill someone. It seems that the audience for the show is sheep though the further along Richards gets there is a possibility that he may be reaching the people despite the efforts of the state.

Unlike The Long Walk which barely gave us a sense of what America was like Bachman gives us a very clear picture of what 2025 America is like and it’s a little unsettling how prescient he was in many ways. The Richards family lives in a slum that is so run down the cops don't even go near it. The air is filled with pollution and toxic: the wealth wear nose filters to keep from breathing it and the poor get sick, though it is unknown. Poverty and graffiti decorate the city, and most of the public is on drugs. Crime and decay populate every section of it. As Richards walks to the Games Building:

"No smell but the decaying reek of this brave year 2025. The Free-Vee cables are safely buried underground and no one but an idiot or revolutionary would want to vandalize them. Free-Vee is the stuff of dreams, the bread of life. Scag is 12 old bucks a bag, Frisco Push goes for twenty, but the Free-Vee will freak you for nothing. Farther along, on the other side of the Canal, the dream machine runs 24 hours a day…but it runs on New Dollars and only employed people have any. There are four million others, almost all of them unemployed, south of the Canal in Co-Op city.

The Games Building is the only way for a desperate man to make living. And Ben is desperate. He is twenty-eight years old, with a wife and a two year old who needs a doctor and he has no money to pay her. He got married at sixteen and while he is smart there is no real hope for education or advancement in this world.

In this world books are regarded with suspicion at best; there are dozens of doctors in the Games Building but none in the slums. The world is a horrible place; we hear news reports of cannibal riots in India. No one knows the past (Richards confuses the Beatles and The Rolling Stones). Everyone spies on their neighbors for the police.

Richards is clearly angry against the world and he loathes the Games themselves. He hates himself that he has to stoop to this and he shows the level of visceral contempt every step of the way. Its clear the further along he gets that he is both intelligent and angry. When he gets to the psych part and he is forced to tell the truth, he actually explains why he's doing this:

"I haven't had work in a long time. I want to work again, even if its only being the sucker-man in a loaded game. I want to work and support my family. I have pride. Do you have pride, Doctor?"

"It goes before a fall," the doctor said.

The further along in the process Richards gets angrier and more determined that somebody has to pay. By the time he gets to the final stage he's told what he gets who has a clear idea of what's coming:

"I think we're getting the big money assignments. The ones where they do more than just land you in the hospital with a stroke or put out an eye or cut off an arm or two. The ones where they kill you. Prime time, baby."

The police load them into an elevator with a cop. His colleague says: "We're dangerous characters. Public enemies." He has no idea how accurately he's referring to Richards.

It is only with his meeting with Killian (who is the head of the network, not the host of The Running Man) that we get a hint as to why Richards might have been chosen. He has a failure to respect authority dating back to high school. He has refused to sign oaths of fealty to the state. He has been fired six times for insubordination, insulting superiors and abusive criticism of authority. He's intelligent enough to stay out of prison and serious trouble with the government. The main reason he has been chosen for this job is because he is an 'embryo troublemaker'. The game is in league with the government as this is the best way possible to eliminate the kind of people Killian considers an anachronism.

And it is clear this show is weighted to get the public to root against these people, something Killian is proud of: "People won't be in the bars or the hotels or gathering in the cold in front of appliance stores rooting for you to get away. They want to see you wiped out, and they'll help if they can. The more messy, the better."

I suspect the original film combined the characters of Killian with the actual host Bobby Thompson, who in his description in Bachman's book actually sounds like he had Richard Dawson in mind. Thompson is only seen in a few random scenes during the book but every time we do we get a sense of the kind of genius he must be. Perhaps the most brilliant sign of it comes after Richards has eluded the hunters the first time by killing five people, netting him $500:

"Five hundred dollars," Thompson was saying, and infinite hate and contempt filled his voice. "Five hundred dollars. Five police, five wives, 19 children. It comes to just about seventeen dollars and twenty five cents for each of the dead, the bereaved, the heartbroken. Oh yes, you work cheap. Ben Richards. Even Judas got thirty pieces of silver, but you don't even demand that."

By the end of it, the crowd is chanting "Strike him dead!" and Thompson has become religious in his oratory:

"Behold the man! He has been paid his blood money – but the man who lives by violence shall die by it. And let every man's hand be raised against Ben Richards.

Hate and fear in every voice, rising in a steady, throbbing roar. No, they wouldn't turn him in. They would rip him to shreds on sight."

I would have loved to hear Richard Dawson make that speech. I hope Wright's film has some version of it.

The reason that I believe Wright is getting his film right is that, based on the trailers, his Ben Richards is actually running.  That's the real problem with the Schwarzenegger version: the contestants are put into a life-sized pneumatic tube and shot into a giant but essentially enclosed arena where they must due battle with mechanized gladiators. In this version of the film the final boss is called Captain Freedom and he's played by Jesse Ventura.

In the book, by contrast, Ben gets what's amounted to a forty-eight hour head start and then is being chased down by every cop in the world as well as the Hunters. The head of the Hunters is Evan McCone, who is described in the book as a 'direct descendant of J. Edgar Hoover and Henrich Himmler. The personification of the steel inside the Network's cathode glove."

Eventually we meet him and it's almost anticlimactic to Richards:

"He was a small man wearing rimless glasses, with a faint suggestion of a belly beneath his well-tailored suit. It was rumored that McCone wore elevator shoes, but it so, they were unobtrusive, There was a small silver flag pin on his lapel. All in all, he did not look like a monster at all…Not like a man who had mastered the technique of the black car in the night, the rubber club, the sly question about relatives back home. Not like a man who had mastered the entire spectrum of fear."

I won't give away the circumstances in which the two men meet face to face (you may very well see on the big screen soon) but it becomes clear within minutes of their meeting that McCone is a master of psychological warfare and almost manages to hypnotize Richards into giving up his secrets within seconds.  I doubt this is the case but I could see him being played by Christophe Waltz because in his dialogue and delivery he reminds me very much of Hans Landa and Ernest Blofeld.

I should mention that there is a rebellion of sorts going on in Bachman's novel but it's not being done with guns and an assault but an effort to bring out information. It comes from the slums and the underprivileged, the ones who want to get the truth out but who FreeVee is actively silence. Richards' rebellion is not one of guns and violence but of trying however he can to reveal the truth.

This brings me to the most important point of The Running Man. It is delivered in the form of a countdown. The novel unfolds in 100 chapters, all begin 'Minus 100 and Counting' and yes we do reach zero at the end. Bachman/King makes it clear the novel is counting down to some grand climax and he doesn't back away from it.

That said, I must tell you upfront that there is no way the version in the book could appear in a film today. In a way that King could have never foreseen he foresaw the future with his final page of this book and there's no filmmaker in the world who would dare try to have it play out. (Wright knew this going in and when he chose to rewrite the ending King gave him his blessing, understanding why it had to be done more than anyone.) That said, in a perverse way it is the most optimistic ending of any of the Bachman novels as the protagonist does sacrifice himself but for once his actions may have irrevocably changed the system in a way none of the other endings of a Bachman book do.

I will admit that considering that essentially the final third of the novel is set on a passenger jet much of it may itself have to be rewritten.  That said there's a part of me that hopes it will play out in a certain extent because in order to get there Bachman essentially gives a monologue to Richards in which he makes it clear that he knows the situation he's in and how he plans to beat it. In it Richard uses poker as a metaphor to explain his situation and that he knows the deck is stacked against him. He says they are playing stud poker and that the biggest hand possible is a royal flush with spades.  I won't describe how he qualifies who his four up cards are (save that he is the King) and that while his hole card isn't the ace, he intends to run a bluff. When he's told this won't work his answer is:

"I think that they've been playing a crooked game so long that they'll fold. I think they are yellow straight through the belly."

It's not that much of a reach to argue that Richards is talking about the top one percent of which Free-Vee is the most visible manifestation of that.  And when you consider that this book came out in 1982, right about the time trickle down economics was becoming gospel for Reagan and Republicans, King might very well have had that on his  mind.

In 'Why I Was Bachman' King says The Running Man might be the best of the Bachman novels  "because it's nothing but story – it moves with the goofy speed of a silent movie, and anything which is not story is cheerfully thrown over the side." There is manifest truth to that but there's also a lot of subtext that is just as pertinent in the real 2025 as the fictional one that is the era of Bachman's original novel.  Wright might have to change a few dates and plot points to make it more relatable to today's audience but honestly it's as timeless  a story that you could put it anywhere. I just hope we don't inspire an actual game show with the same gimmick.

(And no The Amazing Race doesn't count. Not until they start killing the losing contestants each week.)

 

 

 

 

How The Democrats Lost Dixie, Part 6:The Democrats Find A New Direction in the 1980s And The Left By And Large Goes The Opposite Way

 

If one reads enough material from the typical progressive article, whether from Daily Kos or another website, one knows all too well exactly what the Republicans were doing throughout the 1980s when Reagan came to power. I'm going to spend this article talking about two things they generally omit from their descriptions of that decade: what the Democratic Party was doing and what those who come to call themselves progressive were doing.

Considering that Reagan is the biggest villain the left can come up with up to this day, there's something ironic that their behavior during this critical decade so much resembles his most famous statement in his inaugural: "Government is not the solution to the problem; government is the problem." Because when one looks at the history of the various members of what was once called the coalition of liberals you see them basically all as one doing everything but in that to work against everything Reagan was supposedly tearing down.

Because we know what the left wasn't doing: they were not forming think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, they weren't creating groups like the Federalist Society and when the Fairness Doctrine was repealed they didn't come up with an equivalent to Rush Limbaugh or start doing the work for a progressive equivalent of Fox News. All of those methods that they will attack the conservatives for doing, those who called themselves left-wing were not. And they certainly weren't running for elected office to come up with their own Newt Gingrich to work inside Congress destroying the order of civility for Democrats the same way he was.

What they were doing, as far as I can tell, was playing to their base. That meant lots of books from Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn and other academics, filmmakers both fictional (Oliver Stone) and documentarian (Michael Moore) arguing America had lost its way, an increasing number of demonstrations and activist movements from members of the African-American, female and what was then know as the gay community all expressing outrage at America for leaving them behind. And as voter turnout records from that decade clearly demonstrate,  an increasingly refusal to turn out to vote even though they would later acknowledge low turnout only helped Republican lawmakers.

And what they chose to increasingly do as their approach to bringing about change (if one stretches that definition as far as it could go) was increasingly take the position that all institutions were fundamentally broken and that anyone who tried to bring about reform was wasting its time. They would even turn on some their former heroes for the crime of selling out. Whether it was Tom Hayden, one of the Chicago 7 attempting to run for office in California or Gary Hart, one of McGovern's top campaign officials campaigning for the Presidency as an 'Atari liberal' (more on that below) by and large the members of the left increasingly didn't think one could change the system from within. But they weren't willing to do much more than make a spectacle for the cameras and then go home. To paraphrase Malcom X's famous statement, they had rejected the ballot and were too lazy to use the bullet – and had little regard for those who did either.

So by and large the more left wing members of the liberal coalition were almost completely absent from politics one way or the other during the 1980s. The one exception was Jesse Jackson's two attempts to obtain the Democratic nomination for the Presidency in 1984 and 1988.

Jackson's campaign was historic for being the first African-American man to run for the Presidency and achieve some electoral success. This does not change the fact that Jackson had no real qualifications to be President; he'd never held elected office before, was famous for fiery and frequently offense rhetoric while advocating for civil rights and had done much to isolate other members of the Democratic coalition even before he ran for office. What he had was an ability to turn a phrase and eloquence from speechmaking. That was it.

And in truth it was only because the field was so relatively sparse in 1988 (it was referred to somewhat derogatorily by the media as 'the 7 dwarves' that Jackson had something resembling a creditable showing. His best day was Super Tuesday when he managed to win five primaries: Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and Virginia, all South states where he primarily managed to win based on the African-American turnout. He and Al Gore, then the Senator from Tennessee (we'll deal with him later) essentially divided the South while Michael Dukakis took the north. Jackson managed to do well in the caucus states (including Michigan) but the only other primary he won was South Carolina. After moving within one delegate of Dukakis after the Michigan caucus, the rest of the voters lined up behind the Massachusetts governor. One could argue Jackson didn't get the nomination because race was a factor, but one could also point out if he wasn't African-American he wouldn't have gotten as many votes as he did in the first place.

Aside from this by and large almost every coalition of the left began to have their belief calcify in a kind of dogma that holds true to this day. Much of it was based on beliefs that had existed for decades and some of it had mirror images among conservative doctrine that was forming at the same time. But the most bizarre and dangerous thinking was a kind of odd election denialism.

Basically the left chose to argue that in the period between 1968 and 1988 when the Republican Presidential candidates won five out of six elections, four of them with Republican candidates getting more than 400 electoral votes and two where the Republican candidate carried 49 of 50 states, were proof that democracy was a failed experiment.  Their role in the conservative movement starting with the anti-war protests in the Vietnam War, was erased from the narrative of the 1960s. Instead they chose to argue that what these elections 'proved' was what they had always believed: America was a racist country in the hands of corporate interests and the military and that voting or running for an office to try and change the system was a waste of time. Conversely they chose to read the voter apathy in the 1970s and 1980s as a sign that people wanted the policies of liberalism but no one was truly offering it. That much of this was no doubt a product of the conditions of the Vietnam War and Watergate was ignored; that millions of people were embracing conservatism – which they equated to fascism – was explained by the general ignorance of the masses which the left tends to believe.

And the Democrats could not be trusted because they accepted the results of elections and chose to work with Republican Presidents. That this was how Congress had basically worked throughout the 20^th century and was always supposed to work was something the left chose to ignore. That the results of both the popular and electoral results had given these Republicans a mandate for their agenda was also ignored. This basic concept would not begin to breakdown until Newt Gingrich took over the House in the 1994 midterms but the Democrats basically chose to follow those standards until relatively recently.

This denies the very real fact of those electoral realities. While Watergate had done much to give lie to the idea of America's shift to the right, Reagan's landslide victor in 1980 was one the Democratic Party could not ignore if they hope to be a viable alternative.  They continued to learn this the hard way in the next two Presidential elections, first when the nominated Walter Mondale in 1984 and then when they nominated Michael Dukakis in 1988. Both of these men were liberals in what was very much the definition of the term from the New Deal onward (Dukakis somewhat less so) and both were effectively crushed in electoral landslides. Mondale would carry only his home state of Minnesota and receive just 40 percent of the popular vote; Dukakis did somewhat better against George H.W. Bush but he still lost with only 111 electoral votes to Bush's 426. The Democrats had sent candidates with strong liberal candidates and both times America had overwhelmingly chosen Republicans. The fact that the voter turnout in both these elections was little more than 50 percent of registered voters did nothing to change the fact that the electorate seemed to want the vision of Republicans over liberal Democrats.

And it's worth noting for those who argue about the horrors of Reagan as a Republican and what he chose to do the liberal order during this period, there was very little Congressional Democrats could have done to stop him. While they still controlled the House of Representatives by a healthy majority throughout his entire term, the Republicans would control the Senate during all of Reagan's first term and not lose control until the 1986 midterms. The idea of being obstructionists was not in the Democratic mindset any more then than it really is today and while Republican senators and congressmen were starting to become more combative, the idea of civility was still prevalent.

So during this period the Democratic Party began to slowly and reluctantly absent what was necessary for their survival, particularly in the Senate. They had to go where the voters were and if that meant going to the right, so be it. The left never accepted this betrayal, labeled those Democrats like Bob Kerrey and Paul Tsongas who did so 'neoliberals' because they were trying to win elections.

This success did not come overnight. While the Democrats managed to gain 26 seats in the House during the 1982 midterms (in large part because of the recession) the Senate didn't reflect those changes with the Democrats only gaining a single seat. In part this was because Harry Byrd retired and Republican Paul Trible narrowly won election in Virginia.

In 1984 despite Reagan's landslide the Democrats actually managed to gain two seats in the Senate. One of their major gains occurred in Tennessee. Howard Baker retired that year and his seat would be filled by Al Gore Jr, the son of a former Tennessee Senator. Most of the South held in both these elections except in Kentucky when two term incumbent Walter Huddleston narrowly lost to a relatively unknown Mitch McConnell.

1986 was a disaster for the Republicans in the Senate as the Democrats gained eight seats. Almost all of the gains were in the South, including a special election in North Carolina. Jim Broyhill had been an interim appointee that hear but he narrowly lost reelection to the former governor and one of the original members of the New South, Terry Sanford. Richard Shelby narrowly won election in Alabama, Paula Hawkins of Florida was defeated by Bob Graham in a landslide. Mick Mattingly who'd been elected in Reagan's original landslide, narrowly lost to Wyche Fowler in Georgia. After Russell Long stepped down after six terms serving Louisiana, John Breaux was elected to fill his seat that year. And Barbara Mikulski became the first woman to represent Maryland in the Senate that year. Only in Missouri after Thomas Eagleton retired this Republicans make a gain as every other Southern Democrat won reelection.

There were signs of change in the 1988 election even as the Democrats gained another Senate seat. Trent Lott would come to power in Mississippi and when Lawton Chiles retired Connie Mack III would take his seat for the Republicans in Florida. But by and large the South held with Democrat Chuck Robb defeating Paul Trible and taking back the seat in Virginia Republicans had gained.

Even though George H.W. Bush had been elected with the opposite of a mandate (the Democrats had gained seats in both houses of Congress that year) and though he was considered a moderate going against the direction of his party by and large the Democrats chose to work with during that term to a point that actually displeased many of the more extreme members of it. By and large the 1990 elections represented relative stability with the smallest seat change since direct election of Senators became enshrined as in the Constitution with the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment.

Some believed a chance for a pickup was lost in North Carolina when Jesse Helms won reelection to his fourth term and Harvey Gantt, the African-American Mayor of Charlotte. Factors would retroactively be raised such as his famous 'Hands' ad as well as Michael Jordan's refusal to endorse Gantt, saying "Republicans by sneakers too." But in fact Helms won reelection by a slightly wider margin then he had in 1984 when he had run against the Democrat governor Jim Hunt where over $26 million was spent and Helms only managed to win due to the appearance of Ronald Reagan campaigning for him in the leadup to election day.

Helms was a despicable figure to be sure but by nominating an African-American to try and unseat him in 1990 the Democratic Party lost votes compared to when a white politician six years earlier. But it is because of the belief of how Helms chose to win that leads many to dismiss the electoral relevance of his defeat.

To be fair most of America was distracted by what was happening in international news and there was a lot going on during this period. The Berlin Wall had come down in 1989 and the Soviet Union itself would collapsed by the winter of 1991. During this same period Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and the first Gulf War took place. When it ended in a speedy conclusion, Bush's approval ratings were at the highest recording in presidential approval history well into the high eighties. In the leadup to the 1992 elections prominent Democrats were going out of their way to announce they were not going to run for President as Bush's reelection in the spring of 1991 seemed all but assured. And the few who did were not being taken seriously by anyone.

It was not until April of 1991 that things began to change and would start a path for how the Democratic Party was going to find its way out of the wilderness after 12 years.  In the next article I will deal with the circumstances that led to the unlikely rise of Bill Clinton from long-shot candidate to the unlikely Democratic nominee.

The Stephen King Universe in A Nutshell and Why I'm Looking forward to Welcome To Derry

 

Sometime in college I was in a Barnes & Noble and I came across a volume called The Stephen King Universe. I was already a huge fan of King so I bought the book which was roughly 450 pages in length.

The book confirmed what even the most casual fans of King are aware of: King's novels, short stories and other works all have Easter eggs (the term that hadn't become part of the cultural zeitgeist in the early 2000s) that link to earlier King books. The writer divided King's novels into seven universes most of which escape me but which I suspect the average King reader will remember.

The most famous of these universes is of course The Dark Tower series. The series wasn't completed ye (the first edition of this book wasn't published until 2001) but even then it was clear that this was the work around which all King fiction centered. It had already been linked to The Stand, Eyes of The Dragon, Insomnia and one of the stories in Hearts of Atlantis; after the book was published it would be linked to The Talisman and Salem's Lot.  There was also a category  to Castle Rock which was the setting of four novels, two novellas and several short stories.  Another sub-category were novels centered around 'The Shop', a mysterious government organization that is at the center of Firestarter and had already been linked to The Tommyknockers and the short-lived TV series The Golden Years. You get the general idea.

There was a new edition published late in the 2000s and it would not shock me if there's even a series of Wikipedia pages at this point telling us how everything links together.  But it does tell you yet another way why King was ahead of the curve. There had been countless other authors well before King who built their own stories that had common characters and small towns even going back into the late 19^th century when writers such as Arthur Conan Doyle started it. But there's an argument that  so many other authors in the half century since King and indeed much of pop culture in the 21^st century has been built on the skeleton of what King began to provide in the world of horror.  It might be a stretch to say that the MCU and all of ways that Star Wars and Star Trek built interconnecting worlds couldn't have existed without King, but not a big one.

And its worth noting King was basically doing this from the start of his work. Right after Salem's Lot was published his first collection of short stories Night Shift contained both a prequel of sorts and a direct sequel: Jerusalem's Lot and One for the Road. The Shining was originally attended to be structured as a five part novel to mirror the play Jack Torrance was writing and King originally wrote a prologue titled Before the Play. (It didn't see publication to a larger readership until it was published in TV Guide in the spring of 1997.)  And while it's not a direct link to The Stand King did write a prequel of sorts in Night Shift that deals with an America devastated by Captain Trips, the superflu that wipes out humanity in The Stand.

That said it makes a certain amount of sense that there have been more movies and TV shows written about King then perhaps any other living author by this point during the 20^th century and much of this one they've basically been self-contained. You can't really blame the filmmakers or TV show writers for doing so both in the 20^th century and for basically the first decade of this one: unless a horror film is a direct sequel (and King didn't officially do one of those until Black House in 2002) even the best moviemakers didn't want to isolate their audiences.

 Unfortunately this would often rob so many of the films of their soul. The most obvious example was Hearts of Atlantis. This story is actually based on the novella Low Men in Yellow Coats and it tells the story of Bobby Garfield and how he meets Ted in 1960. The story is linked to the Dark Tower series something that becomes clear to the reader by the time we reach the end of the book. (The link is made direct in the final book in the series.) Unfortunately the writers tried to tell this story and left out the importance of the Dark Tower to it. And without those elements the story is kind of aimless and the film, while it had superb acting by Anton Yelchin and Anthony Hopkins, didn't work at all.

Fortunately for filmmakers and TV writers alike almost all the other King stories can work without these Easter eggs. You don't need to know that Cujo and The Dead Zone take place in Castle Rock to appreciate either film for what it works. There's an implication in Cujo that the dog has been possessed by the evil of Frank Dodd, the serial killer that Johnny Smith helps Sheriff George Bannerman bring to justice in The Dead Zone, but the book works perfectly well without it and the film does too.  And while 'The Body' technically takes place in Castle Rock there are no real characters or settings that are so vital to it that you couldn't transfer all of it to Oregon as Rob Reiner did so effectively in Stand By Me and you couldn't make a masterpiece.

The problem with the less successful King films I've seen in my lifetime (and there have been some stinkers out there) is just how long many of his books are.  To try and transfer a book that is at least six hundred or seven hundred pages effectively into a two hour film (as was horribly done in Dreamcatcher) is asking to much of the best filmmaker. Perhaps that is why the best film adaptations of King over the years have been of either his relatively shorter works (Carrie, Cujo, The Dead Zone) novellas and short stories (Shawshank Redemption, Stand By Me, The Mist) or operate in a single setting (The Green Mile, Misery). It also explains my belief that so many of King's longer works were best done when adapted for TV in the 1990 to the mid-2000s, most notably ABC's version of The Stand, The Tommyknockers and King's version of The Shining. (I've made my opinion on Kubrick's version clear, so I won't repeat myself.)

As we've entered the world of Peak Limited Series in the past ten years it hasn't come as a shock to me that so many of King's latest and even earlier novels have now been adapted in that form. These included the adaptations of Mr. Mercedes, Hulu's 11/22/63,  The Outsider and MGM+ 's The Institute.  Telling stories in these formats is the best way possible to get to the deeper parts of the universes King has built. And it's for that reason I am so looking forward to Welcome to Derry.

The Muschietti brothers absolutely nailed the best way to adapt the magnum opus that is Stephen King's IT. You make two separate films: one telling the story of the Losers as children, the other doing so from adulthood. I had no problem with the time jump of starting the novel in 2017 and the childhood in 1989; by this point King adaptations have been moved to contemporary settings multiple times and  while I did have issues with some of them, the themes in many of King's books are universal enough for it to work. (I'm looking forward to Mike Flanagan's limited series of Carrie for that very reason.) There were quite a few changes that really did have to be made to make it palatable (and no I'm not just talking about the excision of 'Love and Desire').

So much of IT took place in the sewers of Derry and there's no way that could translate well to today's audience. (It actually kind of bothered me when I was reading it as a child.)  There's also the fact that quite a bit of both final confrontations are unfilmable. In 'The Ritual of Chud' the Losers end up going into the sewers to fight It and they go so deep underground that they seem to be journeying to the center of the earth and it gets bigger the deeper they get. Perhaps this could have been done with CGI but not convincingly. And I have to say considering that so much of the confrontation in both versions is both mental and seems symbolic (honestly in the 1958 section I had no idea what Bill and the Losers had done to make it sure they'd killed IT) that there's no way this could translate to the screen at all. (The 1990 miniseries managed to do a more visual version that was still flawed.)

All and all I came away from both films with a satisfaction that the general story had been told. That said, I did come away somewhat disappointed though I wasn't surprised the brothers hadn't tried it.

In King's original novel, somewhere between 200 and 220 pages take the form of a diary told by Mike Hanlon as an adult. In these passage, which he acknowledges may be notes for a history he doesn't expect to live to write, Mike tells the story of the sordid history of Derry with all of the ugliness laid bare  - and all of the monstrosities that Pennywise has been responsible for. This is not a story Derry wants told and there's an indication that the story itself has dangers. We learn that one historian who gave even a hint of what was happening would later commit suicide.

In it Hanlon tells us some of the stories that make up Derry's bloody and violent past, some of which goes back even to the town's original founding. It's not just that children disappear at a horrible rate during Mike's childhood, they happen every year. And he notices the cycle that is critical to IT; every 27 to 28 years there is a huge spike in disappearances and the murders of children. And every year, a sacrifice and bloody event opens the cycle and another one ends up closing it.

If you've seen the movie you know that in 1990 the cycle begins with the disappearance of Georgie Denborough. (There's no pretension as to his survival in King's novel; Georgie's arm is ripped off by Pennywise in the sewer in the first chapter.) By the time the books ends Bill is aware of what the pattern is supposed to be: the Losers are supposed to be killed by Henry Bowers and his gang and that will bring a stop to the violence. They thwart the cycle by stopping IT.

In the 'Interlude' segments of IT Hanlon mentions more than  a few of these rituals and sacrifices, some of which he has learned about from those in Derry who are still alive and who are willing to talk with him. (There are not that many of the latter.) The ones we hear about in great detail are ones that happen in the cycle between 1929-1931 and 1904-1906.

The former begins with the massacre of the so-called Bradley Gang. In it the good people of Derry arm themselves with every gun possible and kill the gang in broad daylight in the street, including two relatively innocent women. ("Couple of whores', a survivor says casually.) The cycle comes to an end with a fire at The Black Spot, an night club for African-American soldiers in Derry that is burned down by the white populace. Will Hanlon is one of the few to survive – though he had help that wasn't entire natural. (Readers of the book will know who and you may be seeing this man again very soon.)

In 1904 a group of lumberjacks who are responsible for massacring a bunch of men trying to unionize are massacred by the sole survivors in a local bar called the Silver Dollar – while it is full of customers who don't seem to notice people being chopped up not ten feet away from them. In 1906 this cycle comes to an end with an explosion at the Kitchener Ironworks while the Easter egg hunt is going on. Children's bodies are found in a mix of blood and chocolate. No one can explain how even though everything was turned off, the boiler still exploded.

All of these stories when they are told by Hanlon are riveting on their own but it is logical that a film would not touch on them. I didn't think even a TV series would do so. And that's why I'm so looking forward to Welcome to Derry, which debuted last night on HBO.

I won't be reviewing the series here (stay tuned for the official review in the weeks to come) but the very idea of it thrills the King fan in me to its core because in decades of watching adaptations of King's work I don't know of anything like this that's been attempted before.

I have no doubt this wouldn't even be tried were it not for the massive successive of Game Of Thrones and HBO's attempts to replicate it with multiple prequels. (Yes I saw the trailer  for Seven Kingdoms in the moments before the series premiere.) To be sure trying to make TV series that involve IP has been the kind of thing that HBO has been doing (and doing well) over the last year. The Penguin was by far one of the best series of 2024 and while I didn't see Dune: Prophecy there were enough good things told about it.

But even by those standards Welcome To Derry is trying to be radically different. For one thing, this is going to be a horror story above all else. More to the point, it's going to be one that we know in advance is going to end badly and with nothing changing.  Whatever happens to the young people in Derry in 1962, they are going to fail and fail badly.  They have to, otherwise the action in the film is impossible.

You might think this would doom the project. On the contrary I think its freeing. As I've written in some of my television reviews prequels have the potential for a kind of greatness because they have a fixed endpoint that most series just don't.  And as a result they can create characters who aren't part of the conventional narrative and whose fate we can become invested in even if it ends badly. This worked brilliantly in Better Call Saul but I've seen it work just as effectively in Bates Motel and Smallville and its one of the reason I took the cancellation of Dexter: Original Sin so hard.

There's also the benefit that because of the sprawling nature of King's universe, both in this book and beyond, characters that are relatively minor in some stories can become more significant in other ones. In a sense this actually works better in IT because of the nature of Derry. Because so many of the cycles involve families who've lived in the town their whole lives you constantly see references to people knowing they've lived through this before and keep seeing it.

There's actually an example of this in King's book. George Denborough's body in found in 1958 by Bill's next door neighbor, Harold Gardener. In the next chapter, 27 years later, Adrian Mellon who is killed by gay-bashers is first found by Dave Gardener, a police officer and Harold's son. There are other examples of this in the book, some in the action, some in the Interludes. I can see this played out well in a prequel series.

Then there's the most daring and original part of the plan for Welcome to Derry. The writers are moving backwards. Season 1 is taking place in 1962, Season 2 (if it happens) will take place in 1935 and Season 3 (the planned end date) will take place in 1908. Each season is scheduled to end with a horrific event that is canon in King's books though none have ever been filmed.

This experimentation in format is unlike anything I've seen on television in my years of viewing and is likely unparalleled in the history of the visual medium. And it's particularly fitting for HBO which has done this thing multiple times in so many of the dramas that made it great. David Simon famously said the main character of The Wire was Baltimore and the camp was as much a character of Deadwood as Al Swearengen or Seth Bullock.  And considering that King originally considering titling IT Derry it's particularly fitting for a TV series to try and do so, particularly because at one point Bill actually says: "Derry is IT."

And as we saw in the films there's a larger truth to that. All of the horrible things that happened to the Losers both in the past and the present were basically done with the larger citizenry letting it happen. Welcome to Derry offers a chance to do something I'm not sure any series has done before, even in the age of Peak TV: show how monsters are passed down from generation to generation. Considering how much of today's dialogue about America is about the evils of the past playing out in the present, it will be fascinating to see this play out with a visual manifestation of that evil.

And it's not like the underlying themes of IT aren't relevant today even if you put nothing political in it at all. Racism was, if anything, a bigger factor in King's novel then it was in the films and to be clear parental abuse and bullying were even more foul-mouthed and blatant then in either of the films. Indeed early in the book Henry Bowers father carves a swastika on Mike Hanlon's door and while one sheriff forced him to back down, local law enforcement lets his behavior pass.

  If anything the filmmakers toned down the menace then Henry Bowers and many of his friends represented in the movies. In the film Henry only starts to carve his initials on Ben Hanscom's belly and is egged on by his friends. In the book, not only does he get the H on there but his friends are horrified by how far he's gone and they actually seem relieved when Ben escapes. And in the novel Henry engages in horribly racist and behavior that shows how insane he is becoming with each passing year. We see another example with Patrick Hocksetter, briefly seen in the film but a quick casualty. In truth, he's a psychopath who has already murdered his baby brother and is keeping animals in a refrigerator to watch them die before he is finally killed.

Child abuse is far more blatant in King's novel. One of the characters is suspected of being murdered by his father who regularly beats him and who has beaten his younger brother to death before IT gets him.  He is called one of the missing because he disappears without a trace and his murder is blamed on his father.

You could argue that King could have been using the evils of Pennywise to talk about the real life horrors in America in the 20^th century. It's a stretch to go from saying that racial attacks and gay-bashing can be influenced by an evil monster that manifests as a clown but considering the world we live in today, again it's not much of one.

Again all of this is speculation and I don't know the kind of reaction Welcome to Derry will cause. (I have reason for optimism after the season premiere but I'll get to that later.) I hope it does mainly because I am such a fan of King's work and because I do believe that these kinds of series are the best way to tell the stories he's been churning out for half a century.  Just as in the town of Derry itself, there's always something deeper lurking just below the surface.

 

 

How The Democrats Lost Dixie, Part 5:What Carter And The Democrats Got Wrong About Reagan Reflects Their Biggest Weakness to This Day

 

It is during the recollection of Carter's fall campaign against Ronald Reagan in The Outlier where we see by far the greatest amount of rewriting of history by Kai Bird.  Because Reagan has always been the greatest representation of everything the Democrats and the left get wrong about electoral politics as well as being their biggest supervillain Bird does everything possible to argue that Carter  and his campaign always took Reagan seriously

That's not what is reported in Camelot's End Jon Ward's more objective retelling of Carter and the 1980 campaign. According to Carter in that book: "At the time, all of my political team believed that Reagan was the weakest candidate the Republicans could have chosen." He was contemptuous of Reagan's speaking style and in his diary said: "He has his memorized tapes. He pushes a button, and they come out." He calls Reagan 'dumb and incompetent.' None of this is in Bird's book.

The reason is transparent. Ronald Reagan represents everything that the left and much of the Democrat party loathe about politics, the so-called intelligentsia that George Wallace said made up the party as far back as 1972. Then and now the left wing of the party is full of the intellectual snobs Wallace warned about and at a basic level they are either unable or unwilling to accept how much of politics is about how the average voter reacts emotionally to a voter rather than about intellectual policy.

The Democrats had been making mistakes like this repeatedly over the past thirty years. They had preferred Adlai Stevenson's intellect even though Eisenhower trounced him twice. They could never accept how Nixon's emotionally angry appeal had a hold on a certain level of the electorate and how television only enhanced it.  Reagan, however, was by far the biggest mistake they ever made and even more than half a century after he took the political world by storm, most of them refuse to acknowledge it.

They couldn't take seriously the way he regaled his audiences, nor understand how his folksy optimistic delivery registered with them. Reagan's ability to brush off remarks and asides with humor was something none of his opponents on the Democrats could ever understand, primarily because by and large liberal candidates rarely had the ability to emotionally connect with the masses the way conservative Republicans can. In large part this is because of the intelligent nature of the left who does feel inclined to look down on the very working people that felt isolated by much of the way candidates like Kennedy and McGovern were campaigning. And when they did try to speak emotionally they frequently did in terms of a jeremiad much like Carter would during the fall campaign and how much of his 'meanness' was always present.

Bird bends over backwards to try and argue that Carter was cheating out of victory, bringing up all the old standards: the briefing books that a Kennedy insider supposedly gave to Reagan an edge in their only debate, the idea that Southern Baptists rejected a 'real Christian like Carter' for political power (ignoring that many Americans at the time had thought Carter's Christianity off-putting) the idea that Reagan's team might have engaged in backchannels in Teheran to stop an 'October surprise' from happening. All of this ignores some very clear realities that were apparent at the time.

For one thing Reagan had locked up the nomination early, clinching it after the Michigan primary. For another, unlike Reagan, he had a united party behind him that had every intention of defeating Carter. Reagan himself did much to add to that unity, healing old wounds with Gerald Ford and offering him the Vice Presidency and eventually, though reluctantly, taking his biggest rival for the nomination George H.W. Bush as his Vice President. And on the night of his convention acceptance speech Reagan made it clear he rejected the idea America was in decline (what many had taken away from his crisis of confidence speech) and ended with a bit of stagecraft by ending with a moment of silent prayer.

 Reagan had an ability to regain control of events and master television that Carter simply did not, as his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention demonstrated repeatedly even before the debacle with Kennedy. His speech was stiff, sounded like he was begging for Kennedy's approval and when he tried to give a cheer to Hubert Humphrey, he referred to him as 'Hubert Horatio Hornblower!" before he corrected himself. When Reagan saw the final minutes of the convention his remark was simple: "If that's there idea of unity, they have a long way to go."

Even before the fight with Kennedy became a bigger debacle Carter was bleeding from numerous wounds. The first was a third party run from John Anderson, a Republican Congressman from Illinois. Anderson had been a member of the House leadership for a while and for a time in the 1980 primaries had thrown a scare into Reagan, nearly winning both the Massachusetts and Vermont primaries before Reagan regained momentum. After it ended in late April Anderson announced a third party run.

Anderson was particularly popular on college campuses and the platform he had was fairly radical. He proposed a 50-cent-a-gallon gas tax to reduce consumption, wanted to slash social security tax in half, modest gun control reform, supported the ERA and was vociferously in favor of abortion. He also believed in a moratorium on new nuclear energy plants. He considered first Walter Cronkite, then Edward Brooke, the first African-American elected to the Senate in history as his running mate. He would eventually settle on Patrick Lucey, the former Democratic governor of Wisconsin as his vice president.

By this point Anderson's liberalism was far out of touch with where the GOP was and pretty extreme for where Democrats were at the time. One can see his campaign for the Presidency as a prototype for similar left-wing runs for the White House such as Ralph Nader and Bernie Sanders. The Carter team took him seriously. In July Anderson was shown with 23 percent of the vote in California, more support than Carter had in the state.

Anderson knew what his role was and who he was taking votes away from. On July 31^st he met with Kennedy and emerged saying he would consider dropping out if Carter would not stand for reelection. When that failed Anderson managed to get on the ballot in all fifty states and managed to achieve enough support to qualify for the first Presidential debate in Baltimore. Carter refused to attend, saying that he viewed Anderson was 'primarily a creation of the press." Anderson had indicated he would drop out if Carter debated him but when he didn't he chose to stay in the race.

Increasingly this made Carter look churlish and childish. There had been an idea of an empty chair at the debate to represent Carter (the idea was dropped) and the political cartoonist Oliphant drew the debate stage with a baby's high chair to stand in for Carter.  Reagan by contrast agreed to debate him which gave him the moral high ground and an opportunity to appear before a national audience who didn't see him as the boogeyman Carter and the Democrats made him out to be. It also robbed Carter of a chance to make a case for himself as President which he wasn't doing a good job of.

It didn't help that before the convention his campaign pitched up more baggage, this time from his own family. On July 14^th the Justice Department filed a civil complaint against Billy Carter for violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Carter's younger brother had failed to report to the government services he had rendered to the Libyan government by waging 'a propaganda campaign' on behalf of the nation's foreign policy objectives. Considering that at the time the Libyan government was deeply hostile to America this was bad enough but the fact that the President has written his younger brother and told him not to travel there anymore, yet Billy had continued to do so, was even worse.

Worse on that very day Billy Carter registered as an agent of Libya, meaning the President's brother was officially working for a country whose citizens had just a few months earlier stormed and set on fire the American embassy in Tripoli.

On July 15 the Justice Department complaint hit the front page of the New York Times, sharing space with Reagan's promise to 'make America great again'. One week later, new reports came possibly linking Billy to a plot by Libyan operatives in the U.S. to bribe American officials. And worst of all it was announced that Brzezinski had used Billy as a go-between to start talks with the Libyan government to see if they would be helpful in getting the Iranians to release the hostages.

By this point Carter was trailing Reagan in the polls by anywhere from 25 to 30 points. He made up much of a difference by the end of the convention but he was facing a far bigger problem. And its worth noting the key difference between The Outlier's perspective on Carter's reelection and reality because it's by far the biggest way the book is revisionist.

According to Camelot's End going into the fall campaign Carter was facing an anger over a stagnant economy, high inflation and rising unemployment.  Yet if one read The Outlier you'd be hard press to know any of this was a problem during Carter's term or for that matter the 1970s. Stagflation the term that became the downfall of Carter's administration is mentioned exactly once on one page in regard to Carter's Presidency. Nelson Rockefeller, by contrast, is mention three times over three pages. The 'economic situation is mentioned less than 20 times in the 628 pages that make up the bulk of Bird's book. David Rockefeller, by contrast, is mentioned 17 times, a ridiculous disproportionate amount. (Bird seems to believe he is mostly responsible for much of what happened with the Shah of Iran coming to America.)

To be clear Bird claims to have done extensive research, read transcriptions of Carter's diaries and most of the aides were still living as well as Carter himself. The bibliography is 20 pages long as opposed to the mere 8 of Ward's book which is significant shorter. Yet Ward mentions inflation no less than 17 times in his book and unemployment 7 times.

This is not a small matter but it is clear what the reason is. Having spent much time among so many progressives of which Bird demonstrates more than a few times he clearly is, the reason for the economic problems of America today is solely the fault of Ronald Reagan and Reagan alone. Most discussion of economics among progressives (and Bird I should mention makes it clear that he agrees with it) goes from the unprecedented economic growth from the New Deal to the Great Society and then jumps to Reagan having ended it, basically ignoring the entire 1970s as well as Carter's Presidency.  In a sense this is a rewrite of what progressives themselves believed during Carter's administration,, that Carter rejected the rules of liberalism causing them to first support Kennedy's candidacy and then later John Anderson's third party run.  The whole reason for the plan to unseat Carter was a battle for the soul of the Democratic Party and what it stood for. Carter clearly understood that the country had moved to the right but not even in a biography of the President is someone who is fundamentally progressive willing to acknowledge this reality.

So much of the fall campaign is spent bashing Ronald Reagan. And its clear the biggest difference comes about one of the most famous lines in debate history. At the end of the second debate Reagan famously summed up by asking the voters: "Are you better off then you were four years ago?" The book also talks about Carter's generally miserable debate performance against Reagan and details how the campaign thought they knew they'd lost.

Very little about Carter's fall campaign is mentioned in The Outlier. And when Reagan gives his famous line, Bird says: "And many voters concluded that they were not."  He also says Carter knew he had performed badly on TV. But they give no reason why voters might have had any reason to think things were bad for them and takes another opportunity to take a swing at Reagan's better performance.

So much of The Outlier is clearly done as much a swing at Reagan than anything else. They take an opportunity to say that Carter had more press conferences in one term then Reagan did in two for the sole purpose of saying Reagan avoided the press. They devote an entire chapter arguing that many of Reagan's staff may have worked to stop an October surprise that would have allowed an early release of the hostages. And they do everything in their power not to say that Reagan won the White House but Carter was cheated of it which simply ignores the real economic realities which had been  one of the reasons the Democrats had not wanted Carter to run for reelection in the first place. It's like trying to write about why Lincoln was facing grim prospects for reelection and then ignoring how badly things were going for the Union in Atlanta and Richmond during the summer of 1864.

And this ignores the biggest problem with Carter's reelection campaign: he couldn't come up with any real reason for people to vote for him again. So instead he spent the entire fall campaign attacking Ronald Reagan so viciously that he was guilty of overkill. No more was this more clear then at the Al Smith Dinner, a tradition since 1945 where the two would meet in person for the first time.

Reagan, who spoke first, was brief, funny and self-deprecating. He joked about his age (he was about to turn 70) multiple times including: "There's no truth to the rumor that I was at the original Al Smith Dinner." By contrast Carter skipped the dinner and arrived merely in time for the speeches, unlike Reagan. He was tone-deaf, didn't joke about himself and only took shots at Reagan. Then he delivered a speech within a speech, talking for ten minutes about the need for religious tolerance.

A columnist pointed out Carter's biggest problem: "There is no fun in Jimmy Carter. He has acted as if his job were a pious duty. He has uplifted practically no one." He did have successes to tout, but his lack of vision prevented him from doing so.

In hindsight the biggest surprise about the 1980 Presidential election was that the polls tightened to the point that Reagan was actually concerned that Carter would win and agreed to drop his request Anderson appear in any debate in order to debate Carter before election day. And from the start of the October 28^th debate millions of viewers saw what Ham Jordan did: "Reagan looked relaxed, smiling, robust; the President, erect, lips tight, looking like a coiled spring, ready to pounce, an overtrained boxer, too ready for the bout."

And it showed in another famous moment. When Carter accused Reagan of campaigning against Medicare, the moment Reagan was allowed to speak, he paused, looked askance at the President, and said with a practiced chuckle: "There you go again." That famous moment is not in The Outlier at all, nor is Ted Kennedy's reaction to it. He turned to a campaign advisor and said: "He just got killed."

The stunning thing in hindsight about the 1980 election was that for much of it Carter actually thought there was a chance of winning.  On the eve of the election Carter received notice from Jody Powell saying that internal polling said not only was his lead gone but the break was so great that it was going to be a devastating loss. Which is was, of course. Reagan won by a margin that stunned even him winning with 51 percent to Carter's 41 percent (Anderson received less than 7 percent) and carrying 44 out of 50 states for 489 electoral votes to Carter's 49. Carter only carried his native Georgia, Mondale's home state of Minnesota, Hawaii, Maryland, Rhode Island and West Virginia along with DC. Anderson did take votes from both candidates but most of it was greater than Reagan's margin of victory in fourteen states. Yet even had Anderson dropped out it would still have been a resounding defeat according to the statistics: Reagan would have gotten 321 electoral votes to Carter's 217.

But far worse consequences occurred down ballot, most dreadfully in the Senate. In what was one of the worst defeats for an incumbent party in the history of the 20^th century and by far the most recent the Democrats would lost 12 seats to the Republicans giving them control of the Senate for the first time since 1954. And much of this must be laid at the foot of Carter, though some was more about the rightward trajectory of the country.

Many Democrats who'd been in the Senate for years were in states that had been Republican strongholds for longer. Birch Bayh of Indiana, George McGovern of South Dakota and Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin (at that point the state was fundamentally Republican) had managed to buck the trend for years. In 1980 Reagan's coattails were long enough to get them out. Another loss may have come from the decision of a liberal Republican. Jacob Javits of New York had lost his Senate primary to Al D'Amato but rather than leave the race he chose to run on the Liberal Party ticket. Many Democrats were afraid that he would syphon off enough votes for Elizabeth Holtzman, the Democratic nominee and that D'Amato would win. This fear was well-founded. D'Amato won his first election to the Senate by less than 1.5 percent in a race where Javits took eleven percent of the vote. It was a Democratic opportunity for a pickup that someone closer to their own politics had thwarted.

A larger problem may have come when Carter chose to concede at 9:50 pm, Eastern Standard Time. At that point polls on the West Coast and in some states that were in the Central and Mountain time zone were still open. This would outrage many Democrats at the time who later thought Carter's politically tone-deaf decision might have cost them in down-ballot races in these states. There is evidence to back this up in some states.

Frank Church of Idaho had been fighting the political headwinds of his state for years. But he ended up losing his election to Steve Symms by less than one percent of the vote. It's a tougher argument to make with Warren Magnuson, who lost by nearly nine percent and was already in ill-health but an argument could be made. That decision might have also cost the Democrats a chance for a pickup in a critical seat.

 Barry Goldwater was running for his third term for the Senate since 1968. One would think the man whose campaign was considered the inspiration for Reagan's would have floated to victory in the Senate.  Instead, he only managed to win over Bill Scuultz by little more than one percentage vote, meaning had polls not closed the Democrats might have taken some measure of revenge. (The narrow margin would later convince Goldwater to retire after this term.)

There was also a chance, albeit a more remote one, for a pick up in Oregon. Republican Bob Packwood was expected to have an easy victory over Democratic challenger Ted Kulongoski. He led by double digits in most polls but the Democratic incumbent closed the gap as the race went on. Packwood made no real blunders but it's not impossible. Still it is at least possible Carter's early concession might have allowed the Democrats to hold the Senate, even if they suffered major defeats across the country.

The party did face some losses in the South as well. Jeremiah Denton narrowly won the Senate in Alabama over Jim Folsom Junior. Herman Talmadge of Georgia lost by a similar slim margin to Mark Mattingly in Georgia. Robert Morgan of North Carolina lost to John Porter East, making North Carolina have both members of the Senate as Republicans.  And Democrat Richard Stone lost his primary to Bill Gunter in Florida only to lose to Paula Hawkins. However Dale Bumpers of Arkansas, Russell Long of Louisiana, Fritz Hollings of South Carolina, Wendell Ford of Kentucky  and Tom Eagleton of Missouri all kept their seats even though Reagan would carry all of these states by enormous margins. Not even the enormous coattails of Reagan's landslide could completely dethrone the New South.

The clear lesson of the 1980 election was that the coalition the Democrats had relied on since the New Deal, made of union members and ethnics in the big cities, poor rural voters, racial minorities, Catholics and the South – had splintered for good. It was an event that led to political realignment that we are still feeling the repercussions of to this day. For the next decade the Democratic Party would try to rebuild and learn lessons from this massive defeat – lessons, it should be noted, that certain parts of that coalition are still in denial about even now.

In the next article I will deal with how the Democratic Party began to adjust to the new political realities during the 1980s and how by contrast the left wing of the party basically chose to ignore them.