All the way back in the summer of 2016—remember that world? Yeah … okay, come back now—I promised that I was going to spend some time regularly talking about “Utopia.” Over the five centuries since Sit Thomas More’s work by that name was first published, the term Utopia has taken on not just a veneer of impracticality, but a suggestion that it defines some single not-so-Utopian vision. But the Utopia I’m talking about is really a small-U utopia. A utopia in the sense of a post-scarcity society, one where people’s needs are met, where opportunities abound, where freedom is protected, and creativity is encouraged. What does that world look like? It’s hard to define, because it’s something different for everyone. But here’s what it’s not — it’s not this world.
Except … it kind of is. It’s my firm belief that we have everything we need to create a post-scarcity society, one that truly enables and encourages the achievements of every human being on the planet, while simultaneously protecting the nature of that planet as a biologically diverse, complex, and fundamentally living world. The only such world, so far as we know, that exists now, or ever.
The fundamental inequality that keeps so many billions deprived isn’t an issue requiring some fundamental technical breakthrough, it’s a structural problem that arises from government and economic systems that were never designed to solve those problems. Instead, we created a system that is an inequality engine. Occasionally we feel guilty about it and hurl a tiny percentage of resources toward the problem. Which is followed by a round of back-patting. Then a round of making things incrementally worse. And then we wonder why the system that was designed to create inequality does it so, so well.
In that first essay more than two years ago, I made a commitment to return to the theme of utopia, and specifically to looking at ways we can move toward the kind of society that most people would really believe embodies that term. For the most part, I’ve broken that promise. However, I recently returned to the idea in this space. I’ve talked about this movement in relationship to the Accountable Capitalism Act drafted by Elizabeth Warren, and in connection with Franklin Roosevelt’s Second Bill of Rights. Now i’m going to change course. Not in the sense of dropping that call for utopia, but in the sense that I’m no longer casting about for a line to grab that leads along the path. Because I found it. From now on, I’m going to regularly use this space to support the Green New Deal.
I’m not doing it because it’s perfect. It’s not. I’m not doing it because I’m a fan of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Though I’ll confess that I’m absolutely a supporter of many pieces of legislation introduced by AOC’s co-author on the GND, Ed Markey. I’m supporting the Green New Deal because it’s not just a plan to help halt the destruction of climate change, but a plan that recognizes that efforts to address climate change while leaving intact all the systems that have created the problem have not worked. We can save ourselves. We can save the planet. But we can’t do one without doing the other.
In that belief, the GND holds a lot in common with another plan, one that was introduced here on Daily Kos (unbelievably) over a dozen years ago. That plan recognized that it was impossible to talk about stopping greenhouse pollution without doing it in a broader context that touched on everything from national security to creating jobs. The Green New Deal isn’t perfect. But it represents movement in the right direction. And I’m going to be talking about it, in detail, and often. That’s a new promise.
But hey, if you want to skip it, you can always go to page 2, where the pundits live. Just know, you’ll be missing the Good Stuff.
Green New Deal
Jonathan Chait is not a fan.
New York Magazine
The next time it gains control of the federal government, the Democratic Party is going to need to quickly implement an ambitious program to reduce carbon emissions. So far all the political oxygen on this problem has been sucked up by a slogan, “Green New Deal,” for which a blueprint was unveiled by New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts senator Ed Markey. The strategy they have produced is at best grossly undercooked, and at worst fatally misconceived.
To say that I believe Jonathan Chait is wrong on this point is underplaying it. I believe he’s not just wrong, but wrong-headed. Worse, I believe he’s doing so deliberately, with little real goal but to carve a notch on his iconoclast tally board. Chait goes on to criticize the GND for being too small here, too large there, for not providing enough detail, or providing too much — as it suits his argument.
What Chait most deliberately ignores is that there is no other plan on the table. Not only that, but a “quickly implemented” and “ambitious program to reduce carbon emissions,” created in the sort of isolation that Chait appears to favor, is an unworkable, unpassable, damn near impossible task. Democrats on a climate change committee can draft almost anything they please, but if that plan appears to be all sticks, no carrots, all personal sacrifice, no political vision, that plan will fail. Hard. And honestly, it should.
Any serious approach to climate change is an energy plan. Any serious approach to climate change is an infrastructure plan. Any serious approach to climate change is a labor plan. Any serious approach to climate change is an economic plan. And any plan that is not all those things, is not a serious approach to climate change.
And … honestly, I could keep kicking on Chait all morning for a column where he seems far more interesting in stirring muck than cleaning the air, but Meteor Blades has already done it for me.
Art Cullen on whether the Green New Deal would sell in Iowa.
Storm Lake Times
We generate more electricity per capita from wind than any other state thanks to one of the earliest Renewable Energy Portfolios in the nation. As the complex has been built out and threatens the fossil fuel industry, groups have emerged that create false alarms. Just this week environmental scientists had to bat down the latest disproved theories that wind turbines harm human and animal health. David Osterberg and Kerri Johannsen reported through the Iowa Policy Project last Friday that the peer-reviewed scientific literature demonstrates no ill effects from wind turbine sound or shadow flutter from its blades. Yet the phony evidence used to attack the wind production tax credit and local property tax incentives fuels turf-grass groups that are attempting to block new wind development all over northern Iowa. It is having a real stifling effect.
Likewise, the Iowa Legislature eliminated a solar tax credit program. It defunded the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, which showed farmers how to capture carbon through crop rotation and help tamp down climate change. Congress just cut in half funding for the Conservation Stewardship Program, which provides payments for conservation on working lands in line with rotational grazing and building soil health. Funds for livestock confinement oversight were shifted to other programs within the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. The statewide water quality monitoring program is frequently suggested for elimination because it continues to provide scary results about toxins in our water.
Yeah, the great thing about eliminating water quality testing is that untested water is always completely safe. Right, residents of Flint? As a citizen of a state where rules on solar, wind, and electric vehicles are actively hostile, I sympathize with Cullen’s situation up there in Missouri’s hat.
There could be a different way for Iowa.
We can build rural communities and jobs through renewable energy and sustainable agriculture. There are a lot more well-paid technicians tending wind towers around there than coal-fired power plants or natural gas plants. Iowa has as much solar energy potential as Florida, believe it or not. Businessman Rob Hach is creating jobs and opportunity by installing solar units here that make money for the owners — farmers are prime for opportunity. We could double our wind energy output (and thus revenues) easily if we could settle misinformed opposition that creates bottlenecks to transmitting power from western Iowa to Chicago. (Why is an oil pipeline favored over a transmission line that runs renewable energy?
Because the green deal may be new, but the deal that oil companies made is not.
Scary, Scary Socialism
Paul Krugman on how Republicans are dusting off the socialist boogeyman.
New York Times
In 1961, America faced what conservatives considered a mortal threat: calls for a national health insurance program covering senior citizens. In an attempt to avert this awful fate, the American Medical Association launched what it called Operation Coffee Cup, a pioneering attempt at viral marketing.
Here’s how it worked: Doctors’ wives (hey, it was 1961) were asked to invite their friends over and play them a recording in which Ronald Reagan explained that socialized medicine would destroy American freedom. The housewives, in turn, were supposed to write letters to Congress denouncing the menace of Medicare.
Those Ronald Reagan recordings, if you haven’t heard them, are kind of amazing—in a sort of Joe McCarthy, holy s#!t way. Over the course of several years in the late 50s and 60s, Reagan did a kind of extended road show, working on what amounted to a stage act for conservatism. He tried it out at factories, and at civic organizations, and at county fairs. And by the time he was ready to run for governor of California, he had the patter down well enough to make giving someone a dime for cup of coffee sound like high treason. When you think that Republicans today couldn’t go any lower, look up Reagan’s recordings and see where they started.
Obviously the strategy didn’t work; Medicare not only came into existence, but it became so popular that these days Republicans routinely (and falsely) accuse Democrats of planning to cut the program’s funding. But the strategy — claiming that any attempt to strengthen the social safety net or limit inequality will put us on a slippery slope to totalitarianism — endures.
And so it was that Donald Trump, in his State of the Union address, briefly turned from his usual warnings about scary brown people to warnings about the threat from socialism.
What do Trump’s people, or conservatives in general, mean by “socialism”? The answer is, it depends.
Krugman gives a good baseline definition of what Republicans consider socialism now — which isn’t much different from the rant Reagan was selling fifty-some years ago. But don’t worry, by 2020 socialism will encompass breathing. Hey! Did you pay for that air, commie?
Election 2020
Jay Bookman on why the old guys shouldn’t … they just shouldn’t.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
John Kerry has been a superb public servant, beginning with his heroic service in Vietnam and extending through a 28-year career in the Senate and a productive four-year stint as secretary of state. He is as qualified as anyone in U.S. history to serve as president of the United States.
Yet, John Kerry should not run for president in 2020.
Joe Biden is a wise and decent soul, someone sincerely committed to making this a better country. In his 36 years in the Senate and eight as vice president for Barack Obama, he too has demonstrated the character and qualifications to be an excellent president.
He too should not run in 2020.
As you might expect, there are other names on the list of “should not runs.” Bookman puts Hillary Clinton there. He also includes Bernie Sanders. And, despite today’s announcement, he tentatively includes Elizabeth Warren.
My concern about their potential candidacies have nothing to do directly with their chronological age. None of the four shows any signs of age-related issues, and they are all perfectly capable of significant continued service. But in part because of their age and their long resumes, they will inevitably be identified with an era that seems increasingly irrelevant.
Whatever else it will say about him, history will see Donald Trump as a marker in time that divides what came before him from what will come after him. He is a ridiculous figure, especially as president, but the fact that he was elected anyway demonstrates the bankruptcy of that previous era and the repudiation of an approach to politics that had grown stale and unresponsive.
Lord. I hate to be thought of as not just living through Trump, but having my whole generation stained as leading up to Trump. It’s … gah. Oh, and Jay Bookman was one of those folks who was recommended to me back in December and who I promised to include in future APRs, but he was on vacation at the time. Now … here he is! Thanks for the recommendation.
On the Border
Laurie Roberts wants to stop talking about the wall for a moment, and talk about the fence.
Arizona Republic
Forget, for the moment, about Donald Trump’s wall. What the heck is going on with Donald Trump’s concertina wire?
The good people of Nogales would certainly like to know. It seems they don’t appreciate their latest downtown redevelopment project, courtesy of the U.S. military.
Coil upon coil upon coil of flesh-slicing razor wire. The sort of stuff you’d find in a war zone, or around a concentration camp or a maximum-security prison …
Or now, dripping from top to bottom of the 18-foot U.S.-Mexico border fence that runs through downtown Nogales.
Last month, there was just one coil running along the top of the two-story fence, installed before the midterm elections. Nogales Mayor Arturo Garino told the Associated Press that he asked Sen. Martha McSally when she was in town last month to help the city get rid of it.
Instead, over the weekend, troops strung five additional coils, layer after layer of barbed steel covering the fence from top to bottom in places.
Of course they did. Honestly, I think Democrats could get some value out of Trump’s border security push if they play along in the right way. Think how many breakthroughs would be required to deploy shark lasers along a border. Especially where there’s no river. Instead, we’re getting the latest in World War I tech.
It’s dangerous, running, as it does, right down to the ground in close proximity to business and residential areas.
It’s overkill, in that while Trump warns that the border is a “very dangerous area”, Nogales really isn’t.
It’s also incredibly silly.
We’re going to get about $2 billion of incredibly silly. And we’ll call it a win, because it’s not $5.7 billion.
Virginia, Racism, and Racism in Virginia
Renée Graham on why Virginia is in the spotlight, but is far from the only spot.
Boston Globe
As usual, this is bigger than one state or state house under siege and, as usual, the national conversations are falling short in reflecting that. Especially concerning blackface, Virginia has become a social media punching bag and late-night punchline.
And the hits just keep on coming. On Wednesday, a Virginia police officer assigned to monitor protests around the Northam scandal was suspended for having “an affinity with white nationalist groups.”
With its loaded history from Jamestown to its status as the capital of the Confederacy to the deadly horror of Charlottesville, Virginia is a perfect repository for this nation’s racist ills. Especially outside of the South, there’s a natural tendecy toward haughtiness as if states below the Mason-Dixon Line are the only purveyors of racism.
As a native New Yorker and a longtime Boston resident, I certainly know better. The first time I saw someone in blackface — two young white women on Halloween — it was in Syracuse, N.Y.
My personal experience as a white person who grew up in a south which was surely saturated in casual racism and deliberate inequality is that … I rarely noticed. Oh, I noticed. And when I thought about it, I was ashamed and angry enough to work with organizations and groups that were trying to do something about it. But I know, when I think back, that I let things slide—actions, jokes, statements, expectations—that I should never have accepted. Then, after college, I worked in several northern cities away from my rural southern roots and what I found there … was racism. The racism I found in St. Louis, and Chicago, and New York seemed so much more blatant, and somehow uglier, than anything I’d seen at home. It took me a long time to recognize that wasn’t true. It was just that that stuff back in small town Kentucky, was the racism that I knew. The racism that was all too comfortable.
I had this same experience years later when an illness left me stranded on a couch in Brisbane, spending weeks watching Australian TV (which, honestly is a kind of low grade torture, even for Australians). The racism I saw there, especially toward Indonesians and Indigenous Australians, was jaw-dropping. It was obvious, it was ugly, it was offensive, it was … something I saw because I wasn’t part of the culture that had created it.
None of this is meant to provide any cover or forgiveness for Ralph Northam, or the people who thought wearing blackface and KKK hoods at a medical school wasn’t just an acceptable activity, but something they should memorialize in their annuals. It’s a recognition that those in a position to oppress others have to actively consider whether their actions are harmful. If the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men should do nothing, that’s doubly true for racism—because most men aren’t nearly as good as they believe. They’ve just stopped seeing the evil.
Michael Tomasky on Virginia’s time in the deep end of the crazy pool.
The Daily Beast
This seemed to cap a mind-blowing series of events that have unfolded in the Commonwealth since last Friday. A quick review:
First, as we know, Governor Ralph Northam was outed as wearing blackface (or a KKK robe) in 1984. At the time everybody said hey, no problem, let’s just make him resign, and we’ll have an actual African-American as governor, and someone everyone likes and who took a strong stand against Confederate statuary to boot.
Then that very lieutenant governor, Justin Fairfax, got caught up in a #MeToo allegation from 2004, which he denies but which the woman, a serious professional, is clearly not content just to let drop. Well, crap, but okay then, thought Virginia Democrats, if we have to settle for the attorney general, we’ll do that, he’s a good progressive.
And then came Herring’s admission [of wearing blackface in college].
Here is, I think, the worst thing I’ve ever done—or at least, the worst I’ve done that I can recall and which, were I running for any office (which I never, never ever, ever will) might come back to bite me. In 1975, sitting at the worn depression era tables in my crumbling pre-depression era high school, a friend and I (hiya, Ed) got to grumbling about how the Soviets were always calling Americans “imperialists.” In about five minutes flat, we decided that if we were going to be called imperialists, we should just be imperialists. By the time study hall was over, we had created the American Imperialist Movement, complete with a little badge that, in retrospect had way too much red and black in its design to be comfortable. Way too much. So far as I recall, this ugly little fantasy lasted about a week, but if someone ever produces an image of me holding up something that looks like a cross between a rifle target and a Japanese flag, the sum total of my excuse is—I was an idiot. I mean, the sideburns that would be included in any such picture should be enough for an insanity plea all on their own. Okay, confession time over. Back to Virginia and people who were definitely not 15 and definitely not doodling in study hall, dammit.
And then, right after 2 pm, Tyson, who has an appointment at Stanford and holds a PhD from the University of Chicago, released her devastating statement about what she alleges Fairfax did to her in his hotel room in 2004. It’s disgusting, it’s gross, and it’s credible. She’s very specific about what she says happened, step by ugly step, and it’s all too believable. And if one needed further proof of her credibility, consider the lawyers she hired—the same firm that represented Christine Blasey Ford during her testimony against Brett Kavanaugh.
This isn’t kid stuff. It isn’t excusable on any scale. The sooner that the slate gets cleaned, the better.
Aisha Sultan on why white people just keep using blackface.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
The blackface scandals raging in the news may suggest it’s a thing of the past, a racist form of entertainment people engaged in long ago.
Sadly, that’s not the case.
There’s a surprising group of people who continue to find it appealing.
“Blackface, particularly in white sororities and fraternities, is as common as cheerleaders on a football field,” according to Lawrence Ross, author of “Blackballed: The Black and White Politics of Race on America’s Campuses.” Ross is talking about young people in this present moment. Not middle-aged or older people getting in trouble for decades-old racist acts. A Google search for college students and blackface will bring up plenty of contemporary examples, including the white University of Oklahoma sorority girl caught this year on Snapchat in blackface saying what sounded like the n-word.
There is a strange yet enduring appeal to blackface and racist tropes among certain groups of white college students who presumably should know better.
Honestly, I don’t understand the appeal. But then, I have a near phobia of masks or disguises of any kind, even without the racial overtones, I just find the idea creepy.
Politicians who used blackface in the past have been in the headlines before, but this time it threatens to take down a governor. Ralph Northam, the Democratic governor of Virginia, is roiled in controversy for yearbook pictures of a person in blackface standing next to someone in Ku Klux Klan robes and hood. Mark Herring, the Democratic attorney general, also revealed he wore blackface at a college party in 1980. Last month, Michael Ertel, the Republican secretary of state in Florida, resigned after photos surfaced showing him in blackface dressed as a “Hurricane Katrina victim” at a party. But these incidents are hardly an aberration or spectacles from the past.
Sultan does a quick review of the history on the subject, and it’s definitely worth visiting for a fast read. Aisha Sultan was also one of those people recommended for APR back in December, but she didn’t have a new column at the time and I kind of forgot to go back and check since then. Glad I remembered today.
Donna Edwards on why ‘that was then’ is never an excuse.
Washington Post
When the news broke that a photograph of two individuals wearing shockingly racist garb appeared on Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s 1984 medical school yearbook page, my immediate instinct was to Google him. I needed to know his age. I knew Northam wasn’t a peer of former senators Strom Thurmond or Robert C. Byrd, with their Jim Crow and Ku Klux Klan histories, respectively. No, he was from my own generation, born after me, in 1959, five years after Brown v. Board of Education was decided. He was a kindergartner when the Civil Rights Act was signed into law. It was essentially the same for Virginia Attorney General Mark R. Herring (D), born in 1961, who has now admitted that he, too, once wore blackface, as a 19-year-old student in 1980.
It’s mind-boggling.
I’m the same age as Northam. For all that I said about my rural southern upbringing, I never saw anyone in my little town in blackface, not at party, not at a costume contest, not at anything. What worries me now is that it may not be that I didn’t see it, but that I don’t recall seeing it, because it didn’t shock me enough at the time to make an impression. And lord, I hope that’s not the case.
Northam, Herring and I are the beneficiaries of the civil rights generation. Though children, we had our childhoods marked by the traumas of the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. We witnessed the dignity and resolve of activists, black and white, who risked all to hold America to the promise of its founding creed. We learned of the murders of Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney in Mississippi in 1964. We remember in vivid detail the burning streets and neighborhoods of the summer of 1968. We were in high school or entering college around the time of our nation’s bicentennial.
When I was small, I went with my father to talk to students at the “negro school,” the old, segregated school that was, as you might expect, even more decrepit than the pretty darn decrepit school I’d attend a decade later. I don’t remember what my father was doing there that day, but I do remember understanding the situation well enough to be surprised that the school still existed, because by the public school in my town had been officially desegregated for years. I don’t know why that school was still there when I was close to starting school myself. What bothers me now, is that I never tried to find out. And while I think it was long gone by the time I was being a high school idiot … I can’t say that for sure, because I never checked. Like I said before, it’s easy to be comfortable.
The Washington Post makes it’s position on Fairfax clear — this isn’t a political issue.
Washington Post
Justin Fairfax has now been accused of sexual assault by two women, neither of whom has any apparent reason to lie. If Mr. Fairfax does not resign, as he has been urged to do by many prominent Virginia’s Democrats and Republicans, the state should undertake an immediate inquiry into the allegations against him. They cannot be allowed to fester.
The furor around Mr. Fairfax, a Democrat and former federal prosecutor, involves allegations of criminality: First, the accusation by Vanessa Tyson, now a college professor, that he forced her to perform oral sex on him nearly 15 years ago in a hotel room in Boston. Second, the accusation by Meredith Watson that he raped her when both of them were undergraduates at Duke University in 2000.
Reporters for The Post looked into Ms. Tyson’s story a year ago and could not corroborate it; nor did they find evidence of similar accusations against Mr. Fairfax. Ms. Watson’s decision Friday to make her allegation public suggests a pattern of conduct by Mr. Fairfax. Each woman’s account appears credible on its face. Taken together, they are a grave indictment — not least because Ms. Watson told a college friend at the time that she had just been attacked by Mr. Fairfax. (She told another classmate the same thing in 2016, by email.) The fact of contemporaneous and past witnesses, who also have no apparent motive to lie, cannot be lightly dismissed.
The State of the Union, And the better State of the Union
Will Bunch on Trump’s shambling, vision-free, limp dishrag of a speech.
Philadelphia Inquirer
With House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her blunt instrument of a gavel looming just a few feet behind him, America was told that Trump – supposedly chastened by his car wreck of a government shutdown last month – would be on his best behavior for Tuesday’s State of the Union address, saying all the right things about national unity and bipartisanship.
He couldn’t make it past the first 25 minutes.
First the seething president met privately with TV news anchors and called former vice president and possible 2020 rival Joe Biden “dumb” and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer “a nasty son of a bitch.” As darkness descended on Capitol Hill, White House beat reporters said that America’s divider-in-chief was chafing at the earlier speech drafts pledging national conciliation and that he was huddling with his xenophobic aide Stephen Miller to craft a new version that would be tougher on Democrats and undocumented immigrants.
The biggest part of Trump’s speech was the Trump is Great part, which was delivered at the pace of three words, wait for applause, three words, wait for applause, even when Republicans forgot to applaud. Everything else was nasty lies and attacks, sandwiched between two very thin slices of “gee, why can’t we all get along” that were delivered with the enthusiasm of cold cheese soup.
There were audible groans in the House chamber when Trump insisted that “large, organized caravans” of migrants are again headed to the United States — the same endless Fox News loop that the president used to whip up voters in the 2018 midterms — while boasting of sending more troops to the border and insisting that he will get an expanded wall built despite unanimous Democratic opposition. He again sent fact-checkers into overdrive with false claims about immigrants causing more crimes and overstating the number of murders by migrants.
Trump’s delivery had been lethargic, punctuated by sniffs, before his lengthy rant on immigration, when suddenly the tension could almost be felt coming through the TV screen.
That’s not quite true. Trump’s enthusiasm really picked up during the “laud my every word” portion of the address. And the sniffs stayed all night. They probably had something to do with what Trump took to extend his executive time into the evening without falling asleep on the podium.
Joan Walsh on Stacey Abram’s short, inspired, and very effective speech.
The Nation
Even an hour-plus of Donald Trump’s lies couldn’t fully obscure the profound political renewal his 2016 election inspired. The first high point of Trump’s soporific State of the Union address came when he congratulated himself that women have taken most of the new jobs created in recent years, and inadvertently triggered a wild standing ovation by the record number of women who took jobs in Congress this year (almost all of them Democrats, many wearing suffragette white). “You weren’t supposed to do that,” he chided them, seeming confused by their cheering. But they didn’t care; the celebration roared across the chamber.
The next big moment came when Trump finally finished, and the Democrat designated to deliver the SOTU rebuttal took the microphone: Georgia’s Stacey Abrams, who narrowly lost her bid for governor in November, but emerged as a rising Democratic star nonetheless.
It wasn’t just that Abrams’ speech was everything Trump’s was not — touching, energetic, informed, and succinct — it was also a speech that did what the State of the Union was supposed to do; offer some proposals about the future course of the nation.
Flanked by a multiracial audience behind her, Abrams had no problem surpassing the lackluster performances of the many men, from both parties, who’ve preceded her. One of my questions was how her Georgia-specific appeal, honed in 18 months on the stump, could translate for a national audience. Traveling with Abrams last fall, I was struck by her deep knowledge of the state and its challenges: It was losing $8 million in federal funding a day because it refused to expand Medicaid; 5,000 children were on a waiting list for pre-kindergarten; the state has more retirees than any place but Florida. That specificity worked with Georgia crowds, but she’d have to widen her focus in this setting.
And she did, with apparent ease. Still, she started the speech with a family story she used well and often on the stump last year: driving late at night, with her whole family, to pick up her father on rainy nights when his walk home from his shipyard job was a challenge. One night, he’d given his coat to a homeless man, and was drenched by the time they found him. “He was alone,” her father explained, “and I knew you were coming for me.” In Abrams telling, in every setting, it’s a parable of how in a just society, we’re there for one another. “Together, we are coming for America—for a better America,” she began.
That was such a great moment, delivered so well, that I’m tearing up again reading about it. Really.
Note: My apologies for the extra injection of personal stories this morning. I hope that no one takes them as in any way an attempt to decrease the gravity of events in Virginia or similar events elsewhere. It’s really just the result of realizing that I and Ralph Northam are the same age, nearly to the month, and pondering to what extent I failed to see events such as those related recorded in Northam’s school yearbook, and to what extent I simply failed to register them because of my own unacceptably skewed worldview. Uncertainty is its own form of horror.