Michael Moore mentioned on his Rumblepodcast for Wednesday (8/19/2020) that he assumes Bunker Boy is looking at New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern's postponement of the national election in New Zealand to see how he might attempt something similar here this year.
So it's worth thinking about just what the postponement of the New Zealand election involves. A quick summary:
New Zealand's system allows the Prime Minister to set the election date with the approval of an Electoral Commission
There is a legal limit to how long it can be proposed, this year's limit being November 21
The main opposition party, the largest party in Parliament, had called for a postponement
The later date is considered to favor the opposition, an earlier date to benefit Ardern's Labour Party
Ardern's initial proposal for a two-week postponement was rejected by the Electoral Commission
The postponement was made in consultation with all four parliamentary parties currently serving along with the Labour Party
Ardern said after consulting with every political party in parliament, as well as the electoral commission, she had decided to move the general election from 19 September to 17 October.
She said her first suggestion of moving it by two weeks had been rejected by the Electoral Commission as not enough time to prepare logistics such as venues.
“The Electoral Commission, via the Ministry of Justice, has advised me that a safe and accessible election is achievable on this date,” Ardern said. “Moving the date by four weeks also gives all parties a fair shot to campaign and delivers New Zealanders certainty without unnecessarily long delays.”
Ardern said Covid-19 would be with the world “for some time to come” and repeatedly pushing the election date would not lessen the risk of disruption to voters and parties.
“This is why the Electoral Commission has planned for the possibility of holding an election where the country is at level 2, and with some parts at level 3. I will not change the election date again.”
New Zealand has a different system than the US. The US Presidential election is set by law to be the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. The President does not schedule it.
Here we see that: the change had to be approved by a (presumably independent) Electoral Commission; the Election Commission rejected her first proposal for a new date; and the decision was taken in consultation with the other parties;
Ardern is leader of the Labour Party. The National Party is the largest party and is in opposition. The other three parliamentary parties are the ACT Party, the Green Party, and the New Zealand First Party. Ahern's government is a coalition of Labour and New Zealand First, with the Green Party voting to form the government without formally being part of it, also known as "tolerating" the government.
New Zealand First, the junior coalition partner, supports the new election date. "The opposition National Party has argued the election should be delayed as restrictions [in Auckland due to COVID-19 restrictions] on campaigning mean Ms Ardern had an unfair advantage." (New Zealand: Jacinda Ardern delays election over coronavirus fearsBBC News 08/17/2020) The largest party in Parliament, currently in opposition, were demanding the election be postponed.
And the conventional assumption apparently is that not postponing the election would have favored the government and the Labour Party and that postponing the election may benefit the opposition. As Praveen Menon reports (New Zealand's Ardern postpones election as coronavirus flares up Reuters 08/17/2020):
Jacinda Ardern bowed to pressure to delay the polls after parties complained they could not campaign with nearly a third of New Zealand’s 5 million people under lockdown in Auckland.
“Ultimately, the 17th of October ... provides sufficient time for parties to plan around the range of circumstances we will be campaigning under,” Ardern said at a news conference.
The prime minister ruled out delaying the polls any further, as her Labour Party maintains a strong lead over the conservative National Party in opinion polls. ...
An earlier election would have worked in Ardern’s favour, as her success in stifling COVID-19 and keeping the country virus-free for 102 days until the latest outbreak had boosted her popularity.
The election was scheduled for Sept. 19 and New Zealand law requires it to be held by Nov. 21. Advance voting will now start on Oct. 3.
As a Sanders voter who is actively engaged for electing the Biden-Harris ticket, because of course even half-competent government would be a distinct improvement from the Bunker Boy fiasco, I'm not part of the main target audience for the current Democratic National Convention's daily infomercial blitz that counts as a convention this year.
But it's hard not to fear that the Democratic Party leadership isn't stuck in the same corporate-friendly, Woke approach to campaigning style of 2016: lots of talk about harmony and diversity ("Stronger Together"), take the actual voter base for granted, and assume that Donald Trump is such an obvious incompetent and such a narcissistic mess that he has to lose.
Political campaigns always have something of a sports event about them. And longtime Democrats are sorely tempted to focus the idea that as long as Democrats hold the White House, everything will basically be all right. That's especially true of relatively well-off Democratic voters over 60 or so. I suspect that part of it is that the closer one gets to the higher end of the average life span, people with some actual feelings of responsibility for society as a whole would find it nice to think that we're leaving behind a better world than the one we were born into. And for anyone with a broadly liberal outlook, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris come much closer to offering that assurance than the Trump-Pence ticket does.
The American oligarchs would find it very convenient if the election were seen by the public as really nothing more than a sports event. That way, the electoral part of politics could be reduced to a harmless reality show while the neoliberal principle of TINA (There Is No Alternative) held sway in in economic and social policy as well as foreign policy, economic elites could fight among themselves over who would get which piece of the pie. But they wouldn't have to suffer the annoyance of actual democratic rule in which a majority of the people might prefer policies like public education for all or pensions and health care for everyone that don't directly benefit the wealthiest 1% in an immediate, direct way.
The first night of the 2020 DNC was a fitting event for a party that prefers defeat to change. After a humiliating and close to delegitimizing election loss in 2016, Democratic leadership refused to take stock of their own failings, and blamed an assortment of outside forces: Russia, Facebook, Jill Stein, James Comey, to name a few. With Biden at the helm — a candidate with all the same weaknesses as the one who lost four years ago, but even worse — they decided to rerun the exact same campaign as last time, from the all-consuming focus on Trump’s failings right down to the attempt to bring prominent and rank-and-file Republicans into the party fold.
Yet at the same time, the party understands the precarious position it’s in. Between Trump’s outright stated intent to cheat his way to victory, the yawning enthusiasm gap between his and Biden’s supporters, and a raging pandemic that will keep people physically away from the polls, the party elite are well aware low turnout from unenthusiastic sections of the base — voters who are either deeply suspicious or totally indifferent to its candidate — could sink their chances. But any alternative approach that might be more promising would likely involve policies alienating the two constituencies they truly prize: conservative voters and corporate donors. [my emphasis in bold]
One could easily make the same judgment is somewhat less categorical terms. The reason that Biden-Harris have a strong chance is the same reason Hillary Clinton did in 2016: that Trump is a malicious character who is obviously unfit for such a responsible job that can affect the lives of so many people in the world.
But Biden-Harris also face the same risk that previously active Democratic voters don't turn out to vote. With the added risk this time that aggressive voter-suppression efforts by the Republican are significantly more intensive than in 2016, which COVID-19 in play as a wild card with hard-to-predict effects on turnout. I'm concerned that the pandemic may limit the traditional kind of get-out-the-vote operations the Democrats need.
We all know that more people vote in a general election than in a primary. But the Democratic primary in Flint in 2016 had a turnout much larger than the general a few months later. Nobody has bothered to look at that or ask why. I do, in this film [Fahrenheit 11/9]. And the reason isn’t because people in Flint decided there was no difference between Trump and Hillary. Nobody took that position. It was because the Democrats actively depressed the vote. First, in the primary debate in Flint between Hillary and Bernie, the DNC gave Hillary the questions in advance. When that was revealed a month or two later, the people of Flint, the mothers of the kids poisoned by lead in the water, the people who had stood at the microphone to ask a question that they thought that she was hearing for the first time, when they found out that it was rigged, many people in Flint, and certainly the people that were there at the debate, felt used as props by the Hillary campaign and by the Democratic Party.
Then one month after the debate, President Obama comes to Flint and drinks the water and says the water’s fine. But it wasn’t fine, and everybody knew it was still poisoned, and nobody could understand why he would do this. That was like a knife in the heart to the people of Flint. So on Election Day, the turnout was much lower than it had been in the primary. And Trump carried Michigan—by 10,000 votes. And it’s not just Flint. All over this country people felt that the party of the people has let them down. [my emphasis]
Michael Moore's Rumble talk of today (08/19/2020) on the election, Ep. 110: The Moment of Truth Is Here. But he expresses a partisan intensity that I'm afraid we many not hear from Biden and Harris.
Marcetic recalls a disappointing moment during the Obama Administration:
Unfortunately, the strategy of taking the party’s disaffected sections for granted and courting conservatives didn’t work out in 2016, while the party hectoring its own voters is often a precursor to its electoral defeat. Just look at Biden on the eve of Obama’s 2010 mid-term “shellacking,” admonishing “our base constituency to stop whining and get out there and look at the alternatives.” Two months later, the GOP took the House with the biggest win in seven decades and the Democrats lost their Senate supermajority, closing the door on whatever transformational aspirations Obama might have had for the rest of his eight years. [my emphasis]
And he reminds us, "The GOP takes care of its base; the Democratic elite dislikes theirs." (This is a variation on The One True Thing David Frum Ever Said: "while Republican politicians fear their base, Democratic pols hate theirs"; Gibbs on the LeftFrumForum 08/10/2010) And Marcetic concludes, "And for all their hopes to the contrary this year, that might still make a difference."
Moore in these comments from several days ago seemingly reluctantly says that even though the Ukraine accusations against Joe Biden are bogus, Biden's response was lacking in the kind of fighting posture it needs to have. "Trump is on the run," he says. "They [the Democrats] need to chase him down."
Both raise a central dilemma in responding to political disinformation, also known as lies. That is that responding to false claims also spreads the false claim itself. And serious commentators and news sources taking a dishonest claim seriously enough to refute it can itself convey an aura of seriousness to the false claim that it doesn't deserve.
Political scandals are not entirely new. Not by a few millenia. But the term itself I first picked up from a piece by historian Sean Wiltentz, Will Pseudo-Scandals Decide the Election?The American Prospect 12/19/2001. He defined the concept this way:
... an ambiguous or outright false scandal that acquires the appearance of the real thing in the media through the dogged repetition of charges and investigations. Genuine scandals, such as the Iran-Contra affair and the pilfering by former Democratic Congressman Dan Rostenkowski, have touched members of both major parties in recent years. But likewise, both parties, aided by the media, have helped to perpetuate pseudo-scandals related to campaign finance or other matters of alleged behind-the-scenes financial favoritism. The 1991-1992 pseudo-scandal over the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro and President George Bush's alleged illicit dealings with Saddam Hussein (promoted by, among others, New York Times columnist William Safire and vice presidential candidate Al Gore); the 1992 uproar over the House Bank overdrafts (promoted by, among others, Newt Gingrich); the false Whitewater, Travelgate, and Filegate scandals (promoted by observers and operatives all across the political spectrum, from Jerry Falwell to Christopher Hitchens)--each has exemplified the exploitation, for ideological or partisan purposes, of justified public concerns about the modern nexus of money and political influence.
He distiguishes his pseudoscandals in American politics from the previously normal kind of scandal-mongering and political propaganda:
Recent pseudo-scandals have relied on the manipulation of the courts, congressional committees, and the now-defunct Independent Counsel Act in order to harass elected and appointed officials with flimsy accusations. And the pseudo-scandal masters have managed to gain the subtle and often unwitting but crucial complicity of the independent mainstream news media. Without the credibility provided by law and journalism, the new style of pseudo-scandal might simply be dismissed as partisan maneuvering. Coated with a gloss of objectivity, however, pseudoscandals gain a respectful hearing, vastly reinforcing the blatant tub-thumpers, fake inside-dopesters, and latter-day [Westbrook] Peglers who appear on the cable networks and talk-radio shows as well as in the newspapers. [Pegler was a notorious and thoroughly obnoxious far-right columnist.]
Although the focus of today's pseudo-scandals is primarily political money, the direct historical antecedent is the media-friendly demagoguery pioneered by Senator Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy, [Daniel] Boorstin wrote, showed "it is possible to build a political career almost entirely out of pseudo-events." It is nearly forgotten today that McCarthy worked gleefully and sometimes woozily, during and after hours, cultivating "the boys" of the press over drinks and gossip. News-hungry reporters, in turn, developed a fascination for McCarthy: Love him or hate him, he was great copy. "Newspapermen were his most potent allies, for they were the co-manufacturers of pseudo-events," Boorstin observed. "They were caught in their own web. Honest newsmen and the unscrupulous McCarthy were in separate branches of the same business." [my emphasis]
Parts of the quoted analysis seem a bit dated after nearly 18 years. When he talked about "political money" as being the main pseudoscandal of the moment, he's presumably not referring to legitimate questions about the influence of campaign donations and dark money, the roles of which have increased geometrically since the Citizens United decision of 2010, one of the most destructive, bad decision by the Supreme Court since Dred Scott.
The reference to Banca Nazionale del Lavoro refers to the scandal once known as Iraq-Gate. (Link is to 2014 Britannica article) That one doesn't seem to fit too well into the pseudoscandal framework. There were legitimate reasons to investigate it. Even though in the end (Britannica):
Four years were spent investigating Iraqgate. (Clinton Administration] Attorney General Janet Reno released a 119-page report in 1995 summarizing the findings of nearly 20 prosecutors and investigators. They found no evidence of a conspiracy or a cover-up in the Bush administration. Although it can be argued that poor policy decisions were made over Iraq on the part of the Bush administration, there was no evidence that the [Reagan] administration acted illegally.
That one was actually a sideshow to the Reagan Administration's support of Iraq in its long, bloody war with Iran, complicated by the Iran-Contra scandal and its bizarre premises. Iran-Contra was unfortunately a very real scandal, and the failure to hold officials who broke the law in connections with it accountable was a major stepping stone to the Trump Traversty we're living today.
Which brings me to the New York Times report and the Jane Mayer pieces. Several things can be true and once. And are in the case of the Biden-Ukraine pseudoscandal, according on what is in the public record at this point:
The accusations that the Trump team is pushing in this case are bogus and constructed in extereme bad faith: "There is no evidence behind Mr. Trump's claim that Mr. Biden intervened inappropriately with Ukraine to help his son" (NYT)
Hunter Biden's role at the Ukrainian oligarch's oil company was an obvious effort to curry favor with the Obama Administration
Accepting such a position was ethically dubious on Hunter Biden's part
Nevertheless, there is no evidence that Biden played any role in securing that position for Hunter, even though the intent of the oligarch involved may have been to curry favor with the US government
On the contrary, Joe Biden on behalf of the Obama Administration pushed the Ukrainian government to reinstate the prosecutor that had been investigating the company with which his son Hunter was associated, the opposite of what one would expect if Biden were trying to protect that company
It is, probably unfortunately, legal for close family members of senior elected officials to take positions that create an appearance of undue influence on the officials
It's unfair that Joe Biden has to respond to transparently manufactured charges of illegal/unethical behavior on his part
But he does have to respond to them
The corporate media's habit of trying to set up Both Sides Do It interpretations of every controversy is especially toxic when pseudoscandals are in play
Unfortunately, when conspiracy theories like this Ukraine pseudoscandal become a practice assumption for large numbers of people, responsible media can't afford to ignore them, as they can and should if they are confined to an isolated minority of kooks or cultists.
Jane Mayer's article is a good one in showing how the Radical Right injects manufactured propaganda falsehoods into the mainstream and works the weaknesses of the corporate press to give the story an appearance of factual legitimacy. As Wilentz wrote in 2001, "the pseudo-scandal masters have managed to gain the subtle and often unwitting but crucial complicity of the independent mainstream news media." The corporate media should have gotten much more savvy about this by now.
The amount of stenography in the New York Times article is hard to miss, since they explicitly quote Biden campaign sources so much. But it does point out that the Ukraine pseudoscandal is only one difficulty in the Biden campaign:
In addition to the attacks from Mr. Trump, Mr. Biden's top rivals, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, each outraised him in the third quarter by about $10 million. And as Ms. Warren has emerged as Mr. Biden's most formidable competition, Mr. Sanders, her main challenger for progressive support, just had a heart attack, casting uncertainty over whether he could siphon votes from Ms. Warren, as the Biden camp had hoped. [my emphasis]
The Biden campaign obviously and understandably wants to keep the focus where it should be, on Trump's illegal solicitation of foreign intervention in the US Presidential eleciton:
His communications aides contend that most voters were more focused on what Mr. Trump did to prompt the impeachment inquiry than on the false claims themselves. And they pointed to the former vice president's forceful attacks on Mr. Trump at a news conference Friday to argue that he was now ready to do battle with the president.
But they also seem to be promoting one of Biden's longtime themes to invoke sympathy for him, his family tragedies:
Mr. Biden was even blunter, and angrier, in private after news first emerged that Mr. Trump had exhorted the Ukrainian government to investigate him and his son.
"I can't believe this guy is going after my family like this," he told Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, as the two campaigned in Iowa, Mr. Coons recalled. ...
But Mr. Biden is confronting an almost unimaginable situation: the president he hopes to challenge is facing impeachment for urging another country to help smear him. What's more, the House inquiry centers on what Mr. Biden values most in his private and public life: protecting his family and honoring institutional norms. Several Democrats close to Mr. Biden say he did not take on Mr. Trump sooner in large part because of his reverence for congressional prerogatives - he did not want to immediately insert himself into the House's jurisdiction. But Mr. Biden also sought to address the attacks on his son on his own terms rather than sit for hastily arranged television interviews that would have forced him to answer questions about Hunter Biden's work that few of his own aides dared pose.
I share Paul Krugman's reaction to this article, which shows how Biden's faith in an impossible level of bipartisan cooperation with a Republican Party that has degenerated into a cult-like state itself:
Until recently I wondered whether Joe Biden's seeming naivety about the GOP, his insistence that he could work with Rs, was a pose. But it's now clear that he really was clueless about the ruthlessness of his opponents. Not a good sign https://t.co/UsznZjGfzN
I would also note that in that last bit of stenography quoted, the sources still seem to be proceeding from an assumption that impeachment is something that the Democrats should have avoided if they could.
