"Should Democrats Have Sat Through the State of the Union?
No, They Shouldn’t Have Showed Up in the First Place"
Those of us who watched the SOTU Tuesday night probably asked ourselves the same question as Matthew Sitman does in this short essay (up on CWL now): "Why Am I Watching This." Maybe it was the thrill of 80 minutes of idiocy. Or maybe it was the ultimate question: How far will he go? We could have turned off the TV, walked away, or gone to the bathroom anytime.
But we had a choice. The Democrats en bloc did not. They are the Other Party and their prospects and projects aren't so prize-winning or electorally alluring that they can afford to absent themselves from the struggle to keep the ship afloat. Some members didn't come, but the party was there, the surrogate for that part of the citizenry appalled by this president. More important: though ours is not a parliamentary system, the Democrats are the official opposition (enshrined neither in the Constitution nor in law, but only in custom and history). Their absence would have signaled one of the dangers of our current situation, a one-party state.
The Democrats are what stands between us and who knows what. Stop giving them bad advice.
P.S. some of you may be amused by this ID on my column in the on-line version of February 9. "Margaret O'Brien Steinfels, a former editor of Commonweal, writes frequently in these pages and once blogged at now-deceased dotCommonweal".
"Now-deceased" sounds ominous: not simply on life support as some may have hoped.
I agree. It's their duty to be there. Although I'd rather have a root canal. Personally, I got out of the habit of watching State of the Union during Bush II. The sight of Repubs AND Dems applauding Bush's lame war pieties got to be too much. I can always catch the highlights and synopses later and skip the dulling boredom.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you and Margaret that the Democrats needed to be there. They need to send the message that they are responsible adults, and pouting and going AWOL isn't the way to do it.
DeleteI'm still reeling over the fact that a publication that my sainted senior English teacher pointed out as "quality reading" used "have showed" instead of "shown," the word "normalcy" instead of "normality," and "deceased" instead of "defunct."
ReplyDeleteYes, Democrats needed to show up so they could testify that they saw it first hand and were appalled. It wasn't as if they were jumping up and licking Trump's face like the big dumb dogs in the GOP.
Whether the Democratic Party can keep the ship afloat, much less steer it, is another debate.
LOL, in my line of work normality is the gram equivalent; a measure of the reactivity of a molecule in solutiion.
DeleteThanks, Teach. I'll have to remember the "normality/normalcy" thing. Guilty of it, myself, I believe.
ReplyDeleteWarren G. Harding didn't coin the word as far as I know, but a campaign slogan was "return to normalcy," contributing to both vapid political rhetoric and poor usage at once.
DeleteOf course, Trump has erected a new bar for judging bad presidents. By comparison, Warren G. seems like a not-too-bright bon vivant with poor judgment who happily supported his illegitimate child and mistress, and who died in office before he could wreak a full two terms of havoc and corrupt deals on the nation.
The only black kid in my white bread Catholic all boys high school was named Harding G. Warren. With a name like that, he had to be a nice guy and he was.
DeleteHear! Hear! for hardy Warren! What a guy.
DeleteI feel a bit uncomfortable doing this, but . . . This isn't an "Advertisement for Myself" (cf. Norman Mailer) but for a long comment of mine at the end of Margaret Steinfels' earlier "When the Irish Mafia was virtuous". She posted it almost a week ago, so most of you probably stopped checking in to see if there were new comments. I didn't post mine till yesterday. I'm emboldened to do this because, as you'll see, the people who have read the comment, have liked it a lot; I think you might, too. Thanks for indulging me.
ReplyDeleteI thought the president's speech was nearly a home run, and I thought the Democratic members of Congress looked awful. Previously, I had assumed that Republican politicians had registered the trademark on the I-just-swallowed-a-pint-of-castor-oil facial expression, but Democrats were in full pinched-face flower that night.
ReplyDeleteAmong the items for which Democrats remained in the stony-faced seated position were a healthy economy, a record-breaking stock market, record low unemployment for blacks and Hispanics, the virtual collapse of ISIS and the Capitol Building. Oh, and the grieving parents of two girls who were murdered by a street gang.
Trump played them like a violin. Democrats have given Republicans a lot of campaign ad material. They should be ashamed of themselves.
Trump's approval ratings have gone up something like 10 points in recent days. It's possible that the speech was, or was part of, a turning point in Trump's presidency.
Rather than disagreeing strenuously with your assessment about the Dems, let me point out that Trump is a master at painting people into a corner. He makes himself wholly obnoxious, and then says some things that probably ought to be applauded. But one hesitates to do so because one's constituents might take it as giving Trump credit for these achievements rather than simply acknowledging them.
DeleteAs a result, Dems will catch flak from some in their party for applauding, for showing up, for sitting stone-faced, or not showing up. And thereby the Dem base is distracted from the takeover of the oligarchs.
Trump is an evil bastard who is manifestly on intimate terms with the Seven Deadlies. I suspect he's given them each a free suite at Mar-a-Lago. But he's quite cagey, and we underestimate him at our peril.
I thought I was a Pollyanna! Jim you take the cupcake!
DeleteJim, you are right about Trump playing them like a violin. But I wouldn't call his speech a home run. He just managed for a change not to embarrass himself. I guess that sort of is a home run the way things have gone for the past several months. I didn't listen to the whole thing, I had more fun things to do like clean the refrigerator. But my husband watched it and I checked in from time to time. One thing I noticed was that the audience applauded after every. single. sentence. I know these things are interrupted by frequent applause, but this reminded me of a middle school awards night.
DeleteYes, as long as the economy vital signs are going in a favorable direction, he is going to get credit for it, and some people aren't going to delve any deeper. And they're not going to parse the difference between correlation and causation.
Katherine - you're right that my expectations were bottom-of-the-pond low, so any distant similarity to an actual president seemed reason to exhale gratefully.
DeleteIt turns out that Dana Milbank has been reading this blog. Or, given that his column is dated before my comment, it's just barely possible he thought this through on his own. He does pick my theme and elaborate on it, although he also introduces a few notes I don't endorse. Headline: "Democrats' behavior at the State of the Union was embarrassing".
Delete"This matters, because as nasty as Trump’s speech was, his first 20-or-so minutes contained an effective message — false, but effective — about how his plutocratic policies have boosted the economy and benefited working people. Democrats need a simple, clear and effective counter to that claim, and it is not to be found in the unfocused protests and reflexive petulance they showed Tuesday and again Wednesday."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/democrats-behavior-at-the-state-of-the-union-was-embarassing/2018/01/31/b2461c1a-06cc-11e8-8777-2a059f168dd2_story.html?utm_term=.c610a0572b5a
Per Milbank, I am not clear how a message can be both false and effective. Yesterday the stock swooned (not that that is "the economy"), and we've yet to see how working people will benefit from Trumpian policies. Waiting to see how coal miners will do and workers at Carrier air conditioning.
DeleteThe Stock Market swoon has been attributed to rising wages and a hint of inflation. So Trump can brag about the stock market if he wants, but it does not like rising wages. What does he brag about then?
You and I don't disagree about the poor performance of the Democrats either at the SOTU, or in general. However bad they look and however dismal their prospects come to be in November, at least they are not sycophants, such as most (not all) members of the House Republicans, and some (not all) members of the Senate Republicans. Republicans in Congress follow a dangerous path in supporting Trump's every word and in failing to call him to account, e.g. Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell--grit your teeth.
"I am not clear how a message can be both false and effective."
DeleteHow about this lie that was effective in getting candidate Trump elected?
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”--Donald Trump
It sounds a lot like Horace Greeley's patently false attack on Chinese immigrants in the 1870s, which effectively led to the Chinese Exclusion Act:
"The Chinese are uncivilized, unclean, and filthy beyond all conception, without any of the higher domestic or social relations; lustful and sensual in their dispositions; every female is a prostitute of the basest order."
Lies are effective messages if enough people in power repeat them.
I think Democrats should show up. I'd consider it a black mark for any congressperson of either party to boycott one of these painful customs, regardless of who is president.
ReplyDeleteDaniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal offers what I consider some plausible speculation as to what was passing through Minority Leader Pelosi's mind:
"It was impossible not to notice that Nancy Pelosi spent President Trump’s 70-minute State of the Union speech grimly chewing her cheek. She was thinking: “What I know, and he doesn’t know, is that history says a year from now I will be speaker of the House, and he’ll be on the brink of impeachment.” Odds are, she’s right."
https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-trump-hold-the-house-1517440357?shareToken=st5f1de158746742d0b507dc2629fd2361&reflink=article_email_share
Watching Nancy Pelosi grimace and grit her teeth made me think she should talk to Gov. Jerry Brown about some Zen-like mindfulness. At our age we should not be gritting our teeth like that. Bad for the enamel and the root canals.
DeleteI confess I only listened to SOTU in the radio because I could not stand the prospect of watching Howdy Doody Pence and Eddie Munster Ryan looking on in fawning adulation at an elderly man with a bad dye job and spray-on tan taking credit for making America a great big embarrassment again.
DeleteI think saying her rosary as Trump served up his offal might have been appropriate. Who could fault her for praying for Our Prez?