What should we carry into 2021? -- Dec. 31, 2020 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Four years ago this week, I wrote about “The Things They Carried,” Tim O’Brien’s haunting short story about the weight of things foot soldiers carried in Vietnam.

The soldiers carried necessities as practical as mosquito repellent, as powerful as anti-personnel mines and as personal as memories. The short story is a classic, beautifully written, rich in detail and as poignant now as when it was first published in 1990.

Rereading it made me start thinking about the New Year, what I wanted to carry into 2017 and what I hoped we could leave behind.

I mainly thought we should leave behind the 2016 presidential election. At the time, the wounds of Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump were still fresh. Her supporters were devastated, and recriminations were flying.

Yes, the election was a shock, but we need to let it go, I said.

Commentators were prolonging the agony, and even President Barack Obama opined that he could have beaten Trump in the general election had he been able to run again. I thought that was the kind of wishful thinking Democrats should leave behind with 2016.

In retrospect, the 2016 election was a civics lesson. While Democrats were sad about Clinton’s loss in the Electoral College, after winning 3 million more popular votes than Trump, they did not deny Trump’s victory. No one harped for weeks the election was rigged or voter fraud rampant. Clinton was gracious in defeat.

No one could have imagined then how the Trump presidency would shred democratic norms and values or that it would end in a Trumpian hail of false claims of victory, spurious attacks on election and state officials and even on Republicans who dared to acknowledge reality that Joe Biden won.

But Trump has always been all about Trump. Even after dozens of defeats in the courts challenging election results without producing any verifiable evidence and numerous failed overtures to bully state legislators into overturning the will of voters, Trump continues to rage against facts and truth.

“Can you imagine if the Republicans stole a Presidential Election from the Democrats – All hell would break out,” he tweeted Tuesday from Florida. His temper tantrums are ludicrous but also dangerous.

Trump still has many dedicated followers, and I write this knowing they will see red – and not just their MAGA hats – at my opinion.

Democrats, take note: Trump was the most admired man in America in 2020, Gallup poll reported Tuesday, with 18% of respondents naming Trump compared with 15% for Obama. Trump toppled Obama from the top slot after 12 years.

Biden came in at 6% and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, 3%.

When Gallup asks people the open-ended question which man and woman they admire most, the incumbent president usually wins, the pollster reported. But 21% of respondents this time did not offer an opinion at all and 11% named a relative or friend as the man they admire most.

So what should we leave behind in 2020? I wish we could leave the disputes over the 2020 presidential election, but we know Trump will never concede. He’ll keep flailing in the mud from Mar-a-Lago or wherever he ends up after Jan. 20. But Americans will no longer need to pay attention to his sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Biden has a rocky road ahead, and it’s made more difficult by lies that he gained the office by cheating. Biden, though, already is showing a contrast with the last four years of megalomania. He has the experience at governing that should help restore confidence in our battered institutions.

He’s surrounding himself with a diverse group of competent people, starting with his choice for vice president. Kamala Harris will inspire new generations of young people to public service.

And what should we carry into 2021? You already know. We need to keep our masks and hand sanitizer close and our social distance. We need to fight coronavirus fatigue and be ready to roll up our sleeve to take the COVID-19 vaccine when it’s our turn.

That’s the only way we truly will put 2020 behind us.

Happy New Year.

©2020 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

What Trump in 2016 teaches us about 2020 -- March 21, 2019 column

By MARSHA MERCER

We’re coming up on a milestone, of sorts.

On March 23 four years ago, the first hopeful Republican contender entered the 2016 presidential race.

“The answer will not come from Washington,” he said. It will come “when the American people stand together, and say, `We will get back to the principles that made this country great.’”

Sound familiar? Not exactly. It was Ted Cruz, in a speech to cheering students at Liberty University.

That was in the B.D. era – Before Donald.

As more Democrats line up to run for president, it’s worth remembering what happened when 17 Republicans competed for the presidential nomination.

We know who won. How many of the others can you still name?

Time’s up. They were: Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Chris Christie, Carly Fiorina, Jim Gilmore, Lindsey Graham, Mike Huckabee, Bobby Jindal, John Kasich, George Pataki, Rand Paul, Rick Perry, Marco Rubio, Rick Santorum and Scott Walker.

When Donald Trump jumped in nearly three months after Cruz, he vowed at Trump Tower to “make our country great again” and “have Mexico pay for the wall.”

He also gave a sour taste of things to come when he gratuitously belittled his opponents at their campaign launches.

“They didn’t know the air conditioner didn’t work. They sweated like dogs. They didn’t know the room was too big, because they didn’t have anybody there. How are they going to beat ISIS?” Trump said.

Trump was making a fallacy of false cause argument -- trying to establish cause and effect between unrelated things. Someone’s not knowing the air conditioning was broken at a venue shows absolutely nothing about how he’d do at fighting ISIS. It’s absurd, but catchy.  

Trump laid waste to once-viable candidates one disparaging nickname at a time: “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz, “Liddle Marco” Rubio and “Low Energy” Jeb Bush.

In Cruz’s case, Trump also claimed Cruz’s father was associated with Lee Harvey Oswald before the JFK assassination. Cruz called the allegation nuts and kooky.

“You know, you have to brand people a certain way when they’re your opponents,” Trump said before the Florida primary in March 2016, explaining how to call out Cruz: It’s “Lyin’ Ted,” he said, “L-Y-I-N-apostrophe.”

“We can’t say it the right way,” he said. “We’ve got to go, Lyin’! Lyin’! Ted!”

Moving on to Rubio, he spelled out “L-I-D-D-L-E. Liddle, Liddle, Liddle Marco.”

Trump has an uncanny knack for finding a rival’s soft spot and choosing a nickname that sticks.

He famously labeled Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton “crooked Hillary,” called her “such a nasty woman” in a debate, and at rallies beamed as his supporters chanted, “Lock Her Up.”

Trump’s ad hominem attacks were stupid, wrong and creepily effective.

Now, the 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls are his target.

He reportedly thinks Elizabeth Warren will be the Democrats’ pick and early on dubbed her Pocahontas for her claim of Native American heritage. She has struggled ever since, finally apologizing for saying she was Native American.

Lately, Trump watched Beto O’Rourke’s video announcing his candidacy March 14 and picked up on his expansive hand gestures.

“I think he’s got a lot of hand movement. I’ve never seen so much hand movement. I said, `Is he crazy, or is that just the way he acts?’” Trump told reporters.

It’s only March 2019. O’Rourke has time to tone down the splashy gestures. Not all the Democratic candidates are even in the pool.

Joe Biden is said to enter the race soon. Virginians Terry McAuliffe and Mark Warner are among those weighing a bid.

Meanwhile, Trump is warming up his attack machine. He called Biden Monday “another low I.Q. individual.”

As we saw in 2016, he shut down his rivals before they could introduce and fully define themselves through their actions, ideas and policies.

Trump will try again to set the tone of the presidential campaign with his personal-attack brand of politics, but he doesn’t set the rules.

Voters should pay attention to policies and hold all candidates accountable for glib fallacies and falsehoods.

We can tune out slurs and nicknames for what they are: petty, malicious noise.

And, most important, we can vote.    

©2019 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

Third time's the charm for Romney? -- Oct. 16, 2014 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Oh, Mitt, they need you.

No, not the out-of-touch, loser Mitt Romney of 2008 and 2012.  

What they want is the new and improved Mitt, version 2016, who would connect with voters by showing his compassion and his competence. And maybe his sense of humor. That, anyway, is the hope of establishment Republicans who have been trying for months to persuade Romney to make his third bid for the White House.

“Run, Mitt, run!” supporters chanted in Iowa last Monday.

As always with political nostalgia, the boomlet for Romney says more about current discontent than a true longing for the past. Romney is the Republicans’ national leader, and he looks positively statesmanlike next to, say, Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

Showing their compassion, the Romneys will raise $50 million for the just announced Ann Romney Center for Neurologic Diseases, which will bring 200 scientists together to study multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s and other diseases. Ann Romney, 65, was diagnosed with MS in 1998; it is in remission. The center is scheduled to open in 2016 in Boston.

Even so Romney, 67, is an odd choice as the GOP’s next big thing. He was a terrible presidential candidate.

To recap, Romney in 2012 lost women, 18- to 29-year-olds, African American, Hispanic and Asian voters to President Barack Obama. Romney’s fan base was whites, people 45 and older and especially those 65 and above. Romney barely won college educated voters, but Obama took the post-graduate school set.

  

Romney’s defenders blame his advisers and insist voters never saw the real Romney. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., Romney’s running mate in 2012, says he will forgo his own presidential run next time if Romney tries again.

“Third time’s the charm,” Ryan says.

For now, Romney is generating buzz by saying he’s not planning to run for president. His wife also says he has no plans to run. She told the Los Angeles Times the family is “done, done, done” with presidential campaigns.

But Ann Romney told The Washington Post, “Honestly, we’ll have to see what happens.” Romney himself recently conceded that “circumstances can change.” Aha!

Romney says he learned a lot from 2012, particularly that anything he says may wind up on the front page. At a Florida hotel in May 2012, he thought he was speaking only to donors at a closed fundraiser when he disparaged the “47 percent” of the electorate who are dependent on government, pay no income taxes and will vote for Obama “no matter what.” Mother Jones later obtained the video and put it online – where it lives in perpetuity.

Given that the video will live forever, consideration of Romney for 2016 has an air of desperation:  Who else could stop a kook like Rand Paul or Ted Cruz in the GOP primaries? Who else might stop the Hillary Clinton juggernaut? 

Jeb, of course. If former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush decides to run, the pressure on Romney to run could evaporate. Bush also hasn’t decided whether he’s in, although he now says his wife is supportive and his mother has moved to neutral.   

To prove he’s not running for office, Romney actually told a joke the other day. Advisers always tell candidates to avoid jokes. Here it is:

“President Obama went to the bank to cash a check, and he didn’t have his ID. And the teller said, `You’ve got to prove who you are.’

“He said, `How should I do that?’ She said, `The other day Phil Mickelson came in; he didn’t have his ID but he set up a little cup on the ground, took a golf ball, putted it right into that cup so we knew it was Phil Mickelson. We cashed his check.’

“`And then Andre Agassi came in and...didn’t have his ID either. He put a little target on the wall, took a tennis ball and racquet, hit it onto that target time and again. We knew that was Andre Agassi, so we cashed his check.’

“And she said to him, `Is there anything you can do to prove who you are?’

“And [Obama] said, `I don’t have a clue.’

“And she said, `Well, Mister President, do you want your money in small bills or large bills?’”

The crowd loved it. Meet the new Mitt. What a card.

© 2014 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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