Ronald E. Yates's Blog, page 56

Joe Biden: Not My President?

Some of my followers may have wondered why I haven’t been posting anything since my last post on November 21. Or maybe you haven’t.

That’s okay. I am going to tell you anyway.

It has taken me this long to digest the indigestible dog’s dinner that the 2020 presidential election turned out to be.

During my 30-year career as a reporter and editor, I have never witnessed a more outrageous and potentially fraudulent presidential election. Millions of unsolicited mail-in ballots were sent out and distributed by state election officials to dead people, people who had moved to other states, to illegal aliens, to people who received not one, not two, but sometimes four and five ballots.

We all know who was behind this disgrace and travesty of an election: election officials in states run mostly by Democrat governors.

Chicago’s late Democrat Mayor Richard J. Daley must be smiling down (or up) from whatever transcendent, otherworldly abode in which he is currently residing. For those who don’t know about Daley, he was the last of the so-called “big city bosses” and he ran one of the most efficient, effective, and corrupt Democrat machines in American history from 1955 to 1976.

Chicago Mayor Daley ca 1968

How the Dems managed to filch the election from Trump needs to be investigated by a special counsel and I hope Barr appoints one to do that, thereby making Biden’s tenure in the White House as miserable as the Dems have made Trump and his family since 2016.

If Daley were still around, he could tell us. He had so many dead voters casting ballots for him and his machine that it is said he only campaigned in the city’s cemeteries.

If Donald Trump had been defeated fairly without the taint of rigged ballot machines, phony ballots, unsigned mail-in ballot sleeves, people voting multiple times, thousands of ballots marked only for Biden and no votes for down-ballot candidates, and ballot counting in the middle of the night after both Democrat and GOP observers were booted out of counting centers, I would have been more inclined to accept Biden’s improbable election.

As it is, I am tempted to do what Democrats did when Donald Trump was elected in 2016 and shout: “Not My President.”

But I won’t, because once Biden is sworn in, Joe Biden will, for better or worse, be “my president,” even if he received an implausible 80 million votes by hunkering in his basement without doing any substantive campaigning.

But that’s not the only reason I am tempted to shout “Biden is NOT my president.”

Biden is a proven liar and plagiarist—inconvenient truths that forced him to drop out of the 1988 presidential race. Don’t take my word for it. Check out this montage from various news networks. If you haven’t seen this, you owe it to yourself to view it. It’s short!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCJMF7mflGE

Isn’t it amazing that the American public and press were outraged by this behavior in the 1980s, but in 2020 nobody cares if a 78-year-old prevaricator and plagiarist with a diminished mental capacity becomes the American president?

More recently, evidence and corroboration have emerged about the Biden family’s inappropriate financial dealings with China and Ukraine while he was Vice-President under Obama. Most of us have heard all about the millions of dollars Hunter Biden took from Ukraine and China and the 10% that went to the “Big Guy.”

Turns out the “Big Guy” is the millionaire deceiver and prevaricator who is going to attempt to lead the country.

Here is what to expect.

If the Democrats gain control of the Senate, there is little doubt that we are headed for socialism, with illegitimate and devious restraints on the First and Second Amendments, not to mention checks on many other rights that we take for granted today.

I believe many of the 74 million Americans who voted for Trump will not sit by passively as their rights are taken away while the country returns to being a willing supplicant to China as it was under the feckless Obama.

I hate to think about what will happen with Iran and the progress President Trump made in the Middle East with historic peace accords between Israel and Arab countries. By the way, even though these were the first peace accords in the Middle East in a quarter-century, the corrupt legacy media chose largely to ignore them or give them short shrift.

Be prepared for a reversal of Trump’s drawdown of American military involvement in the Middle East and Afghanistan. More war in the M.E. may be right around the corner.

All those who voted for Biden should also get ready for a precipitous decline in our economy; massive job losses as companies move off-shore once again in response to Biden’s promised 10 percent increase in corporate taxes; and a rise in long-term interest rates triggered by decreased demand for treasury notes under Janet Yellen, Biden’s pick for Treasury Secretary. Yellen is considered a monetary policy “dove” meaning she prefers keeping rates low to spur more hiring and faster job and wage growth without worrying too much about rising inflation.

As for short-term interest rates, I predict the Fed will attempt to get a handle on our multi-trillion-dollar debt by decreasing the money supply & raising interest rates, thereby making it more attractive to deposit funds and reduce borrowing from the central bank.

Nobody in Biden’s cabinet has ever run a business or had to meet a payroll. For most of their adult lives, they have gorged themselves like swine at the public trough—and that includes Biden and Kamala Harris, who is quite possibly a communist, like her mother and father. Don’t expect either Biden or Harris to have any understanding or sympathy for struggling small American business owners who are the backbone of this nation’s economy.

Instead, watch Biden the falsifier and plagiarist take credit for the Covid-19 vaccine and its swift distribution which has already started under President Trump. Biden will gut religious freedom protections that allow faith-based homeless shelters, charities, and small business owners to act according to their consciences. He has promised to eliminate ALL of Trump’s tax cuts while raising taxes on individuals and small businesses. Even more disturbing is Biden’s promise to rein in charter schools, which have proven to be an effective alternative to failing schools in our nation’s inner cities.

Watch him on day one of his presidency use a slew of executive orders to undo many of Donald Trump’s America-First policies, such as the elimination of business-crushing government regulations; Trump’s tough trade stance vis-à-vis a predatory China; his departure from the Paris climate accord and the World Health Organization; his ban on travel from some Muslim-majority countries; and his withdrawal from the flawed Iran nuclear accord.

In other words, Biden’s regime will be a repeat of the weak and ineffective Obama administration in which the United States returns to leading from behind while allowing our so-called allies in Europe and Asia to take advantage of us with unfair trade deals and unfavorable international political agreements and treaties. Does NATO ring a bell?

So, is Joe Biden my president?

No, he isn’t. Not yet, at least. He will have to earn my support by proving he can actually bring a divided nation together.

Sadly, right now, Biden appears more disposed to continue alienating conservatives and Trump supporters by pushing an uncompromising and unprecedented leftist/socialist agenda.

That’s a mistake. The United States is NOT a socialist country and I hope it never will be.

Stay tuned!

 

 

 

 

 

 

New NYC Book Award Video for The Lost Years of Billy Battles

Hey, ForeignCorrespondent followers, check out this new video for The Lost Years of Billy Battles from the New York City Big Book Awards. Let me know what you think. It was part of the prize package for the book’s NYC Big Book Award.

The Lost Years of Billy Battles is Book 3 in the award-winning Finding Billy Battles Trilogy. The trilogy is available on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001KHDVZI/-/e/B00KQAYMA8/

You can find out more about the New York City Big Book Awards here: nycbigbookaward.com and here: https://www.youtube.com/c/IndependentPressAwardSpringNYCBigBookAwardFall

Thank you for stopping by!

Happy Veterans Day to All My Fellow Vets

Today is Veterans Day. Given that only 7 percent of the people of this nation have ever put on a uniform, I am not sure Americans have any idea just why Veterans Day is a holiday.

Yes, it means schools and most government offices are closed. But it means a lot more to the men and women who served this country.

Veterans Day gives Americans the opportunity to celebrate the bravery and sacrifice of all U.S. veterans. However, most Americans confuse this holiday with Memorial Day, reports the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Memorial Day honors service members who died in service to their country or as a result of injuries incurred during battle. Deceased veterans are also remembered on Veterans Day but the day is really set aside to thank and honor living veterans who served honorably in the military – in wartime or peacetime.

[image error] PFC Ron Yates

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Someone, I don’t know who, once defined a veteran this way: “A Veteran is someone who, at one point in his or her life, wrote a blank check made payable to “The United States of America,” for an amount of “up to, and including his or her life.”

That is Honor. It’s a concept that those who have never worn the uniform will ever fully comprehend or appreciate.

There are too many people in this country today who no longer understand what honor and sacrifice are.

Today, when athletes feel entitled to kneel during the playing of the National Anthem, or when our nation’s flag is burned or disrespected, it’s a slap in the face to veterans–at least to most of us.

Yes, it is a First Amendment right to display that contempt and to disparage those who served. The great irony is that those who do are permitted to enjoy the advantages and freedom veterans have won for them just the same.

I joined the U.S. Army in the 1960s and spent almost four years on active duty with the Army Security Agency (ASA). It was probably the best thing I ever did. It taught me about leadership, self-discipline, and working as part of a team. It taught me to be dependable and trustworthy. And it showed me the importance of serving something more important than yourself—the country that you were fortunate enough to be a citizen of.

I achieved the rank of Sergeant (E-5) and had I re-upped I was promised an immediate promotion to Staff Sergeant (E-6) along with a hefty re-enlistment bonus because I had what the Army considered a “critical MOS” (Military Occupation Specialty). I declined because I wanted to finish my college education and become a foreign correspondent. I achieved both and I credit my time in the U.S. Army with teaching me about setting goals and doing what is necessary to achieve them.

[image error] U.S. Army Security Agency Shoulder Patch

Let me end with a few facts about the nation’s veterans.

There are 18 million veterans living in the United States as of 2020, according to the Census Bureau. Of these, 1.7 million are women.
As of last year, there were 6.4 million American veterans who served during the Vietnam era and 7.1 million who served in the Gulf War era, which spans from August 1990 through the present. (Some veterans served through both eras.) There were also about 500,000 World War II veterans, down from 5.7 million in 2000. There are another 1.6 million who served during the Korean conflict, the VA estimates.
About three-quarters (77%) of veterans in 2020 served during wartime and 23% served during peacetime.
A large proportion of the veteran population, 9.2 million, are aged 65 and older, while 1.6 million are younger than 35. By service period, Post-9/11 veterans were the youngest with a median age of about 37; Vietnam Era veterans had a median age of about 71, and World War II veterans were the oldest with a median age of about 93.
Currently, nine-in-ten veterans (91%) are men while 9% are women, according to the VA’s 2016 population model estimates. By 2045, the share of female veterans is expected to double to 18%.

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Fewer members of Congress have prior military experience than in the past. As the share of Americans who are veterans has declined, so has the share of Congress members who have previously served in the military. In the current Congress, 20% of senators and 19% of representatives had prior military service, down drastically from just a few decades ago.
The American labor force has 7.2 million veterans ages 18 to 65. Of these, 6.8 million are employed. Male and female veterans’ annual median incomes are both higher than their nonveteran counterparts.

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Veterans from recent service periods have the highest levels of education. More than three-quarters of Post-9/11 and Gulf War veterans had at least some college experience, and more than one-third of Gulf War veterans had a college degree.
Post-9/11 veterans had a 43% chance of having a service-connected disability, after accounting for differences in demographic and social characteristics among veterans —significantly higher than that of veterans from other periods.
Among veterans who had a service-connected disability, Post-9/11 veterans had a 39% chance of having a disability rating of 70% or more — significantly higher than for veterans from other periods.

So, this is just a quick shout out to all of my fellow veterans who put on the uniform of this country and served: HOO-RAH!  

Musical artist Sailor Jerri shares her music video of Hallelujah that she rewrote as a tribute song for Veterans. Click on this link to hear her:

Hallelujah Veterans

Some Facts About Books, Publishing and Technology You Didn’t Know

I have updated this previously posted story to include the latest numbers and facts about books and the publishing industry. For those who may have missed it the first time around, I hope you enjoy it. For those seeing it for the first time, I hope you will find it eye-opening. 

I  am a compulsive collector of trivial information, some of which is not as trivial as you might think.

For example, as a writer, the following facts fascinated me about books and publishing–an area that I am primarily focused on because it is critical to my work.

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In 1889, 4,600 book titles were published in America.
By 1989, 45,000 new book titles were published.
In 2009–just 30 years later–1.3 million new titles were released in the U.S.
Today, there are more than 7,000,000 books available for sale–most of them e-books in places like Amazon.
57% of all books are not sold in bookstores – they are sold by mail order, online, through book clubs, or in warehouse stores.
In 2005, 1.2 million book title sales were tracked by Nielsen Bookscan, and only 25,000 titles sold more than 5,000 copies each. Another 950,000 books sold fewer than 99 copies.
First-time authors write 75% of all new nonfiction books published each year.
85% of all new titles published each year are non-fiction, and 15% are fiction.

For those who write for a living (or just for the fun of it) some of that information will be a wake-up call–especially the fact that almost 1 million books published each year via a variety of avenues (e-books, self-publishing, publishing on demand, publishing with small and vanity houses) will sell less than 99 copies.

And that brings me to a topic that I have discussed in previous posts, namely, how even the most successful authors struggled to get their work before the public.

Take Chicken Soup for the Soul, with sales of more than 8 million copies and which subsequently generated a series that includes more than 80 best-selling books. It was rejected by 144 publishers before it was finally published.

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Here are a few more of these “no talent” authors.

A Time to Kill by John Grisham was rejected 45 times. Stephen King’s debut novel, Carrie, was declined 30 times. J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was rejected – 14 times!  And even Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell was declined by 38 publishers.

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That tells me that publishers and those who read the manuscripts that fly over their transoms make a lot of mistakes when it comes to judging what makes a good book. Publishers are notorious for turning down books that went on to become bestsellers.

Of course, there is no accounting for taste. For example, what kinds of books do you think are selling the most today?

If you guessed romance and erotica novels, you would be right. Those books top any other genre by far, within fiction. Women make up 90.5% of their readership. Last year, romance novels brought in $1.4 billion in revenue.  Mysteries brought in half of that. Classic literary fiction revenue generates barely a third of what romance books earn. I am not a big fan of romance and erotica novels, but I say to those who write them: “good on ya.”

Here’s another fact. The United States has the largest publishing industry in the world. In 2015 the U.S. market was worth just under $35 billion and represented about 26 percent of the total global publishing market. The book publishing industry claimed the largest share of that amount, with revenues totaling almost $34 billion the same year.

And here are some more facts from AuthorEarnings.com, a website for authors, by authors. The Author Earnings report produced by the website takes its data from 7,000 top-selling digital genre titles on Amazon’s category bestseller lists. Here is what it found:

The Big Five traditional publishers now account for only 16% of the e-books on Amazon’s bestseller lists.
Self-published books now represent 39% of e-book sales on Amazon’s Kindle Store.
Indie authors are earning nearly 50% of the e-book dollars going to authors.
Self-published authors are “dominating traditionally published authors” in sci-fi/fantasy, mystery/thriller, and romance genres but — and here is the surprise — they are also taking “significant market share in all genres.”

In other words, this is not your father’s or grandfather’s publishing world. The options for writers today are almost limitless.

And finally, let me end with a collection of a few more facts that were contained in the most recent Author Earnings Report.

$2.99 and $3.99 are currently the pricing sweet spots for most e-book bestsellers. In general, authors who price their books modestly earn more than those whose average price is higher, but 99 cents is “no longer the path to riches.”
Readers prefer longer e-books. Bestselling books tend to be over 100,000 words. This came as a big surprise to us.
Series books outsell standalone books — but series books under 50,000 words are at a sales disadvantage.
Free still works as a marketing tool, especially when an author offers the first book in a series for free. Still, it is much less useful than before — primarily because so many authors are taking advantage of it.
Pre-orders give authors a sales advantage. “I think pre-orders today are where free was five years ago,” says Mark Coker, founder of e-book distributor Smashwords. “The first authors to effectively utilize pre-orders will gain the most advantage, just as the first authors to enter new distribution channels gain the most advantage,” he says.
Non-fiction earns more at higher prices. That was a real shocker for me. “Non-fiction buyers are less price-sensitive,” says Coker. “It appears as if most non-fiction authors are under-pricing their works, and they should experiment with higher prices,” he says.

So what are the lessons you can learn from all of these facts? Well, for one thing, you don’t have to drown in rejection slips from traditional publishers. You can publish your book yourself as an independent author, or you can choose to publish an e-book via Amazon, Createspace, Smashwords, or any number of other organizations that publish e-books.

The world of book publishing is changing at warp speed. There is no need to be left behind. However, if you choose to forgo the traditional publishing route, be prepared to spend countless hours marketing your work via a variety of avenues.

But that is a topic for another day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Post Election Therapy: Read a Good Book. Here are the 100 Greatest Books of All Time

Okay, the election is over. Well, maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. And maybe you are happy with the outcome, or maybe you are not. In any case, it can’t hurt to take your mind off it. One way to do that is to pick up a good book and lose yourself in it. So today, I am providing a list of the greatest books in the world as chosen by W. John Campbell, a writer, and literary critic.

In his book, The Book of Great Books: A Guide to 100 World Classics, written in 1997, Campbell not only lists the top 100 books, but he also provides summaries of each work with an analysis of the main themes, writing style, key characters, plots, the language and social trends in the period in which each book was written, and so on. The 866-page book has sold more than one million copies since its publication 19 years ago.

When the book was first published, The New York Times wrote that “The Book of Great Books unlocks the secrets to 100 of the world’s most enduring novels, plays, and epic poems. Encompassing great works by authors from Homer to Hemingway and from Machiavelli to Toni Morrison, this book will guide you through the plot twists, major themes, and key details that make these classics so enduringly classic.”

Obviously, not everyone will agree with Campbell’s selections.

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[image error] Missing from the list: Two Classics

For example, I can think of a few books that should be on the list that aren’t. Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop and Brideshead Revisited are missing, as is Sister Carrie, by Theodore Dreiser.

And then there’s The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexander Dumas; Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte; The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky; Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo; Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe; Kim, by Rudyard Kipling; and To Kill a Mockingbird, by the late Harper Lee.

Clearly, Professor Campbell’s book was not meant to be authoritative. It is one person’s list, albeit a list compiled by an individual with impeccable credentials.

However, I will let you be the judge. Would these books fill your top 100 list? What books would YOU add to this list? Would you delete any?

You can let me know in the Comments area at the end of this post.

Here they are, listed alphabetically:

Aeneid, Virgil

All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Marie Remarque

All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren

Animal Farm, George Orwell

As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner

As You Like It, William Shakespeare

The Awakening, Kate Chopin

Beowulf, Anonymous

Billy Budd, Herman Melville

The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison

Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

The Call of the Wild, Jack London

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Candide, Voltaire

The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer

Catch-22, Joseph Heller

The Color Purple, Alice Walker

Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The Crucible, Arthur Miller

Daisy Miller, Henry James

David Copperfield, Charles Dickens

Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller

Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank

The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Dante

Doctor Faustus, Christopher Marlowe

A Doll’s House, Henrik Ibsen

Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes

Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton

Euthyphro Apology, Crito, Phaedo Plato

A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway

Faust, Parts 1 and 2, J. W. von Goethe

For Whom the Bell, Tolls Ernest Hemingway

Frankenstein, Mary Shelley

The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams

The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck

The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

Great Expectations, Charles Dickens

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift

Hamlet, William Shakespeare

Hard Times, Charles Dickens

Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

Henry IV Part 1, William Shakespeare

House Made of Dawn, N. Scott Momaday

The House of the Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne

Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou

Iliad, Homer

Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte

The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan

Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare

The Jungle, Upton Sinclair

King Lear, William Shakespeare

Light in August, William Faulkner

Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad

The Lord of the Flies, William Golding

The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien

Macbeth, William Shakespeare

Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert

The Mayor of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy

The Merchant of Venice, William Shakespeare

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, William Shakespeare

Moby-Dick, Herman Melville

Native Son, Richard Wright

1984, George Orwell

Odyssey, Homer

The Oedipus Trilogy, Sophocles

Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck

The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway

Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s, Nest Ken Kesey

Othello, William Shakespeare

Paradise Lost, John Milton

The Pearl, John Steinbeck

The Plague, Albert Camus

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce

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Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli

The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane

Republic, Plato

The Return of the Native, Thomas Hardy

Richard III, William Shakespeare

Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare

The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne

A Separate Peace, John Knowles

Silas Marner, George Eliot

Sons and Lovers, D.H. Lawrence

The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner

Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse

The Stranger, Albert Camus

The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway

The Taming of the Shrew, William Shakespeare

The Tempest, William Shakespeare

Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy

Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston

Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain

Treasure Island, Robert Lewis Stevenson

Twelfth Night, William Shakespeare

Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett

Walden, Henry David Thoreau

So there you have it. A list of the world’s best books. Do any strike your fancy? I have already found at least six I have not yet read and I suspect I will have to read all six in order to purge the tension and turmoil generated by the frenzied and feverish 2020 presidential election.

‘People Are Going To Be Shocked’: Return of the ‘Shy’ Trump Voter?

Today, I am posting a Q & A with pollsters Arie Kapteyn of USC’s Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research and Robert Cahaly of the Trafalgar Group. In 2016 both men foresaw a Trump victory, while other pollsters were predicting a Clinton landslide. They say in 2020 most polls are once again undercounting Trump’s support. 

The Q & A was conducted by Zack Stanton of Politico Magazine. Take a look. I think you will find it fascinating. Zack Stanton is digital editor of Politico Magazine.

With Nov. 3 racing toward us, it can be tempting to see the 2020 election as a done deal. For months, Joe Biden has consistently and convincingly led Donald Trump in polls. Swing states in the industrial Midwest and Sun Belt appear to be heading Biden’s way, and if you trust the polls, it’s not a leap to imagine him winning 330+ electoral votes.

But what if you shouldn’t trust the polls?

In 2016, months of national polls confidently showed Hillary Clinton ahead, and set many Americans up for a shock on Election Night, when the Electoral College tilted decisively in Trump’s favor. Two pollsters who weren’t blindsided by this are Arie Kapteyn and Robert Cahaly. Kapteyn, a Dutch economist who leads the USC’s Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research, oversaw the USC/Los Angeles Times poll that gave Trump a 3-point lead heading into election day—which, Kapteyn notes, was wrong: Clinton won the popular vote by 2 points. Cahaly, a Republican pollster with the Trafalgar Group, had preelection surveys that showed Trump nudging out Clinton in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida and North Carolina—all of which he won.

This year, both men believe that polls could again be undercounting Trump’s support. The reason is “shy” Trump voters—people reluctant to share their opinions for fear of being judged. Though the “shy voter” idea is thrown around a lot by both Trump supporters and Democratic skeptics, Kapteyn and Cahaly have specific insights into why, and how, Trump support might be going undetected.

For Cahaly, those votes are likely to make the difference again. “There’s a lot of hidden Trump votes out there,” he says. “Will Biden win the popular vote? Probably. I’m not even debating that. But I think Trump is likely to have an Electoral College victory.”

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As an illustration, Kapteyn described what his team at USC sees in its polls. Beyond simply asking voters whether they support Biden or Trump, USC asks a “social-circle” question—“Who do you think your friends and neighbors will vote for?”—which some researchers believe makes it easier for people to share their true opinions without fear of being judged for their views.

“We actually get a 10-point lead, nationally, for Biden over Trump” when asking voters who they personally plan to support, says Kapteyn. “But if you look at the ‘social-circle’ question, Biden only gets like a 5- or 6-point lead. … In general—and certainly on the phone—people may still be a little hesitant to say to that they’re Trump voters.”

“We live in a country where people will lie to their accountant, they’ll lie to their doctor, they’ll lie to their priest,” says Cahaly. “And we’re supposed to believe they shed all of that when they get on the telephone with a stranger?”

This year, conventional pollsters say they’ve learned their lessons, and are accounting for factors that skewed their results last year. Kapteyn and Cahaly aren’t so sure, as they explained to POLITICO this week via Zoom. A transcript of that conversation is below, condensed and edited for length and clarity.

Election Day is next week. National polling averages show Biden leading Trump by around 9 points. In 2016, averages had Clinton up by around 3 points, but you both ran polls that showed Trump winning the presidency. What do you see this year?

Robert Cahaly, the Trafalgar Group: Well first, we don’t do national polls, and that’s for the same reason I don’t keep up with hits in a baseball game: It’s an irrelevant statistic. But the battleground-state polls are a little closer [than the national polls], and there’s a lot at play. People are going to be shocked. A lot of people are going to vote this year who have been dormant or low-propensity voters. I think it’s going to be at an all-time high.

The models of who’s going to turn out this year are very flawed. What type of person comes out for Trump? They’re not a normal election participant. They’re a low-propensity voter. We included them in all of our surveys in fall 2016, and we are including them now.

Relying on live callers for polls is especially bad in this modern era, where “social desirability bias” is in full play. People avoid awkward conversations. So when a person you don’t know calls and asks how you feel about Donald Trump—and you don’t know how they feel—you tend to give them an answer that you think will make them look at you in the best light. We’ve seen it year after year, and I think it is very much at play this year.

Polls are undercounting the people who don’t want to give their real opinions. If they had corrected anything, why didn’t they see Ron DeSantis winning in his 2018 race for governor in Florida? They made the exact same mistake with his opponent, Andrew Gillum. [The final RealClearPolitics polling average in that race had Gillum up by 3.6 percentage points. DeSantis won by 0.4 percentage points.] This wasn’t some random state’s race; this was the hottest, meanest—neck-and-neck races for governor and senator in Florida in an off-year election. Every single major player was polling that state. And 100 percent of them got it wrong; we got it right.

Arie Kapteyn, USC Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research: First, let me start with a qualification about our results four years ago. It looked as if we did a good job because our national poll had Trump winning. But that, of course, was wrong: In the popular vote, Trump actually lost. So we didn’t do that well, and the reason why was our sample had an overrepresentation of people in rural states. Even though we weighted by education and past voting participation and all of that, we simply had too many Trump voters in the sample.

We have about 9,000 people in our panel [this year], and they answer questions every two weeks. And we ask them a number of things. We ask the probability that they will vote. We ask them the probability they’ll vote for Biden or Trump or someone else. But we now also ask them a question I think you’d always asked, Robert: “Who do you think your friends and neighbors will vote for?” We call it a “social-circle” question.

Now, we actually get a 10-point lead, nationally, for Biden over Trump. But if you look at the “social-circle” question, Biden only gets like a 5- or 6-point lead. One explanation for that may indeed be “social desirability.” In general—and certainly on the phone—people may still be a little hesitant to say to that they’re Trump voters.

Cahaly: I have many problems with polling today. It’s outdated. Part of it is they can’t concede that this model of long questionnaires, small sample sizes and exclusively live callers—I mean, they’re attacking the guys putting up telegraph wires, but they’re running the Pony Express.

People are busier than ever, and long questionnaires reduce the ability of average people to participate. Who has time to answer 22 questions on a Tuesday night when you’re trying to fix dinner or put your children to bed? Nobody. You end up with people on the ideological extremes—either very conservative or very liberal—or, worse: people who are bored.

We give [respondents] lots of different ways to participate—online, by text or email. You get one of our text polls at 7 p.m., and you can flip through it while watching TV, or answer Question 1 at 9 p.m. and answer Question 2 the next morning. That’s fine! We give you the time to participate on your schedule. We make it very easy. It takes less than three minutes if you do it all at once.

Kapteyn: We have an Internet panel, but it’s a little different from most others. We recruit our respondents by sending them letters. We buy addresses from the post office—or from a vendor—draw randomly from addresses in the United States, invite people to participate in our studies and we pay them really well. We pay them join, and then $20 for a 30-minute interview. We have a relationship of trust with them.

I agree that telephone polling in the traditional way, as far as I can tell, is pretty close to death. You get extremely low response rates, and there is this issue: Who is still answering the phone?

That’s a thing [our surveys] don’t really suffer from as much, because these people typically answer questions that aren’t about politics. We ask them about their health or their finances. We give them cognitive tests. We do all sorts of scientific work. We get them to wear accelerometers and we measure their physical activity. Because they participate in all of this, they’re probably less likely to be extreme—although if they had no interest in politics, they might not participate.

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You both spoke with POLITICO after the 2016 election. Back then, you said that one of the big things polling missed was “shy” Trump voters. In retrospect, do you still think that’s the case, or was there something else at play?

Kapteyn: We actually did a little experiment during the 2016 election: If you get called for a survey, and a live person asks who you’re going to vote for, do you answer that question differently than if you’d received the question in a letter and mailed it back, or answered the survey online?

We found some evidence that being called up by someone you don’t know makes people more hesitant to reveal their voting preference. And if you looked at whether these were Trump or Clinton voters, you did see that those people who told us they were Trump supporters were more likely to say they would not share their preference if they got called on the phone. So that at least suggests that there was a “shy Trump voter” phenomenon in 2016. Whether that’s the case this year, I really have absolutely no idea. We haven’t looked at that, and I just don’t know.

Cahaly: I believe it was prevalent. In 2016, the worst being said about Trump voters is that they were “deplorable.” 2020 is a whole different ballgame. It is worse this time—significantly worse. This year had more things where you can get punished for expressing an opinion outside the mainstream than almost any year I can think of in modern history.

I’m finding that people are very hesitant [to share their preference for Trump], because now it’s not just being called “deplorable.” It’s people getting beat up for wearing the wrong hat, people getting harassed for having a sticker on their car. People just do not want to say anything.

We talk to lots of people in our surveys. And I hear things like, “Yeah, I’m for Trump, my neighbors are for Trump, but there’s one neighbor who just hates Trump. And when he walks his dog, he kind of wrinkles his nose by those houses, and I don’t want him to do it at my house, so I don’t put a Trump sign. I like the guy, and I don’t want him mad at me.” I hear stuff like that all the time. People are playing their cards close to their chest because there’s a stigma to being for Trump. What happens when the stigma rolls away from people who hide their vote, and they start admitting where they are? This is what I think is going to happen on Election Day.

Now, there’s certain people who are vocal Trump supporters. To me, it has more to do with your personality. Are you the kind of person who avoids awkward conversations, or are you the kind of person who enjoys them? If you enjoy them, and you’re for Trump, you’ll tell everybody. You’ll be in a boat parade! But if you’re the kind of person who’s quiet and non-confrontational, you aren’t going to say anything. And a lot of those people live in the Midwest. They’re very regular, down-to-earth folks who are kind and deferential.

Robert, I’m from the Midwest—Macomb County, Michigan, the home of the “Reagan Democrats,” which voted for Obama twice then flipped to Trump. When you go there, you see tons of Trump flags in people’s yards or waving from their trucks, reading, “Trump 2020: No More Bullshit.” It’s difficult for me to believe that people who are not shy about expressing their support for Trump in pretty much every other instance are shy when—

Cahaly: But they’re different people! Think about what you just said, because that’s the reason why other Trump supporters are shy: The soccer mom doesn’t want to say she’s for Trump because she doesn’t want you to think she’s one of them. You just made my point for me! That’s exactly it! [Laughs]

This is probably a horrible example, but there are a lot more people who like professional wrestling than admit it. There are lots of fans who don’t want you to think they’re like the other people who like professional wrestling.

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Kapteyn: The only point I would make is that it seems that over the years, increasingly, political preferences are localized. One county, one area is safe Democratic; the other area is Republican. If you’re in the minority—you’re a Democrat in a Republican area, or a Republican in a Democratic area—civil political discussions have sort of ceased to exist. People become careful in expressing their political preference if they feel that their whole neighborhood has a different opinion.

In that sense, I think there will be some symmetry in shyness, at least in sort of day-to-day conversations. It’s not the same as answering the phone to someone you have never talked to, but there is a lot of evidence that suggests people are careful expressing their opinions if they feel they are in the minority.

Cahaly: Absolutely true. It doesn’t matter whether it’s in a family or a company, people do not like talking about politics when they feel like their opinion is in the minority.

Robert, after the 2016 election, you told POLITICO that you didn’t buy the idea that there were shy Clinton voters.

Cahaly: I don’t.

Do you believe there are shy Biden voters?

Cahaly: No. And not because it’s just for Republicans. For example, had Bernie Sanders been the nominee and been beat up every day as being socialist, there would be a tremendous “shy” vote among moderate-to-conservative Democrats who would vote for him as their nominee, but who may not want to tell people.

It depends on the polarization of the figure. Nobody looks at Joe Biden and says, “Oh, it’s toxic to be for him. People say Biden supporters are pond scum.” Nobody says that. Nobody does that. It’s really about the stigma you get for supporting the person.

Kapteyn: This is why I feel that using the Internet [for surveys]—in the way we do it—may help us a little bit. If someone on the Internet checks the box for Trump, no one is going to yell at them.

If someone is shy about their views, how do you measure that? You mentioned using online surveys rather than live phone calls. But how do you actually measure the existence of a group of people who won’t give you their opinions? How do you know they exist?

Kapteyn: Partly, you ask, “What do your neighbors think?” or “What your friends think?” That’s an indirect way of eliciting opinions.

Generally, if you do surveys, people give you all sort of wrong answers. In cases where you can verify it, you’ll find that there are very systematic biases. For example, one of the things we do at USC is we measure people’s physical activity—how active they are, how often they do sports. And I’ve done international comparative work on this. If you ask about it, Americans are just as active as the Dutch or the English. But if you measure it—

Cahaly: [Laughter] I love it.

Kapteyn: —you get a Fitbit, and sure enough, you notice an enormous difference. This is not unique to political polling; there is a general issue with asking questions and what to do with the answers.

Cahaly: I couldn’t agree more. We live in a country where people will lie to their accountant, they’ll lie to their doctor, they’ll lie to their priest. And we’re supposed to believe they shed all of that when they get on the telephone with a stranger and become Honest Abe? I cannot accept that.

Now, how we measure it is a little different. We find questions that are less confrontational. We brought the “neighbor” question into the mainstream, but I got that from a man named Rod Shealy, who’s since passed. I learned a lot from him doing politics in South Carolina. He always said that people are real polite, so when you need to know what they think about something that’s not pleasant to talk about, ask them what their neighbors think, because they’ll give you their real opinion without you judging them for it.

This year, we’re asking a series of other questions that are easy and don’t seem like you’re going to get judged harshly for answering them. Our first goal is to minimize the social desirability effect. And you do that by giving them a great sense of anonymity. The more anonymous they think they are when giving answers, the more honest they tend to be.

It’s kind of like the people who have two Twitter accounts—the one where they tweet out pictures of their pets and children, and one where they just go give everybody a fit. Well, that “troll” account is their real emotion. And the persona that runs that troll account is the one in the ballot booth. That’s who I’m trying to get to.

The results in 2016 really hurt people’s willingness to trust polls. You’re seeing it now: Democrats say, “Biden is leading, but the polls showed Clinton winning in 2016, and she lost.” Among Republicans, it’s sort of the opposite: “The polls in 2016 didn’t reflect Trump’s strength, but he won and will win again.” So how should people look at the polls over the final days of this campaign?

Cahaly: One, they should ask themselves these questions: Do you know someone who is going to vote for Trump—someone who maybe confided that fact in a few people, but didn’t share it widely? Do you think that person, if called on the phone by a stranger—a live person who knows who they are—would tell them? If the answer is yes, then you should be skeptical of polls that are given with a live person.

And ask yourself, would you answer a survey that took 20 or 25 minutes on a Tuesday night when you’re feeding your family? If the answer is no, then you should look with skepticism at polls with long questionnaires.

Kapteyn: I think it’s good to add some nuance to the idea that polls didn’t do so well in 2016, because after all, if you look at the national polls, they actually weren’t very far off when it came to the popular vote.

Another thing that may be a little underappreciated: One of the things that was quite clear just from looking at the data is that there were events late in the election season in 2016 that had an effect—for example, [FBI Director James] Comey’s announcement that he was reopening the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails. That moved the needle by, like, 2 percentage points or so. I could see that in the data. And that’s a big number, given how tight the election was. So I think there were some reasons why the polls seemed worse than they perhaps were—and why they couldn’t be more accurate, because some major events happened very late.

Cahaly: I’m a little different on that one, because we saw the Trump numbers the whole time. Nothing was new about them to us.

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Did the gap between polling in 2016 and the results affect the way either of you think about polling?

Cahaly: I became fascinated with why there was denial that social desirability bias was in play and important. It made me realize just how critical the assurance of anonymity is to getting an honest answer.

Other people started using our “neighbor” question, as Arie pointed out. And that caused us to think of some new questions we thought would be more revealing. And this time, we decided we weren’t going to share them with the world.

Kapteyn: In that sense, we are at opposite ends of the spectrum. We [USC’s Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research] are not a polling firm; we’re a research firm. We happen to have this Internet panel where we ask people all sorts of questions, so why not also ask them about politics? For us, this is largely an experiment. That’s why we ask about this in different way: We want to see what works best.

Frankly, if I were in the business of trying to forecast who’s going to be elected, then a national poll is a pretty poor instrument for doing that, because it has become increasingly clear that the battleground states are really what matter. As far as I can tell, there are many more state polls than four years ago—for good reason. You see them in all the battleground states.

My model is more this: Try to understand what works, get into these social desirability or other questions as, frankly, a scientific exercise. And then, in the process, I will be happy if my estimate is right on the mark. But if it isn’t, we have probably learned something, too.

Last question: The election ends on Tuesday. National polling has consistently shown a substantial lead for Biden. What is your message to people who think that this thing is done?

Cahaly: I don’t think it’s done. Some of these national polls are not even taking into consideration the fact that Republicans have closed the gap with voter registrations. I don’t think they’re taking into account the number of low-propensity voters who are voting and who will vote on Election Day. I don’t think they’re measuring people’s genuine opinions. And I think [pollsters] are just not going to see it coming.

There’s a lot of hidden Trump votes out there. Will Biden win the popular vote? Probably. I’m not even debating that. But I think Trump is likely to have an Electoral College victory.

Kapteyn: I will be really surprised, given our own numbers, if there isn’t a very sizable gap between Biden and Trump in the popular vote—in favor of Biden. But in the states? I don’t know.

Cahaly: I like your skepticism.

Did You Miss Banned Books Week?

Like a lot of people, I wasn’t aware that there was a week devoted to banned books. There is. It runs between September 27 and October 1, which means you, like me, probably missed it.

Not to worry. Below I have compiled a list of the most commonly banned books according to the American Library Association. These are classics that have offended and angered people over the years.

Banned Books Week was launched in 1982 by the Banned Books Week Coalition in response to a sudden surge in the number of challenges to books in schools, bookstores, and libraries. More than 11,300 books have been challenged since 1982 according to the American Library Association. Many of those have been banned.

According to the organization’s website, the Banned Books Week Coalition is a “national alliance of diverse organizations joined by a commitment to increase awareness of the annual celebration of the freedom to read. The Coalition seeks to engage various communities and inspire participation in Banned Books Week through education, advocacy, and the creation of programming about the problem of book censorship.”

In today’s world of political correctness where books like Huckleberry Finn and even the Holy Bible are sometimes prohibited, Banned Books Week calls attention to books that are forbidden, censored, redacted, or even edited to remove words or concepts that don’t fit a particular political or social narrative. For authors and journalists, that kind of behavior should be an abomination. It certainly is to me.

Fiction is particularly susceptible to those who censor and ban books. Themes of politics, religion, morality (or immorality), violence are the usual triggers for those who remove books from library shelves and bookstores. In today’s cyber-connected worldwide web, banning a book is not nearly as effective as it once was—at least not in the United States.

You can find forbidden books with a click of your mouse on Amazon and in other e-book stores and download them in seconds into your e-reader. Of course, that is NOT the case in places like North Korea, China, Cuba, and other countries controlled by brutal dictators and rigid political ideologies.

Below are the world’s ten most banned books of all time as compiled by the American Library Association. Clearly, there are many more books that have been banned, but these are the ones that are most often cited. If you haven’t read one of these banned books, you should. That’s one way to defeat those who want to control what we write and read.

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Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)

The gist: Written in 1931 and published a year later, Huxley’s parody of H. G. Wells’ utopian future in his novel, Men Like Gods isn’t wholly dissimilar to George Orwell’s 1984. Addressing the period’s core theme of industrialisation, Huxley explored the loss of identity and increasing division of society to devastating effect.
Why was it banned? Initially, Ireland pulled it off the shelves for its controversial themes on childbirth, before several states in the US tried to have it removed from school curriculums due to its “themes on negativity.”

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939)

The gist: Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, released in 1939, told the all too familiar story of the effects of the Great Depression on the rural poor. Focusing on a family of sharecroppers, the Joads, who were driven from their Oklahoma home by drought, economic hardship, and changes in the agriculture industry. With nowhere left to turn, they set out for California along with thousands of other “Okies” in search of land, jobs, and dignity.
Why was it banned? Despite the book being championed by the literary elite, it was publicly banned in the US and burned en masse by the general population. People were shocked by its description of the poor, which Steinbeck later admitted was a sanitised version of what was really going on in these remote communities.

Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (1934)

The gist: Set in France during the 1930s, the book follows the life of its author, Miller, who at the time was a struggling writer. Written in the first person, he wrote about his sexual encounters with friends and colleagues; it was an expose on the lives of American expats living abroad.
Why was it banned? Almost as soon as it was released, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Michael Musmanno wrote Cancer is, “not a book. It is a cesspool, an open sewer, a pit of putrefaction, a slimy gathering of all that is rotten in the debris of human depravity.” As you can imagine, people weren’t ready for what George Orwell would later call “the most important book of the mid-1930s”.

  Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)

The gist: Billy Pilgrim, a disoriented, and ill-trained American soldier, is captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge and taken prisoner in Dresden. Housed in a disused slaughterhouse, known as “Slaughterhouse number 5”, he and the other POWs and German guards alike hide in a deep cellar; sheltering from the firestorm during the Bombing of Dresden in World War II. During this period, time begins to warp, and Pilgrim starts to see visions of the future and the past, including his death.
Why was it banned? The good old USA thought better than to let its children be exposed to such themes, residing it to the ranks of the American Library Association’s 100 Most Frequently Challenged books.

The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie (1988)

The gist: Rushdie’s book tells the story of an Indian expat living in modern day England. After surviving a plane crash, Gibreel Farishta, a Bollywood superstar is left to rebuild his life, while the other survivor, the emigrant Saladin Chamcha has his life torn apart.
Why was it banned? Many in the Islamic community saw Rushdie’s take on Islam to be blasphemous. In Venezuela, you would be imprisoned for 15 months if caught reading the book, while Japan issued fines for people who sold the English-language edition. Even in the US, two major bookshops refused to sell the book after death threats were received.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chobsky (1999)

The gist: Inspired by the late J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, the book, published in 1999, tells the story of a teenager, “Charlie” who writes a series of letters to an anonymous friend. Being a teenager, Charlie goes to great lengths to describe his introversion, teenage sexuality, abuse, and his drug use.
Why was it banned? Its explicit sexual content, particularly the homosexual aspects, has led it to be withdrawn from libraries across the US, and it regularly makes the American Library Association’s top 10 most challenged books list.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (1958)

The gist: One of the most celebrated pieces of African literature, Achebe’s story of Okonkwo, a leader and local wrestling champion in Umofia – a fictional group of nine villages in Nigeria – recalls the influences of British colonialism and Christian missionaries on his traditional Igbo community during an unspecified time period in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century.
Why was it banned? Reportedly banned in Malaysia, it is critical of colonialism and its consequences.

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American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis (1991)

The gist: Easton Ellis’s tale of a serial killer and impeccable businessman Patrick Bateman, starts off as merely the retelling of one man’s experiences living in an affluent part of New York City during the 1980s. As the book progresses, however, the shiny veneer of Yuppie life soon reveals a far more sinister side.
Why is it banned? Anyone who has seen the film will know why. Germany deemed it harmful to minors when it first appeared in 1991 and restricted its sales. It was banned in Canada until very recently, and it’s banned in the Australian state of Queensland and is limited to over 18s only in all other states.

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (1915)

The gist: One day, Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman supporting his parents and sister, awakes to find he’s turned into a giant bug. Once the most beloved member of his family, so begins his estrangement from his beloved, and the rest of society, to the point where he is locked away in his room and plainly forgotten about.
Why was it banned? All of Kafka’s work was banned under the Nazi and Soviet regimes, and also in Czechoslovakia because he refused to write in Czech, using only German.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)

The gist: Humbert Humbert, a scholar born in Paris, is obsessed with young women, or “nymphets” as he calls them. Moving to a small New England town, he comes obsessed with the 12-year-old daughter of Charlotte Haze, and secretly covets her, using his marriage to her mother as a ruse. Humbert and the girl abscond and begin hopping from town to town trying to conceal their true relationship.
Why was it banned? After being called ‘the filthiest book, I have ever read’ by the editor of the Sunday Express, the Home Office seized all copies of the book in 1955 on the grounds that it was pornography. The French banned it the following year, but curiously, it was published without issue in the USA.

According to the American Library Association, the five most challenged titles in public and school libraries in 2019 were:

Looking for Alaska, by John Green

Reasons: Offensive language, sexually explicit, and unsuited for age group.
Fifty Shades of Grey, by E. L. James

Reasons: Sexually explicit, unsuited to age group, and other (“poorly written,” “concerns that teenagers will want to try it”).
I Am Jazz, by Jessica Herthel and Jazz Jennings

Reasons: Inaccurate, homosexuality, sex education, religious viewpoint, and unsuited for age group.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon

Reasons: Offensive language, religious viewpoint, unsuited to age group, and other (“profanity and atheism”)
The Holy Bible

Reasons: Religious viewpoint.

Wait a minute. The Bible?

Yes, that’s how bad things have become in our politically correct world.

 

 

Political Smears in 2020 are Tame Compared with the Past

As the 2020 Presidential campaign winds down, the slurs and mud-slinging are picking up.

Joe Biden calls President Trump a clown and a xenophobe. Donald Trump calls Biden corrupt and “sleepy Joe.” Liberals call conservatives white supremacists and racists. Conservatives call liberals leftist lunatics and fanatical communists.

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Pretty nasty stuff, right?

Not really; not when you look at the kind of mudslinging gutter politics that existed in the 19th Century and the early part of the 20th Century.

I happened upon some of these gems of abuse when I was conducting research for my Finding Billy Battles trilogy.

For example, as I was looking for information about President William McKinley and Woodrow Wilson, I discovered modern politicians have a long way to go to best their counterparts from 100 and 200 years ago when it comes to personal attacks and world-class mudslinging.

Just take a look at some of these zingers:

In 1898, while serving as Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Navy, Theodore Roosevelt became convinced that President William McKinley was a “vacillator.” He said of the President, “McKinley has no more backbone than a chocolate eclair.” Ironically, in 1900 Roosevelt became McKinley’s Vice Presidential Running Mate.

Reminds me of the relationship between Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. During the Democratic Presidential debates, Harris implied that Biden was a racist for opposing busing decades ago.

During the election of 1884 between Democrat Grover Cleveland and Republican James G. Blaine, Blaine’s camp jumped on the fact that Cleveland had sired a child out of wedlock (obviously a much greater transgression then than now).

The Blaine camp came up with this little ditty to celebrate Cleveland’s indiscretion: “Ma, Ma, Where’s My Pa? Gone to the White House, Ha ha ha.”

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Ma, Ma Where’s My Pa?

Not to be outdone, Cleveland’s handlers responded with this little ode: “Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine, the Continental Liar from the State of Maine.”

Turning the clock back even further, we see that the 1800 campaign between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams was no walk in the political park.

In that election (the only in American history where a vice-president ran against a sitting president), Jefferson called Adams a “repulsive pedant” and a “hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”

Adams responded by asking voters who might be considering voting for Jefferson: “Are you prepared to see your dwellings in flames… female chastity violated…children writhing on the pike? Great God of Compassion and Justice, Shield my Country from Destruction.”               

After that election, Congress passed the 12th Amendment to the Constitution, which mercifully changed the rule that the presidential candidate who got the second most votes would automatically be vice-president. From then on, each presidential candidate picked a running mate, thereby avoiding the prospect of a sitting president having to run against his own vice-president.

 Move forward to 1828 and what many consider the most contentious, nastiest presidential campaign in American history–Andrew Jackson versus John Adams’s son, incumbent President John Quincy Adams.

Adams, of the Federalist party, fired the first shot in this vicious contest, saying that Jackson was a murderer, had the personality of a dictator, and was too uneducated to be president (they claimed he spelled Europe ‘Urope’).

And they didn’t stop there. The Adams camp decided it wasn’t enough to go after Jackson. They would attack his wife, Rachel, and his mother too.

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       Jackson & Adams

Jackson’s wife, the Adams camp said, was a prostitute.

Before marrying Jackson, Rachel had been in an abusive marriage with a man who eventually divorced her. In the early 19th Century, divorce was still considered a scandalous affair. The Federalists called Rachel a “dirty black wench” and a “convicted adulteress” who was prone to “open and notorious lewdness.”

Jackson’s handlers responded by charging that when Adams was serving as the ambassador to Russia, he had sold his wife’s maid as a concubine to the czar of Russia. They branded Adams a “Pimp to the Coalition,” a reference to the Russian government.

Jackson won 642,553 votes to Adams’ 500,897.

Later in the 19th century, Tennessee Congressman Davy Crockett accused Martin Van Buren of secretly wearing women’s clothing: “He is laced up in women’s corsets.”

James Buchanan, who had a congenital condition that caused his head to tilt to the left, was accused of having unsuccessfully attempting to hang himself.

During the 1868 campaign, newspapers called Ulysses S. Grant, the general who led the Union to victory in the Civil War, “brainless as his saddle,” a “man of vile habits” and a “drunkard.” He was elected twice.

In the election of 1876, Democrats claimed Rutherford B. Hayes shot and wounded his own mother in a drunken “fit of insanity.”

Not even Republican Abraham Lincoln, the great emancipator, was immune from slinging the sludge and being whacked with it.

In the 1860 election campaign, Stephen Douglas called Lincoln a “horrid­ looking wretch, sooty and scoundrelly (sic) in aspect, a cross between the nutmeg dealer, the horse­ swapper and the night man” (whoever or whatever the night man is).

And he didn’t stop there. Lincoln, he said, “is the leanest, lankest, most ungainly mass of legs and arms and hatchet face ever strung on a single frame.”  And, he continued, he has stinky feet.

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                   Lincoln & Douglas

Wow, how low can you go?

Lincoln responded by calling Douglas, who was only 5-feet 4-inches tall, the “little giant.”

“Douglas is about five feet nothing in height and about the same in diameter the other way,” Lincoln said.

When Douglas left Washington D.C. for New York City on the train, he told the press he was taking a leisurely trip to visit his mother, when in fact, he was going on the campaign trail.

Lincoln and his supporters took note of the fact that it took him more than a month to get to New York and even put out a “Lost Child” handbill that said Douglas: “Left Washington, D.C. sometime in July, to go home to his mother…who is very anxious about him. Seen in Philadelphia, New York City, Hartford, Conn., and at a clambake in Rhode Island. Answers to the name Little Giant. Talks a great deal, very loud, always about himself.”

During Lincoln’s reelection campaign of 1864, his Democrat opponent George McClellan described Lincoln as: “nothing more than a well-meaning baboon!”

More recently, in 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson mocked his political foe, U.S. House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford, who once played Center on the University of Michigan Football team, saying: “Ford’s a nice guy, but he played too much football with his helmet off.”

It is only my opinion, but I think the folks running for president today are amateurs when it comes to venting their gall, slinging the slime, and generally putting their opponents’ noses out of joint. They could all take a few lessons from history.

As Lord Chesterfield once said: “An injury is much sooner forgotten than an insult.”

 

 

The Lost Years of Billy Battles wins New York City Big Book Award

I am honored to announce that The Lost Years of Billy Battles has won an NYC Big Book Award.

Here is the Press Release announcing the award.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Author wins national recognition with the NEW YORK CITY BIG BOOK AWARD®!

The NYC BIG BOOK AWARD has recognized The Lost Years of Billy Battles by Ronald E. Yates as the Winner in the category of Historical Fiction.

Experts from different book industry disciplines judge the competition, including publishers, writers, editors, book cover designers, and professional copywriters. Selected award winners and distinguished favorites are based on overall excellence.

In 2020, the NYC Big Book Award once again achieved worldwide participation.  Entries remained strong during the worldwide pandemic. Book submissions streamed in from six continents and over 100 cities. Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America all participated.  Across the globe, book entries poured in from places such as Budapest, Capetown, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, New York City, Port of Spain, Vancouver, and Victoria, to name a few.  Winners were recognized globally from Australia, Canada, England, India, Singapore, Uganda, and the United States of America, among other nations.

The breadth of publishers ranged from Amazon to Wiley, from Black Rose Writing to She Writes Press.  Our award-winning authors are from all kinds of different backgrounds and enrich the program.  We are proud of such diversity of winners and distinguished favorites in the annual NYC Big Book Award.

“We are pleased to highlight these books, recognize their excellence, and share their achievements,” said awards sponsor Gabrielle Olczak.  The awards program “foments a strong interest in these authors and publishing houses, and we expect our winners and favorites to receive a heightened level of attention.”  Olczak went on to say that “excellent books can be found globally, and we are happy to help bring them to a larger audience.”

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Here is a short synopsis of The Lost Years of Billy Battles, Book 3 of the Finding Billy Battles Trilogy.

The year is 1914, and the world is in turmoil. In Europe, the Great War is raging. In Asia, fierce insurgencies are in progress against the colonial powers of Europe. In Mexico, a bloody revolution is ripping that nation to shreds and threatening to spill over into Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.

Meanwhile, in Chicago, Billy Battles and his wife, the former Baroness Katharina von Schreiber, have managed to live an uncommonly sedate life for almost ten years. But, with one telephone call, their tranquil world is shattered when they agree to a secret assignment in Veracruz, Mexico.

In Veracruz, Katharina and Billy embark on a succession of wild adventures that will alter their lives for all time. Their new and violent world is one brimming with miscreants, secret agents, treachery, and tragedy. But most importantly, it triggers Billy’s mysterious decades-long disappearance. Where is he? What happened? The answers are in The Lost Years of Billy Battles, Book 3 of the award-winning Finding Billy Battles trilogy.

For more information, please visit www.nycbigbookaward.com.  To view the list of winners, visit https://www.nycbigbookaward.com/2020winners; Distinguished Favorites listed here: https://www.nycbigbookaward.com/2020distinguishedfavorites.

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Are American Voters Stupid or Just Ill-Informed?

With the 2020 election a little more than two weeks away, I found myself speculating on how informed the American electorate is. Given a biased mainstream media, I wondered if American voters are able to make an informed decision when they mark their ballots.

A few years ago during an academic conference, MIT professor Jonathan Gruber referred to the “stupidity of the American voter” and his comments ignited a firestorm of outrage.

But was Gruber wrong when he made those off-the-cuff remarks about the American electorate?

Sadly, it appears that he may have been right in his assessment. According to at least two recent surveys, Americans are woefully ignorant when it comes to their country and its governance.

Ask them to name just one Supreme Court Justice and 65 percent can’t, according to the Annenberg Public Policy Center.

It gets better. Ask Americans to name the three branches of their government and 36 percent of Americans can’t. Ask them to name just a single branch of government and 35 percent can’t even do that.

But in a nation consumed like no other with celebrity, ask Americans to reel off the names of the top rock stars, gansta rappers, Oscar favorites, superstars in the NFL, NBA and Major League Baseball, and any number of mindless reality TV shows and their minions and guess what? You will have no problem getting an answer.

So while Gruber was pilloried for his remarks, the sad truth is that he was right. American voters are stupid–or perhaps apathetic or indifferent are better descriptions.

Lying to them, as the Obama administration did when it was ramming Obamacare through Congress and down our throats, was viewed as an acceptable tactic. After all, they reasoned, Americans are too stupid to know what’s good for them.

Remember President Obama’s famous fib: “if Americans like their doctor, they’ll be keeping their doctor. You like your plan? You’ll be keeping your plan.” 

While such a conclusion about the stupidity of the American voter may smack of somebody’s opinion, it was backed up last month in a groundbreaking survey by the U.K. research firm Ipsos MORI. That survey highlighted the political “ignorance” of 11,527 people across 14 countries

It found that Americans are second only to Italians in how little we understand our nations and the issues facing it. (See Graphic)

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Here are a few of the questions asked and the results:

What percentage of the U.S. population identifies as Muslim?

Americans guessed: 15%.  Reality: 1%
What percentage of the population do you think are immigrants to America?

Americans guessed: 32%. Reality: 13%
Do you think this statement is true or false: The murder rate is rising in America

70 percent of Americans guessed: True . Reality: False
What percentage of American girls aged between 15 and 19 years give birth each year? Americans guessed: 23.9%. Reality: 3.1%

Back in 2008, Rick Shenkman, the editor-in-chief of the History News Network, published a book entitled: Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth about the American Voter.

Shenkman found that most Americans were, among other things:

Ignorant about major international events
Knew little about how their own government runs and who runs it
Were nonetheless willing to accept government positions and policies even though a moderate amount of critical thought suggested they were bad for the country
Were easily swayed by stereotyping, simplistic solutions, irrational fears and public relations babble.

Shenkman found that Americans, when they do pay attention, do so when they perceive that an issue may impact them, their families or friends personally. That is not earth shattering, but it does say something about the fact that Americans, like it or not, are part of the global family.

I spent some two decades as a foreign correspondent, covering stories throughout Asia and Latin America. During that time I discovered that relatively few Americans had any understanding at all of the impact events and policies in places like China or Japan can have on their lives.

For example, when products are manufactured more inexpensively in China or India or Vietnam that often means higher paid Americans lose their jobs.

When rapacious government policies allow a Chinese steel company to export its products at a price that is lower in the American market than the price charged in the domestic Chinese market, and thereby unfairly undercut American steel makers, that is called “dumping.”

What most Americans may not know is that dumping is legal under World Trade Organization rules unless the aggrieved foreign country can demonstrate the negative impact of the exporting company on domestic producers. In order to counter dumping, most nations use tariffs and quotas to protect their domestic industry from the negative effects of predatory pricing.

But let’s get back to that Ipsos MORI survey and Gruber’s unflattering characterization of the American voter.

We often decry the quality of elected officials today. But what about the quality of voters?

How can we make informed decisions about places like Iraq and Iran, organizations like ISIS, government spending, and societal issues if we have no understanding of the essential specifics involved?

American educator and philosopher Robert Maynard Hutchins may have said it best:

“The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.”