Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Paul Begala
Read between
October 3 - October 7, 2020
Country singer Charlie Daniels penned a biting response: “My faith goes much deeper than his superficial explanation, and I love my guns even when I’m not frustrated.” He went on to say, “To me this latest Obama blunder only helps reveal the depth of condescension the far left ...
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Eight years later, my friend Hillary Clinton made a similar gaffe, also when speaking at a fund-raiser. Analyzing her campaign’s priorities in terms of targeting voters, she pointed out that not every voter was open to supporting her—an obvious truth. “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.” Oops. She then went on to say that she felt the pain of other Trump
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Countering Trump’s racist appeals will require creativity and discipline, but it will also require empathy.
If all we do is shout “Shut up, racist” at his voters, they will only redouble their commitment to him. Instead, we should follow the lead of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, and raise folks’ sights, show how racist appeals only distract from our common humanity and our shared goals.
Instead of telling people they are evil racists for voting for Trump, tell them they’ve been duped. And show them how their interests are being betrayed by those who are preaching division.
Just 18 percent of Americans control fifty seats in the Senate, and a mere 7 percent of our citizens can save a president from impeachment by delivering a whopping thirty-four Senate votes.
Think about that: Just 23 million people can block the other 308 million Americans from removing a corrupt president.
But the suburbs are a-changin’. Two factors are driving this: the shifting political values of college-educated whites, and the increasing diversity of formerly lily-white suburbs.
from 1952, the advent of modern political polling, no Democrat has ever won college-educated white voters. Ever.
the 2018 election the first in history in which the Democratic Party carried college-educated white people.
The problem for the Democrats is that only 33.4 percent of Americans have a college degree. The Democrats risk trading dominance among the majority of whites for dominance among a minority of them.
The key to Trump is that he harnessed economic populism and paired it with traditional right-wing conservatism. That’s new, it’s different, it’s potent, and it’s dangerous.
Monaco has the highest life expectancy worldwide, at 89.4 years. The central African nation of Chad has the lowest, at 50.6 years.
if you are a white man without a high school diploma—the heart of Trump’s political base—it’s just 67.5 years. For white women without a high school education, it is 73.5 years.
It is important to realize that for people of color in America life expectancy has always lagged behind that of whites. That is a tragic legacy of racism, affecting everything from infant and maternal health to victimization by violence. But as life expectancy fell by five years for white women without a high school diploma, and by three years for white men without a high school degree, life expectancy for African Americans without a high school diploma actually surpassed that of whites without a high school diploma.
we are losing them in part to what the researchers called “diseases of despair”: death by drug and alcohol abuse, and suicide.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2018, 67,367 Americans died from drug overdoses, the vast majority of them—46,802—from opioids. That’s slightly down from the peak of 2017,
in each of those years, we lost more people to drug overdoses than we lost in twenty years of fighting in Vietnam.
From 1999 to 2017, more than 700,000 Americans died from drug overdoses—and 400,000 of the deaths were due to opioids. To put that into perspective, 405,000 Americans died in World War II. Opioids have killed as many ...
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A study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association reported “a clear overlap between counties that had high opioid use… and the vote for Donald Trump,”
Trump typically won 60 percent of the votes in counties with higher than average rates of chronic opioid prescriptions, the study found.
The Government Accountability Office found that Trump’s declaration helped cut red tape. Okay. He allowed two states to proceed more quickly on their own opioid programs. Good. And he sped up some funding for research. Fine. But all in all, that’s a pretty tepid response to this crisis. For example, the GAO report found that the Public Health Emergency Fund has a grand total of $57,000 in it.
If corporate profits are worth spending $1.9 trillion on, how much is Trump willing to spend to combat an epidemic that’s taking tens of thousands of lives each year? Eleven billion dollars. That’s all. The Bipartisan Policy Center combed the federal budget and found fifty-seven different federal programs that work to curb the epidemic. All told, they spend $11 billion a year. At that rate, it will take well over a thousand years for Trump’s opioid response to match his corporate tax giveaway. Corporate profits are literally a thousand times more important to Trump than are people dying from
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only one in ten addicts (and one in five opioid abusers) ever seeks specialty treatment.
After buying almost $20 billion of farm products in 2017, China cut back to $9 billion in purchases in 2018. Soybean purchases by China fell 75 percent in just nine months, from September 2018 to May 2019.
From 2013 to 2018, farm income plunged 45 percent.
The number of farmers who went bankrupt in 2019 jumped 20 percent over the previous year, making 2019 the year with the biggest spike in farm bankruptcies since 2010, as farmers were still reeling from the Great Recession.
Foreclosures were at or above a decade high in Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota, South Dakota, South Carolina, Ohio, and Wisconsin.
Ninety-one percent of farmers and farm workers say financial stress affects their mental health.
In his 2020 budget proposal, Trump included a massive 15 percent cut in funding for the US Department of Agriculture—a reduction of $3.6 billion. Why? Well, programs that benefit farmers are “overly generous,” the Trump budget said. This proposal came at a time when floods, drought, and Trump’s trade war were all pressuring farmers, and while the opioid crisis was hammering farm country.
Just so we get this straight: corporate profits are at an all-time high. Farm incomes are at an all-time low. So Trump proposed giving $1.9 trillion to corporate America and taking $3.6 billion from rural America. Got it.
it cost a Wisconsin dairy farmer $1.90 per gallon to produce milk. The corporate conglomerate, which is the only buyer for them, thanks to the corporatization of dairy, pays them just $1.35 a gallon.
Trump’s trade war (dairy sales to China dropped 43 percent in 2018, when China hit US dairy with tariffs),
Wisconsin lost 465 dairy farms in 2017, nearly all of them small operators—that is, family farms. They lost another 638 dairy farms in 2018 and 551 more in 2019.
Trump welfare program for f...
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The Environmental Working Group ran the numbers and found that 68 percent of the checks that went out in the first round of Trump’s welfare program went to the wealthiest 10 percent of ag operators. A thousand people who got checks don’t even live on a farm—they’re city dwellers who are absentee landlords.
Democrats could find a lot of common ground if they tried: on wilderness protection, public lands, clean air and water, even climate change. But as the great Steve Forbert once sang, “You cannot win if you do not play.” Democrats need to pull on their hip boots and wade in.
When we listen, when we show up, two things happen. First, folks open up. Second, we open up, too. We see women and men who are being screwed by the same system that’s screwing communities of color in our cities. We see that there is more that unites us than divides us.
a rising American electorate that will dominate our politics for decades. There are four elements to this new American majority: people of color, unmarried women, younger voters, and the religiously unaffiliated.
When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, 88 percent of voters were white. By 2016, that percentage had dropped to 71 percent.
Democrats need to push the percentage of minority voters above 30 percent if they want to win in 2020. Then they need to persuade people of color to vote for the Democratic nominee.
African American turnout fell by 4.7 percent in 2016. The impact was, of course, especially crucial in the swing states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. African American turnout fell by a crushing 12.3 percent in Wisconsin, 12.4 percent in Michigan, and 2.1 percent in Pennsylvania.
Do we electrify our base, or search for the swing voters? It is a false choice. The Democrats have to do both.
One of the reasons I believe Democratic presidents are more successful than Republicans is their party looks more like America. To succeed in the Democratic Party, you have to unite people across lines of race and religion and region; gender and generation. Democrats need to both inspire their base and expand their electorate.
But according to the Post poll, six in ten African American voters identify as moderate or conservative.
The solid majority of black voters say that the most important priority in choosing their nominee is picking someone who can beat Trump. Only a third say the most important thing is choosing someone they agree with on all the issues.
only 7 percent of African Americans approve of the job Trump is doing. Ninety...
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poll asked African Americans to name their top policy priorities. Seventy-seven percent gathered around three issues: affordable health care, college affordability, and creating good jobs with good benefits.
Latinos are much less bullish about the Trump economy than Anglos.
Trump won 29 percent of the Latino vote in 2016.
