Llewellyn King: Despair and danger

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

Body language is the new political voice in America.

The language is universal and easily learned because it has just four components: eye-rolling, sighing and shrugging, accompanied by turning hands up.

“Oh my God, it’s a disaster,” is one translation. Another might be, “Don’t ask me, I didn’t sign on for this.”

It belongs — this silent expression of despair about the presidential election, unfolding for 2024 — to old-line Republicans and to a wide swath of Democrats, too.

Political discussion has ended in these groups, replaced by the kind of fatalism summed up in the words of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats that we are slouching toward Bethlehem.

Of course, as Washington Post columnist George Will says, the inevitable isn’t necessarily inevitable. However, at the moment, it looks as if it is.

The despair is spread pretty evenly among Democrat, many of whom consider President Biden too old, and Vice President Kamala Harris not up to the job she has, let alone the presidency.

At 80, Biden is showing reduced vigor and limited mobility, and he favors scripted speeches. This from a politician who was famous for nonstop talking.

Over the years, like other reporters, I have often thought, “Joe, you have made your point, now stop.” These days, you wait in vain for him to go off script. His speeches, which he reads from a Teleprompter, sound as though they were prepared by a committee — lifeless repetition.

He never holds a press conference, a sign of dwindling confidence.

The bigger fear in the Democrats isn’t that Biden is too old but that Harris, at some point, may become president. She has proven herself to be woefully inept and incoherent.

In every assignment Biden has handed her on which she could have shown her worth, she has failed or simply not done. Remember, she was Biden’s point person on the border crisis? She hasn’t been heard from as such.

This past spring, she went to Ghana, Tanzania and Zambia to counter the Chinese and chose to make it an occasion to apologize for slavery. I was born and raised in Africa, in what is now called Zimbabwe, and have traveled extensively on the continent, and slavery isn’t a burning issue. The high point of this visit was Zambia, where Harris’s paternal grandfather came from and where she was welcomed.

China has three great appeals to African countries: It asks no questions, doesn’t lecture on human rights, and pays off the ruling elites, trading these indulgences for minerals.

While Biden and Harris may seem a dangerous pair, Donald Trump, twice indicted (so far), twice impeached, now reduced to feeling sorry for himself on a colossal scale, is terrifying. He has promised an administration of vengeance.

Whereas I can’t find any Democrats who are enthusiastic about the Biden-Harris ticket, I certainly can find far-right Republicans who love Trump. Mostly, they are the working-class White voters, who were once the mainstay of the Democratic Party and now believe that the America they know and want to preserve can only be saved by the reprehensible Trump, with his relentless abuse of all who cross him and endless lachrymose pity for himself.

Trump’s defense of himself is risible, but the faithful Trumpsters believe in him — as much as ever.

They aren’t statistics to me. Recently, my wife and I were eating at a Chinese restaurant in Rhode Island when a couple with a small child took the booth behind us. You might call them the salt of the earth: working people doing their best to raise a family. The husband was complaining loudly about the high cost of living. Then, after seeing Trump on an overhead TV, he said to his wife, “The only honest man is Trump.”

That young father wasn’t alone.

At a neighborhood pub that, in the British sense, is our “local,” the owner and patrons know that both my wife and I are journalists, and because Rhode Island PBS airs our program, White House Chronicle, we are treated with deference. But that doesn’t prevent good, hard-working, fellow patrons, mostly of Italian, Irish and Portuguese stock, from lambasting the media within earshot of us. “It’s all lies.” “They hate Trump because he tells the truth.” They say things like that because they believe them. They are the Trump base.

When I hear that stuff, how do I react? Well, I roll my eyes, sigh, shrug my shoulders, and, if no one is looking, I turn my hands up to the heavens.

On Twitter: @llewellynking2

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS.

White House Chronicle

Llewellyn King: About the border wall: U.S. immigration policy must be ad hoc

Trump stands in front of a section of border wall near Yuma, Ariz., in June 2020

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

Going to the border and harrumphing won’t solve the very real immigration problem, which pits our humanity against our sovereign entitlement to say what kind of people we are.

We are not alone in this struggle.

The world is on the move. Untold millions of people who live south of our border with Mexico want to move north. Equally untold millions who live in Africa would like to move to Europe; and millions in eastern Europe want to live in western Europe.

From the Indian subcontinent, millions would like to move to Europe, especially to Britain. Millions of East Asians have their eyes set on Australia.

Within these areas, people also are on the move. Millions from Venezuela have flooded their neighboring countries. Likewise in Africa, where war and famine are ever present, people try and walk to a marginally better future in another country. In the Middle East, Jordan and Lebanon are flooded with refugees first from Palestine, then from Iraq and Syria.

As The Economist pointed out recently, a slum in Spain is incalculably superior to a slum in Kenya.

The drivers for migration are poverty, violence, crop failure and political collapse. And persecution, ethnic and religious; for example, the Rohingya in Myanmar have sought refuge in Bangladesh.

The goal of the migrant is the same worldwide: a better, safer life.

The political price paid by the stable democracies continues to be huge. It played a role in Donald Trump’s election and will play a role in the next presidential election, whether Trump runs or not. It was the great driver for Brexit and Britain’s seeming self-harming. It has driven the move of Hungary, under Viktor Orban, to autocracy.

It is hard to stop people who have nothing to lose from crossing a frontier if they can. But they aren’t the only migrants. Some, a small number, are opportunists. These are the migrants who overstay student visas, manipulate qualifications for residence, and willfully circumvent the law or contract so called green card marriages.

But they aren’t what the border crisis is about -- any more than it is what the overloaded boats crossing the Mediterranean Sea is about. It is the physical manifestation of desperation.  

Because the migration problem is so complex – human problems are almost by definition complex— it isn’t a matter of resolution so much as management. We want, for example, immigrants with high-tech skills, but we are worried about the impact of millions of desperate peasants walking across the deserts.

Now a new driver of migration has opened: global warming. The heat and drought hitting the U.S. West Coast are also hitting Central America and will affect livability.

Adding to the complexity of the immigration conundrum is the labor shortage. Construction depends on immigrant labor, farming on contract labor, and slaughterhouses and chicken processors can’t stay open without immigrants to do the unappealing work.

One small step forward would be a sensible work permit.

It seems to me that the wall -- Trump’s wall – isn’t a bad thing. It is a declaration, a symbol. It won’t deter desperate people and it won’t end smuggling. The latter is going to get worse with drones and even autonomous aircraft that can bring their lethal cargoes deep into the United States.

While there is an insatiable market for drugs here, smuggling will continue and even increase. And while that is so, lawlessness south of the border will accelerate.

Sadly, despite Vice President Kamala Harris’s statements, we aren’t going to repair the countries to our south overnight. But we might look to repairing our drug policy, seeing if that can be adjusted to take the profit out of the trade. Except for the gradual, local legalization of marijuana, we haven’t contemplated drug management, short of prohibition, in a century. A new look is due.

There is no single policy that is going to solve the human misery south of the border which drives so many to risk their lives or, through love, to send their children north.

Therefore immigration policy will never be a total, sweeping thing, but rather an ad hoc affair: We need some immigrants, we don’t want others; we have big hearts, but we fear immigration that is unchecked.

We fear the political, cultural and social change that immigrants will bring, especially if they are of a common language and background. Pain in Central America is political torture in the United States.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Web site: whchronicle.com

Llewellyn King: The disappointing Kamala Harris

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

Kamala Harris shone in the Senate when she was asking questions in hearings. That is where the idea that she might have presidential possibilities flourished. Democrats, observing her surefootedness, were led to think, “Here is the next Barack Obama.”

But the shine is off Harris and the tarnish is setting in.

When Harris ran for president, the only evidence of that hearing-room confidence was when she attacked front-runner Joe Biden in the Democratic debates. She implied that he was the proprietor of old ideas and hinted that he wasn’t up to date on matters of race.

So, it was extraordinary that Biden chose Harris to be his running mate. There were other strong contenders among those who had sought the Democratic nomination, and many more who hadn’t run for president. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D.-Minn.) should have been chosen: a tough, well-qualified woman of her times.

Biden, in choosing Harris, heard the music of diversity, which has been turned up of late. He felt the need to make history and to show that he was in accord with the values of today.

But he must have had some dealings with Harris when he was vice president; observed her in action in the Senate and heard about the difficulty she had organizing her small Senate staff. He must have done the political equivalent of due diligence. And he must have been cognizant of the damage that Sarah Palin did to John McCain’s candidacy in 2008.

Whereas Obama appeared not to think of himself as being of color, Harris clings to it. Her journey intrigues her; Obama’s didn’t intrigue him. He travelled it with purpose and dignity.

Now it must worry the president to learn, as the rest of us have, that Harris seems to have no ideas. Her public remarks are flip at worst and off-the-shelf liberal at best.

What does she see as the future for America? This isn’t laid out or even discernible. We need to know her vision because she is vice president to an old man – the metaphorical heartbeat away.

Harris and Biden have chosen to believe that solidarity at the top is an important message, hence the frequent references in White House announcements to the “Biden-Harris Administration.” In public, Harris is often at Biden’s side. But she often seems to be standing there as his girl Friday, not as the second-in-command.

In his well-reported piece in The Atlantic, Edward-Isaac Dovere hunted for the real Harris and didn’t appear to find her. He notes that she asks good, hard questions, like a good prosecutor, but as she dodges reporters, they aren’t able to ask good, hard questions of her.

It isn’t a given Democrats will back Harris if Biden turns out to be a one-term president, which given his age, 78, is a reasonable supposition. But ditching her would be hard because it might cost the party its progressive wing and keeping her might cost them as dearly in the center.

Republicans are salivating at the thought of running against Harris. She is the bright sun in their darkening sky.

The immigration assignment seems to have been thrust on Harris. It is unlikely she sought it. She doesn’t appear to have grasped it with relish. Save for brief visits to Guatemala and Mexico, she has done and said little.

Harris is finally looking at the chaos on the border herself. She needs to present a better idea than championing what amounts to nation-building in Central America. That has been tried and tried again and failed.

She isn’t going to solve the pain inherent in the immigration challenge, but it is a wonderful opportunity for her to give us her view of America, and what we might expect from a President Harris. Another assignment that could be thrust upon her.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

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Llewellyn King: Biden elicits little excitement even among Democrats

Joe Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris

WEST WARWICK, R.I

Four years ago, Democrats slouched to the polls and voted, holding their noses figuratively. Somehow the party had come up with a presidential candidate that even many Democrats didn’t like very much: Hillary Clinton.

Pitted against a risible president, Donald Trump, who is a climate-change-doubting, class-dividing, race-baiting, immigrant-bashing, law-bending, treaty-tearing, dictator-loving, truth-challenged, dissembling incompetent, this time, it should be an easy White House win for the Democrats.

This time, there should be white-hot passion for Democratic challenger Joe Biden, the candidate who would restore our moral base, our international standing, salve our wounds, and give us a sense that the nation is moving forward to a sunlit future. But there is no surge of feeling, zero passion.

Biden is the candidate who would deal with the COVID-19 pandemic and the environmental catastrophe that is unfolding with pestilences of a biblical scale: serial hurricanes striking the Gulf Coast and wildfires from hell in the West. He is the man who should give us confidence in our systems, from health care to voting, to the rule of law at the Justice Department. But there is no surge, no passion.

Instead, the closest thing to enthusiasm I find among voters is resigned, faint praise. “He’s a decent man,” I’ve been told over and again. I’ll have a struggle in not offering the next Democrat who tells me in a woeful voice that Biden’s “a decent man” a physical rebuke.

One may discount the great man or woman view of history, but there is no great argument for the “decent man” view of history. You can have decent men who were great, Truman and Reagan, but you can’t move the needle of history with flaccid decency.

Poor old Joe Biden -- yes, he is old for the job — he’ll be 78 on Nov. 20 -- is defined mostly by having been there, like the TV-watching gardener played by Peter Sellers in the movie Being There. He was in the Senate for a long time, he was vice president to Barack Obama for two terms. He clears the being-there bar, but it is a low bar, very low.

No one is passionately against Biden. Trump’s attempts to paint him as a socialist ogre about to take us to Stalinism have fallen flat. Flat because they are unbelievable, and they are unbelievable because that isn’t Biden.

Biden has always been the quintessential man of the center of the situation. The pressure on his left wing, coming from Senators Bernie Sanders, of Vermont, and Edward Markey, of Massachusetts, and the group around Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of New York, is going to be a problem and a discomfort for Biden. He must also wonder where in that world his vice-presidential pick, California Sen. Kamala Harris, so far defined more by her ethnicity than her philosophy, will fit.

If, as still expected but not guaranteed, Biden makes it across the threshold in this election, his greatest strength will be his address book. His best strategy will be to use surrogates to fight his political wars. That means a strong Cabinet and a great White House staff.

Given Biden’s limitations, his chief of staff will be a critical player. He needs to give his Cabinet secretaries their heads. One of the many weaknesses of the Trump administration has been the pusillanimous nature of the Cabinet: Men and women who see the role only as pleasing the capricious and solipsistic president -- a chorus of lickspittle people singing hymns of praise to the chief.

Biden doesn’t need to point up Trump’s weaknesses: They are manifest. He needs to point up his own strengths beyond his affability and, yes, beyond his decency.

I’ve been watching Biden for years, nodding “hello” to him, and sometimes talking with him, the way it goes for reporters and politicians in Washington. I get the distinct feeling Biden isn’t the man he was eight years ago, when he would’ve been a more appealing candidate within his limitations. He seems diminished, his fire reduced to an ember.

As it is Democrats and renegade Republicans, needs must, will slouch to the polls to vote against Trump. Few in their hearts will be voting for Biden. There is a passion deficit.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Website: whchronicle.com

Don Pesci: The old, tired and reclusive Joe Biden

Waiting to talk politics

— Photo by Visitor7

“If ever a time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin”

— Samuel Adams (1722-1803), Massachusetts politician and a U.S. Founding Father

VERNON, Conn.

I’m sitting in the Midnight Café, only half full on orders of Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont, having breakfast. The place names and personal names throughout have been changed to protect innocent non-politicians. The usual waitress, Sami, of indeterminate age, sporting her usual braided ponytail, greets me, a steady customer, and the order is quickly put on the table.

The next few booths are filled with electricians brought into the state by Eversource to reconnected houses and businesses with mostly repaired power lines. They are, many of them, on their way back to their home states after a grueling stretch in Connecticut dealing with the damage wrought by Tropical Storm Isaias.

Sami calls out to them, “Have a safe trip back, guys,” and they wave beefy forearms in her direction.

“Sami, look at this picture, and tell me what you think.”

The photo, top of the fold, front page, shows Sen. Kamala Harris, whom former Vice President Joe Biden has picked as his vice-presidential candidate, standing at a podium  holding forth, while Biden, stone-faced, is seated in a chair that looks alarmingly like a kiddy highchair, legs wide open, his arms tightly clutching his stomach, his face masked in pretended interest.

Sami quickly assesses the photo and, never shy of sharing her opinion, smiles wickedly.

“Wonder if he had to use a stool to mount that chair?”

“Yeah, you noticed. If he were lying on the floor, he’d be in a fetal position.”

“Right. He’s hugging his tummy tightly.”

“Harris looks presidential though, doesn’t she?’’

“Very. I’m not sure that will help whatshisname,” (Same animated smile.)

It’s one of those pictures that are worth a thousand words.

The skinny on Biden, even among some Democrats, is that he has become a recluse, and not owing to Coronavirus. His early implication that he would choose as his vice president a Black woman had limited his range, but many Democrats feel that Harris might make a tolerable president when Biden, if elected, declines to run for a second term. Biden has not been able or inclined to answer successfully barely concealed imputations that he has become an in-the-closet presidential campaigner because he fears a public, mano a mano confrontation with President Trump.

It is thought by some that Biden's possible future foreign policy with respect to an aggressive and muscular China already has been compromised by Hunter Biden, his grasping son, who had been employed and monetarily rewarded by China because his daddy was Joe Biden, the Democrat’s Great White Hope in the November 2020 elections. And there is a suspicion that Biden has problems unspooling simple English sentences, that he will not be able to carry his weight in office, that he really has forgotten more than he knows, and on and on and on. Biden is 77 years old. His best days, many agreed, lie behind him.

The skinny on Trump is that he has been fatally damaged by repeated failed attempts to remove him from office, and a painfully protracted, failed attempt, lasting as long as his presidency, to find him guilty of collusion with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Some suppose that Trump will be easy campaign prey for a weakened Democrat presidential contender and his more vigorous, Black, female running mate candidate.

Under the hammer-blows of a Democrat opposition unalterably opposed to a Trump second term, it has been supposed that Connecticut Republicans, as happened in 2018, will tremulously withdraw in horror from a toxic president, thereby giving weight to Democratic assertions that even a damaged Biden-Harris administration would be preferable to four more years of an Trump regime.

In both law and politics, silence signifies assent; therefore, silence by Connecticut Republicans on two matters of importance to them – the re-election of a Republican president and the recapture of the U.S. House, as well as a stony silence on what is broadly called progressive social issues – can only be interpreted by state groups traditionally allied against Republicans as a permission to continue unimpeded many progressive programs that conservatives, libertarians, most Republicans and many unaffiliated voters consider repugnant and dangerous to the social fabric of the Republic.

In the new age now upon us, the center has not held, and The Second Coming, born in a dry desert, is slowly slouching toward Bethlehem. The media is now capitalizing “Black” in its reportage, as if “Black” were a race; it’s a color. “White” is also a color, not a race. Distinctions are not made between tolerable and even necessary mottos such as “Black Lives Matter” and political organizations and operations. George Orwell might well sweep all the rotgut Newsspeak away, but there are no Orwells among us.

And we have assented to the anarchic rule of windy and rootless politicians, never mindful of Ben Franklin’s answer when he was asked by a woman on the street, once the Continental Congress had finished its business, “Sir, what have you given us?”

“A republic, madam – IF YOU CAN KEEP IT.”

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.

Looking tired? Joe Biden in Henderson, Nev., last February

—Photo by Gage Skidmore

Llewellyn King: The women who would be president

Good morning class, draw near and listen ever so closely.

So, you all want to be president of the United States, arguably the most difficult and demanding job in the world?

Clearly, you feel that you have unique talents which will promote peace and prosperity and block injustice, racism and men hitting on women.

You are sure that you will be able to curb, gently, the imperial instincts of China and its canny leader, Xi Jinping.

And you have a sure-fire plan to contain Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ambitions in eastern Europe, Asia and the Middle East and to persuade our shaken allies that it is worth standing firm with us.

You might want to know what to do about Africa’s soaring population and declining prospects.

You, also, I trust have given thought to the future as the so called Fourth Industrial Revolution unfolds with huge consequences for the future of work (artificial intelligence taking away jobs); the future of transportation (autonomous vehicles, ships and airplanes); and remote farming (farms operated from city desks).

If you are all set on those things, we can get down to the ones which may decide the election: the social issues, including abortion, education, gender equity and gender equality, gun control, access to healthcare, immigration and income inequality.

You might want to tell people how you will turn back the tides and solve global warming. Rich people are starting to worry about their oceanfront homes; that means it will become a fashionable topic with those who have been indifferent screaming for action

Now, ladies, step forward for little individual tutelage.

Elizabeth Warren: You have the pole position as the racers line up, but already there are troubling things. Ms. Warren, you must stop taking President Trump’s bait. How the devil did you get into getting your DNA analyzed? Bad move. Lead the debate, do not join it.

Kamala Harris: A few good notices and you are off and running. Just wait until the opposition research pulls apart the cases you prosecuted when you were a district attorney in San Francisco -- and the things you said in court. Two former prosecutors, Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie, have tarnished the brand.

Kirsten Gillibrand: The announcement on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert was, well, weak. It looked like you were there because you had just published a children’s book called something like Snuggles the Rabbit.. Bold statesmanship was not to be heard. It is hard to look presidential on a comedy program. Looking presidential is worth a lot in the polls, especially at the beginning. Now to those giant flip-flops on guns and abortion. Were you not a darling of the NRA? What about your switching from pro-life to pro-getting-elected? Explain your double epiphany.

Tulsi Gabbard: Step forward and salute. Major, you are the only declared candidate with military service: the only candidate in sight who has worn your country’s uniform and seen active duty. Bravo! That is going to be a huge credential, but not quite enough to outweigh the fact that you are too exotic: born in American Samoa, raised in Hawaii and a Hindu. At 38, you have got time, lots and lots of it. Beware hopefuls. This lady may not be for turning.

To the whole class of four: Have you ever run a large organization? Have you a big scandal you think you can keep hidden (you cannot)? Do you know enough people to staff the cabinet? Do you know how you will find 1,200 people to fill the positions that must be confirmed by the Senate? How is your golf game?

Three of you are senators, Gillibrand, Harris and Warren, and Gabbard is a member of the House. Hard to run against Washington when you already have contracted Potomac Fever.

Suggestion: Get a big idea and run with that. Keep out of the granular social stuff, it will bring you down. Prepare to be vice president and bide your time.

House, Senate, White House, America’s women are on the move, and may the best woman win.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email isllewellynking1@gmail.com. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.