Post 220 - October 17, 2020

Day 220…

I woke up this morning, for the first time this season, to the hissing of the radiator.

Our building is heated by steam from a big oil-fueled boiler in the basement that looks like something out of a science fiction lab. Like the scorching summers in Arizona, it’s an incredibly dry heat.

We rarely have the radiators on. It gets hot enough in the apartments nearby - especially those underneath us, that our apartment stays warm with them completely off. Often it gets so hot that it can be snowing outside, and I have to open the windows. I’m all about being able to see your breath inside.

When the temperature falls down close to zero and the wind starts ripping down the canyons of our gridded streets, Michael sometimes caves in and sneaks it on. We then spend the rest of the winter turning them on and turning them off behind each other’s backs.

This afternoon, I have to report for four hours of election polling training.

Our early voting here in New York doesn’t begin for another week even though it is well underway in other states.

People seem to be turning out across the country in record numbers. Early-voter turn-out in Illinois, according to a CNN report this morning is up 400% from the last election. My sister and my brother-in-law stood in line for three hours yesterday to cast their ballots in North Carolina.

I find it hard to believe that there is anybody out there who is still undecided about who they are going to support in this election. The dueling Town Halls earlier this week turned out to be a far better way to assess each candidate than their initial debate was.

George Stephanopolous moderated Joe Biden’s meeting in Philadelphia. The former Vice President fielded questions from the audience and answered them in depth, without interruption from the President.

In most regards, the Democratic candidate is a moderate to the center candidate. Even so, given how far to the right his opponent is, they are extremely far apart. It is notable, I think, just how willing he is to discuss even difficult issues.

I am not sure that there is any real way to have a meaningful discussion about racial issues these days without stepping on someone’s toes - whether it be inadvertently or on purpose.

He was asked by a guy what he would say to Black voters who don’t believe that the system - no matter who is in charge - is, in any way, designed to protect them. Biden gave an extremely long, very detailed, answer. It was a bit overwhelming.

At the end he asked the guy if he had said what he wanted to hear.

“I think so,” the somewhat overwhelmed questioner responded.

Biden then said to him, “Well there's a lot more if you want to, if you're going to hang out afterwards, I'll tell you more.”

The only real answer possible to a topic like that is to have a discussion. That he was willing to engage on that level, I found extremely meaningful. He did, indeed, remain behind afterwards, when the cameras were off, and continued to talk with some of the people who were there.

There are a couple of topics that cause some friction for him.

One is the issue of fracking.

Fracking is a way to extract gas and oil from rock using concentrated high-pressure water. A hole is drilled into the ground and water is forcibly injected into it which then releases the trapped material. Unregulated, it can poison groundwater, pollute surface water and threaten wildlife and ecosystems.

The explosive blasts are so powerful that they can cause earthquakes. Small level 1 earthquakes are actually welcomed by the frackers because they help with the release of what they are looking for. Unfortunately, they can also cause larger quakes - the biggest one recorded so far was a level 4 in Texas.

Candidate Biden said that he would not ban fracking. He did not say that he was for it. He elaborated by saying that regulations surrounding it need to be strengthened and enforced.

He also then discussed the fact that we need to move away from our reliance on all fossil fuels. He is not in favor of the Green New Deal which calls for a hard end to fossil fuel use by 2030 as he does not believe that it is achievable in that time frame.

None of that is happening under this Administration. In fact, our current Administration has eroded most of the advances that we’ve made towards achieving that goal. The way to end fracking is to end our reliance upon what it produces.

The other big point of contention is the issue of court-packing.

If he is elected President, will he add more Justices to the US Supreme Court to tilt it ideologically to the left?

He’s left that question open, and, really, that’s the only way to answer that question. Rather than committing to a course of action now, he wants to wait and see what the Republicans do to the court in the next few weeks.

There is nothing, legally, that should stop the Republicans from confirming their nominee to the court. That said, the issue is that they are completely flouting the argument that they made four years ago when they refused to allow confirmation hearings for President Obama’s nominee. Their reasoning was that as we were heading towards a national election, the confirmation should wait for the American people to decide.

Clearly, we are in need of more definitive legislation to be enacted to clarify the process. The Founding Fathers didn’t really outline anything helpful in this regard.

What the Republicans are effectively doing right now is trying to stack the court. If this nominee is, indeed, appointed then the balance of the court which is just to the right as it stands now, then swings solidly to the right - decidedly out of balance.

While it seems inevitable that the President’s nominee is going to be approved, it hasn’t happened yet. Committing to what he will do IF that happens, backs Biden into a corner that he won’t be able to get out of if something else happens. Wait and see is the only response possible at this point. When, and if, it happens, Biden has said he will then announce what his position is on the issue.

It was a thoughtful, not always easy, hour and a half.

In contrast, the President’s competing Town Hall on a different network, was argumentative and rife with made up facts. At one point he held up a printed-out screenshot from the Fox TV Laura Ingraham show to support a claim he was trying to validate.

After a steady diet of Fox interviewers who rarely press him on anything, NBC anchor Savannah Guthrie never let up. After a hurried and forced denunciation of white supremacy, he then turned around and refused to denounce QAnon, the radical right conspiracy theory movement. He claimed to not know anything about them.

“I do know they are very much against pedophilia,” the President said. “They fight it very hard.”

If there are people out there who are truly still on the fence, then, unless they are insane themselves, it seems unlikely that they would be swayed into the Republican camp. The President’s Town Hall was an excruciatingly difficult hour of television to sit through.

He lost the ratings battle as well. 700,000 more people watched his opponent’s meeting than watched his. For a person so totally consumed by ratings and attention, that has got to have stung.

There does seem to be a movement of some Republicans away from the President in recent days. Republican Senator Ben Sasse from Nebraska has started publicly criticizing the President.

Yesterday, the President tweeted that he was “stupid and obnoxious.”

The ship is leaking, and the rats are scurrying.

It would be a mistake to think that the ship is really going to sink. It can take on a lot of water and still remain afloat, we should all be wary of jumping to any conclusions.

Polls are unreliable. Votes are not.

OK, that said, I’m off to my poll training. I guess I should find a jacket if the radiator has come on.

I am hopefully going to do everything that I can to make it as easy as possible for the greatest number of people to cast their ballots.

There is nothing else, these days, more important than getting people to the polls.

Our strength is in our numbers.

Let’s wield that strength.