If you wander around social media at all, you may recall this great video announcing the candidacy of Amy McGrath for Congress in the Kentucky 6th district. On Tuesday, she won the primary against the DCCC's official choice, a perfectly good nominee, Jim Gray, the mayor of Lexington's. She just turned out to be better. A lot of the reason she won is because of her introduction video which, as the saying goes, went viral. She raised $2 million off of it. It's absolutely great -- one of the best political campaign videos I've seen. I retweeted it around, though I was in good company. I'm biased in part because she refers to her mother being a polio survivor. My mother was too, and lived to the age of 87. But I was taken by Ms. McGrath's video long before she even got to that point. It was just icing on the cake. But in recent perspective it's all the better -- remember how on just this past Monday I hoped that Democrats would remind voters about the importance of the Affordable Care Act and how Republicans voted to gut it? Well, that's precisely what Amy McGrath did in the ad (and I'm sure in her campaign), which is why she brings up her mother. But watching only the video, I suspect that even from seeing that little, it's likely she won the Democratic primary for a lot of reasons, not just that one thing. The seat is currently held by a Republican, Andy Barr. But it's considered winnable by Democrats. Barr won his most recent election by 22 points. However, it's not a Deep Red district. I believe that Trump won it by only five points. Four years earlier, Mitt Romney only won the district by eight points. (Which also means it got closer...) And more to the point, in 2010 the district elected a Democratic congressman. One other issue, something I talk about regularly which I think will be a major factor in the mid-terms: the Enthusiasm Gap. In fairness, the Republican candidate was an incumbent, but he did have a challenger. 48,372 votes were cast in the Republican primary. The Democratic primary had 100,418 votes cast. So...we'll see. And as for seeing -- here's that video.
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Speaking of Audra McDonald -- as we were yesterday -- it turns out that the six-time Tony-winner stopped in to visit The Late, Late Show with James Corden while in Los Angeles on her concert tour to participate in an amusing sketch, "Inappropriate Musicals. Along with Corden and Dan Stevens (from the live-action Beauty and the Beast and Downton Abbey), the trio performed scenes from three fictitious musicals which never should have been musicals. I have a feeling that this was recorded separately from the show. It appeared Monday night after her Sunday concert, but during her concert she explained (during shouts for more encores) that they were leaving after the show to fly up to San Francisco. Also, there are several costume changes in the sketch that would seem to take longer than the time allotted if done live, which makes me suspect all the more that this was taped in advance.
On Monday, Trump sent out a couple of tweets praising himself for the great deal he got in his trade talks with China. In case you missed them amid the morass of tweets, they were --
And then another, four minutes later --
Never mind that after the Trump tariffs China actually signed a deal with Russia for soybeans rather than the U.S. And never mind, too, that what he says about China buying products has zero to do with lowering trade deficit. (As an economist explained, the way this works is that the added income into the U.S. would only be used to buy Chinese-made products, which keeps the deficit the same.) But never mind all that. Because the bigger problem is that yesterday -- the very next day (you can see the timestamp on his two tweets above -- Trump had a brief Q&A with the president of South Korea. And in one of his comments, Trump said -- "I'm not pleased how the China trade talks went." No, really. Barely 24 hours later. Today's question, class: How on earth does he expect ANYONE to believe anything he says?? If he doesn't think North Korea follows his tweets & words, he's wrong. Just because National Security Director (sic) John Bolton (sick) can go on the TV over the weekend and with as straight a face say that it's a good thing the planned-meeting with North Korea is so soon because that means Trump doesn't have time prepare for it and can instead just get a real, human assessment of Kim Jong-Un doesn't mean the rest of us have to buy that -- because it's not how world diplomacy and de-nuclearization talks works. This is like the guy in my college dorm sophomore year who would stand in the hallway goofing off with everyone on the last night before his term papers would be due, having waited until then to write them because, as he insisted, "I think better under pressure." And get an F. (And yes, that's true, though I can't swear he would get F's. However, what's also true is that the next year he was elected president of the Inter-Fraternity Council on campus. Just the kind of guy you'd expect to be president of the frats! My only concern is that today he's working in the Trump administration...) "He actually put us all at risk" takes on a new and substantive resonance when it's backed by reality. On Sunday, after attending a music event out in the Agoura Hills at the Paramount Ranch, I drove back an hour to go with my pal Mark Evanier to a concert by Audra McDonald at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. So, though this was the second part of the long day, I'll deal with it here first. I'll get to the earlier part of the day soon. Mark had called me the evening before, and even though I knew it would involve a lot of driving and re-scheduling, I figured I should give it a go. I like Audra McDonald's work very much (it's hard not to), though I'm not at all a die-hard acolyte. I'd seen her with Mark last year in a much smaller venue that was more of a conversation with song, where she chatted with Seth Rudetsky who accompanied her on the piano for the few numbers she sang. (I wrote about it here.) Sunday was worlds different. And that was the point in going, to compare the differences. Mainly, rather than being interviewed and a piano, she sang for two hours with the L.A. Opera orchestra behind her. We're so used to not hearing full orchestras these days -- including at musicals with pared down bands -- that the music alone was glorious. Soaring and rich. Wonderful too was her chatting between numbers with the audience, something I find too often missing in concerts. The performer just stands there and sings most of the time, and you could just as well bought the CD and had close to the same experience. Her chatting was warm and personal, often very funny, and occasionally touching. Much of it is scripted, I'm sure -- that's hardly a complaint. A well-planned show should have prepared material -- but it was clear that a good amount was off-the cuff. For instance, responding to the audience when she'd ask them questions. Or at one point, after screwing up the lyrics of a song. she quipped, "Maybe I should have told you it was okay to sing along." (Or something like that.) And as for her singing -- well, yeah. She does have a set of pipes. And it's not just that her voice is so strong to the point where you wondered why she even bothered with a microphone, but it's her interpretation of numbers that sets her standard, whether funny or emotional. Most of the selections were from musical theater -- most classic numbers, with some that were lesser-known to most of the audience, but also several fairly new works since she's a big champion of developing new songwriters. All in all, it was a very enjoyable afternoon. There was one particular song that stood out from the others as different. It was one of those new ones written by an Australian singer, Kate Miller Heidke, who she talks about meeting, and being SO taken by the song because it spoke so incredibly personally to her down to the details of a very emotional period of her life. As such, she apologized in advance for the language being very different from the rest of her concert and work, but it was too spot-on to what her own thoughts were, that they had to be sung as is. I couldn't find a video of Audra McDonald performing song, but did find her recording of it on one of her albums. And since it was done in concert, it fit well enough. So, here it is, "The Facebook Song" -- As a bonus, here is a video of the song performed by its writer, Kate Miller Heidke. As you'll note, it turns out that Audra McDonald did change one lyric -- the very last line which she softened. Ms. Miller Heidke sings it as intended. The tsunami of disasters that is the Trump administration is SO overwhelming that it's easy to forget news stories that would have sunk any other administration at that instant. Sure, it helps having a complicit Republican Congress that is will to overlook obstruction of justice, abuse of power and conspiring with foreign enemies in order to enable him, but it's oh-so-much more than just that. Even a story like yesterday's about Trump ordering the Department of Justice to investigate itself for their investigation of him is merely just "one of the latest," not even the otherwise Banner Headline of the Year.
And make no mistake, the DOJ's investigation is an investigation of Trump. His own lawyers have said that the Special Counsel called him a "subject" of the investigation. And you'd generally think that the subject of an investigation shouldn't be allowed to investigate their own investigators. Well, okay, I think that, but maybe "law and order" Republicans think differently. But that's just yesterday's news. As is -- sorry, was -- the story of yet another Trump Tower meeting between Don Jr. and Erik Prince (who lied to Congress about not being there), along with representatives of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates during the campaign. And we know how stories like those push others out, like last week's high school massacre in Texas and Trump's bizarre near-silence on it (old news), Trump's lawyer Michael Cohen laundering hush money for a porn actress and the Russians (old news), the missing SAR bank files for those payments (old news) which now seem to have been restricted by the Treasury Department, and the Senate Intelligence Committee issuing a report that confirms the intel services findings that Russia did try to influence the election ordered by Putin (old "fake" news). And those stories pushed out the story of Trump's staffer who "joked" (supposedly...) about John McCan dying -- with no public apology yet, despite one being promised. And that pushed out the many stories of the seemingly-unending scandals by EPA Director Scott Pruitt... And on and on and on. Pushing one Trump administration disaster out of the headline for the next one. All of which made me realize a story long-since forgotten which is one Democrats should continue to be pounding on, since -- although it's not a "scandal" in the non-stop salacious or criminal Trump meaning of the word -- it's one which has had direct and profound impact on the public and will have even far-more down the line. Yet it's one that has been largely overlooked because it's been relegated to Way Old News -- which in this administration is usually anything more than five days ago. And this is ancient, almost prehistoric, all the way back in 2017. And no, I'm not even talking about how the "tax cut" for the richest Americans added $1.5 trillion to the national deficit over the course of 10 years. (Quick side note on that: I Remember that photo op Trump took with Harley Davidson motorcycles? (VROOM!) Well get this -- the company took their big corporate tax cut and are closing a U.S. factory & moving it to Bangkok, Thailand. AND they used their tax cut to buy back stock for themselves! But it gets even better! Harley Davidson is based in Milwaukee, WISCONSIN. The home state of...yes, Paul Ryan, the sycophantic Speaker of the House who enables Trump.) No, no, not the massive debt issue of the "tax cut," I'm referring to another result entirely of that "tax cut" -- which is so easy to forget since it was a give months ago, another lifetime in Trump Years. It was how when Trump and the Republican Party voted for that "tax cut" bill to get rid of the individual mandate which gutted the Affordable Care Act. That's how disastrous the Trump administration has been. That SO many awful things have happened SO often and SO regularly on a near-daily (sometimes hourly) basis that it's easy to forget that in the midst of one of its most harmful actions -- adding $1.5 trillion to the national deficit -- even that wasn't bad enough, and they destroyed health care. And the reason it's especially easy to forget this is because the removal of the individual mandate, which among other things will cause 13 million Americans to lose health coverage, is because that action doesn't take effect until 2019...after the mid-term election. (Republicans were very smart and even more cowardly about making sure of that.) So, most Americans at this point have probably totally forgotten all about that. Forgotten that in the GOP's unending effort to "Repeal and Replace" the program, they not only weren't ever able to figure out how to "replace" it -- but couldn't even properly "repeal" it. And so, they just shredded the thing. Shredding is easy. Replacing is hard. As we've seen, since Trump and his GOP band of merry men (robbing from the poor to give to the rich) STILL haven't come up with that Trump-promised "better, cheaper, beautiful health care" replacement. Or...well, ANY replacement, for that matter. It's my hope that when it comes time to campaign in earnest for the mid-terms and Republicans try to make the "tax cut" their one and only notable "achievement" -- assuming that adding $1.5 trillion to the deficit can be considered an achievement -- that Democrats themselves try to remember to remind the public that along with that gift of a $1.5 trillion deficit comes a bonus, the forgotten, upcoming destruction of health care. Cheers. To your good health... |
AuthorRobert J. Elisberg is a political commentator, screenwriter, novelist, tech writer and also some other things that I just tend to keep forgetting. Feedspot Badge of Honor
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