Clinton picks Tim Kaine for VP

Hillary Clinton has announced her choice for vice president:   Sen. Tim Kaine, who is currently a senator from Virginia and is a previous mayor of Richmond and governor of  Virginia.   This is a good, solid choice;  and I am confident that Clinton chose the person that she wants to have working alongside her in the White House, someone who could meet her stated criterion of being able to wake up one morning, if necessary, and be the president.

Progressives were hoping for Elizabeth Warren or Tom Perez.   Kaine is considered a more moderate Democrat;  for example he supported President Obama on the TPP fast track authorization, although he does not support the TPP in its current form.  Progressives also have concerns about his positions on banking.  In addition, he does not bring excitement to the ticket, no drama, no sizzle.   But in every other way, he is an ideal choice.   He has a Midwest, working class, liberal Catholic background, speaks fluent Spanish, and is the most respected, moral member of Congress.

I don't think I can introduce him in any better way than to quote from what progressive political commentator Krystal Ball wrote a while back on the Huffington Post.    She was a self-described "Bernie Broad," who supported Bernie Sanders in the primary.   But she is also a Virginia resident and has known Sen. Kaine for many years.   Here's what she wrote about him: 

"Kaine is the son of a welder who graduated from a Jesuit high school, flew through University of Missouri and then landed at Harvard Law. While his classmates were hanging out in Cambridge fielding offers from big firms, Kaine took a year off to do mission work in Honduras where he worked with young boys growing up in brutal poverty. The year abroad left him fluent in Spanish and with a deep commitment to using his Harvard law degree for the public good. After law school he made good on his commitment to service and rather than cashing in on his degree, spent much of his legal career fighting against housing discrimination. Now you just tell me, does that sound like the bio of a chamber-[of commerce]-backed, blue dog, corporate Dem? . . .

"Here’s how his elections in Virginia typically go: the NRA gives him an F rating, fear mongers about how he’s going to take everyone’s guns, spends massively against him, and then Tim goes on to win anyway. Keep in mind, the NRA is literally headquartered in Virginia. . . but that didn’t stop Kaine from signing an executive order following the Virginia Tech massacre to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill . . . [or] pushing additional gun control measures as governor like eliminating the gun show loophole. . . . the definition of political courage for a Southern Dem is willingness to buck the gun lobby. Tim Kaine has been unflinching. . . .  


"Speaking of Catholic values, shouldn’t pro-choice progressives be terrified of Tim Kaine on the ticket? After all, he has said he is personally opposed to abortion. . . . [But] Kaine has consistently supported Roe v Wade. In the Senate, he actually enjoys a 100 percent rating from Planned Parenthood. Based on Kaine’s record, it seems he would be entirely comfortable backing Hillary Clinton’s strongly pro-choice positions and in the unlikely event he would find himself President and making Supreme Court picks, there is every reason to expect Kaine would seek out Justices who would uphold Roe. He has been quite clear that while he may have his own personal objections to abortion, he has no interest in policing the lives of others. . . .

"[H]aving watched a long time and gotten to see the man up close, I can tell you he is courageous, principled, and value driven. . . .  He won over skeptical Virginians when it was supposedly impossible. I’d love to see what he can do to help Secretary Clinton win over America."

Both NARAL and Planned Parenthood have hailed the choice of Kaine, so that should allay fears about his stand on abortion.  Others have described him as the most progressive governor in Virginia history.   We may be in for some surprises.

Mo Elleithee, head of the Georgetown Institute of Politics and Public Service, calls Kaine "a true progressive" and says he connects with voters across diverse groups in cities, suburbs and the countryside.   He also has the ability to launch a blistering attack on an opponent and still be liked by the audience.   “I remember one speech where he had the people eating out of his hands.  It wasn’t until later that I realized, oh, my God, he just ripped his opponent’s face off, but it didn’t feel like it.”
 
Sounds OK to me.   Let's go win an election.   The stakes are huge.

Ralph

Trump said he would not lie; let's hold him to it. Let the fact-checking begin.

Political commentator Andrew Sullivan, writing on "The Daily Intelligenser," distilled Donald Trump's acceptance speech to this pithy characterization:  “Everything is terrible. I alone can solve. Just don’t ask me how.”

Sullivan expanded on this:  "It’s also striking how the concept of “freedom” is utterly absent from this speech. It’s all about government power – or rather the near-miraculous powers of a strongman."   Garry Kasparov, Russian former world chess champion, now chairman of the Human Rights Foundation:  "I've heard this sort of speech a lot in the last 15 years and, trust me, it doesn't sound any better in Russian."

So there's that aspect.   Trump presents himself as the "Law and Order President," the strong man with the knowledge, the will, and the power to, oh so quickly, fix all these things that are wrong with America that are totally the fault of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.  There is no complexity, no partisan opposition in congress to stymie action, no competing good causes for the limited resourses that require compromise   We only need to elect him, and all will be well.   He will magically replace bad trade deals with good trade deals.  We'll be rich again.   We'll be safe again.  We'll be great again.

It was sickening on so many counts.   What kept infuriating me was all the lies.   He began his laundry list of problems that he will take care of by solemnly promising to “present the facts plainly and honestly. . .   There will be no lies.”

And then he proceeded to lie in almost everything he said.   He lied in claiming that hordes of Syrians refugees are flooding into our country, and we have no way to find out who they are.   Some of them were so ludicrous -- like blaming Clinton for things that occurred either way before, or long after, her term as Secretary of State.   Some were more serious, questioning the integrity of our Justice Department.   He simply refuses to believe the professional judgment of the most straight-arrow Attorney General in history, a Republican himself who prizes his reputation for integrity above all else.  But the fact that the FBI did not find it appropriate to bring charges against Clinton in the email case is simply proof for Trump that Comey was part of a rigged system.   You see, it simply cannot be that Hillary Clinton is not guilty.   Trump's whole campaign collapses if they can't demonize her;  hating her is what unites this disparate conglomeration of people that is now the crumbling Republican Party.

Here's another easily checked lie underpinning a key point about taxes.   He said:  “America is one of the highest-taxed nations in the world.”   Not true.   In fact, according to the 2015 statistics from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, we are among the lowest at #31 out of 32 they rank.    His claim about police killed in the line of duty is grossly misleading.  We are seeing an uptick in this year, but it has been declining every year for the past three decades and is less than half what it was then.

We could catelogue the lies and distortions ad nauseum, but the scary thing is the demagoguery, the jackboot mentality, and the dog-whistles to nativism, isolationism (his "American First" was the cry of those who opposed our entering WWII), law and order (Richard Nixon), and . . . yes, elements of fascism.

Ralph

GOP Convention Day 4: Trump's speech

Well, it's finally over.   I must say that the final day and Trump's acceptance speech was not a disaster.   Nor was it very different from the usual final day of a political convention.    The speakers turned their attention to praising the nominee.   There was the usual video lauding what he has accomplished (changing the skyline of New York City).   His daughter Ivanka gave an over-long, polished, paen to her father.   There was no big show-biz entrance, as had been hinted.   He just walked out on the stage, looking almost hesitant rather than resolute and confident.

Then he read from the teleprompter, in measured cadences and shouted tones, his way-too-long acceptance speech, clocking in at about an hour and 15 minutes.  [Later said to be the longest of any candidate's acceptance since the 1970s, at least.] It was interrupted many, many times by applause, enthusiastic at first, then less so as it dragged on.   Here's my assessment.

It was a demagogue, rabble-rousing rant, based on lie after lie and distortion after distortion.  His themes were:   Law and Order, Make America Great Again, secure our borders, stop illegal immigration.  He promised to lay out his plan for making America Great Again.    And then, like a typical State of the Union presidential speech, he mentioned every problem that he thinks is wrong with our country -- and then blamed every bit of it on Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, promised to fix it all . . . and to fix it all very quickly.

But his "plans" included no specifics about what he would do or how he would do it.   Never once mentioned working with Congress to achieve these ends.   It was just "we're going to . . . [fill in the blank.] 

The discouraging thing was seeing those gullible people in the audience lapping it up and getting up to cheer.   As the evening wore on and his speech went past the one hour mark, more and more of them were looking tired and ready to go home.   Then the balloons came down and the cheering revved up again.

If I were naive and gullible and believed all his lies and empty promises, I suppose I might be seduced into wanting to vote for him.    But all these nice-sounding slogans and promises are just not the Donald Trump that we've seen over the past year and that we've heard and read about.   I'm afraid what we saw was an unprincipled demagogue who, once again, told the people what they wanted to hear without any plan or knowledge how to do it.  It's all just smoke and mirrors, lies and distortions.  We know that, because he's told us that's what he does.


Ralph

GOP Convention Day 3: Cruz stole the news cycle

The task for the GOP convention in Cleveland was to unify the party.   It didn't.    

An attempt to unbind the delegates that got squashed by the Rules Committee.   Then on the floor a request by a few states simply to have a roll call vote on the rules was steamrolled by the chair who didn't even recognize their request. The Colorado delegation walked out.   So that, rather than unity, became the news.

Day 1:   The news of the day became rumble in the ranks and a significant number of votes for someone other than the nominee.   Not helpful.

Day 2:   The speakers tried to bring unity through viciously attacking a common enemy:   Hillary Clinton.   That was pretty bad, with Christie getting the audience to shout "lock her up."   But the news of the day Tuesday and throughout the day Wednesday was the plagiarism in Melania Trump's Monday night speech and the ineptitude of the campaign in handling that inconvenient, proven fact.   Not good.

Day 3:   This was to be VP nominee Mike Pence's big night delivering his acceptance speech.   He did a credible job.   But the news wasn't about him or his speech.  Again, negative news dominated the headlines and the conversation.   This time it was Ted Cruz getting his revenge on Donald Trump -- and trying to grab the mantle of true conservative candidate for the 2020 election.   Very bad for unifying the party.

Trump had said that no one would speak at the convention that had not endorsed him.   This left Cruz out -- until a few weeks ago, we heard that they had come to an agreement.  Cruz would speak, without any commitment to endorse.   It was a gamble on Trump's part -- but then to go further and give him a prime time slot just shortly before Pence's acceptance speech was foolish planning.

Cruz gave what true conservatives considered a great speech and a direction for the future -- and he played it coy enough that he had the audience thinking his next sentence was going to be an endorsement.   But, with that devilish smirk he gets on his face, he ended by telling people to "vote your conscience in November."   The crowd began demanding "endorse Trump, endorse Trump" -- and when he still didn't, they booed and booed.   His speech was finished anyway, but he left the stage to a loud, angry crowd booing and jeerying him.    Cruz's wife was escorted off the floor by security guards for her own safety.

So that's how Day 3 ended -- and guaranteed that Ted Cruz will be the news on Day 4.   Unity?   Maybe they'll unite against Ted Cruz -- except that he has a pretty good number of delegates supporting him.   It's not the convention GOP leaders wanted and needed.    Now it all rests on Trump himself and his acceptance speech tonight.   Can he unify the party?

Ralph

Finally, the truth about Melania's plagiarism

Finally on Wednesday afternoon, the Trump campaign decided to tell the truth.   At least this sounds like it could be the truth. Two professional speech writers submitted their draft.   Donald Trump didn't like it, spent a week, crossing things out, trying to rewrite it himself, and then finally abandoned it.    Then a Trump organization staff writer (not a campaign staffer) Meredith McIver, who has ghost written at least three of Trump's more recent books, agreed to work with Melania to write a speech.

In their collaboration, Melania read to her over the phone some lines from Michelle Obama's 2008 convention speech that she liked and wanted to use "as inspiration" for her own speech, saying that she had always admired Michelle.   McIver wrote down lines -- and then they just got incorporated into the speech without any attribution.   She now feels terrible for not checking the source and was not aware that it was a direct quote.   McIver has reportedly offered her resignation, and Donald Trump refused to accept it.

That's believable.  But it doesn't change anything I wrote yesterday about this as emblematic of problems in the Trump campaign.   And it adds another:   Trump's basic dishonesty, which pervades the campaign.  Simply telling the truth initially, along with an apology to Mrs. Obama, and the story would have been gone in a day.  Instead, it caused all kinds of subtle and pervasive harm.   Politics 101:  a cover-up attempt always, only makes it worse.

Ralph

Plagiarism in Melania's speech is emblematic of even bigger problems in the Trump campaign

Putting Melania's plagiarism in perspective requires a political, short-range view and a broader, long-range view.    First, as an offense, it ranks pretty low and would easily be overlooked, if it were not for the delicious irony that the lines about values were stolen from the arch-enemy camp itself:   the Obamas.  You know, the guy who lied about where he was born and has ruined everything about America, which used to be great.

But look beyond that.  The whole debacle threatens to mushroom into a serious problem for the Trump campaign because it is emblematic of -- and therefore accentuates -- three serious problems in a Trump candidacy and possible future presidency.

1.  This campaign is woefully understaffed, disorganized, underfunded -- and they simply don't have enough staff to manage things, like someone to vet Melania's all-important convention speech.   In addition, it is almost impossible for his staff and family to contain Donald Trump and keep him focused on important issues.  Instead, they make stupid mistakes and consistently overshadow what should be good news for them by keeping some bad news as the top story of the day.  Example:   on the day that the FBI Director scolded Clinton for her "extremely careless" handling of emails, Trump was still over-explaining how the anti-Semitic tweet he sent out was not an insult to Jews.   In short, if he can't run a campaign, then how can he run the government as head of state, be commander-in-chief, and leader of the free world?

2.  How the campaign has handled this debacle is also worrisome.   Their crisis-mode judgment is not good.  First, they did not catch the problem themselves.   There are digital programs now that you run a speech through, and it will pick up things like this.   They obviously didn't do that.    But their initial response to it being identified, within an hour, by some smart person with a computer, was denial.   Then they lied and tried to shift the blame.  Paul Manafort:  "The first thing Hillary Clinton does when she feels threatened by a woman is to try to demean that woman."  But Hillary is not the one who brought up the plagiarism, and the media isn't letting Trump get away with that.   This is proven plagiarism, pure and simple, line by line -- calculated by one math whiz to be one chance in 47 billion of happening randomly.   A simple admission of the facts, and an apology to Michelle Obama, would have erased the whole thing in less than a day.   So it's emblematic of how badly Team Trump handles crises, which come fast and furious to the White House.

3.  The third problem this highlights is Trump's values.  In the section of her speech where Melania turns to the values that she and Donald share and want to instill in their children and for the children of America, she does not give us some inspiring story that either she, or he, learned from their parents or from some transformative personal experience.   She turns instead to someone else's words, someone's else's experience.   She could have quoted (quoted, not stolen) words from some great moral teacher.   Or why not say:  "As that great First Lady Michelle Obama said in her convention speech, . . . "  Instead, as described by DailyKos blogger "brooklynbadboy,"

". . .  she decided to use someone else's property, put a huge gold-plated TRUMP sign on it, and pass it off as her own. She's definitely learned the family business."

A side note on this came from former George W. Bush speech writer David Frum.  In an article for The Atlantic, Frum listed the multiple impacts this plagiarism will have on the campaign.   Here's one:

"The incident throws a harpoon into the heart of the Trump campaign’s racial politics. Trump’s message: Non-white people are ripping off hard-working white Americans who play by the rules. 'They' cheat; 'we' lose."   Could there be a sharper reversal of that racialized complaint than Melania Trump in her designer dress stealing Michelle Obama’s heartfelt words?"

All of this may not be fair to Melania.   We don't know that she knew this was taken from Michelle Obama's speech.   Maybe it was the ghost writer who supplied the material without attributing its source, and Melania just read what they gave her.  But it is very much an indictment of the campaign's failures to keep such mistakes from happening.  Here's the thing though, quoting "brooklynbadboy again: 

"Nothing she said in that speech about who her husband is as a person has any credibility. That's the way it goes with plagiarism: If anything is rotten, it’s all rotten."

That last idea is so true.   Everything Melania Trump said earlier in her speech about good qualities in her husband already rang false -- because it was so at odds with what we know about him.   Then to have it exposed that their "shared values" were somebody else's stolen words . . . .  Well, it now just seems everything they're presenting is a false front:  who they are, what his business record is, what his policies will be -- all of it.  They're trying to put the Trump brand on values they have stolen from the genuinely moral first couple, Michelle and Barack Obama.

Melania Trump looked smashing (if you like the super-model type), she was poised and gave her speech with a beautiful delivery. . . but the substance was all false.    A beautiful, empty package.

Ralph

GOP convention: Day 2

Donald Trump is now the official 2016 presidential nominee of the Republican Party.   It was a night of speeches by establishment Republicans:   Ryan, McConnnell, Christie;   and by two of Trump's adult children, Tiffany and Donald, Jr.

The evening's big surprise was Donald Trump, Jr., who has emerged in this campaign as a political force to be reckoned with in the future, if he wants to be.    His speech was quickly proclaimed by Rachel Maddow to be the best speech yet at the convention.  Other political analysts, both Democrats and Republicans, agreed.

Christie's speech was typical Christie:   both prosecutorial and rabble-rousing.   He pumped up the crowd with a call-and-answer exchange, where he would make a charge against Hillary Clinton, and then say:   "Guilty or not guilty?"    And the crowd would yell back:  "Guilty."    Then they began shouting, "Lock her up."   And it got a little scary.

Bad as Day 1 was for Trump and the GOP, Day 2 was pretty good.   Except that the news of the day was dominated by the plagiarism of Melania's speech Monday night, with several sentences lifted verbatim from Michelle Obama's convention speech in 2008. 

According to Josh Marshall, the draft written by the professional speech writers was rejected, so Melania rewrote it herself with the help of a ghost writer, Meredith McIver, who has written several of Donald Trump's recent books and who is a family friend.   In their working on it, they read the convention speeches by several former first ladies.   So that dominated the news on Day 2, until the evening roll call vote made the Trump nomination official.

Politicians who spoke didn't so much praise Trump as they did demonize Clinton.   Ben Carson even went to far as to link her with "Lucifer," his favorite avatar of the devil.  And Christie want to put her in jail.   It played well in the hall, but how whether such over-reach convinces the all-important, undecided independents is another story.

Ralph

Some thoughts on Day 1 of the GOP convention. The weaponization of grief.

The drama of opening day (Monday) afternoon was the floor fight -- or rather that attempted insurrection that was quickly squelched by the power of the presiding chair -- over the rules.   All it finally boiled down to was some states demanding that they have a roll call vote on adopting the recommended rules.   They knew they had already lost the attempt to unbind the delegates and let them vote their conscience.   But they wanted the votes to be recorded.

Instead, the presiding chair (I don't know who it was) called for a voice vote, declared that the "ayes" had it (despite a loud chorus of "nos") -- and that was that.   Old fashioned, rigged system -- only now it was rigged in favor of the insurgent candidate, Trump, who complained about the system being rigged against him.

As to the evening speeches, I did what I usually do -- recorded it all so I could fast-forward to selected parts.   So I did watch Melania's speech and was actually pleasantly surprised -- not by the speech itself, which was a boring pastiche of cliches about "my husband" and what he wants for the country, but by her style.

What was positive, for me, was seeing that she can make a public speech with grace and charm and not look cheap.    On the other hand, you'd not mistake her for the "every-woman" who can relate to the common people, unless they are servants at Mar-a-Lago and she can be the gracious lady.

On substance, for the gullible, it played well;   but for us cynics, it had such little relation to truth about Trump as to be hard to listen to.  And that was before I knew about the plagiarizing of Michelle Obama's convention speech in 2008.    I thought she was trying to channel Jackie Kennedy by her look and demeanor.

I did not listen to Rudi Guiliani, whom I cannot abide even for one minute, but I read that he kind of "went wild" (as he is wont to do) in damning HRC.    So for me the worst of the evening -- because it was so effective and so manipulative -- was the mother of the son who was killed in Benghazi.   "I blame Hillary Clinton personally for my son's death.   She should be in prison."    Her pain and grief were so raw and so palpable, and the cameras panned over the faces of numerous people in tears.

It was spellbinding and awful at the same time.  It's hard not to feel for her grief.   But, as several MBNBC commentors said, this was very wrong for the GOP to use a mother's grief to manipulate people's emotions based on assertions that have proven to be untrue by eight different investigations.   Even a Republican strategist agreed, calling it the "weaponization of grief."

Ralph

Trump's "dominance politics" reflected in the short-lived Trump-Pence logo

Take a good look at this logo.   It's gone.  After 24 hours of ridicule, the Trump campaign has scrubbed the image from its website and removed any products that contain it.  It's hard to believe that whoever chose this was truly oblivious to the obvious innuendo of sexual dominance and power (the T penetrating the subservient P).  I'd wager dollars to donuts that it was Trump's choice.

First, I know that Paul Manafort and the Trump kids are not that stupid.   Anyone else who tried this, without Trump's approval, would be instantly fired -- or should be.  I also can believe that Trump liked it, even insisted on it, despite advisers pleas.   Why?  Because it fits so perfectly with what Josh Marshall of TPM calls Trump's "dominance politics."

". . .[T]he entirety of Trump's political message is dominance politics. . . .Trump attacks, others comply and submit. . . .  It is simply no accident that those who come into his orbit, who join with him, are rapidly visited with a string of indignities that stand in a bracing contrast to the power and status they earlier enjoyed. On the field of other political actors, other would-be 'alpha males', for Trump you are either his enemy or his property."

Think Jeb Bush.   Marco Rubio.  And then there's Chris Christie.   He's smart enough to realize fairly early that he was not going to win the nomination.   So he dropped out and quickly endorsed the top dog.  And then, almost unbelievably Christie -- the bully, alpha male personified -- became Trump's lap dog, following him around on the campaign trail, standing mutely with a scowl on his face, while Trump ranted on.  Christie bit his tongue, waiting for his promised treat -- even humiliating himself by a last minute phone call in which he reportedly begged Trump to name him his VP.   Even then Trump strung him along while he made late night phone calls to aides to see if there was any way he could get out of the nomination already offered to and accepted by Pence.

Speculation is that Christie was strongly opposed by son-in-law and trusted adviser Jared Kushner.   As U.S. Attorney for New York, Christie had been the prosecutor who sent Jared's father to prison for a very long time for white collar crimes.

In the end, the final humiliation, Christie learned by news leaks and Trump's tweeted announcement that he had not been chosen.  I was wrong about what Christie had wanted.   I had assumed ever since he endorsed Trump that Christie wanted -- and had been promised -- the Attorney General position.   Which he might still get, if (God forbid) Trump gets elected and Christie escapes indictment himself.  Newt Gingrich fared a little better in that he made his case, lobbied hard, but he never quite grovelled as Christie did.

But then  back to Poor Mike Pence.   Humiliated by leaks that Trump really didn't want to pick him, he then had to endure a 30 minute wait backstage, while Trump talked about himself, bragging about how he had vanquished 16 primary rivals, about all the millions of people who had voted for him.   When he finally got around to introducing his "first choice" for running mate, it seemed pretty tepid.    And then, once the announcement was made, Trump bounded off stage without waiting to listen to Pence's acceptance speech.  It does not bode well that the presidential nominee can't stand to be on the stage with the vice presidential nominee -- and that it is so obvious.

To make matters even worse, Trump and Pence did a joint interview on 60 Minutes on Sunday evening.    It did not go well.   Both of them said the right words of praise for the other;   but there is zero chemistry, zero warmth, zero exultation together that you usually see.   When the interviewer mentioned needing Pence to balance the ticket, Trump just couldn't help himself.   "I didn't need him," and then he bragged again about the millions of votes he'd gotten, including evangelicals.   No, it's not that he needs Pence -- hey, he can do it all by himself.   But, he said, he did it "to unify the party."     Yeeeooowh.   Can you believe it?    Hillary must be turning cartwheels of joy.

Back to Marshall's account of how the Pence pick was rolled out:  

"On its own terms, this turn of events perfectly captures the mix of unsteadiness, cynicism and [stupid decisions] that characterizes everything about the Trump campaign. But the bigger story isn't so much that it happened as that it was leaked, so quickly, and at such a devastating moment for Pence and the ticket. . . .  Yet the precise motivations, the exact origins of the leak pale before a larger reality. . . .  Coming into the orbit of Mr Trump, taking his yoke as it were, requires not only total submission . . . but a farewell to all independence and dignity. . . 

"Trump has already managed to take Pence, the governor of a major state, and recast him as a ridiculous figure, the guy who managed to bag the vice presidential pick only to have the guy at the top of the ticket broadcast to the world that he'd rather not have him. This will hang over Pence regardless of how the ticket fares. He's also now publicly renouncing various past statements about Trump and his policies. . . .  So Trump's Muslim ban goes from being "offensive and unconstitutional" to ... well, awesome. . . .

"None of this is an accident. We can confidently expect a string of new indignities for Pence from now until election day."

So, yes, the now defunct logo -- that symbol of screwing your subordinate -- was 100% perfect to express Trump's feelings and his characteristic way of operating.   Let's hope the voters get it -- before it's too late.

Ralph