Frank's Musings

Trump’s supporters and Biden supporters alike are sports fans.

Many of them probably didn’t vote in 2016. The Biden campaign must find a way to get its  message to them—particularly how important it is just to vote.

Among the channels to tap are of course advertising for all sporting events. Also the Biden campaign  should sponsor sports talk shows, both on radio and TV. Moreover, social media sites that target athletic competition provide a way to approach the youngest sports fans.

The Biden campaign must have a team that focuses specifically on sports media advertising and commentary. I suspect that the combination of conventional media (like ESPN, FOX SPORTS, MLB, and many other specialized channels) as well as a multitude of sports social media websites and, of course, print media (starting with Spots Illustrated) reaches the an overwhelming majority of this segment of eligible voters. It would be surprising if this group did not account for a large number of customarily apathetic voters.

The mission of the Biden campaign’s sports marketing team should be to motivate these potential voters to cast their ballots in November and, of course, that the future of their most cherished human activity is also at risk if they don’t vote and support a change in Washington.

There will, of course, be many consequences of another four (or more?) years of a Trump presidency.  However, one can point to specific ways that Trump will harm the vibrancy and preeminence of American sports.  These include the following:

Reelection of President Trump will directly cripple the sports world much more than only by compelling  the insertion of additional asterisks in the record books to mark the impact of his administration’s mistakes.  Athletic careers will be stunted, lives of potential competitors will be lost, and the excitement and enjoyment of witnessing and engaging in team sports could be seriously diminished for a long time.

The current president of the U.S. hopes to remain in office following the outcome of the 2020 general election because a coalition of single-issue voting blocks will vote for him in sufficient numbers to win a victory in the Electoral College.       Pursuers of those issues include the following:

Right-to-lifers                                 (But can you imagine Trump allowing a wife to escape through abortion her admission of being weak-willed in the face of his predation?)

Climate-change deniers               (Why would he care if anyone or their progeny would have to live with the consequences of global warming?)

Environment exploiters                (It’s not important to him what might result from the uncaring degradation of the planet.)

Fundamentalist Christians           (How manipulative was his photo-op holding a bible in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church on Lafayette Square?)

Resentful white working class     (Some of us willingly rely on the help of those more intelligent or successful than us; some of us think that smarter and wealthier people unfairly enjoy more privileges than the rest of us.)

White supremacists                      (He believes that good people can also discriminate against other humans merely because of the color of their skin or their country of origin.)

Nativists                                          (Those of us who are already in America and violate the principles of our Constitution by denying entry into the country to anyone who accepts those principles.)

Misogynists                                    (Anyone who has had three wives, five children and countless adulterous lovers doesn’t respect women very much.)

Know-nothings                               (Some egotists are disdainful of the expertise of others, to the extent that they refuse to sacrifice their precious time and attention even to reading or listening to what others have to say.)

Pandemic flouters                         (A corollary of that arrogance Is his fixed idea that no one‘s alarm about the unusual nature of the COVID-19 pandemic is more reasonable than his own expectation, because he has not personally been affected, that it will just go away.)

Democracy Disregarders              (For him, democracy is nothing more than the name we have given (forget the Greeks) to the order of things in which an undeserving rich person is free to do as he pleases.)

Each of these voting blocks may not share allegiance to all or any of the other issues; but they all share strong enough conviction in their own issue to constitute a reliable voting and financial resource for the Trump campaign. Therefore, the only way for the Democrats to defeat Trump in 2020 will be to convince those not in those blocks that it is important to vote in order just to preserve the future of an America that makes it possible for us to coexist.

I once selected “insulting” as my one-word characterization of Donald Trump.  It has become evident that he treats everyone, including his 35% base, the same way.  I resent his treatment of me, and they must, too.

His recent references to Senator Kamala Harris as a questionably native-born American are only the latest of his outrageous statements that convince me of his lack of respect for the intelligence of anyone who hears what he has to say.  More importantly, those claims of his show  total disregard for any sensibility among even the people on whom he relies for electoral strength.  That doesn’t even take into account his obliviousness to the tragedy that millions of us have felt because of the raging corona virus pandemic.

It is up to the Biden/Harris Campaign urgently to do two things in order to win in November:

Of course, the Biden/Harris team must also devise and advertise its plans for “building back better” the country, and begin to select the people who will carry out those plans—no one ever thought this would be easy.  But the U.S. will surely be a better place with Donald Trump removed from the White House.

President Donald J. Trump is so impulsive and untutored that it is hard to believe his claim of being a genius.  His ineptitude in dealing with the pandemic and with understandable social unrest as well international relations is evidence of his unsuitability for the job he holds. 

Nevertheless, there appears to be a solid 35% of the population who support his style of governing.  The reasons for that probably are largely related to disaffection with the administration of public affairs by what appears to them as a separate class of people who they see acting as if they believe they are entitled, by their God-given wits and their connections to a network of lucky wealthy, educated,  and mysteriously influential people who run corporate business and the government.

As long as that is true, representative democracy is a fiction for them.  They are captivated by a leader who appeals to their disaffection by promising and delivering chaos in state affairs.  Someone is a genius for having recognized that disaffection with the purpose of government and its relevance to peoples’ daily lives is very wide.  It is so wide that it has enlarged the proportion of the electorate who are ambivalent aout the outcome of a general election to around half of those eligible.   It thereby handed the 2016 election victory to those whose solution to their disaffection was to award the presidency to a demagogue who has used his position like a wrecking ball to destroy liberal democracy. 

Trump’s dominance of the political process has withered because of the embarrassment and disgust his conduct has created among the majority of the population.  Those people normally ignore electoral participation in the U.S. but recent opinion polls indicate that they may have learned that elections do matter.   It is, therefore, questionable whether Trump or the brains behind him can pull off a general election victory again in 2020. 

Do Americans have the right to live under a dictatorship, if that pleases them?  In other words, can a liberal democracy take the form of a benevolent autocracy?  Is that what Donald Trump thinks he was elected to be? 

Some people think that as a constitutionally elected dictator, Mr. Trump also believes he can destroy the validity of future elections that could end his administration.  The purpose of the constitution, however, is to establish government by and for the people at large.  The problem with Mr. Trump’s objectives is that he believes the purpose of his election was to award him with the ability to do as he wants.  That was the theme of the reality TV program he most famously starred in, “The Apprentice.”  Of course, the purpose of that show really was to earn income for its producers by commercializing the attention of its viewers.  Now Mr. Trump is acting as if his “base” rewards him for using the powers of the presidency to entertain them.  Apparently, he still thinks he is performing in a reality show.

Most people in this republic believe that government has more important functions than that.  They demonstrated some of heir impatience for addressing those concerns by protesting across the country this year.  Electing a new president in November 2020 will affirm that his role is to serve the people rather than the other way around.

I didn't have any black or even non--Eastern European-heritage classmates in Chicago until I went to high school.  "Amos and Andy" was the most exposure I had as a kid to African-American culture. I don't have any of my grade school textbooks, but I'd be surprised if they even said anything about the treatment of slaves in the American South or of the Jim Crow era.  My only vague recollection is of scalawags and Carpetbaggers during Rcons

truction.   I was in grade school during the last years of the Great Migration.  We were influenced by our local community to stay away from the southeast part of the city dominated  by blacks, as much because of fear as because of discomfort, if not embarrassment.  I don't remember any African--American classmates at Georgetown University; I had two African-American classmates in graduate school.  So my exposure to the non-white population only really began when I started to work for the dederal goverment in D.C.  Even after that, I was cocooned in a nearly uniform white and Asian environment throughout my years of work and living.  My children had few African-American classmates in their school careers, but now they are both married to Asian-heritage spouses.  

That's a long introduction to my belief that cultural exclusiveness is as efficient a method of inculcating racial bias as government propaganda, like textbook editing.  The "South Pacific" song, "You've Got to be Carefully Taught," applies equally to social and to formal education.