Rob Rogers offers this play upon the question Ronald Reagan famously posed in 1980 to help him defeat Jimmy Carter: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”
It was a great question, because it has more to do with mood than with reality.
Few people were going to actually go back and crunch the numbers and figure in the impact, for instance, of changes in their children’s ages or health issues that had arisen or how their own choices might have altered their situation in the interim.
The national mood was down and, while Carter was advocating that we all pitch in, Reagan was promising great times ahead. The election really came down to whether you believed good times would come along without efforts or sacrifice.
Rogers provides a more specific answer to the question this time, which is that the prevailing zeitgeist, promoted by Donald Trump, has emboldened racism and a return to a pre-Civil Rights Era attitude about who is a “real American.”
Reagan tapped into the power of the forgotten workingclass with a greater degree of sophistication than George Wallace had in 1968, but even Wallace downplayed his own historic status as an anti-integrationist, not that voters had forgotten it.
Trump has had no such restraint, calling Latinos rapists and drug dealers, declaring African and Caribbean nations to be shitholes and demanding a ban on Muslim immigrants.
Rogers is correct: Overt racism is on the table this time around like it hasn’t been in 60 years.
And Trump’s repeatedly deriding a rival’s admittedly clumsy attempt at inclusion has made racist jokes about her an acceptable part of a more important debate, as Rick McKee demonstrates.
The insult undercuts a potentially telling point about the fate of private insurance under Warren’s sweeping plan. Or perhaps it merely distracts from it, keeping the emphasis on ridicule rather than substance.
Does that make it more, or less, effective?
I dunno. Let’s look at this
Juxtaposition of the Day
The major flaw in Warren’s plan is its complexity, a flaw which rises to such a level that she should probably have simply promised some vague sort of health care reform.
Something along the lines of fixing the ACA to make it more inclusive and responsive might have given her a boost that she could then develop in detail from the Oval Office.
As it is, she presents something that might be explained in a 90-minute video with charts and examples that nobody would watch, while a quick summary leaves her open to Kelley’s charge that “Everybody hates this idea,” mostly because nobody knows what the hell she’s talking about.
Davies offers a more incisive approach, narrowing down exactly who hates the plan, but also pointing out that Americans already pay too much for health care.
Still, he’s calling on people to, if not sit down with paper and calculator, at least think it over.
Strictly from a pragmatic political viewpoint, Kelley’s simple “Everybody hates it!” claim is the winning argument.
Hard Fact: Elections are won by public perception, not by objective truth.
For instance, this Phil Hands cartoon puzzled me, because I live in the Burlington TV market and so have watched the introduction of the F-35s there from first rumor (as, of course, has Bernie).
I had to track this one back to find out WTF was going on, and it seems that Rep. Taylor took a trip to Burlington in which she was squired around by opponents to the new, noisier jets, somewhat the way young American activists were “guided” when they came to Cuba in the 1960s to cut sugar cane for two weeks and return knowing everything there was to know about the Workers’ Paradise.
Which assessment I base on this report from VTDigger, which is hardly in the pocket of the Defense Department.
The Vermont Air National Guard has received 14 formal noise complaints since the arrival of the first two F-35s Sept. 19. Capt. Mikel Arcovitch, the state public affairs for the Guard, said the Guard had expected more complaints about the noise from the F-35 fighter jets. The 14 complaints came from eight people, he said.
Will anybody in Madison know that? Does anyone in Madison care?
Does it matter?
Bartender, pour me another
Juxtaposition of the Day
California has more immediate problems than the sound of jets overhead and yet we’re still willing to ignore the obvious in favor of the comfortable, particularly since, as Ohman notes, Donald Trump Forest Ranger is repeating his foolish tips on woodlands management as well as his threats to withhold federal funds if Gavin Newsom and Adam Schiff don’t stop being Democrats.
By the way, Dear Leader knows what he’s talking about, because he has a forested public park in New York State. Well, sort of. It’s pretty much like the rest of his plans and promises.
But, again, perception is more important than truth, and, by the way, clearing out deadwood and underbrush truly is an effective wildfire preventive move.
Though not in the kinds of woods they have in California, or in the kinds of weather and climate conditions there.
But that’s not the point.
Nor is it the point that well over half of the forests in California are federal land, so Dear Leader could grab his rake and go solve the problem any time he wanted to.
No, the point once again is that perception is more important than facts, and that if you say something often enough, it might not become true but it will be perceived to be true, which is pretty much the same thing.
For instance, as Robert Ariail points out, there is no difference between having US policy join with the European Union and our other allies in demanding that Ukraine get rid of a corrupt official and individually insisting that they help you with your own re-election campaign.
Both, after all, can be judged by public perception.
Their differing facts are irrelevant.
Some of the smartest people I’ve met are cartoonists. Also some of the stupidest. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to guess which cartoonists in today’s CSOTD I think belong in which group.
The ability to draw a picture is not unlike the ability to catch a football. It’s not the kind of talent that reveals much beyond itself.
This is why you come to a site called DAILY CARTOONIST. To read people who don’t make their living from it trash the profession.
Woe is me, why don’t the critics understand my genius? My friends like me! My mom likes me! Why won’t you like me?
Only an architect is qualified to judge whether a building has fallen down or lacks a front door.
Please (oh please!) keep me in your heart, or at least keep sending me your postings. God, I love good cartooning and cartoonists, especially political cartoonists. My personal history goes back to the mid-1940s (I was born in 1941, six months before Pearl Harbor, so I grew up (later than Krazy Kat, Little Nemo, etc.) with many great cartoons, most of which are now with the Great Speech Balloon in the sky.
KEEP CARTOONING ALIVE!