Dear friends,
My right arm is covered in a tattoo of a weasel locked in combat with an eagle. It is an homage to Annie Dillard’s poem-essay “Living Like Weasels”:
“He examined the eagle and found the dry skull of a weasel fixed by the jaws to [the eagle’s] throat. The supposition is that the eagle had pounced on the weasel and the weasel swiveled and bit as instinct taught him, tooth to neck, and nearly won…
I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.”
My one necessity is fighting for my children’s future, and I’m weasel: biting hard into the eagle’s neck, not letting go, even if the eagle takes flight. This isn’t just about the election; this is a long, hard fight for the kind of country I want for my children. We’re in for quite the decade, so buckle up, fortify yourselves, and let’s get down to business.
Where to begin after this week? There’s the good news, the bad news, and what you can do.
The good news: About 4 to 6 weeks out from election day, the outlines of the election begin to take shape. The last ten days have had many, many positive signs for the Democrats; to channel Joe Trippi, it is beginning to look like 1980 when an unpopular president (Carter) lost and took 12 Democratic Senate seats down with him. This poll of just one individual Congressional district in Texas is a good example of a trend we’re seeing in a lot of Republican districts: Biden is competitive with Trump in a way Hillary never was.
Not only that, but there is an interesting dynamic where in states where Trump is tied (or even leading) the Republican candidate in the competitive Senate race is losing, sometimes by a considerable margin. This is evidence of the discomfort of some Trump voters with Trump: they may hold their nose and vote for him, but they’ll vote for a Democrat in the Senate to avoid giving him a blank check…. which leads me to:
Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg was an intellectual, moral, and legal giant whose contributions to our country will go down in history. But in this political environment, that is all forgotten as the street fight intensifies. Within a couple hours of her death, Mitch McConnell released a statement that closed with the line, “President Trump’s nominee will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate.”
Remember: don’t trust the polls. Polls are necessarily backwards-looking, and the models they used are based on behavior in past elections. This election is really, really, really unpredictable: the unknowns around pandemic voting behavior and the changed media landscape were already crazy-town, but now we have an empty Supreme Court seat. But don’t forget last time: the Kavanaugh fight fired up the base of both parties right before the mid-terms, and it seemed to even it out: Democrats did much better in suburban House districts, but in competitive Senate races the Supreme Court vacancy helped drive rural and exurban turnout up.
I don’t think that the empty Supreme Court nomination will have that much of an impact on the presidential election, but I think it will be significant in the fight for the Senate. On Friday, I co-hosted a fundraiser for LCV’s program to defeat Susan Collins in Maine, and now it is even more important than ever. Collins came out with a strong statement that she will not support a vote to fill the Supreme Court vacancy before the election. This strikes me as quite misleading (given her history of votes on judges) but -- crucially -- it will gain her an enormous amount of free media coverage, just as most voters start tuning in. She’ll drown out her Democratic challenger, Maine Speaker of the House Sara Gideon, without spending a dime, leaving Gideon at a disadvantage. And it will be, at best, misleading. You can give here, or if you’re unconvinced you can read my detailed assessment of the situation here.
And now for the bad news:
Remember rule 1: it will get crazier. We haven’t hit peak crazy yet. I know that may be hard to believe, but there it is. Here is a partial list of things that could happen between now and the election:
Barr: We haven’t even gotten to whatever Bill Barr has been plotting all year: a mid-October arrest of Jim Clapper and Jim Comey? He's up to something, pretty clear from all the reporting. And Barr quoted CS Lewis this week saying (and I’m paraphrasing here): “I’d rather live under the rule of a cruel autocrat because at least sometimes he’s not cruel, as opposed to those government bureaucrats…”
Hurricane season: Easy to imagine a devastating hurricane hitting Florida and Georgia weekend before the election.
COVID isn't done with us yet, and I wonder what happens if it takes down a cabinet member or GOP Senator… or even another Supreme Court Justice.
Russia is still actively working to elect Trump, as Trump’s hand-picked FBI Director warned this week.
Violence: we haven't seen much of it yet… but it is easy to imagine several different ugly scenarios.
And let’s not forget this week in conspiracy theories.
Regardless of how much crazier it will get, there is one thing we must do: mobilize to vote and to get everyone we know to vote. Remember: personal courage, sound nerves, stark beauty. What we need is here. Especially the sound nerves part.
And after the election, the real work begins. I woke up this morning thinking about two books I read a couple of years ago. Coincidentally, I read them both more-or-less at the same time: Chris Hedges’ “America: The Farewell Tour” and a fictionalized biography of Cicero and the fall of the Roman Republic.
Hedges’ book is not for the faint of heart, as the title suggested. But in interviews and talks, Hedges often paraphrases Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate: “It’s not a battle between good and evil; it’s a battle between a great evil trying to crush human kindness. But if human kindness has not been crushed, even now, then evil will never win.”
So today -- and every day -- keep kindness alive.
Lotsa love, nicco
PS. And I hope to see you on Thursday night at our poetry reading with Roseanne Cash and Yo-Yo Ma: RSVP here.