Why The Democrats Strategy Will Backfire

The morality plank didn't work for the GOP - why would it work for the Democrats?

With the forced resignation of both Senator Al Franken and Representative John Conyers, the Democrats are heading down a new path and strategy to try to win elections in the future - winning elections being something they have not been very good at recently.

Sadly, their strategy I believe will backfire, based on history and demographics. The Democrats are hoping to claim the moral high ground by arguing that anyone who wishes to run for public office should have a squeaky clean background.

The problem with that strategy is that it has been tried in the past and failed.  You may recall in the 1980's when Reverend Jerry Falwell (pictured above) claimed to lead something called the "Moral Majority" and the Republican Party argued that in order for anyone to run for public office they had to be of a particular moral caliber.

The Republicans argument was that it was irrelevant what a person's position on the issues were or how they would vote on a particular piece of legislation - things that would actually affect the lives and outcomes for the nation's voters.  Rather, we should judge our candidates by the ambiguous and nebulous "moral standards" which often were interpreted in favor of the Republican Party.

Of course, the problem with this type of political argument taking aside the fact that is not really a political argument at all, is that it often backfires spectacularly.  During the Moral Majority crusade era, more than one Republican was forced out of office after being found with his pants down, often in a public restroom.  This is when the term "Wide-stance Republican" came into vogue.

The other problem is that what you may consider a moral or immoral, the other party may consider perfectly fine.  Thus, for example Democrats would not have any problem with a legislator being homosexual but Republicans would.  One man's morality is another man's immorality.

And the same is true in this Judge Roy Moore situation.  If Roy Moore was accused of dating 16 year old boys in Alabama he would be shunned from the Republican party.  But since he was dating 16 year old girls, they are less concerned.  The age of consent at the time was 16 so he was arguably doing nothing illegal.  And Republicans, particularly male Republicans, see little wrong in a 30-year-old man dating a teenage girl, provided she's above the age of consent.  As to the accusations he dated a 14-year-old girl, I am sure many Republicans would sweep this aside as either being fabricated or merely saying "well, she looked like she was 16!"

As the last election illustrated, Republicans, even Republican women, are less concerned with moral issues that electoral ones.  They voted for Trump not because he "grabbed pussy" but because he would nominate a Supreme Court Justice - something that would have a greater impact on their lives for decades to come - long after Trump is dead and gone.   They are more interested in the big picture, not mud-slinging accusations, even if the accusations are true.

And that is why they are supporting Roy Moore.  They care less about his personal life or transgressions than having another vote in the Senate.   Alabamans will vote on the issues, and they would rather have a child-molesting Republican voting on tax reform than a squeaky-clean Democrat voting against it.  The Democratic party seems to forget this - you cannot run for office based on scandals of your opponent.  Somewhere along the line,  you have to run on your platform, and get voters to want that platform.   It is not you they are electing, but your votes on the bills.

So this moral crusade of the Democrats really won't affect the Republican Party much. And I think it could actually turned away many voters from the Democratic party as a result.   While it may cement the loyalties of Democratic women, it won't cause the hard-core Republican women to cross parfty lines.

And for the men?   I have seen more than one man shift uncomfortably on his bar stool when the topic is raised, as he knows full well that he may have played a little slap-and-tickle 20 or 30 or 40 years ago and is worried now about being held to account for it  In the old days pinching asses and cupping breasts was, well, a way of life in many parts of the country.  Such men are not quite ready to embrace the entire pussy hat movement.

The Democrats will do little in terms of gaining votes with this strategy and argubly may turn away male voters.  While no one endorses sexual harassment much less sexual assault, the Democrats risk coming across as a preachy organization, a bunch of Carrie Nation's with hatchets ready to chop up the saloons. This could backfire in a big way.

This entire hysteria - I use the term hysteria not pejoratively but in the actual sense of its meaning - started with the accusations against Harvey Weinstein which indeed were very serious. Non-consensual sex, rape, and sexual harassment in the workplace are not funny. But as the weeks unfolded, accusations started to fly, some deadly serious and others seeming really trivial.  "He made me feel uncomfortable" doesn't quite rise to the level of rape.  Nevertheless, the media treats both accusations at the same level.

While these moral values are important, the Democratic party should think long and hard before making this the centerpiece of their party platform - after all, it didn't work for the GOP in the 1980's and 1990's, either.  And in fact, it raises the hypocrisy level somewhat in that Bill Clinton, victim of the Republican's moral crusade, was protected by the Democrats back then.   Maybe both sides are wrong to embrace morality as a political test.

Because, when you get right down to it, the morality of our elected officials doesn't really affect the country much.  No, little Billy doesn't "look up" to elected officials as exemplars of moral behavior.  Odds are, like most Americans, he can't name his Senators and Representatives anyway.   But the laws those elected officials pass are of more importance to little Billy down the road.  And if we use this "moral" litmus test to see who can and cannot hold office, we may end up with a lot of really shitty laws being enacted.

But hey, we will have the satisfaction of knowing our immoral laws were enacted by moral people.

That's something, right?

Please Rate Your Purchase - And Buy More Crap!

Are online sites really interested in your opinion about purchases, or are they just using this as a gambit to get you to return to the site and buy more stuff?

I've noticed lately that every online site that I purchase something from sends me follow-up emails asking me to rate my purchase or review the product.  Amazon, of course is the king at this, but other sites such as eBay and Walmart are also at it, too.

Increasingly, I am thinking that they really are not interested in my review of the purchase or rating of the product but rather just using this as an excuse to get me to go back to the site and buy more junk. The online marketers call it engagement - the amount of time people spend on a site and how often they visit that site. The more you're engaged with a particular mercantile website, the more likely you are to purchase things.  They also want to make sure you return to their site and don't go to anybody else's.

Again, Amazon is the king of this sort of thing, with their "Prime" feature - a customer loyalty program, basically, to get people to exclusively buy things at Amazon rather than shop around on price.  Once you have a customer hooked on your site, you can charge them higher prices as they will stop cross-shopping with other outfits.

And again, many people think that sites like Amazon are "tech" companies, but they really just mercantile establishments and these loyalty programs are as old as the hills.  Back in the 1960's, the local gas station or grocery store would give you S&H Green Stamps which you could accumulate to purchase things like toasters and small appliances.  Or they gave you a free dish or glass with every fill-up or with so many dollars worth of groceries purchased, so that you would be induced to come back again and again to get a full set of dishware for your house.

The idea back then was to build customer loyalty - so that you'll always come back to the same store and shop around less on price.  Once you establish customer loyalty, you can then charge slightly higher prices and the customers may not notice, as they are no longer comparing prices with a store across town.

I'm not sure what the point of this is, other than today I'm less and less inclined to accept Amazon's generous offer to rate the purchase of the toothbrush or whenever it was I bought on their site, as I don't sincerely believe they care about my opinion, they just want me to go back to the site and possibly buy more things.

That's the name of the game, really.

Dinner's Ready! - No, It's Not!

Why, as human beings, do we try to trick one another?

One of the more annoying things about human nature is how we try to spoof each other through passive-aggressive games. When I was a child, that is to say a teenager, my parents used to always call us down to dinner every evening.

My brother and I did not like to go to dinner, as it was the time my father used to call us out on our various faults or perceived faults and then ridicule and run us down as to why we were horrible people.  Usually this involved the length of our hair, which although it seems odd today, was a big issue back in the 1960's and 70's.  "Why don't you get a God damn haircut!" my Dad would always say.  And of course we would then rebel even further by refusing to get our hair cut.

Since we didn't want to attend dinner with our parents, we always were trying to delay the inevitable. So our parents would call us down to dinner, and we would dilly-dally, often working on some projects such as building a model rocket or model airplane or just goofing off or watching television or whatever.  They would call us to dinner, and we would delay, and they would get more and more angry.  It was a vicious circle.

My father, being a manager, thought that one solution was to call us to dinner early.  Rather than waiting until dinner was on the table, he would wait until five minutes before dinner was ready, and then call us for dinner, figuring that we would dilly-dally for five minutes and arrive just in time as the meal was served.  This might have worked the first time, but once we realized we had been tricked, we adjusted our schedules.

Thus, the next time Dad calls us for dinner, we figured that it was actually five minutes before dinner and then waited ten minutes before showing up.  This became a classic game of passive-aggressive behavior.  Dad now calls for dinner ten minutes early, in which case we would delay fifteen minutes, and so forth.  In the end, it got to the point where he was calling us to dinner before the stove was even turned on and we would delay for half an hour to an hour or more. We really had communication problems, in retrospect.

Mark's Dad did the same thing with the bus.  Since Mark liked to sleep in (and still does) his Dad was always worried he would miss the bus, which he did on occasion.  So the same game was played, with his Dad calling, "Mark, the bus is here!" when in fact, it was at least a half-hour away.  So I guess this is a common game that is played in families.

Now that my parents are dead, I wish that I could say this sort of behavior was in the past and just a mere curiosity of one's childhood.  But it continues on to this very day.  Every morning, we make breakfast and sit down to eat. About 4/5 of the time Mark makes breakfast which is usually some simple 400-calorie egg sandwich or something of that nature. About one-fifth the time I will make breakfast to relieve him of the burden.

Lately, I've been noticing that Mark will do the same trick my Dad did, namely calling me, saying "breakfast is on the table!" when in fact it isn't.  And usually this is because I am working on a blog entry and he gets upset when I am late for breakfast and thus wants to call me in early.

He knows I'm in the middle of a blog entry, and not willing to just abandon it, would rather spend two or three or five minutes finishing it before sitting down to eat.  So instead of waiting until the food is actually on the table to call me breakfast, he has been increasingly calling me earlier and earlier much as my Dad did for dinner when I was a child.  Needless to say this is frustrating, as I thought I put this sort of behavior behind me for good.

The other day, this reached a crisis point, as he call me to breakfast and when I got up and went into the kitchen, I found the stove was not even turned on.  Apparently he thought that he should call me to breakfast almost a half an hour in advance as he felt that I would dilly-dally for that amount of time before sitting down to eat.

I realized we needed to work on our communication skills. The reason why I wasn't sitting down to breakfast when he called was not because I was being obstinate or didn't want to eat, but rather I was in the middle of a project and want to finish it before I sat down.  Breakfast could wait five minutes or ten minutes at the most.

But I understand his perspective.  The days that I make breakfast - granted which are not the majority - it is frustrating to get everything working together, toasting the toast, cooking the eggs, boiling the coffee and whatnot.  And when it all comes together you want to serve it hot and fresh at its peak enjoyment.  And it is frustrating when you realize that your audience is gone missing and doesn't show up for until minutes later when everything is gone cold and no longer is palatable.

I'm not sure what the answer is, other than communication is the key.  I'm not sure that trying to trick or fool your spouse or your children by calling them out earlier and earlier is necessary the answer. Because in a way, that is just deceiving your partner in the deal, and they will realize they've been tricked when you call them early and then show up and nothing is ready.  It isn't fixing the problem, only making it worse.

Maybe it is wrong to show up late for supper with somebody calls you to the table.  But calling people to the table earlier and earlier is not necessarily the solution. Two wrongs don't make a right. And passive-aggressive behavior never results the satisfactory outcome.

Cheapness With No Purpose

Taking the owners manual when you sell the car is just cheapness with no purpose.

I wrote before how I was approached by a casting director for a reality TV show.  They wanted to do a show about people who are stingy or cheap.  She indicated in her email that they were looking for people who annoy their family members with their thriftiness.  I got the impression what they wanted was some cranky old Dad who collected pocket lint and yelled at the children to turn the lights off.  And the kids would all say "Oh Dad!" - and it would all be so hilariously funny on reality TV, which of course is not real.

But this got me to thinking, that there are indeed people who are cheap for no apparent real purpose.  Or to put it more precisely, they are cheap, but they receive no benefit from their cheapness. Back when I was a kid in the 1960s, I remember a friend's Dad was selling his car and he took out the owners manual from the glove box. I asked him why he did this, and he said, "it's free so I might as well keep it!"

And I thought, "You might as well just take the spare tire and the jack as well."  And I'm sure there are some people who do just that sort of thing.  And I've seen this in my life, people hoarding old parts from cars they sold off years ago, as if they somehow got a bargain in the deal by keeping things like extra sets of keys or whatnot.  For some reason, rental car companies do this when they sell their cars - stripping out every accessory from the car, such as the floor mats, before it goes on the sales lot.  They usually also keep one of the extra keys for some reason which is a real pain in the ass in an era where an extra key can cost $200 or more at the dealer.

These sort of things are cheap, but with no real purpose.  There's no gain to the individual, and in fact it often is just a pain in the ass, hoarding old owner's manuals and bits from your cars that are no longer of any use to you, and just clutter up your life.

Similarly, even if such things might benefit you incidentally, if you neglect larger items, they seem kind of pointless.  For example, my Dad always yelled at us for leaving lights on, but he left thermostat set at 72 in a house with resistive heat.  The 60-watt light bulb in the living room wasn't causing his electric bill to skyrocket, it was a horribly inefficient heating system and the fact that they had the house so warm in the winter, you could walk around in your underwear without being cold.

Being rationally stingy means perceiving where the real savings are, and in that example, the savings would be in turning down the thermostat, insulating the house, or putting in a more efficient heating system.  Yes, you should turn off lights when they're not in use, but plugging tiny holes in the dam doesn't make any sense when there's a huge breach pouring water.

And of course, today, with LED lights, the savings in turning off lights is becoming less and less important.  A whole generation will be raised not at being yelled at by their Dad for leaving the lights on!

Some readers have taking me to task for not being cheap in every area of my life.  They argue that I should always be looking for the least-cost option, the cheapest thing to do, or avoiding engaging in some activities entirely, just to save money.  I think this misses the point of my blog, which was to live a better and more rich life for less money, not to live like a monk and deprive yourself.

The secret is to save money on things in life where it really doesn't count and thus save money to do things that you really want to do.  I run into a lot of people who do just the opposite.  They complain they have no time or money to do the things they truly want to do with their lives, but spend inordinate sums on things that really are of no use to them. Or worse yet spend inordinate sums of money on things that actually harm them.  Or just squander money on status items to impress others, but not satisfy themselves.

And sometimes this means you miss out on real savings and real opportunities.  Take replacement windows, for example.  We spent about $3500 replacing the windows on our house with more energy-efficient ones, saving a ton of money by doing the installation ourselves.   But the real deal is, every month, our utility bill is about $50 less than before - so it pays for itself.   But many people, convinced that they could not "afford" to replace the windows, would spend the $50 more a month on the utility bill instead - they can afford, so they think, small charges, but can't make big capital expenditures, unless of course, they financed it on a high-interest-rate consumer loan.

It is like the thinking of a server we met on the island.  It was her first day on the job and she said she didn't like paying the daily $6 toll.   We pointed out that an annual pass was only $45, and she said, "well, I'll have to wait until payday to buy that, as I can't afford it right now!"   Payday was at least a week away, yet she was convinced that paying $6 a day for a week was a better deal than coughing up $45 all at once.   But she had the latest smart phone, of course.

Spending is like that - it kills you in little dribs and drabs, not in huge big-ticket items.  That is one reason so many people in the financial press like to attack things like Starbucks.   Buying a coffee at Starbucks isn't going to destroy your finances.  But buying one ever single day of your life while not funding your retirement, is.  It is the slow death of 1,000 cuts.   Recurring expenses like cable TV, cell phone plans, convenience foods, and the like - they are "only" a few dollars a day, but the days pile up and they turn into huge expenses, over time.

And this is where it pays to be cheap.   Which would you rather do, have a coffee at a gourmet coffee shop and eat lunch at a restaurant near work every day for a year, or brown-bag your lunch and bring a thermos and go to Disney with the family?   If your choice is the former, then good for you - but bear in mind it was a choice, not a mandate.  No whining about "living paycheck to paycheck" when you fritter away your cash on a daily basis on trivial things.

Go Bold Or Go Home!

Today you either have to be bombastic or meek - there is no middle ground.

Something has changed dramatically over the last decade, and it seems that we have failed to notice it because it has been such a gradual change. And this fundamentally has changed how we express ourselves in the public domain.  Today, you can be either outrageous and say whatever you think, or you have to shut up and keep your thoughts to yourself.  There is no middle ground.

I first noticed this trend in the 1990s.  I would say something on a website or discussion group that might generate controversy, and before I knew it I was receiving emails from people I hadn't heard from in years or had never heard from at all. I realized that the internet was not the intimate discussion group it appeared to be, but rather a public chalkboard the entire world could read. You say one wrong thing and it's all over for you.

That is, unless all you say is wrong things.  At the same time people are being castigated for political incorrectness on the internet, others were becoming famous for it.  For some people, one wrong comment would end their career, social life, and marriage.  For others a string of such horrible comments made their career - or made them President.

In this regard president Trump is not an anomaly but the end result of this pattern.  He tweets and twitters and comments and says outrageous things and the more outrageous things he says, the more popular he is.  He is literally the first teflon president.  Indeed, he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue, as he boasts, and no one would say a word.  And the reason he gets away with this is that he is unapologetic for his comments and just digs himself in deeper whenever he gets into trouble.

Others are less certain of their own views, and play the apology game. When called out on ill behavior or inappropriate comments, they immediately fall all over themselves apologizing for the errors in their ways and lawyer up for the inevitable lawsuit.

During the recent hysteria regarding sexual harassment, many people have been called out for actions they have taken in the distant past, some of which are indeed atrocious.  Others, less so.  People who sexually harass or intimidate subordinates, or worse yet rape them, should be called to task for their actions. Of less importance are people who are cupping buttocks or breasts for 5 to 10 seconds at a time during a photo opportunity.  While also inappropriate, those actions hardly raise to the level of brutal rape. Yet the media treats them as equivalent events.

But what seems incongruous is that the people who are committing the worst acts seem to be the least apologetic.  President Trump is on record for saying that he likes to grab women by the pussy - a word which the media feels they have to blank out for being obscene.  He's unapologetic about these remarks, and indeed claims the entire tape was faked - that somehow his voice was impersonated, and the entire tape assembled in some grand conspiracy against him.  This seems to be the new norm - do something outrageous and then claim it was all faked up.  Judge Roy Moore is following a page from this playbook.

Meanwhile, others who have committed far less grievous sins are doing the talkshow apology tour and a mea culpa and praying for the forgiveness of the public -  forgiveness which will not be forthcoming.  By owning up to your malfeasance, you are admitting to it, and thus at the mercy of the whims of public opinion.  On the other hand, if you just go in for strict denial - or double down on your bet by saying harassment is fun and the way things should be - then you come out clean as a whistle in the end.  Never compromise, never vacillate, never accommodate - that seems to be the new norm on the internet.  The most popular YouTube stars are the ones who say the most outrageous things.

And in modern public relations, the old model of mea culpa seems to be falling by the wayside. Admitting to your defects and transgressions seems only to amplify them.  In our modern era, the best thing you could do is to double down, fail to compromise, and boast of your malfeasance, as if it were a personal accomplishment.

The Al Franken situation is a case in point.  Franken, known as "that comedian from Saturday Night Live - you know, the unfunny one" was quite adept at saying and doing stupid things long before he became Senator.  And that is one reason I never thought he would make a good Senator.  His schitck was gay jokes - he once told an interviewer that he was glad a gay man was beaten to death.  He also did a skit on SNL as "Franken and Davis" where his partner, Davis "comes out" to him on live television, and Franken, of course, castigates him - all in the name of an humorless and uncomfortable joke.  To say this guy "has issues" is to understate.  But on a scale of one to Roy Moore, he probably is a five.

"He recalled writing a skit called "Seamen on Broadway" that was rejected from the Hasty Pudding show "by some preppie so they could take some other preppie's skit." Franken started to smile again, but his tone was serious, too serious. "It's not preppies, cause I'm a preppie myself. I just don't like homosexuals. If you ask me, they're all homosexuals in the Pudding. Hey, I was glad when that Pudding homosexual got killed in Philadelphia." The smile became so broad it pushed his eyes shut. He couldn't stand it any longer. "Put that in, put that in," Franken laughed, leaning over the desk. "I'd love to see that in The Crimson.""

Oh, brave new world, to have Democrats such as this.

So let me make it clear, I am no fan of Al Franken,  Not only is he not funny, which is the cardinal sin among comedians (all those sketches after "Weekend Update" which made you turn off the TV and go to bed, were his works) he is also not qualified to be in the august body that is the Senate.  And neither is Roy Moore.   But on the other hand, I get a little suspicious when a rough-and-tough Army Ranger breaks out into tears when she says that Al Franken "cupped her breast" for 5-10 seconds in a photo op.  I wonder how she will deal with the Taliban, Al Queada, or ISIS after that experience?  It seems we are getting a little carried away with this sort of thing.  And no, you can't be "intimidated" by a second-rate former writer for SNL who really wasn't that funny.  I mean, we aren't talking about Kevin Spacey here, right?

But the upshot is, Al Franken will end up stepping down and Roy Moore will end up getting elected.  And let's be clear about his - Roy Moore was having sex with underage girls, which is far worse than grabbing the tits of an adult female.  Both are wrong, one is wronger than the other.  The wronger guy will prevail in today's climate.   Does this make sense?

We are also seeing this attitude predominate in the financial sector.   People are doing wrong things and not being apologetic about it, but bombastic - and often getting away with it - up to a point.  Uber was notoriously belligerent in many different respects.   Not only did they try to bully the taxi regulators in dozens of countries, they bullied their own employees as well as sexually harassed them.  Other "tech" companies are following a similar pattern, with a no-holds-barred and take-no-prisoners approach to business dealings.

But in the long run, belligerents, dictators, and tyrants always fall.  We are seeing this in the tech sector as these "new paradigm" companies whose business model was basically bullying and fraud, are taken to task, one by one, either by regulators or the market.   And in terms of celebrities and politicians, it also seems some sort of reckoning has come.  The only concern is that those least culpable will be held most accountable, while the real malfeasants escape unscathed.

The real victim here, though, I think is the middle-ground.  Companies that do honest business providing a product or service at a reasonable price at a reasonable profit, are being run over by these new belligerent companies that don't play by the rules.  Similarly, in politics, the vast majority of Americans are middle-of-the-road in their opinions, but are increasingly being asked to choose between one of  two belligerent extremes on the Left or Right.   Nazism or Communism - those are the two choices we are presented with, and somehow Democracy seems only for sissies.