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THAT’S THE NEWS

I lucked into a daughter whose love of theater surpasses my own.

In fact, she’s written plays that were staged or read, and – BRAG ALERT – they’re really good.

What my daughter doesn’t write is news copy. That’s what I used to do – for much of a 40-year career.

I’m glad she loves writing. I’m also glad she’s not in the profession that helped pay for the education that led her to writing plays and TV scripts.

The reason this thought  came up this week is that my daughter took me to see the Broadway production of “Good Night, and Good Luck.” It stars George Clooney, who directed the film from which the play is derived. In the play, he portrays broadcast journalism legend Edward R. Murrow after playing Murrow’s producer, Fred Friendly, in the film.

In case you haven’t seen it, or forgot, “Good Night, and Good Luck.” highlights Murrow’s CBS broadcasts on Sen. Joseph McCarthy, whose crusade against people he perceived as Communists led to an atmosphere of fear in the 1950s. It captured – and was focused – on the fear of the era, educating another generation about a dark period in American history.

The movie is excellent and I recommend it if you can find it on a streaming service or old DVD. 

But I thought the play underscored a great point in a way the movie didn’t.

The play, much more that the film, takes place in the CBS “See It Now” newsroom. It depicts what’s great about journalism – the collaboration among colleagues, the rush of tracking down a hot story, the matching of wits with really smart people.

Murrow and his crew were disgusted by McCarthy’s intimidating and smearing. The parallels to 2025 America are obvious to anyone who checked their news alerts at the theater before turning off their phones.

But the play also highlighted the nature of the business known as broadcast journalism.

TV stations and networks have big newsrooms. They produce some incredible work – few newspaper pieces can match the power of a well-produced piece on a “See It Now” or its offspring, “60 Minutes,” not to mention some of the great PBS documentary series such as “Frontline.”

But big newsrooms are expensive. And, as many of the scenes in the play highlight, they don’t exactly bring in big numbers – news only gets ratings when it’s catastrophic, like the September 11 attacks. People even turn off Election Night coverage to watch old movies

There are scenes throughout the play when CBS’ chairman, William Paley, reminds Murrow that it’s the sponsors who pay his and his co-workers’ salaries. Murrow and Friendly even have to pay the costs of their McCarthy broadcasts because sponsors won’t.

I’ve seen the respect for broadcast journalism go from awe to awful. When I was young, there were icons on the air – Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, Mike Wallace, Daniel Schorr, Judy Woodruff. Barbara Walters was an outstanding interviewer, pressing for a point when a politician kept trying to dodge it. 

People trusted and admired these men and women. They accepted that what they reported was as factual as it could possibly be.

Time, unfortunately has eroded that trust in two ways.

One is the quality of what we call news. Too much of what passes for news in the 21st century would have been scoffed at when I was young. Somebody setting a record on “Jeopardy!” A male celebrity’s stupid remark. A female celebrity’s apparel choice.

On TV, local newscasts forsake important issues in their community if they have video of somebody being rescued from a river in Thailand. The only stories that seem to take place in their market are easily filmable crime scenes and suspects, often the exceptions to the statistics that show crime decreasing in a city.

Celebrity and sensational stuff have been increasingly infringing on news. Even Murrow, the patron saint of broadcast journalism, did interviews with people like Liberace and Zsa Zsa Gabor to satisfy CBS’ ratings cravings. 

The other problem has come up a lot more in the past 30 years, since the creation of Fox News by Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch: Calling propaganda “news” and blaring it 24 hours a day.

It plays on people’s fears and addiction to personalities. And it makes crises out of nothing – think famously of Barack Obama wearing a tan suit or Joe Biden eating an ice cream cone. It trumpets clowns like Donald Trump – unless he accidentally does something that hurts Fox’s bottom line – and promotes morally bankrupt ineptitudes like Jesse Watters and Sean Hannity as “newsmen.”

In the play’s final monologue, Murrow – speaking to some unnamed awards dinner – muses that television should inform as much as it should entertain. That primetime should be used not just to show westerns and comedies, but also discussions of domestic problems and foreign policy.

The problem is that it’s unlikely you’d get even 1% of the audience for “Tracker” or “Chicago Fire” for those kinds of discussions. The most popular news show, “60 Minutes,” is a notable and laudable exception, but it is more about hot-button issues than in-depth discussion of matters that matter.

As a result, we’re not as smart as we should be. We’re susceptible to demagogues and liars.

I went into journalism as my way of informing a world I wanted to improve. I thought the truth, whether it fit with what I believed or not, was the most important thing – that’s what I told the Northwestern professor who interviewed me in 1971. He warned me that, while my thinking was admirable, the truth was not as rock solid as I thought.

As “Good Night, and Good Luck.” reminded me, I love journalism. I love what it accomplishes when it’s good. There are still colleagues of mine doing incredible work – and I’m so proud I know them.

But I’m happy my daughter is a playwright and screen writer. Because I think that, in 2025, she’ll help people find the truth about the world a lot more efficiently than if she worked in a newsroom. 

This isn’t Edward R. Murrow’s America any more. We’re all the worst for that – and the path back from that is hard to see.

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GOOD THINGS THAT END

Jimmy Carter’s passing reminds us that human lives aren’t eternal – even ones as worthy of going on forever as the 39th President’s.

Carter died Sunday at the age of 100, the longest-living American president. That’s a nice fact, but here’s a nicer one – he appears to have been a genuinely good person. He was honest – perhaps too much for American politics – and saw the future when others found it safer to stay in the past or present.

Because his opponents – on both the left and right – found it convenient, the narrative they painted was of a failed presidency. 

His firm stand on human rights and only tepid support of the corrupt Shah of Iran was seen as leading to the Iranian Revolution, 

In turn, that was seen as leading to the taking of American hostages at the embassy in Tehran and a largely unwarranted surge in oil prices. 

And that in turn led to some of the worst inflation in my lifetime. Which resulted in the election of Ronald Reagan.

That all sounds really bad. But Carter got what we would now call “trolled” a lot. 

He was not popular with the Washington establishment – to be fair, he was a bit haughty about it, but there was certainly some justification. His focus on human rights ticked off the Arab nations, right-wing dictators in Latin America and the Soviets. And once the U.S. right – Reagan et al. – and the left – Ted Kennedy et al. – ganged up on him, he was finished.

But Carter saw climate change and the energy crisis coming. He established diplomatic relations with China and negotiated the Camp David accords that still keep the peace between Israel and Egypt.

More important, he didn’t talk to the American people as though they were idiots. His August 1979 address to the nation – often called the “malaise speech” – is perhaps the bravest any American president ever delivered. 

But by telling the American people that there might be something wrong with them, he opened the door to opportunistic types who knew they could curry favor by pandering. (see Trump, Donald J.)

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The timing of Carter’s death seems like quite a coincidence. It’s three weeks before Trump’s inauguration – just in time for Carter’s family to avoid having Trump play a major role in the commemoration of a man he belittled for decades.

Instead, a eulogy will be delivered by President Biden, who was among the first major political figures to support Carter’s long-shot 1976 presidential run. (It also says a lot about Carter that the man he defeated for the presidency, Gerald Ford, will eulogize him through a letter written before he died.)

That’s a reminder that another good thing that’s ending, unfortunately, is Biden’s presidency.

The Biden and Carter presidencies share a lot. They both inherited a mess from a disreputable Republican predecessor. Biden got the mishegas Trump left because of his botching of COVID. Carter came on in the aftermath of Richard Nixon’s resignation in disgrace following Watergate, something the more honorable Ford couldn’t overcome.

Both men confronted a fanatical and fantastically well financed assault from the far right. Carter contended with the so-called “Moral Majority,” the slime such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. For Biden, it’s the megabillions of Elon Musk and other would-be oligarchs seeking favor from their bought-and-paid-for candidate.

The final thing the two men share is that their presidencies being appreciated more than 40 years after the fact. Carter’s vision and humanity is coming to the fore now that he’s no longer around to accept the accolades. 

That, I’m afraid, is what will happen to Joe Biden. Americans blamed him for higher gas prices and whatever it was they were paying for a dozen eggs. It didn’t matter that the supply chain problems that produced the inflation came as a result of Trump’s COVID failure.

In the process, Biden not only rebuilt the economy, but managed – along with the Federal Reserve – to cool its overheating without inflicting a recession on this country. He actually get the funding for thousands of project to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure.

Biden stood steadfast behind Volodymyr Zelensky and the people of Ukraine when threatened by Vladimir Putin – who seems to be Trump’s hero. And while he couldn’t get out of the trap Putin, Iran, Netanyahu and Trump set for him in Gaza, he never stopped trying to get a fair solution and an end to the horror – his critics notwithstanding.

Joe Biden – in fact, probably you and I – won’t be around when historians realize how lucky we were to have a man of such compassion and intelligence as our president. That’s little comfort as 2024 ends.

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If my GOOD THINGS THAT END headline seems a little off to you, I understand.

The proverb is “all good things must come to an end.” I’m guessing its intended meaning is that you should appreciate what you have when you have it.

But while that might apply to vacations in Hawaii, a bowl of chocolate chip ice cream, and the presidencies of Jimmy Carter and Joe Biden, it doesn’t – it can’t – apply to everything.

Caring about the other people in our world. Compassion for the sick and needy. Encouraging dreams and hard work. Civility. Diversity. Generosity. Creativity. 

Democracy.

In the eight weeks since the election, I’ve taken the first breather from news in my 70 years. I’ve avoided social media except for wishing good tidings to friends and family – and sharing my thoughts about holiday music. I refused to let the latest outrage, the chaos meant to consume and disable us, spoil my holiday season with friends and family.

Now, it’s time to reengage. We have less than three weeks until we are mandated to give the White House back to its desecrator. It’s time for the fight of our lives.

Because there are many good things about America that can never be allowed to end.

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DRY UP

Did you know there’s a whole array of coffee mugs on sale that purport to be holders of “liberal tears?”

I write this because I’m still hearing from friends and reading social media posts about how terrible life will be following last week’s election debacle.

With every transition announcement from Trump, every absolutely despicable person picked to help him run the country, there’s more caterwauling. More angst. More agitated talk about how this country is lost, how you don’t know how you’re going to make it to 2029 and how you need to think about the country to which you’re going to flee.

Stop it already.

Yeah, this sucks. A lot. All the horrible things we thought about prior to November 5 seem to be materializing. 

It might actually be worse – I didn’t have suspected pedophile and Botox frequent-sticker Matt Gaetz as an attorney general possibility. The biggest disappointment is that my imagination didn’t meet the moment.

But lamenting ain’t helpful. 

The most important reason is that one of the reasons some of these people voted to bring this felon back into our lives is, frankly, that he pisses us off. For some reason, their life gains meeting when they make people they don’t like angry.

I mean, I’ve always thought the rationale for being in politics was to get others to sign on to what you believe. In 1984, Ronald Reagan won a landslide re-election, carrying all but one state and Washington, D.C. One of his supporters, Rep. Jack Kemp, went on TV and said he wanted the administration to work to get D.C.’s support, too.

And the election mandate Trump claims isn’t close to Reagan’s.

If you put 1,000 people in a room and then divided that room into people who voted for him and people who didn’t, you probably wouldn’t be able to tell at a quick glance which side was which. In that room, as of now, 502 people would have voted for Trump, 498 would have voted for Kamala Harris or someone else.

So the idea should be to get more of those 498 people to support you, to make your agenda more popular.

That’s not their idea. They’re playing into the idea that their base is the only thing that matters. 

But they won because people weren’t happy with our side. I’m not sure that was justified, but it is what it is – and we have to fix it. That’s how democracy flourishes.

They’re doubling down on the crazy. Not to do best by the American people. But to piss off the people who don’t support them.

They want you upset. They want you scared. They want you in despair.

Don’t give them what they want.

First, keep in mind that we are enjoying the final 65 or so days of the Biden administration. One of the best presidencies in our lifetime, maybe in American history.

Enjoy the strongest economy in the world as we celebrate the 2024 holiday season. Gather with your friends and family. Play in the snow or find the warm sun and bask in it.

Agonizing over the Trump administration can start at noon EST on January 20, 2025. Until then, Trump’s just a convicted felon and 4-time bankruptee. Why waste the time leading up to it in pain?

Second, the 65 days will give you time to figure out how best to make Trump’s presidency as difficult for him as possible.

Donate to the groups that will be in the front lines of fighting him. My first choices are ProPublica, the public interest news organization, and the Brennan Center for Justice. Donate. Find out what they stand for. Find other groups working on issues close to your heart: gun violence, women’s bodily autonomy, protecting migrants, and so on.

Thirdly, don’t be miserable.

They want that. They want, as they say, to drink liberal tears. 

Keep them thirsty. Challenge them. Confront them. Do whatever you can to frustrate their worst impulses.

As I said, we’ll figure this out. We’re the good guys. Let them bask in their cruelty and pettiness.

The MAGA folks hate the expression “We’ve got this.” It implies a “we” that works for the common good.

Yup. 

We’ve got this.

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I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER

It was an incident after one of my happiest moments of 2024 – and it served as a warning that I didn’t see until now.

The New York Mets had just won the National League Division Series against the Philadelphia Phillies last month. Euphoric fans – including me – jammed the platform for the No. 7 train to Manhattan.

It originated at Main Street in Flushing and there were passengers aboard before the Citi Field stop. As joyous fans jammed the train, a young Hispanic man was standing by the opposite door.

He could tell the fans were happy, so he shouted “Let’s go Mets!” Which I thought was cute.

But for some reason that I’ve thought about since that moment, he shouted “Let’s go Donald Trump!”

Why the hell he would shout that-  at that moment – bewildered me. Not enough, however, to stop me from shouting back “Fuck Donald Trump!” – language I don’t use in public. (Although I suspect I’ll be using it more for awhile.)

What was going through his mind that he would shout his support of Trump in as unsuitable a moment as that?

Tonight, I found out. According to CNN’s exit polling, Latino men voted for Trump more than ever before – in some states, a majority of them voted for a guy who has belittled or diminished Hispanic Americans for decades. 

It’s amazing. He was first elected because of his racism toward Mexicans and Central Americans. And now some of those people are sending him back to the White House.

Why? 

Is it the phony toughness he projects? Like those wrestlers he admires and who seem to support him en masse. 

Were they suckered by “The Apprentice” into thinking that a guy who has claimed bankruptcy four times actually knows what it takes to make them more financially secure?

Can it be that they associate with his outlaw status? That they think he’s been railroaded they way some of them perceive themselves to be?

Do they, like some spoiled-brat white folks, believe there are people getting “free stuff” that they’re not getting- and either they want some, too, or no one should have whatever that stuff is?

And is the idea that a woman – and it doesn’t matter if she’s white or Black and South Asian – could be the most powerful person in the world so threatening and offensive to them that they’d put an incompetent male in the White House instead? Twice!

I’m angry and sad in a way I haven’t been in eight years. And what makes me most sad is seeing people voting against their own interest, taken in by a conman who is now going to avoid prison by claiming he’s above the law.

Or worse, that he is the law.

I do not pretend to understand why anyone sees a hero in Trump. There is nothing admirable or compassionate about him. He has no respect for people other than himself and anyone who can help enrich him.

It’s bewildering that anyone thinks the guy whose pathetic mishandling of the COVID crisis contributed to the inflation endured between 2021 and 2023 is the guy to bring down the price of eggs.

And because he respects tyrants, this is a moment of triumph from a diverse set of the world’s rogues – from Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinpeng to Benjamin Netanyahu and Viktor Orban.

I suppose the people who voted for Trump would say I’m being paternalistic – that they can look out for their own self-interest without my help. 

Kamala Harris ran as good a campaign as I’ve seen in my lifetime – and she will have nothing to show for it. I’m certain that a key factor in her defeat is that, well, she’s a she. And that she’s also a Black she and a South Asian she.

But the loser in a democratic election concedes. With the grace that Trump refused to give Joe Biden four years ago.

I just hope she doesn’t congratulate him. He doesn’t deserve it. Neither do the people who voted for him. 

As I said at a moment when some jerk zapped my joy of a Met win, “Fuck Donald Trump!”

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I’VE GOT ISSUES

This is, as you have heard more times that you ever wanted, the most consequential presidential election of our lifetime.

The consequences surpass those of the last presidential election in 2020. And, of course, that one had consequences exceeding the 2016 vote. Obviously, 2016 was more consequential than 2012 – which, now that I think about it, probably was the least consequential of the 21st century.

You get the idea.

The problem is that this, seriously, is a real test for our country. It’s about what kind of a nation we are – not what we imagine we are or wish we were. If we’re about governance and community, or grievance and dissolution.

Are we going able to look at ourselves on November 6 and shout hosannas about the beauty of democracy? Or are we going to decide that, yeah, this country is closed until further notice while we clean the place out?

Too much is written about this election already – and I’m somewhat sorry to add to the noise. The fact is I wanted to be more involved in this – I even signed up for a local congressional campaign.

But I admit I don’t have the patience to hear the other side on this. I’ve heard it already. 

I heard it in Citi Field one gray May afternoon when this couple – that was clearly, as my Dad used to say, in their cups – groused loudly about how all these people were getting free stuff thanks to “Clueless Joe” in the White House.

I see in signs on lawns around my neighborhood. “Democrats Support Iran,” “Democrats are Socialists,” “Trump Saved America.”

There are the shirts and signs that read something like “We like country music, the Lord’s Prayer, guns, the American flag and making liberals mad.” As if they like those things only because they hope it gets some people pissed.

I did text messages in 2020 and got the same sort of crap. 

Then there was whatever that was at Madison Square Garden yesterday. I don’t have to catalog the bigotry, the racism and the hatred spewed – you can read about if you haven’t already.

In fact, it took me to this point to tell you what I want to write about instead of that – and what I hope to write about in the run-up to Election Day.

Because, after thinking about it, I’ve got a theory about why this election is even close.

It has to do with a strategy that includes the venomfest that polluted midtown Manhattan. That display was not designed to convince anybody to vote for Donald Trump. 

It was designed to keep people talking about Donald Trump. Because when “Morning Joe” and “The View” and “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” are talking about Trump and the asininity around him, they are not talking about what Kamala Harris would do if she was elected.

That is the point.

Michelle Obama raised a great point in her speech in Kalamazoo, Michigan, on Saturday: Harris is held to a much higher standard that Trump. It’s unfair. Or as Van Jones said, she needs to be flawless, while he can be lawless.

And the fact is that she meets that higher standard. Consistently. Constantly. With passion, with intelligence, with empathy and with joy.

You won’t know that. That won’t be the zeitgeist. Because the cacophony of Trumpania is designed to make sure you don’t.

It explains why people think she’s not specific about what she would do as President. Because no one can hear what she has to say when the national conversation is about who maligned Puerto Rico or Hannibal Lecter or eating dogs in Ohio.

Before Trump came along, seeking the presidency was about a vision. Even if you disagreed with it – I’m a lifelong Democrat and have never contemplated voting for a Republican, but I know John McCain and Mitt Romney had some sort of idea about moving America toward the future.

Trump doesn’t give a damn. As long as he panders to his base, he’ll say anything. Do you think he really cares one way or another about abortion? Or even how to build a national economy?

As long as people support him for giving them tax breaks and eroding women’s rights, he’s fine.

So what I want to talk about the next few days is the future. The place we’re all going for at least some of the way.

Because Kamala Harris has tried to campaign on what she’d do as the 47th President of the United States. And Donald Trump doesn’t want her to do that.

So we’ll talk about a few things that require our attention: housing, elder care, transportation, immigration, America’s role in the world, education and our politics.

Now that’s the kind of discussion I can look forward to.

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WARNING FLAGS

Of course you didn’t watch coverage of yesterday’s British parliamentary election.

Why would you? You were celebrating the day 248 years ago when, as Archie Bunker said, “we threw those people out of here.”

And, given the bleak U.S. election picture since last week’s debate, a break from democracy on the brink is understandable. (Note: I can’t tell you how happy I am using bleak, break and brink in the same sentence.)

But I watched the BBC’s coverage of the returns for three reasons – one of which is not that I’m scouting places to live in the event the unthinkable happens in November.

One is that BBC election coverage is really entertaining. Great graphics, interesting commentary. The vote count has the drama of the constituency announcement – once ALL the votes are counted, the candidates go on stage and an official reads the results. The candidates include everybody, including people such as the guy from the Monster Raving Loony party.

And we in America have an advantage – we can watch at reasonable hours while the British have to stay up all night.

Second is the fact that I just came back from a wonderful trip to London (Let’s Go Mets!) with my family. Not only did we hang in the central city, we went out to Salisbury to see Stonehenge and to outskirt places west and south of Piccadilly Circus. So I wanted to see how the good people I met last month voted.

The third reason is more pragmatic.

Months before the 2016 presidential election, the British people voted on a binding referendum to determine if the country would stay a part of the European Union. It was a dumb move by the then-and-not-about-to-last-much-longer Conservative prime minister David Cameron, compounded by the fact the vote only needed a simple majority for approval.

The vote was 52% out, 48% stay. The results crossed party lines and reflected a well orchestrated scare and isolationism campaign. 

It was a precursor of what would happen in the United States on November 8. It should have been a warning to Hillary Clinton and the Democrats.

So should last night.

Yes, Labour – a party more aligned with U.S. Democrats – emerged with a massive majority, meaning that leader Keir Starmer has become prime minister. 

But Labour, thrashed in the 2019 election, had a strong tailwind. The Conservatives had been in power since 2010 and through their bungling gone through five prime ministers. One of them was Boris Johnson, who it would be understandable to think was part of the Monster Raving Loony party.

The now-former PM, Rishi Sunak, is ostentatiously wealthy and not particularly adept at campaigning – in particular, leaving a D-Day 80th anniversary commemoration for a political event.

Labour, still a major party in the country, won. It has a 174-seat majority – that’s like the Democrats or Republicans having more than 63% of the seats in the House or Senate.

Why should the U.S. Democrats be concerned?

There are two issues in the U.K. that have the same footprint on this side of the Atlantic.

One is immigration. A thing I noticed on this, my third trip to London, is how diverse the population has become over the past 40 years. I saw more hijabs than I see in New York. I heard more different languages on the Underground.

The benefit is a more vibrant city. The food is not nearly as terrible as it was in the 1980s. There are young people out well into the night – in the ’80s, the streets were deserted after 10 p.m.

But as in this country, not everybody in Britain is enamored with this. A lot of muttering about “not having a country anymore.”

That’s why there was Brexit. And among the leaders of that movement was Nigel Farage, a Donald Trump wannabe who doesn’t have Trump’s advantage of a right-wing sycophant mediascape; there’s no Fox News in the U.K.

Farage decided to get behind something called the Reform Party, whose idea of reform is actually retreating to the Britain of the past. MBGA doesn’t really work.

The Conservatives were gutted by Reform. Their seats went to Labour, but about 4 million of their votes – perhaps enough to swing the election – went to Reform. Farage won his seat, as did only three other Reform candidates. 

It’s the raw numbers that are scary. You could probably still say Britain moved to the left if you add Labor, the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party.

But Farage is just getting started. He’ll be in a good position to help his buddy Trump this summer and fall by trying to foul up the works in Parliament. And he’s got a soapbox for his bigotry and xenophobia.

The other concern for American democrats (and Democrats) is Gaza.

Independent candidates opposed to Labour’s somewhat equivocal stance on Israeli action in Gaza stole some votes. One party leader expected to be part of the Sturmer government lost his constituency because of defections from Muslim voters in the district.

Gaza is a thorny situation for the U.S. and its allies. This country has always supported – correctly – Israel’s right to exist. It took Harry Truman just 11 minutes to recognize the nation when it came into being in 1948. But Israel’s reaction to the October 7 terrorism of Hamas has provoked a humanitarian crisis that doesn’t just trouble Muslims.

The idea that Palestinians deserve some sort of entity of their own is not unreasonable. Most people in this country – including many if not most American Jews – believe the solution to this long-standing problem is the two-nation one that gives Palestinians a country of some kind and Israel iron-clad security from terrorists.

The people who don’t want that are Hamas and the supporters of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and neither side seems to care what price is paid to affirm their stance. 

There’s a certain irony in the fact that there’s almost a tacit alliance between two sides that are shooting each other. If I was wearing the tin foil hat right-wing America seems to embrace, I could imagine a coalition between Netanyahu, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, Vladimir Putin and Trump to make life miserable for Joe Biden all the way to November 5.

The results showing weakness in Labour’s Muslim vote is a warning to Biden or whatever Democrat replaces him if he drops out. The Gaza crisis needs to be solved. Quickly. Both because it’s the moral thing to do and, if Trump wins, there will be no reason for it to stop.

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IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, BREAK GLASS

For the past three nights, I’ve watched my TV set with jitters.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, I worried that my resurgent Mets would run afoul of the Yankees. I hate watching the Mets lose to the Yankees as much as I hate any scenario in sports – or anything else for that matter.

I needn’t have worried. The Mets bludgeoned the Yankees both nights. Mr. Met’s legions triumphed over the guys with the 27-rings shirts and the bandwagoners in pinstripe shirts with the name on the back.

So I hoped to go 3-for-3 last night watching the debate between President Biden and Donald Trump. Sure, I had the same sense of dread as the other two nights. But they turned out OK, so maybe the debate would too.

Uh, no. 

You could tell when he walked onto the stage that it was going to be bad. He looked like a befuddled old man trying to find a seat on a park bench. His gait was halting. His mouth formed a circle like the one in Munch’s “The Scream.”

He painfully reminded me of my father’s final years, when a vigorous, strong man was diminished.

I would trade both those Met wins for Biden holding his own. Alas, I can’t.

Since then, I’ve had three thoughts that, even though you didn’t ask, I’m going to share.

ONE: Within five minutes of the debate’s end, I sent a campaign contribution to the Biden-Harris campaign.

I wasn’t completely sure how I felt in the moment. But like many other Democrats, I think of Joe Biden as a hero. He took on Trump at a perilous moment in 2020 and, despite the mewling of Trump and his sycophants, beat him like a drum.

And Biden has delivered a remarkable presidency. Which leads to…

TWO: History has its eyes on you, as they sing in “Hamilton.” 

Much was made of the fact that Biden kept referring to the presidential historians who rate Trump the worst president ever. And, OK, maybe he shouldn’t have dwelled on that.

But in 2074, when late-century historians evaluate Biden’s presidency, they’ll see his legislative accomplishments, his focus on economic fairness, the quality of his staff, and the humanity and decency that comes naturally to him. And they’ll put him in the pantheon of greats – in the same line as Washington, Lincoln and FDR.

Unless…

THREE: History is written by the winners. If historians in 2074 have to be certified by the Stephen K. Bannon School of Historical Revision and Correction, Biden won’t come out so well. 

The 388 million Americans of that time will hear how Biden allowed 6 billion people to illegally cross the border. Because all 7 billion of them got put on Social Security and Medicare, those programs had to be canceled. And the 8 billion terrorists who came into the country were only foiled from their nefarious plans by the wisdom of Tsar Donald I.

Even among those remaining who remember democracy in the United States, they will blame Biden for allowing Trump to get back into the White House.

How Biden looked and sounded last night are one thing. It’s what he failed to do and mention that have me shaken. The effort to ban IVF and birth control. The threat to LGBTQ rights, including the same-sex marriages of people such as my daughter and her wife. The 2025 Project, a playbook for totalitarianism.

It might have been OK if Biden just had one bad night – as many Democratic leaders are calling it – against Nikki Haley or Marco Rubio or Mitt Romney. It’s another to have it against Donald Trump.

We’d be screwed if the soldiers invading Guadalcanal in 1942 and Normandy in 1944 had a bad day. That’s how you have to look at what happened with the president last night.

I don’t know how this is all going to play out. How would the Democrats nominate another candidate?Who would they nominate? Would they pick the next in line, an apparently very unpopular Kamala Harris, or come up with a fusion ticket of Democrats and Never Trump Republicans.

I’m as scared as you are. I think I’d feel better if Joe Biden came to the realization that people who are fond of him feel the same way.

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