Judge Merchan Loses His Temper

Although the New York courts have announced that they intend to post transcripts of the Trump trial "before the end of the following business day", this so far hasn't taken place, and the most recent transcript on the site is from Monday. Thus, at least so far, I'm having to rely on incomplete media accounts of the record. Here's the version of vesterday's blowup on Breitbart:

Merchan then asked Blanche to explain if Trump believed he was not violating the gag order when he reposted the Truths.

“I’d like to hear that,” Merchan exclaimed.

Blanche tried to explain, but Merchan said, “Blanche, you’re losing all credibility. I have to tell you right now, you’re losing all credibility with the court.”

There's a not fully helpful account of the proceedings in reverse chronological order on CNN. The exchange above appears to have taken place near the end of the hearing, close to the start of the day's trial at 11:00 AM. The specific issue, according to the CNN link, came up in relation to Trump reposting a comment by Jesse Waters:

Moving onto the post about the jury and Jesse Watters, Judge Juan Merchan asked: "Your client manipulated what was said and put it in quotes, am I right?"

"I wouldn’t use the word manipulation your honor," Donald Trump's lawyer Todd Blanche responded. "But the rest of the quote was not part of the quote."

Merchan said that Trump's post on the jury was not a repost.

"This is something that was said on TV and your client had to type it out. He had to sit there, use quotation marks, the shift key and type every thing out and then add those additional words," the judge said.

Blanche acknowledged that Trump's post about the jury was not a repost.

Judge Juan Merchan said he wants to hear an assertion under oath that Donald Trump believed he wasn't violating the gag order when he made the posts in question.

Merchan said: "How do I know that’s his position? Are you testifying under oath that that’s his position?"

"I'm not testifying, I'm making argument," attorney Todd Blanche replies.

"It's your client's position that when he reposts, he did not believe he was violating the gag order. I’d like to hear that. Or you just want me to accept it because you’re saying it?" Merchan says to Blanche.

This excerpt from Politico isn't covered in the CNN version, but it appears to be in the context of the same exchanges:

Prosecutors argued earlier that Trump's social media post calling Cohen and Daniels "sleaze bags" was a part of the former president's strategy to “condition” his followers.

Merchan also remarked that he would take into consideration the timing of Trump’s messages.

“You said the timing matters, why?” Blanche asked. “Why?”

Merchan responded sharply. “I’m asking the questions, OK?” he told Blanche.

Merchan warned Blanche that he was running out of time before the jury is expected to come back at 11 a.m.

Merchan's mention that they're running out of time is the one feature that caught my attention. Merchan scheduled this hearing to begin at 9:00 AM, to last until 11:00 AM, when the jury would arrive to start the day's abbreviated trial session. The hearing actually started around 9:20, and from what I can see in the CNN version, it spent over 90 minutes going round and round and accomplishing nothing -- Merchan said he wouldn't rule from the bench in any case, so we'll have to wait to see what he rules.

I note that the American Bar Association's statement on the Special Functions of the Trial Judge says in Standard 6-1.5. Obligation to use court time effectively and fairly:

(a) The trial judge has the obligation to avoid delays, continuances, and extended recesses, except for good cause. In the matter of punctuality, the observance of scheduled court hours, and the use of working time, the trial judge should be an exemplar for all other persons engaged in the criminal case. The judge should require punctuality and optimum use of working time from all such persons.

As best I can see, Judge Merchan wasted everyone's time in a rambling hearing in which he went round and round with Trump's attorney Blanche on questions like whether it's a violation of his gag order to repost someone else's opinion, and in the face of Blanche's argument that it was common sense that it wasn't, Merchan lost his temper and, in the media accounts, raised his voice. ABA Standard 6-1.4 says,

The trial judge's appearance, demeanor, and statements should reflect the dignity of the judicial office and enhance public confidence in the administration of justice.

This comment on courtroom etiquette from a working attorney explains the issue of how judges should address attorneys in court:

Judges often address attorneys by their last names, preceded by a courtesy title such as "Mr." or "Ms." This form of address is respectful and maintains a professional tone. For instance, "Mr. Smith, what is your argument regarding this motion?"

. . . Regardless of the specific term of address, judges typically maintain a respectful and professional tone when speaking to attorneys. This upholds the decorum of the court and the impartiality of the judiciary.

For Judge Merchan to addresss attorney Blanche as simply "Blanche" is outside normal courtroom decorum -- but in Trump's civil trial with Judge Engoron, the judge addressed Trump's attorney as "Chris" when he became impatient. This reflects badly on both judges.

The fact that yesterday's hearing ended only because it ran out of time suggests to me that Judge Merchan is simply over his head in this case, and it's confirmed by his losing his temper at Mr Blanche. So far, the case has been stumbling along with repeated recesses, when it would be even to the prosecution's advantage to move things quickly.

But we're also back to the Chicago Seven defense, which Alan Dershowitz, who helped develop it in the original Chicago Seven case, acknowledges the Trump defense has been using, particularly in the New York civil and criminal cases. The strategy is to get under the judge's skin and deliberately cause outbursts like Judge Merchan's yesterday. This in turn damages the court's credibility with the public.

Unlike Abbie Hoffman, Trump isn't wearing costumes or performing street theater in court, but he's doing precisely the things that will set the judge off. He posted before yesterday's hearing:

HIGHLY CONFLICTED, TO PUT IT MILDLY, JUDGE JUAN MERCHAN, HAS TAKEN AWAY MY CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO FREE SPEECH. EVERYBODY IS ALLOWED TO TALK AND LIE ABOUT ME, BUT I AM NOT ALLOWED TO DEFEND MYSELF. THIS IS A KANGAROO COURT, AND THE JUDGE SHOULD RECUSE HIMSELF!

— Trump on 𝕏 (@trump_repost) April 23, 2024

This thing is going to collapse of its own weight -- and Trump is going to continue to bait Merchan to the point where Merchan will try to put him behind bars.

"Pecker's Up!"

In the middle of her podcast yesterday, while discussing the Trump trial in New York, Megyn Kelly interrupted the discussion to announce, "This just in! Pecker's up!" and proceeded to giggle. This, of course, was a reference to David Pecker, the former publishing executive who is the lead prosecution witness in the trial. Her reference to his being "up" meant that he was taking the stand as they spoke, but the point, of course, was the bawdy implication that could be drawn from the circumstance.

This, it seems to me, is the emerging problem for the prosecution with this trial, and as with anything else, no plan survives contact with the enemy. After more than a week, it's been a bore. During jury selection, we had the usual talking heads outlining the usual defense strategies for choosing jurors, with the usual pontifications about New York juries -- except that the usual things didn't happen. Politico was one of the few outlets to notice:

As if there weren’t enough plot twists in Donald Trump’s legal saga, this week’s jury selection has produced one more: At least two lawyers will sit on his jury.

. . . Typically, prosecutors and defense lawyers alike try to keep lawyers off juries, fearing heightened scrutiny from members of their own profession. But in a Manhattan jury pool that is largely seen as unfavorable to the former president, Trump’s legal team might see a silver lining in having lawyers on the jury.

“They’re not emotional thinkers,” said Galina Davidoff, a Chicago-based trial consultant. “The profession requires them to do analysis, and emotional thinkers get more easily swayed by the side that goes first, that tells a good story.”

But this also reflects the overall dullness of the proceedings so far. No sooner did Mr Pecker come up than the court adjourned for a juror's toothache, and that led some commentators to wonder if the toothache was real, that the tedium might be more than at least that juror could bear.

Trials and hearings can be great television -- look what happened to Fani Willis in Atlanta just a short while ago. Clips and stills from that episode went viral for weeks. But in this trial, there are no cameras and no recordings, and media hungry for visuals can't get them. Did Trump fall asleep? Did he fart? Did he look annoyed? We'll never know. All anyone can do so far, like Megyn Kelly, is make bad jokes where she can find them.

Here's the pre-trial conventional wisdom from legacy media, via Doug Gordon at Newsweek:

According to the most recent New York Times/Siena poll, nearly 6 in 10 voters believe the charges of hush money payments made to a porn star are serious, including 54 percent of Independents. And the bad news for Trump doesn't end there.

Exit polls during the Republican primary showed that around 30 percent of Republican primary voters would not believe Trump was fit for the presidency if he were convicted of a crime. Even if you assume that 95 percent of those Republican voters eventually come home to Trump—a safe assumption—the 5 percent who may not are more than enough to deliver a second term to President Joe Biden.

The problem I see here is that Stormy Daniels was an issue in 2016, along with others like Karen MacDougal and the Access Hollywood tape. None of these hurt Trump badly enough to cost him the election in 2016; the voters factored them in then, and they're still going to factor them in now. The prosecutors seem to be angling to bring them into this trial if they can, but trying to take the audience back to 2016 isn't going to work, especially if they can't play clips of porn stars on the witness stand.

Doug Gordon goes on at Newsweek:

The contrast and opportunity this hands the Biden campaign could not have been any clearer than it was last week. While Trump was confined in court like a common criminal, Biden spent the week barnstorming across Pennsylvania talking about lowering taxes and bringing manufacturing jobs back to the United States. It's a movie we're likely to see play out over and over again: Trump in court and Biden in battleground states.

Except that Joe wasn't "talking about lowering taxes and bringing manufacturing jobs back to the United States", he was talking about Uncle Bosey and fumbling with the takeout box. This won't be Gordon's idea of a movie -- there'll be no film of a fidgety, annoyed, or guilty-looking Trump in the trial, while Joe has an inexhaustible supply of stumbles, gaffes, malapropisms, mispronunciations, and brain freezes that will lead the headlines because there won't be any footage of Trump in the coutroom at all.

Nor can I discount Trump's attorney Todd Blanche's remarks to the jurors in his opening statement,

"Use your common sense. We’re New Yorkers. It’s why we’re here," Blanche said, adding "we trust you" to decide the case on the evidence.

Especially if there are two attorneys on that jury, I'm starting to think this isn't going to turn out like just about everyone has been predicting. Let's not forget the stunned surprise when Nixon Attorney General John Mitchell and Finance Committee Chairman Maurice Stans were acquitted of charges that they had obstructed an investigation in a New York federal trial in 1974. I'm not so sure New York juries are as precictable as everyone seems to think.

Inaccurate Polling

I've kept thinking about a piece I read last week in The Hill, It’s time to retire the laziest cliché in election polling. The author, W Joseph Campbell, is not the better-known Joseph Campbell (1904-1987), the academic quack who promoted myth and folklore. Whether W Joseph even rises to the level of quackery, I'm not sure. His thumbnail says he is a professor emeritus of communication at American University. Here's his argument:

Opinion polling has no lazier cliché than “snapshot in time.”

. . . [T]he phrase is a refuge or metaphoric shield for pollsters when their pre-election surveys misfire. In such cases, “snapshot in time” is cited in attempting to defend or rationalize polls that careen well off-target, as many of them did in the 2020 presidential election.

Joe Biden was elected to the presidency four years ago by margins well short of the double-digit blowout suggested by the polls of CNN, Quinnipiac University, Economist/YouGuv and NBC/Wall Street Journal. Those polls estimated Biden’s end-of-campaign lead at 10 to 12 percentage points over then-President Donald Trump.

Biden won the popular vote by 4.5 points.

The discrepancy in 2020 between election results and polls overall was the most pronounced in 40 years, and prompted characterizations that the outcome was a “train wreck” and “a disaster for the polling industry,” as David A. Graham wrote in the Atlantic.

This starts with the assumption that polls are intended to be predictive. If that were the case, it seems to me that there would be a concerted effort among the pollsters' customers -- legacy media -- to increase their predictive accuracy, especially if their performance in the last two presidential election cycles was as disastrous as Prof Campbell says it was.

I think a better starting point is to recognize what Rush Limbaugh understood throughout his career, that polls are intended to manipulate the news, not report it. As he said on September 10, 2012,

The polls are just being used as another tool of voter suppression. The polls are an attempt to not reflect public opinion, but to shape it. Yours. They want to depress the heck out of you, and they want to suppress your vote.

On January 19, 2018, he said,

I don’t trust the polls that are published anymore. As wrong as they were about the general election, as wrong as they were about the special elections that happened last year, the polls are nothing more than a tool for making public opinion. The polls are not taken to reflect public opinion at all. The primary purpose of polls is to depress and dispirit Republican voters by making them feel constantly like they’re in the minority.

The purpose of polls is to reinforce among Republican voters that there’s no hope, that no matter what it might look like, Republican voters are a very tiny minority of the thinking in this country.

He generally explained that the pollsters do this by consistently oversampling self-identified Democrats and undersampling Republicans with various justifications, and their results then reinforce the opinions they prefer -- which are often what their customers, the legacy media outlets, prefer.

In the wake of the 2020 election, the Pew Research Institute did a detailed study on the possible effects of oversampling Democrats in polling, almost certainly in implicit response to Limbaugh's allegations. It looked at potential polling outcomes with an oversampling of Democrats versus a more realistic sampling and found little difference:

The adjustment from the tilted version (a 12-point Biden advantage with a 10-point Democratic advantage in party affiliation among nonvoters) to the balanced version (a 4.4-point Biden advantage with equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans among nonvoters), makes very little difference in the balance of opinion on issue questions. Across a set of 48 opinion questions and 198 answer categories, most answer categories changed less than 0.5%. The average change associated with the adjustment was less than 1 percentage point, and approximately twice that for the margin between alternative answers (e.g., favor minus oppose). The maximum change observed across the 48 questions was 3 points for a particular answer and 5 points for the margin between alternative answers.

One 3-point difference was on presidential job approval, a measure very strongly associated with the vote. In the balanced version, 39 percent approved of Trump’s job performance, while 58 percent disapproved. In the tilted version, 36 percent approved of Trump’s performance and 60 percent disapproved. Two other items also showed a 3-point difference on one of the response options.

But 3 points nationally is still a 3% error, not negligible at all, and this omits the bigger problem in recent presidential elections, where they've hinged not on the national popular vote, but on the outcomes in swing states and their effect on the Electoral College vote. What if we were to revise Biden's numbers in current polls down by 3 points? One thing that now seems to be happening is that polls that have proven highly inaccurate in the recent past, like Quinnipiac, are feeding outlier results into the Real Clear Politics average. This must certainly be deliberate, and RCP is enabling this effect.

Thus we're seeing what I think are troubling indicators of the national mood, like the emrgence of conspiracy theories surrounding relatively minor events like the collapse of the Francis Scott Key bridge, or a real uptick in self-immolation protests, contrasting with happy-face statistics like an RCP national polling average showing Trump ahead by only 0.3 points. Real things are happening that aren't being reported.

Frankly, this can't be right. Part of the mainstream obliviousness is Prof Campbell's assumption that the pollsters' customers want accuracy. He quotes David A. Graham's Atlantic piece:

Graham’s essay anticipated the “snapshot-in-time” defense favored by pollsters, writing: “If their snapshots are so far off, where were they aiming the lens? Why bother?” He noted that “the public uses opinion polls to try to understand what happens [in elections]. If the polls and their analysts don’t offer the service that customers are seeking, they’re doomed.”

But I think Limbaugh was much more insightful, the customers want to shape the news, not report it. Prof Campbell completely misses that point.

Reflections On Uncle Bosey

It's taken me a couple of days to absorb fully the implications of Joe's Uncle Bosey remarks, which he gave twice on Wednesday, April 17. Here's the transcipt of the key remarks in the second version that he gave in Pittsburgh, which are also covered in the YouTube clip above:

And my uncle — they called him Un- — Ambrose — instead of “Brosie,” they called him “Bosie.” My Uncle Bosie was a hell of an athlete, they tell me, when he was a kid. And he became an Army Air Corps, before the Air Force came along. He flew those single-engine planes as reconnaissance over war zones.

And he got shot down in New Guinea, and they never found the body because there used to be — there were a lot of cannibals, for real, in that part of New Guinea.

The schoolmarms in the media promptly fact-checked this, and I'm not going to spend time repeating the historical version. But several features of the Pittsburgh episode in particular popped out to me. The first is the dutiful politeness of the facial expressions on the union members who stood behind him. This reminded me of a report from another stop he made in Pittsburgh that day:

Biden stopped at a gas station this week to order food in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Upon entering, few flocked to interact with him. Most patrons stood by, did not hold out their hands, and watched the president walk past.

Biden tried to speak with a girl when he entered the station, but after receiving little interaction, he slowly marched on while cameras followed and onlookers pressed themselves up against the wall. Biden posed for a few photos before he walked to the door.

Everyone is being polite -- this is the leader of the free world, after all. Everyone's anxious to get this over with. But now, it seems that even pre-teen girls are wary of him.

The second big takeaway is his delivery. Initially, I was going to approach this from the perspective of The King's Speech, in which the speech therapist Lionel Logue discovers that George VI, plagued with a stammer that's persisted since childhood, can do things like sing or shout cusswords without stammering. At first, I thought that Joe had delivered the Uncle Bosey story without -- or at least, with less of -- the slurring, hypercorrection, and malapropism with which he delivers more scripted remarks.

But reviewing the segment above, I began to recognize several things. The first is that these aren't spontaneous remarks, this is the second time he's told this story that day. In fact, he's clerly glancing down at notes while he's talking about his uncle and the cannibals, and apparently his big point, which is repeated in both the transcripts of the Uncle Bosey story, is that Bosey's heroism stands in contrast to Trump's calling American war dead “suckers” and “losers.”

Well, that got lost in the shuffle when it turned out that Uncle Bosey wasn't eaten by cannibals after all. This is not "Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" level oratory, even if someone wrote it out for him. But the second problem is that, although there's somewhat less slurring, hypercorrection, and malapropism in his remarks than there was, for instance in Friday's speech to the electrical workers:

You — by the way, go on out and ask people who know you — that you’re acquainted with who aren’t in the business at all, “What’s it take to be an electrician?” You say, “Oh, well, you just say (inaudible). You get a little bit of training.” Four to five years of training to become an electrician. You’re the best in the world. That’s why it’s the (inaudible). (Applause.)

the slurring, hypercorrection, and malapropism is still there, teleprompter or no.

We're back to Nate Silver's recommendation from last February that I linked again the other day, that Joe get out and do unscripted, improvisational encounters. The problem is that they're all scripted. Someone thought the Uncle Bosey story would look like a spontaneous personal aside, but it was clearly written for him on notes that he looked down to read as he spoke, and he stumbled through the same remarks twice -- and scripted as they were, they were nevertheless dumb remarks that drew all the attention from the intended point.

When the opportunity arises for truly unscripted encounters, as might have happened in the Wawa and Sheetz stores in Pennsylvania this past week, he just shuffles glumly through them. It might be that he comes off as unapproachable, but I almost wonder if, as apparently happens frequently with the pre-teen girls he approaches himself, he comes off as someone people don't want to be approached by, either.

And this brings me back to something I've mentioned before, the features we frequently see in his speech, scripted or spontaneous, include slurring and hypercorrection, which are featues of speech that an experienced police officer would immediately recognize as indicating intoxication. This is borne out in the Pittsburgh clip at the top this post as well -- for much of the segment, his facial fwatures are flaccid, numb, and unexpressive, which I was taught many years ago is how the term s***faced is derived. For that matter, his tone often trails off into maudlin-confidential and barely audible.

His remarks at Scranton the other day, when he breought up Uncle Bosey the first time, included a number of other debunked stories, including

We had just finished spring football practice at the University of Delaware. And I had been named as the likely starting safety that year and — next year.

But the one that I think has the least credibility of all, no matter how many times he tells it, is this one:

I’m the only Scrantonian and the only Irishman you’ve ever met that’s never had a drink in his life because too many people have too many drinks in their life, in my opinion.

This man is plastered, pretty much all day, every day. The big mystery is why nobody has called him on it. I suspect that people who know him even a little bit, from Obama on down, have known this for decades and are keeping quiet.

This Is Rare -- Why Are We Seeing More Of It?

According to Wikipedia,

The Buddhist crisis in South Vietnam saw the persecution of the country's majority religion under the administration of Catholic president Ngô Đình Diệm. Several Buddhist monks, including the most famous case of Thích Quảng Đức, immolated themselves in protest.

The example set by self-immolators in the mid 20th century sparked similar acts between 1963 and 1971, most of which occurred in Asia and the United States in conjunction with protests opposing the Vietnam War. Researchers counted almost 1000 self-immolations covered by The New York Times and The Times.

On November 2, 1965, Norman Morrison, an anti-war activist, doused himself in kerosene and set himself on fire below the office of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara at the Pentagon, to protest United States involvement in the Vietnam War.

Wikipedia has a separate entry containing a list of "political" self-immolations beginning in 1948. The vast majority of these took place outside the US, and indeed mostly in India, Southeast Asia, and China. In the West, they were often protests against Communist regimes. But the overall pattern of the list confirms my impression that most in the US took place in the 1960s and 1970s in protest of the Viet Nam War.

Four people, Alice Herz, Norman Morrison, Roger Allen LaPorte, amd Celene Jankowski, set themaelves on fire in the US on 1965, presumably following the Vietnamese examples. Then, after a year, two people, Florence Beaumont and Erik Thoen, set themselves on fire in 1967, followed by one, Ronald Brazee, in 1968. In 1969, Bruce Mayrock set himself on fire, not in protest of the Viet Nam War, but in protest of genocide against Biafra in the Nigerian Civil War.

In 1970, two people in the US self-immolated in protest of the Viet Nam War, Robert Rex Vice and George Winne Jr., both in the immediate aftermath of the Kent State shootings. Things were then quiet for more than a decade until 1986, when Orland Payne McCafferty set himself on fire to protest Reagan's policies. In 1987, Antoine Thurel set himself in fire in Boston to protest conditions in Haiti. In 1988, Mehrdad Imen set himself on fire in New York to protest human rights abuses in Iran.

In 1993, Binh Gia Pham set himself on fire in Boston to protest persecution of Buddhists in Viet Nam. In 1996, Kathleen Chang, going under the name Kathy Change, set herself on fire in Philadelphia to protest conditions in general. In 2011, Thomas James Ball set himself on fire outside a New Hampshire courthouse to protest family court injustice. In 2014, Thu Hoang set himself on fire, apparently to protest a Chinese oil rig. A few days later, Charles R Moore set himself on fire in Texas to protest racism in the town where he grew up.

In 2016, Charles Ingram self-immolated to protest corruption in the Department of Veterans Affairs. In 2018, David Buckel set himself on fire to protest fossil fuels; Chloe Sagal self-immolated to protest homelessness and mental health issues; John Watts set himself on fire to protest corruption at the Department of Veterans Affairs; Nicholas McCrary set himself on fire to protest involuntary celibacy. Four people in 2018 matches the highest number in 1965.

In 2019, Amav Gupta, from India, set himself on fire outside the White House for unknown reasons. In 2020, Linda J. Zhang self-immolated to protest climate change. In 2022, Wynn Bruce (no relation) set himself on fire outside the Supreme Court to protest climate change. In 2023, Chet Bohrer, a non-student, self-immolated on the UC Berkeley campus to protest bullying in Utah.

And now we have two incidents in the sort of quick succession that we haven't seen since 1970; on February 25, 2024, Aaron Bushnell, who set himself on fire outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC to protest the Israeli invasion of Gaza, and just yesterday, Maxwell Azzarello, who set himself on fire outside the New York courthouse in which the Trump trial is being held. His specific reasons appear to involve conspiracy theories that aren't necessarily related to Trump.

So in the US, the self-immolation phenomenon began in the Viet Nam War era, a time of great social change, followed after 1970 by a 16-year interval of no self-immolation protests at all; one a year in the late 1980s, then a couple in the mid 1990s -- and then another 15-year interval ending in 2011, with incidents beginning to ramp up again since then.

Azzarello's motives were unclear. According to the New York Post,

The self-described “investigative researcher” traveled to New York City in recent days from Florida without his family knowing and had been protesting in front of the courthouse where he bashed political leaders from both sides of the aisle.

“This extreme act of protest is to draw attention to an urgent and important discovery: We are victims of a totalitarian con, and our own government (along with many of their allies) is about to hit us with an apocalyptic fascist world coup,” Azzarello wrote in part of a rambling manifesto on the Substack page.

. . . Azzarello was previously arrested three times across several days in the Sunshine State that included charges of disturbing the peace and damage to property last August.

Following his third arrest, Florida cops noted he was suicidal and listed him as unemployed, per police reports.

On one hand, the Azzarello episode and the uptick of those preceding it for the past decade can be attributed to growing issues of homelessness and untreated mental health problems. On the other, we're looking at conditions of social change that are bringing about phenomena that we haven't seen since the 1960s and early 1970s -- except that counterculture fringe figures seized the limelight then, like Abbie Hoffman, Timothy Leary, Angela Davis, and Eldridge Cleaver -- but their mainstream political allies, like Eugene McCarthy, Bobby Kennedy, and George McGovern, proved feckless. There are no equivalent counterculture figures now, while one political agent of change, Donald Trump, is proving highly effective.

These developments are at least driving me to think we're in conditions like the 1960s and early 1970s, but I'm not ready to say much more than that at the moment.

Joe Is Being Forced To Campaign

I was scratching my head about four vignettes featuring Joe over the past few days and trying to put them in the context of the conventional wisdom from Sean Trende of Real Clear Politics:

There’s little doubt at this point that President Biden’s standing in the polls has improved. In late January of this year, former President Donald Trump led Biden in national head-to-head polls by as many as 4.3 points. As of today, Trump’s lead sits at just two-tenths of a percentage point. Why might we be seeing this?

One answer I might give is that several outlier polls came in over the past couple of weeks that had the effect of skewing the Real Clear Politics average in Biden's favor, which I think was the intent, and Trende for whatever reason is buying into this. In fact, in the first sentence of the quote above, he's comparing apples and oranges -- Trump led Biden in individual polls by "as many as 4.3 points" but he new leads the RCP average by just two tenths. That's basically a meaningless statement.

But what's happening in the real world? Two months ago I linked to an essay by Nate Silver, It's time for the White House to put up or shut up, in which he prescribed a strategy for Biden to improve his prospects for November.

Say that, in any given period of time — maybe over the course of a couple months — Biden has 20 opportunities to do what you might call Improvisational Public Appearances (IPAs). We can define these as events where Biden is not merely making pre-scripted remarks and instead faces sustained questioning from the media, voters or other public figures.

. . . The White House has worked with Biden for a long time and they know his performance varies based on the setting, who he’s taking questions from, and his fatigue level. So what do they do? Well, they do their best to lop off the bottom part of the graph by making excuses for Biden to avoid these IPAs or never scheduling them in the first place.

. . . [As a result of this strategy,] when we see Biden’s public appearances, we’re only getting a truncated sample. And the results still aren't very good.

The analogy is to an NBA player who’s aging and losing his shot. If he only takes wide-open jumpers, his shooting percentage may remain tolerable — but you can observe the decline in his skills from the lack of shooting volume.

Silver's actual prescription was that Joe should do more sit-down interviews with serious journalists. Well, the closest we came this week was "don't move on Haifa".

This comes during an interview with Reshad Hudson from Nexstar Media, where President Biden mistakenly referred to the Israeli city of Haifa as Rafah, a city in Gaza.

He then added, "And I made it clear to Israelis – don’t move on Haifa." The intended reference was to Rafah, a city located in the southern Gaza Strip, bordering Egypt and also a major crossing point.

The problem Silver can't escape is that Biden simply doesn't do well with IPAs, and in fact, he seldom has, ever. But the Haifa episode was just the start. Tuesday also brought the hotel bathroom ramble:

. . . And I was in one of those 8-by-10 bathrooms — you know they have a shower, a toilet, and a sink. And I got a towel on me and shaving cream, and I hear, “Bam, bam, bam,” at my door really loudly. And I wonder, “What the hell is that?”

And I walked to the door and opened it up and standing there was the former governor of the state of Delaware, Elbert N. Carvel, a big guy, about six-five. Talked at you like this. (Pronounced in an accent.) (Laughter.) And the state representative who got defeated four years earlier as a Democratic state rep — who was retired — and one of the — from the family that had more so — more senators appointed than any other family in American history, the — the Tunnells — and a former retired Justice and the — and the state chairman.

And they said — and I’m standing in a towel with shaving cream on my face. (Laughter.) And with that, they looked at me and said — they come in and said, “We’re — we’re coming — we just had dinner. We want to talk to you.”

And I walked in, and I said, “Okay, gentlemen.” And I ran to the bathroom thinking I could put something on. (Laughter.) All I could do is take off the shaving cream. I had on a towel. I walked out — two headboards nailed to one side of the wall, the desk to the other side.

And I’m st- — they’re — he’s sitting on the end of the bed. And I’m sitting down, and they said, “Joe, we just had dinner, and we think you should run for the Senate.”

And then there was the visit to the Wawa store where he couldn't figure out how to close the takeout box:

Biden just stopped by to visit another gas station. He was greeted by 0 supporters.

This is the 2nd time in 24 hours.pic.twitter.com/Jjzq4skqVP

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) April 18, 2024

This calls to mind a campaign event from back in 1992, George H W Bush's supermarket scanner moment:

A supermarket scanner moment is a political gaffe in which a politician is portrayed as out-of-touch with everyday affairs. The term derives from a 1992 New York Times report that characterized sitting U.S. President George H. W. Bush as being amazed by commonplace supermarket barcode scanner technology at a grocers' convention. Political commentators widely spread the story, portraying Bush as unfamiliar with daily American life. Though other major media outlets soon refuted the report as a mischaracterization, the popular memory of Bush's reported amazement at a supermarket scanner remains one of the most enduring American political myths.

And then there was Joe's Uncle Bosie, who was eaten by cannibals:

Was President Joe Biden's uncle eaten by cannibals? That appears to be what he suggested − twice − this week when he said the remains of his uncle, a military veteran who died during World War II in a plane crash off the New Guinea coast, were not recovered.

Biden's telling differed from an account published by the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, which says Biden's uncle, Ambrose Finnegan, and two other men "failed to emerge from the sinking wreck and were lost in the crash."

. . . "And he got shot down in New Guinea, and they never found the body because there used to be − there were a lot of cannibals − for real − in that part of New Guinea," Biden continued.

Cearly the White House is responding to a perceived problem, which must certainly be Joe's continued poor standing in the polls. And they're clearly following some version of Nate Silver's advice: get him into more unscripted "improvisational public appearances", sit-down interviews, gas station visits, chats with union workers, and so forth. I think Silver was being optimistic when he made that recommendation back in February; he thought Joe could do well in some, less well in others, and it was the White House's job to limit his overall appearances but pick the ones where he could play to his strengths.

So far, this isn't working. Joe without a script is likely to be a disaster, but even Joe with a script shows him slurring, dyslexic, and fighting the teleprompter. Silver admits Joe has good days and bad days, but the problem is that putting him on the campaign trail with multiple weekly events is tiring him out, and it's going to increase the number of bad days and bad IPAs. But this is precisely the situation his campaign was able to avoid in 2020: they had him scripted from the basement. Apparently the thinking this year is they can't do this, they have to get him out, active, and interacting, and it's turning out to be one supermarket scanner moment after another.

Who Is Katherine Maher?

I've long had an interest in the sociology of what C Wright Mills called the power elite, modified by Ferdinand Lundberg's view that a somewhat smaller cabal of powerful families and their retainers actually controls the planet.

Over the past week or so, we've seen a new star rise in what must be that constellation, Katherine Maher, named at age 41 to be CEO of National Public Radio this past January with no journalistic experience, although she has a lengthy resume in foreign policy and non-profit circles. Uri Berliner had little to say about her directly in the critical essay that led to his resignation, except to say,

A few weeks ago, NPR welcomed a new CEO, Katherine Maher, who’s been a leader in tech. She doesn’t have a news background, which could be an asset given where things stand. I’ll be rooting for her. It’s a tough job. Her first rule could be simple enough: don’t tell people how to think. It could even be the new North Star.

But this is an example of what I accused Berliner of yesterday, obliviousness. Katherine Maher has never been "a leader in tech", so let's start by taking a look at her real backgound. Via Wikipedia,

Maher grew up in Wilton, Connecticut, and attended Wilton High School. After high school, Maher graduated from the Arabic Language Institute's Arabic Language Intensive Program of The American University in Cairo in 2003, which she recalled as a formative experience that developed her interest in the Middle East. Maher subsequently studied at the Institut français d'études arabes de Damas in Syria and spent time in Lebanon and Tunisia.

In 2005, Maher received a bachelor's degree from New York University in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies.

Maher originally intended to be an academic and work for human rights and international development organizations.

Two key markers are conspicuously missing here -- she went to a public high school, not a prestigious private prep school, and she didn't go to an Ivy-level university. I did a web search on NYU, and I found a number of opinions along this line:

Things may have changed, but when I was growing up here/applying to college, NYU had a reputation for being the school that wealthy parents with more dollars than sense sent their kids to because they HAD to come to school here. You know that USC scandal? That's how NYU was perceived, all the way. Wealthy parents who had money to blow spending $60k a year on their kids to come here "take advantage of the city", i.e. partying hard and enjoying life downtown, with few repercussions because their parents were millionaires anyway. It was known much more for its glamorous/wealthy students rather than its intellectual rigor; but I'm 32 so maybe that all has changed in the intervening years.

In other words, it kinda sounds to me as if NYU is to New York as USC is to LA, and I say that as someone who has taught and studied at USC. But what about Ms Maher's susequent career? Back to Wikipedia:

After internships at the Council on Foreign Relations and Eurasia Group, in 2004 and 2005, respectively, Maher began working at HSBC in London, Germany, and Canada as part of their international manager development program.

So OK, it looks like she was being fast-tracked into the kind of foreign policy positions she'd studied for in the Arabic program in Cairo and in Lebanon and Tunisia. In fact, I would almost say she was being groomed for some sort of deep-state intelligence-related work in that area -- but then, no more spooking, she's doing banking. And then banking doesn't work out. Things quickly turn gaseous:

In 2007, Maher returned to New York City, where from 2007 to 2010, she worked at UNICEF as an innovation and communication officer. She worked to promote the use of technology to improve people's lives. She traveled extensively to work on issues related to maternal health, HIV/AIDS prevention, and youth participation in technology. One of her first projects at UNICEF involved testing MediaWiki extensions related to accessibility in Ethiopia. Another project received USAid Development 2.0 Challenge grant funding to work on the use of mobile phones to monitor nutrition in children in Malawi.

MediaWiki extensions related to accessibility in Ethiopia? What on earth is that? And this must be from her own resume -- hire me as a key member of your team, I worked on MediaWiki extensions related to accessibility in Ethiopia! Not only that, but I worked on the use of mobile phones to monitor nutrition in children in Malawi!

For several more years, there was more gaseousness, for instance consulting

on technology for international development and democratization, working on ICT for accountability and governance with a focus on the role of mobile phones and other technologies in facilitating civil society and institutional reform, particularly in the Middle East and Africa.

Then she worked at widely disparate jobs for a year or two at a time.

From 2013 to 2014, Maher was advocacy director at the Washington, D.C.-based Access Now. . . . Maher was chief communications officer of the Wikimedia Foundation from April 2014 to March 2016. . . . Maher became interim executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation in March 2016 following the resignation of executive director Lila Tretiko. . . . In 2019, Maher became CEO of Wikimedia. She proposed potentially paying contributors to help address gaps in diversity. Maher stepped down from her positions as CEO and executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation on April 15, 2021.

Then there's a three-year gap. At least back in the day, HR departments didn't like to see gaps like that on a resume; they could be covering up for, say, a stretch in prison, or maybe rehab. Whatever the explanation here, when she left Wikimedia, nobody seems to have wanted to hire her for useful work. Instead, after the three-year lacuna, it was back to non-profits:

From 2022 to 2023, Maher was a member of the US State Department's Foreign Affairs Policy Board, an expert panel established in 2011 by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to advise US officials. As of 2023, she chairs the board of directors of the Signal Foundation. She is also the board chair of nonprofit organization, Adventure Scientists as of January 2023. In October that year, Web Summit appointed Maher as its new chief executive, to replace Paddy Cosgrave.

Wait a moment. Web Summit named her CEO in October of 2023, but she became CEO of NPR in March 2024? Sounds like something didn't work out bigly at Web Summit. I asked the web what Web Summit does and got this answer:

Web Summit’s mission has been to create software that enables meaningful connections between the CEOs, founders, investors, media, politicians and cultural figureheads who are reshaping the world.

In other words, it puts out gas, which seems to be the one thing Ms Maher has wide experience in doing. The overall impression I have is that her career has mostly involved trying one or another field and moving on to another without accomplishing much in any. But why does she keep moving from CEO position to CEO position? So far, I can get ony a partial answer. Wikipedia says her mother is Ceci Maher,

an American executive and politician. She currently serves as a member of the Connecticut State Senate, representing District 26, which encompasses Darien, New Canaan, Redding, Ridgefield, Stamford, Weston, Westport and Wilton, for the Democratic Party.

So there seems to be upscale Connecticut money in the family background, although Ceci became a member of the state senate very late in the day, elected only in 2022. Ceci's husband, Katherine's father, was Gordon Roberts Maher, a Goldman Sachs banking executive. His obituary says,

Gordon Roberts Maher, a retired vice president of commodities operations, and spiritual Parisian, died October 5, 2020 in Norwalk, CT of complications from alcoholism.

Gordon, known as Rob, or less frequently but more cherished to him, Gordo, Maher was born in Norwalk, Connecticut, growing up in Wilton, CT for a time. . . The family then decamped to St. Germain du Pres, France as a result of their father’s work at IBM where family lore contends he may or may not have been a postwar spy.

It sounds like there's generational wealth in the family, plus a likely intelligence involvement, which probably is how Katherine got fast-tracked into the Arab Studies program until she quickly didn't work out, went into banking -- likely via her father's influence -- until she didn't work out there, and then went into non-profits, where she doesn't seem to be working out all that well.

As far as I can see, the task of the power elite here has been to find someplace to park her. I doubt if it was ever expected that she'd accomplish much at NPR, and the consensus for now is that nothing will change there, whether she can hold onto her job or not. But given her track record, I don't expect her to last long, whether it's her tweets that do her in or something else.