Politics: The Mother of Despair & Inspiration
A National Temper Tantrum Subsides, Giving Us a Chance to Breathe
At worst, politics and politicians game out abusive relationships with voters and constituents and scorch the earth — and truth — for control and power.
At best, politicians can also be activists, experts and leaders who leverage their egos and coalitions to actually try and get things done.
I have met scoundrels and inspirations at every level of government. The shame of it to me is our recent chaotic fox trot with a certain seditionist pathological liar is that all of politics, and all politicians, are painted with the same broad orange-tinged brush.
That’s a shame, but given the results of the November 8th midterm elections, it feels like the national temper tantrum that we’ve all just lived through has finally worn itself. At least a little … I hope.
Maybe this more rational U.S. electoral map (i.e. Trump / MAGA candidates were widely rejected) will let us all look harder and more thoughtfully about who we want representing us, and how. Our collective hair is less on fire. The fever feels a little broken.
One of my first jobs out of college in the early 1980s was as a communications director in Albany for a New York State Assemblywoman. Her name was May Newburger, and she represented the 16th State Assembly District on Long Island, including Port Washington where I had grown up.
May was chair of the NYS Assembly Task Force on Women's Issues, and she served as co-chair of the Legislative Commission on the Water Resource Needs of Long Island, which investigated aquifers and water quality. May’s work directly led to NY being an equal-division of property state for divorce, ensuring spouses were not ripped off for wealth grown during a marriage. She also championed efforts to require closure of landfills and implement groundwater protection measures. May cared, and worked, for a better New York.
May died in 2012 at the age of 92. I was living in Seattle at the time, but we had shared several phone calls over the last few years of her life, plus a few Christmas dinners in Port Washington when she was able to join us at my parents’ home. May always brought two bottles of wine as a gift, one white and one red, just in case. To this day, I still like to bring the Louis Martini Cabernet May would always bring.
In our final conversation, May called me: “Hello, doll.” She said, and commenced to update me on her cancer diagnosis. She said the visiting nurse had been acting all grim, suggesting it was time for May to get her things in order, including funeral arrangements.
I took notes of the call. They’re pretty amazing, because they show how incredibly pragmatic May was, and why she was such a great leader.
“What's the point of making funeral arrangements? I'm going to be cremated. One place I called says it will cost $2,000. The next place says $5,000. I ask the man: ‘How could it be $3,000 difference?’ He says ‘we provide something a little extra. We come in a limousine. (May laughs) Isn't that ridiculous? Like I need a chauffeur to drive me around in my little can of ashes.’’
During my time working for May, the governor of New York was Mario Cuomo. With talk of the presidency or a Supreme Court nomination, Cuomo was at the height of his power. He had given the main address at the 1984 DNC Convention, and the tone and tenor was so persuasive, it opened the door for people to say the same thing about Barack Obama when he gave his eye-opening 2004 DNC speech.
Cuomo’s vision and oratory power made the buzz around Albany in the mid 80s pretty electric, and being a fellow downstate Democrat and head of two influential task forces, May Newburger had a direct pipeline to Mario.
As a 20-something support staffer, I’ll admit feeling quite a rush seeing the levers or power, if not the sausage-making, being pushed and pulled. Getting stuff done requires tenacity and bullheadedness and calling in chits. I remember attending an event at the Governor’s Mansion with May and watching her make a calculated beeline to Cuomo, where she engaged him on a few important points necessary a bill she was negotiating.
Being there in the room was a thrill I carried with me as I became a reporter, especially when I landed in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania after 2008 economic implosion.
Talk about a heady time in American politics. Obama had just been elected, the economy was on the brink, Republican Senator Arlen Specter switched parties at the behest of his old buddy and former fellow Pennsylvania Senator, now Vice President Joe Biden, and the Democrats were able to push through TARP, a $787 billion economic recovery package that stabilized the cratering U.S. economy.
Orchestrating some of this inter-Pennsylvania/D.C. political power play was none other than Ed Rendell, into whose office I was granted access as the politics columnist for the Patriot-News. Unlike Cuomo, whose purity as a moral leader of democratic ideals was pretty compelling, Rendell was a little more … how should we say … profane. Like a lot more.
Nonetheless, getting behind-the-scenes access to governors and state lawmakers and U.S. Senators let me see above or behind the profanity of politics, especially during legislative crunch time. That’s when posturing and politics gave way to putting policies into action — whether it was for better water quality or women’s rights or access to access to health care or whether a state should allow the fracking of natural gas out of rock shelves.
The vast and complicated world we all live in requires organizing principles and institutions. If we were all really libertarians or anarchists, our world would turn into a hellscape pretty fast.
In our democracy, what we’ve got is what our Constitution gave us. And each other.
And what we’ve got are systems for putting our fellow humans into positions to try and makes our cities or towns or states or country better places. Those can be liberal causes or conservative, as long as Americans don’t kill each other in the process.
That we got to the point of killing each other … it was brewing.
When I was working for the Patriot-News in Pennsylvania covering Ed Rendell and Arlen Specter and the Obama/Biden White House, that was when the “grass roots” Tea Party started rolling along on big dollars pumped in by the Koch brothers and Americans for Prosperity.
By 2009, oddly just as Obama got into office and Mitch McConnell vowed to block everything Obama tried to do, the disruptive Tea Party movement was in full force. The whipped-up Tea Party was opposed to global warming regulation, the Affordable Care Act, the expansion of Medicaid and economic stimulus.
The “anti-government” clarion call that sucked so many into the Tea Party was as much a pro-business/supply side/trickle down movement that succeeded by sweeping up angry “American Patriots” — most of whom got all their “information” from the Fox News’ firehose of rage. And before we know it, good ol’ money-laundering blowhard Donald Trump was riding the golden escalator, shoving his way to the top of a major American political party.
As I said, there have been scoundrels and liars and destructive politicians on both sides of the aisle. But what we just lived through the past seven years was an utterly exhausting and destructive temper tantrum of chaos.
I’m glad the baby seems to be tired out. The midterms seemed to prove Americans as a whole have had enough. I hope we all get a chance to see more clearly the better ways, and the better people, we can put to work for us. I’ve known a few worth their office and our praise and support.