Summary: With the 2018 midterms now all over, “bar the shouting,” Democrats seem to have done passably well. Aotsunami (the Blue Tidal Wave) may have appeared to be more Aonami (the Blue Wave) than the Fukushima-like phenomenon we had hoped, but nevertheless, it delivered us control of the House of Representatives, numerous state governorships, and results in some local races that merit further discussion.
Of course, the ineluctable temper tantrum from The Donald has created more of a stir and more controversy the White House can ill afford. The Donald’s petulant stripping of CNN reporter Jim Acosta’s White House press pass, and White House flak Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s invocation of an obviously doctored video provided to her by Infowars’s Alex Jones, has given birth to another one of the endless parade of scandals dogging The Donald.
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The dust from the midterm elections is slowly settling, though we probably won’t know the full extent of Aonami (the Blue Wave) for some time. Nonetheless, in addition to wresting back control of the House of Representatives from the Republican Party, Democrats also appeared to have made some significant inroads at the state and local levels.
Indeed, Democrats may probably be forgiven today for experiencing some measure of Schadenfreude as close elections continue to tilt in their favor.
Here in Cathedral City, congratulations are due to incoming councilmembers John Rivera and Raymond Gregory, as well as to returning councilmember Mark Carnevale. Congratulations also to outgoing Council member Shelley Kaplan as he moves from the Cathedral City city Council to representing Zone 4 of the Desert Healthcare District, an obscure, but important post.
We don’t have the official canvass of voters from the Riverside County registrar yet, so we can’t know just how Democratic Cathedral City broke in the last election; all we have are results without knowing what part of the city voted for which candidate for assembly, State Senator, Congressman, or U.S. Senator. While according to the registrar’s numbers, Riverside County appears to have broken for Republican gubernatorial candidate John Cox, statewide numbers show Cox being trounced by Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom. How Cathedral City voted in that election we can’t yet know.
Nonetheless, there were some distinct losers in Tuesday night’s election. Cathedral City’s fourth Council District, by choosing experienced former planning Commissioner John Rivera over Trumpist conservative Ernesto Gutierrez, appears to have fairly decisively rejected the siren song of Trumpism. Unfortunately for departing mayor Stan Henry, his embrace of Gutierrez will taint his otherwise positive legacy. Stan would have done better to have kept his mouth shut altogether rather than endorse so manifestly unsuitable a candidate as Gutierrez.
The other loser in Tuesday night’s election, at least as far as District 4 is concerned is our local Gannett publication. By endorsing Gutierrez as their choice in District 4, the Desert Sun has once again demonstrated how woefully out of touch it is becoming with the increasingly Democratic electorate of the Coachella Valley. The Desert Sun seems to have forgotten or to have been utterly indifferent to changing voter demographics. Of course, The Desert Sun’s Republican cheerleading tendencies have always been readily apparent.
This after all was the same newspaper that last endorsed a Democrat for president some time during the administration of Franklin Roosevelt. When the Desert Sun in 2016 bucked its historic trend of endorsing Republicans for president, Democrats throughout the Valley were shocked; this was, after all, the same newspaper which had once fired an editorial page editor and escorted him off the premises under heavy security when he had had the effrontery to suggest that the Desert Sun might want to endorse a Democrat in a local congressional race.
We had expected our local Gannett publication to bend over backwards to find some sophistry of reason to justify endorsing Donald Trump. Fortunately, that did not happen, and two years later, the editorial staff of The Desert Sun are, in hindsight, probably thanking their lucky stars that they did not give the nod to The Donald.
Nevertheless, the endorsement of Ernesto Gutierrez was another blunder by the Desert Sun’s editorial staff. Unfortunately, as the monopoly print media source in this market, the Desert Sun can pretty much get away with ham-handed editorial decisions. Only time will tell what their next gaffe will be.
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Of course, the landfall of Aonami, for all the effects it may or may not have here in the Coachella Valley, certainly has provoked more peevish, splenic outbursts of temper from the toddler occupying the Oval.
In my last post, I suggested that junior hominids, unlike kittens, puppies, or ducklings, are most distinctly not cute. Indeed, the toddler years can be years of travail for both parent and child; but never before have we had a toddler occupying the Oval Office, with all the various and sundry misbehaviors in which not-yet-socialized children indulge. To watch The Donald is to watch just such an un-socialized toddler, immured in a 72-year-old body, flaunt his inability to conform his behavior to the norms of civilized society.
We were subjected to just such a dog and pony show yesterday with The Donald’s breathtakingly bizarre 87 minute press conference in the East Room of the White House, the low point of which was Donald Trump’s testy exchange with CNN’s Jim Acosta, who apparently has long been a particular bête noire of the toddler-in-chief, followed by the yanking of Acosta's White House press credential.
After Trump attempted to cut off Acosta in mid-question, he sent a White House intern to try to forcibly relieve Acosta of his microphone. The intern should have known better; the least touching of another in anger is a battery at common law, and the intern has now made herself vulnerable to a lawsuit from Jim Acosta and from CNN. Trump, having instructed the intern to do so, has also made himself vulnerable to a lawsuit; even a president is not immune to being called to account in damages for ordering an assault and battery against another person.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, whose record for lies and mistruths is very much coterminous with that of The Donald himself, attempted to justify the battery of Jim Acosta and the stripping of Acosta's credential by referencing a video that had been altered by Alex Jones’s Infowars, a gambit which was quickly found out and called out.
What neither The Donald nor his flack understand is that outside the dwindling minority of the population that constitutes The Donald’s base, the “enemy of the people” rhetoric he uses to describe the American media, like the rest of his rhetoric intended to cast doubt on the legitimacy of our other institutions, including our public institutions of self-government, has worn infinitesimally thin.
We may reasonably expect that when the Democratic House of Representatives takes control on January 3, barring some kind of Fujimori-style self-coup by The Donald, that Elijah Cummings’s House Government Reform And Oversight Committee may very well want to conduct hearings and investigations into, among others, the physical attack on Jim Acosta at the November 7 White House press conference. It might be time for Sarah Huckabee Sanders to think about lawyering up.
After all, as the Republicans have liked to gloat over the last two years, elections do indeed have consequences.
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