You Can’t Beat A Mormon And A Jew

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There was this old racist joke about the Dodgers baseball team back in the 60s. The Dodgers had broken the color line with the signing of Jackie Robinson, but the league was still segregated to a degree and the Dodgers had more Black players than any other team. At that time, their Jewish pitcher Sandy Koufax was on an unprecedented run of dominance that arguably hasn’t been matched to this day, and the Dodgers were the best team in baseball. The joke was, “You can’t beat eight niggers and a Jew.” It was joke, but like a lot of humor it was also true. 

During the run-up to the 2012 election, I had the idea that America should have co-presidents. This would not require a Constitutional change, but rather two viable presidential candidates who would team up BEFORE the primaries and say, “One of us will be listed for President on your ballot, but we’re running together as equals and we’re going to govern as a team and you’ll get the best of both of us.”

What happened between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders is a perfect example of one of the many reasons why this would be an improvement. Bernie and Hillary beat each other up in the primary and then America lost to Trump. If Bernie and Hillary had said from the start, “We’re running together. We disagree about some things, but you’ll have two different perspectives in the White House and we’ll work together to give you the best solutions.”, they’d have probably pulled 70% against Trump. But instead they weakened each other to the point that it wasn’t even politically practical for them to run together because their supporters were so at odds. 

Co-presidents would have a lot of advantages. First, it would give us the ability to consider a wider range of candidates by making viable people who might have a weakness in one important area that makes them unelectable even though they are very strong in other areas. A perfect example would be someone who is a poor public speaker, a trait that makes you unelectable no matter how smart and capable you are. But with co-presidents, the poor speaker could team up with  somebody like Barack Obama, or Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan who excels at it, and be like Moses and Aaron in the Bible. 

With two presidents, we get two sets of skills. The idea that the president is in charge of the government as an individual is a myth anyway.  So it wouldn’t result in power struggles. It would actually make the presidency an easier job, because there is a fair argument to make that the job has become too difficult for anybody. 

One problem it would solve is that the president has to waste a lot of time talking to the media. I’m sure that every president has felt at times while working on a crisis that it would be better if they didn’t have to leave the situation room to answer a bunch of stupid questions from the press. Not just that, the president has to be visible at a lot of public events that take him or her away from real work. With two presidents, this burden would be spread out, and if one of them needs to stay locked in a room working on something night and day for a month, they can do it. 

It would also reduce the amount of cutthroat behavior in politics, because now, twice as many people will have a chance to hold the highest office, so you won’t have as many political figures worried about their presidential window and not focusing on their role as senator or governor. 

America is a very young nation, still in its infancy if you consider how long countries like England, France and China have been politically organized. For such a young country, we are remarkably set in our ways and resistant to making significant structural changes. Pete Buttigieg is absolutely right about that. 

It is ridiculous that the view of so many Americans is that we need to try to stick to the letter of an 18th century document written by an all-male, all-White (and all-wealthy) group, most of whom owned slaves. I don’t demonize the founding fathers. I think most of them were courageous, enlightened men. But they’d never seen electric light, let alone an airplane or an iPhone. They would have said you were crazy if you told them a man could walk on the moon or that you could split the atom and unleash the same energy that powers the sun. The population of the WORLD was only about 650 million at that time. Now America alone has more than half that.

It is a different world and we have to stop being afraid to have a different government. We shouldn’t discard the Constitution. We should build on what is good in it, as the Constitution built on what was good in the Magna Carta. We have to be courageous and enlightened for our time and start building a 21st century government. I believe a good first step would be to discard our national John Wayne mentality, the lone cowboy hero at the top and, starting with the presidency, set a new collaborative tone for the nation. 

I’ve always liked Mitt Romney. I remember taking notice when he was governor of Massachusetts that it was surprising that a Republican could be relatively successful and popular in that state, and that put him on my radar as someone who might be a future presidential contender. I respected him then because I saw that he was willing to be the governor the people of the state wanted, even if his own political beliefs differed. 

In 2012, I was prepared to vote for Mitt Romney. While I respect Barack Obama as a human being, I share the view of many progressive liberals that he did not do a good job as president, not because he was too liberal, but because he was too conservative.  There are good counterarguments to this, many of which may be true, but that is how I felt at the time. 

A young White guy who owned a restaurant and bar that I frequented convinced me to give Obama more time and I did. I think I had actually already filled in the Romney bubble on my mail-in ballot and changed it.  I later regretted that vote. 

I did not necessarily like the way Romney ran his campaign, but I could see the obvious political calculation that the Republican machine was forcing him to the right. Romney is not the stumbling, bumbling man he sounded like at times in the 2012 campaign. I think he sounded that way because he was trying to be the candidate the Republican Party wanted. Romney could have won the election in the first debate by saying, “I like your healthcare plan, Mr. President. Of course I like it. It was mine. Some of my Republican colleagues fought against it, but I disagree with them. I think what you did there was good. But I do disagree with you about these things...”. Ten million discouraged 2008 Obama voters would have switched sides right there. But Romney was really stuck. He couldn’t run as himself. He was running as a cardboard cutout and I suspect he knew, he couldn’t win that way. 

I want to point out as a professional reporter would do, while Mitt Romney and I both attended Stanford, separated by many years, I have never met him and do not know him. I once had a brief casual conversation at the beach with a fellow Stanford alum who told me he is a Romney family friend, but that’s it. I am in no way a Mitt Romney surrogate. But I like him. 

One of the reasons that I like Mitt Romney is that he is Mormon. Many people mock the LDS faith for some of its unique tenets, but I have found in my life that nearly all of the LDS members that I have come in contact with have been people of high integrity and good character. I feel there is a certain commonality between Mormons and Jews in that both faiths emphasize ethical decision-making and the importance of treating people the right way. Most Christian churches are all about morals, not ethics. While the difference is something you should have learned in about the seventh grade, most people still don’t know. Morals are rules you follow. Ethics are thoughtful deliberations about what is right or wrong to do, and WHY. 

I remember as a child seeing the commercials that the LDS church used to run heavily on TV in the 80s. I still see one every now and then, but not so much anymore. These were not proselytizing or soliciting. They weren’t about theology. They were brief ethical lessons about how to treat other people, and they were good messages. The commercials run by The Foundation for a Better Life are trying to APPEAR to be the same, but they are not. Mitt Romney’s vote to convict Trump is indicative of the kind of integrity that in my experience LDS people tend to have. 

I think it was actually a bad idea to impeach Trump, this close to the election, knowing that it was an unwinnable battle. The Democratic party has less strategic sense than a drunk baby. They are so bad, I truly wonder sometimes if they are the political equivalent of the Washington Generals—paid to lose by the Republican Globetrotters. They could have had a videotape of Trump getting a blowjob from Stormy Daniels while strategizing with Vladimir Putin on speakerphone and there STILL wouldn’t have been more than five or six Republican senators willing to convict him. 

I actually don’t even know if Trump’s guilty on the letter of the law because I don’t know Constitutional law like that. Trump’s guilty of doing a lot of shit that’s fucked up, but the federal law doesn’t mention fuckery, I don’t think. But what matters is that Mitt Romney cast the vote that he believed to be right.  It wasn’t a symbolic vote. Symbolic votes are ones that don’t cost you anything. If you don’t think he’s going to suffer consequences for that as he continues in his role as a Republican senator, you don’t know anything about politics. Say what you will about the tenets of LDS theology, that church is teaching its followers good values, and I support and endorse Mormon people. 

Speaking of groups with good values that I support and endorse, Mike Bloomberg is running for president, and I’ve long thought that he would make a good one. For anybody that doesn’t already know, he’s Jewish.  I don’t know as much about Bloomberg as I do about Romney, but I know he’s smart, capable and thoughtful. I have noticed as a consumer that the output of his media companies is a noticeable cut above most in this era of declining journalistic standards. 

I don’t think Bloomberg can win the Democratic nomination for a variety of reasons. One of them is that he would have to face the obvious mudsling, “We already had one billionaire businessman from New York as president and look how that worked out!”.  But Mike Bloomberg and Donald Trump are not the same! About all they do have in common is that they are both businessmen from New York. Notice I didn’t even say “billionaire”, because I know Mike Bloomberg’s a billionaire, but Donald Trump?  There are credible people who will tell you he’s not. It is like the reverse of if notorious Boston gangster Whitey Bulger was running for president and someone said, “Hey, we already had one Irish Catholic guy from Massachusetts and he was great. How about another one?”. No. Trump and Bloomberg have about as much in common as JFK and Whitey Bulger. 

Bloomberg has been criticized for New York City’s controversial “stop and frisk” policy, as Bill Clinton has been criticized for the crime bill. But I actually defend both of them on those accounts. 

Listen, in the late 80s and early 90s urban crime had become a very real, very serious problem. I know. I was right there in the middle of it and it was bad even in out-of-the-way Wichita, Kansas. People were getting shot all over the place, our little skid row was crowded with dope friends, new gang members were popping up like Count Dracula and The Vampire Lestat were in town turning them. It was far worse in LA, New York, Houston, Chicago. Everybody had ideas and policy proposals, but nobody KNEW what to do. 

Stop and frisk was a horrible policy with fascistic overtones, and I was surprised that the people of New York City allowed it to be enacted, let alone to go on for years. But it was a crisis era, and it wasn’t easy to know what to do. 

People criticize the Clinton crime bill, but most if its critics don’t even understand what’s in it. The crime bill really cannot be blamed for any major part of our mass incarceration problem.  Most of America’s absurdly high incarceration population is in state prisons and local jails based on prosecutions by locally elected district attorneys. Prison populations did not explode because of the crime bill. They exploded because panicked citizens continued to elect more and more “tough on crime” right wing ideologues to state and local offices, and liberal state and local leaders started joining in the tough on crime rhetoric because they saw it won elections.  These were things that were going to happen whether George H. W. Bush, Ross Perot or Bill Clinton was president. What, you would have preferred the crime bill that Bob Dole would have put through a Republican Congress after beating Clinton in 1996 with a Nixonian “silent majority” campaign, as he would have if Clinton had appeared to be ignoring the urban crime problem? Didn’t think so.  

Now, it is true, as documented and established as fact by Gary Webb’s excellent reporting that preceded his suspicious death, the government did essentially start the crack epidemic and by association the urban gang wars as a part of the Iran-Contra operation. But that was under Reagan’s watch, and by the time Bloomberg and Clinton were in office, what was done was done and the problems were out of control. But by the time Clinton left office in 2001, the urban gang wars were essentially over, in large part because of Clinton’s effective economic policies that helped lift so many people into the middle class, policies he could not have enacted without trading the Republicans the crime bill, something they were going to get anyway. That’s effective governing. 

So the stop and frisk thing is a nothing burger, as much as I hated the policy. But Bloomberg’s biggest hurdle to winning the nomination is that he is not a party-line man. I just saw online that there was a rumor that he was going to pick Hillary Clinton as a running mate and that would be disastrous if true. The benefit of someone like Bloomberg is that he is an independent thinker. Whether you like Hillary or not, there is no denying that she is a party-line woman through and through, more than Bill even, and having her on the ticket would pressure Bloomberg to toe the party line as well. It was probably the DNC that floated that rumor. 

Trump could win the GOP nomination as a party outsider because he fired up a certain segment of the GOP base. But Bloomberg has no base to fire up amongst Democratic primary voters. He’s a sober centrist and centrists don’t vote in primaries. 

I actually don’t like the terms centrist and moderate. Those apply to a certain group of people that always try to play the middle and refuse to take real stands. You need to take a position on things. What Bloomberg and Romney really are is independent thinkers. I tell people all the time, if you agree with 100% of the ideology of any organization, political, religious or philosophical, a priori, that means you’re not thinking for yourself. 

But another major hurdle for Mike Bloomberg would be America’s deeply rooted casual antisemitism. Don’t let his fair skin or his huge bank account fool you: Mike Bloomberg is the ultimate minority in America, and antisemitism would surely rear its head in a presidential contest he was involved in. So let’s address that right now. 

I saw a headline in my Forward feed that said, “There are only a few antisemites; why are there so many attacks?”. And my response was, “Huh, what?!? If you guys only think there are a few antisemites, we need to talk!”. I didn’t read the full article. Maybe they meant card-carrying members of openly antisemitic organizations who are radical enough to act violently. But in terms of casually holding antisemitic beliefs and casually making antisemitic remarks, I think MOST Americans do. It’s not a deliberate, ideological antisemitism. Its a kind of passive antisemitism that they’ve picked up because it is just so deeply woven into Western culture. Some people think Jews are paranoid. I hear what people say. I don’t think Jewish people are paranoid enough!

I would think Jews would know how bad it is because of what I call the Amanda Seyfried effect—the large number of Jews who are taken for White based on their physical appearance. I’m guessing people say antisemitic shit to these Jews all the time without realizing who they are talking to, so the Jewish community should know how commonplace it is just as I do. 

Before the 2016 election, when controversy was raging about Steve Bannon’s and Steven Miller’s White nationalist leanings, I was listening to a documentary and they played a tape of some White nationalists talking and one of them said, “I know Trump’s not really on our side, because if he was, he would never give his daughter to a Jew. When I see that beautiful girl with that...”. You can fill in the rest. I have all sorts of problems with Jared Kushner, but nobody should have things like that said about them. And nice misogyny in there too, like who Ivanka Trump marries is Donald’s decision. This was a radical fringe person saying this, but it tells you the state of things if anybody with access to a microphone is talking that way. 

Based on things people say to me in conversation, even some intelligent, highly educated people, I think that possibly a majority of Americans believe there is such a thing as a global Jewish conspiracy that controls banking and media, even though all the major banks and media companies are large multi-national corporations with overwhelmingly Gentile stockholders and majority Gentile boards of directors. There was just another article in the Forward about how a lot of people, liberals especially but some conservatives too, believe that the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) controls America, as if America’s support for Israel has ever been anything more than self-interest. 

What is true is that Jewish people have a lot of INFLUENCE, by virtue of being a community with a lot of highly educated, smart, successful members. But they don’t have a lot of POWER. Well over 90%, (probably over 99%) of the power decisions that are made on this planet are made by Gentiles. How many Jewish heads of state are there? I’m guessing just one. How many Jews are there in the UN General Assembly? I’m guessing just one. Maybe two. America is the most powerful nation on earth and there are a lot of influential Jews here, but China is the second most powerful. How many influential Jews are there in China you think? Mike Bloomberg, Mark Zuckerberg and a few others are on it, but the global billionaires list is still overwhelmingly Gentile. But yet a shocking number of Americans believe these myths about Jewish power and would be deterred from supporting an ideal Jewish presidential candidate for those reasons. 

A lot of people will wonder...”If you want a Jewish president, what about Bernie Sanders?”. I can’t support Bernie for president. Let me explain why. 

Ideologically, I am probably closer to Bernie Sanders than Mike Bloomberg. When I talk about how much I like Jewish people, Bernie Sanders is probably closer to the bullseye of the type of Jew I’m talking about than Mike Bloomberg (though Bloomberg isn’t far from it). But I do not think Bernie Sanders would make a good president for the simple reasons that I don’t think he’s practical and I think his ego’s too big. 

When I say Bernie Sanders is not practical, I don’t mean in the way that Democrats and Republicans alike say it. I absolutely agree with Bernie that America needs to move toward a Western European style social democracy. We can AFFORD free college and free healthcare for all. That’s not something I think, or suspect, or that I’m trying to figure out. I know it. 

But Bernie doesn’t have the first idea about how to achieve these goals POLITICALLY. You would have to build alliances with groups and people he alienated from the start. He would have to talk less about justice to the masses, and talk more to corporate leaders about the economic benefits of a healthier workforce and having a larger pool of educated workers available. These benefits are real and can be shown with economic data but Bernie Sanders does not appear to understand macroeconomics or even to think about it. 

I’ve been very familiar with Bernie Sanders since before the masses heard of him, because he used to make regular appearances on (Stanford alum) Rachel Maddow’s show on MSNBC, which I used to watch regularly. Even back then,  I felt that he was impractical and...dare I say it about a man of his age...politically naive. 

I also think Bernie’s got an ego problem. After being a fringe political figure for so long, I think he’s digging being a rock star a little too much, and that’s dangerous even in a well-meaning person. Though a lot of people don’t see it, I sense that same ego thing in Elizabeth Warren. 

The push over the top in my inability to support Bernie is that, as has been discussed, the Jewish community is not exactly on fire for him, and in this case, I think that is a huge red flag. I don’t think it means Bernie is a bad person or has dark secrets. As many political enemies as he has, we’d know that. But what I do think it means is that the community that he’s closest to knows he doesn’t have what it takes. 

I think someone like Bernie can make the greatest contribution as a senator, as a somewhat contrarian voice in a larger body. If moving America to the left is his goal, he could probably do even more in a role OUTSIDE of government. But I think a Sanders presidency would closely resemble the Jimmy Carter presidency. Not that good even.

But I do like the idea of a Jewish president who is qualified. What I say these days is, I know Jews aren’t running the world, because if they were, things would be running a hell of a lot better!  I have an idea that just might get America running a hell of a lot better...

I’m staying in a hotel right now with the Brigham Young University basketball team. I passed a few of them in the hallway, and as I would expect of kids affiliated with a Mormon institution, they were polite, well-mannered young men who carried themselves without the cocky swagger that athletes good enough to be on TV so often have. 

Here I am, a Stanford alum staying in a hotel with a basketball team from a Mormon school, and writing on my blog about the awesomeness of Jewish people (the girls especially!), and I started thinking to myself, Mitt Romney and Mike Bloomberg are two reasonable, smart men that I could support for President. I don’t believe either of them could win their party’s nomination, and Mitt Romney, while he could probably get elected in Utah for life, is dead in the water with the Republican Party. One is in the east, one is in the west. One is White, one is a minority. Both have executive experience. Both have proven they are not slaves to political parties. Neither has any legitimate questions about their character that I am aware of. They are both successful businessmen, not just in creating a “brand”, but in helping to build businesses that millions of Americans patronize and that many thousands work for...

What if Mitt Romney and Mike Bloomberg ran as independents, as a co-president team?  It wouldn’t matter who was on the top of the ticket. For this to work, they’d have to both be able to set ego aside and be willing to take either spot. They could even say, for the first two years, Bloomberg will take the senior position, and they’ll switch. The law might require one to be president and one to be vice president for the entire four years, but they can govern how they want. 

I don’t think either party could muster a ticket to defeat them, and I don’t think they’d just win with a plurality as Clinton did against Bush Sr. and Perot. I think they’d take an outright majority. 

It is perhaps a majority of Americans that feel our two-party system is broken, and certainly a majority that feel that Washington is broken. These two men who have been truly independent of party dogma could start something new by doing something that has never been done before in American history—sharing the presidency. It’s a radical idea. But America is in the midst of a political crisis and I think it is the right kind of radical idea—a smart one. 

The electoral math for them is beautiful. They should walk to victory in New York, New Jersey, Florida and Utah. They should sweep the midwestern swing states.  The Democrat would still get California, but without New York or Florida, they are toast. The Republican would still get Texas and most of the South. But without Florida or central swing states like Ohio and Pennsylvania that Bloomberg/Romney would almost certainly take, they can’t win. At worst nobody would get 270, but in that case, with a Republican and a Democrat on their ticket, they would be the only practical choice for a Congressional vote. But I think they’d pull about 300.  There is just no ticket I could see beating them in the states that are normally close. With it being impossible for any Democratic or Republican ticket to carry Texas AND California...that’s a landslide. 

If the two of them somehow hear about this idea from a blog nobody reads, and they actually like it, they would need to move fast to start getting organized and get themselves on the ballot as independents in all 50 states. With the political capital Romney earned with his vote to convict Trump and Trump humiliating his own attorney general and crassly gloating about his victory, the time to strike is now!

Print up the bumper stickers: 

Mike and Mitt 2020—You Can’t Beat A Mormon And A Jew!

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