DRINK, PAY: “Join us for Politics, Sex & Cocktails,” urges Planned Parenthood (PP), beating the drum for a Thursday, September 7, bash at the Coral Casino. (I thought sex usually came after cocktails, not before, and certainly instead of politics, but what do I know?)
Price for all this ranges from $250 (what does that get you?) to $3,000 for “champion”-style fun and games. Hmmm. I remember when PP raised money selling potholders.
DREAM ON: While many cling to dreams that President Trump will decide to resign from the mad, mad, crazy political world he’s created, the latest from D.C. is that he’s actually campaigning for reelection, barnstorming the red belt that put him there.
In addition to self-aggrandizing sorties seeking homage among global dictators, he’s also taken to jetting around the U.S., seeking worshipful hosannas from his “base.” Well aware that the very mention of his name will predictably bring out those who loathe him, as well as screaming rednecks and neo-Nazis, he headed for Arizona and got the confrontation he wanted.
Having been to the red state many times — family living there — I’m always amazed that Arizona and California, two side-by-side states that share so much history, can be so different. Arizona is run by racists, and California is run by — well, you fill in the blanks.
California is really two states politically: the coastal strip and the rest. Once upon a time, it was as Republican as it could get. Its heroes were the likes of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. But then the music started changing for the GOP somewhere around 1960.
California was booming, subdivisions were rising, and there were jobs. To many in postwar America, California was the Promised Land — of milk and honey, beach life in the sun, new schools far removed from the dark urban neighborhoods of the East. Hopeful new politics.
I was part of this new immigration, and I can tell you that we were not eagerly welcomed. By and large this new wave was different from the old racist, color-conscious California. By the 1970s, it was starting to take over the local governments and, by golly, the governor’s mansion. Who was this Jerry Brown, and why was he so different from his father, good old Pat Brown? This, of course, was Jerry’s first term, so impatient for change.
I still have a photo of him, rushing through the News-Press newsroom, looking excited, impatient, and a bit wild-eyed. California has never been the same since these young families descended, snapping up tract houses, sending kids to new schools. They soon tired of the old politics.
Arizona, meanwhile, stuck to its traditional cowboy mentality, and it elected sheriffs to keep the Mexicans in line and on the harvest fields and Arizona in the hands of true Republicans.
Only now do the Democrats hope to make it a blue state, which, according to the pros, is liable to happen one of these years.
Meanwhile, Trump is presiding over the last gasp of the old politics of America, a fluke, the result of America not caring enough about its have-not people. You neglect the people who work hard for little reward and you get Trump, and eventually someone worse.
Trump’s people are surely not blind to the angry reaction of voters outraged by the current spectacle of his elitist White House cronies jet-setting around the world on the public’s dime.
How this circus and his current bombastic, brainless blitz will enable him to stay in office, much less be reelected, is one for the history books. Political smarties fill columns speculating how long Trump can withstand the clamor of his baying critics before just deciding to head back to his New York and Florida lairs, using perhaps poor health as an excuse to bail.
Really? I see him so puffed up with ego that it would take all his pet Pentagon generals, an Arizona sheriff, and the whole Texas Ranger corps to drag him out of the White House if he decided to stay.
One thing is for sure: We’ve never seen anyone like Trump. And something tells me we haven’t seen anything yet.