Dallas to Debacle

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The effect on the 2016 elections by the recent shootings by and against the police underlies the struggle to absorb the horror of what has happened.  If the slayings reverberate in favor of Donald Trump, then this week’s events only presage greater terror.  Trump’s lack of understanding of most topics of any magnitude and his shoot-from-the-belt approach —  seriously, no pun intended — would make matters worse.  He has more than demonstrated his capacity to unleash upon the land the full furies of the hate he already has used to fuel his campaign.

Sadly, the assassination of five law enforcement officers in Dallas by a black man transcends tragedy.  The murders personify the country’s new fragility that changing demographics, a difficult economy and vitriol and corruption in Congress are abetting.

Like the new age of climate change that jeopardizes our very existence, we have entered a new era in which race and other critical social stresses animate the possibility of disunion.  It can’t happen here, we are told.  Yet the greatest and most dangerous moment in this already perilous passage into the immediate future emanates from the social media and 24/7 news platforms that govern the public space today.

Ironically, the very tools shedding light into the continuous and discriminate shootings of black men also are the weapons that will be turned against the development of leaders who could lead us through these times.  Those who would lead will have their heads decapitated on social media before they can finish their statements on how to move us forward.  Social media and 24/7 news will serve to make us increasingly leaderless.

If the new-media normal hamstrings President Obama and Republican leaders at so important a moment as this week represents, then it surely bodes ill for the country.  How can anyone float a vision for the future in this unnerving environment?

In this poisoned mess, the country needs a Franklin D. Roosevelt.  Instead, we hear the voices of angry whites and, justifiably, of angrier black men and women who are tired, tired, tired of the rampant murders inflicted on their community by police officers who almost always face no consequences for their actions.  The question is if reaction to action will breed reaction and put us on the path to an abyss.

We as a nation need to rise above ourselves.  But who can call us to our better angels?  White people finally are beginning to understand that black and Hispanic/Latino complaints about law enforcement are neither bogus nor confection, and so white acceptance of reality must be encouraged.  So, too, minority communities must rein in their rancor.  But who can summon us together as a people to make sure that tomorrow or the next days or year or decade are not the beginning of the civic and internal strife that throughout history impelled empires and nations to self-immolate over time?

It can’t happen here denies the possibility of collapse of democratic rule or the arrival of a new holocaust or increasing disconnection that fosters extended paralysis.  It is a view fast becoming antiquated.  The new environment we have entered makes anything possible – even the election of a man like Trump who makes no bones of admiring dictators and dehumanizing his fellow citizens.

Without the anvils weighing her down, Hillary Clinton could have been the one who could speak directly and persuasively to moderate white voters and spark an electoral landslide to set us towards a better future.  O, what judgment history might render on Clinton and her decision to install a personal computer server in her home!  And this is easy stuff for the social media and the 24/7 menace.  What they have done to her we shortly could rue.  Not perfect, Clinton, compared to Trump, is clearly the way to not increase the chances that the new age ahead will be the history of old.

It really does not have to happen here.

Jesús (Jesse) Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.

The Veep Matters

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I love Frank Bruni.  The columnist for The New York Times writes as to invoke envy.  He is smart.  He is creative.  I look forward to reading him.  But his column, published Saturday, July 3, while not wrong, was incomplete.  With the best of his writing, he dismisses the importance of whom Hillary Clinton selects to be her running mate.  Utterly inconsequential, he declares.

If you live in the context of Bruni’s world, you also would be wholly on point, correct and logical.  Except that other things are going on in the country that he and others under-appreciate.  I do not have to go too far to prove my point that perhaps major opinion-shapers like Bruni do not know it all.  The surprise Donald Trump sprung on the entire eastern establishment of writers and television experts of CNN, MSNBC, etc. and on seasoned political operatives more than suggests that perhaps the veep-pick-is-unimportant  view, too, is not altogether correct.

I remember, after Al Gore’s defeat in 2000, having lunch with the editorial page editor of a major eastern newspaper.  I proposed that I join his staff to write about Hispanic/Latino affairs.  A new demography, I said, led by Hispanic/Latino population growth, had taken hold of the country and would change it forever.  He listened politely but in the end said, and I quote:  I do not think that there would be enough to keep someone busy writing about Hispanics full-time.  By then, of course, a significant part of the Hispanic/Latino vote already had helped George W. Bush win.  Like so many pundits who dismiss the importance of the Hispanic/Latino vote, who do they think got Bush so close in Florida to win by 500 votes?

My meeting with this highly-placed and influential journalist was not as eye-opening as depressing.  He confirmed my view that some of the most provincial people live in our supposedly most cosmopolitan cities.  And they are not alone.

I met at the coffee shop of the Capitol Hilton not long after Gore’s defeat with a former member of Clinton’s Cabinet.  I told him that a national anti-Hispanic/Latino reaction would seize the country in one of the next few presidential cycles.  I explicitly said it would be in the vein of California’s Proposition 187 that in 1994 was aimed at immigrants but which everybody understood was specifically anti-Hispanic/Latino, and more specifically anti-Mexican and anti-Mexican-American.   I did not get very far with him.

And so, as much as I love Frank Bruni, he and others who should know better do not understand the whole picture. Part of what he does not understand – beyond the reading of the polls that show Hillary Clinton racking up significant support among Hispanic/Latino voters – is that there is also a new undercurrent of thought within the Hispanic/Latino community that is changing it.

A telling story about the roiled times we live in and how the Hispanic/Latino community is changing occurred in Miami a couple of years ago at a meeting of about 100 or so influential Hispanic/Latino leaders from throughout the country.

The meeting was called to discuss the future of the Hispanic/Latino population, and so the attendees were mostly of Mexican origin, but with a heavy Cuban host contingent.  The attendees were mostly businessmen and businesswomen, both Democratic and Republicans.  No elected officeholders nor the usual political consultants were present.  The conference was meant to think and reflect, not preen nor forage for business.  The environment lent itself to mature, calm exchanges.

The most salient moment for me was when a highly visible Cuban American stood and said to the mostly non-Cuban group:  “Now we understand what you are talking about.”  His reference was to legislation that Alabama and Georgia were then considering that was clearly aimed at Hispanic/Latinos.  A significant number of Cuban Americans live in Atlanta and, of course, the Cuban community’s representatives gather in the legislature in Tallahassee just down the road, not far from nearby Tampa.  They heard the confederate gunfire. The sheltered experience of Cuban Americans finally caught up with the rest of the Hispanic/Latino history in the country.

When these most Republican of Hispanic/Latino voters began to understand the threat Trump poses, they set the stage for something much more important and historic:  The unification of Hispanic/Latino groups and their increased participation in the civic life of the country.  And from that is coming a new kind of energy that can work on behalf of a ticket already destined to make history, especially if Hispanic/Latinos could see on the ballot a name like Becerra, Castro, Peña, Pérez or Salazar.

Polls surely are picking up how Hispanic/Latinos feel about Trump, but that is only part of the story.  I wrote in another blog that this moment is of existential importance for Hispanic/Latinos.

Whom Hillary selects is not utterly inconsequential to us.

Jesús (Jesse) Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.

Inflection Point for Hillary

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Given the announcement by Attorney General Loretta Lynch that she will accept the recommendation of her civil service employees investigating Hillary Clinton’s e-mails and server, the campaign is at an inflection point.  Nothing good is going to come of this, whatever Department of Justice lawyers recommend, mostly because we do not know when their recommendations are going to come.

Timing is everything in politics, and for us not to know when the report will come and what it will say destabilizes the general election environment that favored Clinton.

For me, the inflection point is not constrained solely to the legal issues of the case. Rather, it is within the internal strategic thinking of the campaign itself.  The campaign must prepare for the worst and must consider — now — how to win an election in the most adverse of circumstances against Donald Trump, who is a true danger to the republic.

I have said it again, and I will say it again.  If the Clinton campaign does not make the Hispanic/Latino vote central to its strategy beyond what we have seen so far, we truly are in danger of losing an election that by any other measure should be a historic landslide.

This is the time for Hispanic/Latinos closest to Hillary to speak up.  If they do not, then they are ill-serving Hillary, the Hispanic/Latino community but, most important, the country.  I know some of those people, and I fear that they love Hillary too closely to not step up and say what needs to be said and done.

These individuals face a daunting task:  A fully effective plan to maximize the Hispanic/Latino vote across the board is a very expensive proposition but it is in my mind a necessary insurance policy.  And nothing is as hard to do within a campaign than convince others to spend money on anything – especially if it is out of the ordinary.  And trying to persuade a campaign to spend serious money takes herculean task commitment.  But it is imperative that she carry Florida, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada and think about taking Arizona.

Were Trump to succeed in winning any of the Midwestern states that he covets, then Florida and the Mountain West can save the Democratic ticket, and this, of course, brings to the fore the need to put a Hispanic/Latino on the ticket.

The cost of exploding the Hispanic/Latino vote is by far more expensive than maintaining the high level of African-American support President Obama received in 2008 and 2012.  More expensive by far than expanding the impact of the women’s vote, of the gay and lesbian electorate, of the Asian American vote.

It is absolutely true that the campaign must spend what it must to try to defend the states that Trump — now given fresh ammunition — is targeting by trying to wrest away non-Hispanic/Latino white voters from Clinton.  Were he to succeed, only one group can fill the void: Hispanic/Latino voters.

The immediate consequence of the announcement this morning is that it takes the steam out of the momentum that Hillary was generating.  Her campaign was building — impressively and quickly — an electoral wave that seemed on the verge of swamping Donald Trump weeks ahead of the nominating conventions, much less the general election.

The slow-down now will cause the polls to change, and when polls change, everything begins to change.  Trump will get a second-wind; more Republicans will come home to their party’s nominee;  GOP  donors reluctant to give to Trump now will; states that vote Republican usually but were thought of as potential Democratic pick-ups now revert to the red column; and Clinton supporters will begin to fret and worry and as they fret and worry they cause some to begin to re-think their support.

And that is all before the report is released and any recommendations known.

The new moment serves to paralyze new thinking in a new environment in which the old playbooks no longer suffice.  To me, supporting the usual voter registration organizations is very important but not as important as devising other ways to broaden voter registration efforts, ones that engage average Hispanic/Latinos beyond political activists and paid volunteers in the process of getting Hispanic/Latino voters to the polls in November.

If Clinton’s numbers hold up in the Hispanic/Latino community as the election nears and becomes a tight affair, then still other states might be viable, especially if serious Republican voters cannot bring themselves to vote for Trump to be commander-in-chief.

Current polling suggests that Clinton could breach the 80-percent mark of support among Hispanic/Latinos in November – a historic accomplishment.  Even slightly elevated levels of Hispanic/Latino voter registration and participation can push her electoral-vote margin out of reach.

To not invest heavily in the Hispanic/Latino now is folly –  foolish and perhaps fatal.

Jesús (Jesse) Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.

The Polls of Summer

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Polls of the electorate are now coming at us in swarms.  Like summer’s mosquitoes, they are flying in from every direction, and it is hard to get a fix on any one of them.  That is why averaging them makes so much sense.  Every average so far shows Hillary Clinton with a steady lead.  Anything can happen, though, as the uproar over former President Bill Clinton stumbling into Attorney General Loretta Lynch at an airport in Phoenix on Monday demonstrates.

The damage of any Clinton meeting with the individual whose employees are conducting the investigation into the former secretary of state’s handling of her e-mails is the kind of thing that can turn an election won into paradise lost.  While inordinate, it was not an ordinary sting.

I am often asked whether an event yet unforeseen but easily imagined — a terrorist attack on our country in the days ahead of the elections — can suddenly turn the election.  It is, of course, wholly possible.  More likely it would make the 2016 election closer than it should be.  That is, of course, why Clinton’s political advisors should plan for a tight contest.  If they do not do everything today — including maximizing Hispanic/Latino turnout — they could find themselves ruing the day they got carried away by the polls.

In my heart, I cannot see how Donald Trump should do better than any of the candidates who got wiped out at the polls since 1960.  Would Trump make a better President than Barry Goldwater in 1964; George McGovern in 1972; Jimmy Carter in 1980; Walter Mondale in 1984; Michael Dukakis in 1988?  Of course not.  And these far more worthy candidates than Trump got an average of just 48 electoral votes in their landslide defeats.

Given the furies of our times and the latest polling data, however, it seems that Donald J. Trump could make this election closer than the best of the five landslide losers since 1960: Dukakis won 111 electoral votes.

And it is Dukakis who should be on our mind.  His election turned on a dime when in the first question in a debate against George Bush he could not answer in a convincing manner his positon on the death penalty had his wife being raped and murdered.  Game. Set. Match.

It could be that in one small moment Hillary Clinton against the backdrop of a terrorist attack in October, she, too, could make a mistake that suddenly makes Trump — against  all odds — viable.

Aside from candidates shooting themselves in the foot, bad campaign management indeed can cost a candidate his or her election.  John Kerry and Al Gore should not have lost theirs.  Had Gore’s campaign better understood the true significance of the Hispanic/Latino vote in Florida in 2000, hanging chads and a Supreme Court bullied by Antonin Scalia would not have wrecked his election. The contrast, of course, to those two near-misses is Barack Obama’s brilliant 2008 and 2012 efforts, and about 2008 Hillary Clinton knows every detail, of course.

History would have been totally different after 2000 but along came someone like George W. Bush whose Presidency proved his incompetence and plunged the world into what it is today: A general mess that Republicans are trying to pin on Hillary Clinton.   Campaigns — their strategy, their rhythm, their messaging, their image, their mistakes — do matter.

Between now and the election, we will all suffer near-death from the sting of a thousand polls.

But more important is that we do not let Trump get the last bite.

 

Jesús (Jesse) Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.

 

Hillary Clinton’s Unusual Opportunity: Trumpexit

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Any discussion of the data surrounding the Hispanic/Latino vote and its potential always produces the same negative narrative not to be repeated here.  This blog-post is not about numbers.  Rather, it is about motivating Hispanic/Latinos to vote in higher numbers than usual.

The credible, numerical reality that should drive the formulation of a Hispanic/Latino strategy within Hillary Clinton’s campaign is that Hispanic/Latino voters exist in sufficient registered and unregistered numbers to swing the election to Hillary Clinton and bring along additional states that a splintered Republican Party could help push into the Democratic column.

Conventional thinking suggests that Donald Trump’s candidacy will be enough to cause many more Hispanic/Latinos to register and vote in November than four years ago.  Indeed, I cannot remember a Republican candidate so unpopular among Hispanic/Latinos – to the point of being loathed.

That said, what are the messages that can elevate Hispanic/Latino registration and turn-out to historic numbers?

First of all, the Clinton campaign needs to jettison the standard, boiler-plate language about education, health care and jobs that Hispanic/Latinos have heard repeatedly through the years.  Hispanic/Latinos would not have voted Democratic for decades if they did not already understand that voting Republican is not in their best interest.  These issues are of clear and evident importance to Hispanic/Latinos from Seattle to San Antonio to Miami.  I say let the national convention in Philadelphia, the presidential debates and the campaign’s general advertising take care of re-enforcing the Democratic message to Hispanic/Latinos.

To me, the Clinton campaign should find – and deliver forcefully – a core message the like of which Hispanic/Latinos have never heard specifically from a presidential candidate.  Instead of staid, standard commercials and forgetful speeches, the Clinton campaign should make an icon out of the image of Judge Gonzalo Curiel, the jurist whose Mexican heritage Trump disparaged in racist language not heard on the campaign trail since George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, ran for the Presidency in 1968.  And the campaign should use the icon as bludgeon.

I believe the Curiel episode is an existential moment.  For many Hispanic/Latino voters, a Trump Presidency could determine whether some of their relatives and neighbors can continue to live in this country.  But for many more – for many Hispanic/Latinos whose families in what would become the United States predate the American Revolution – the Curiel episode is about how Hispanic/Latinos will exist in the future.

The fact of the matter is that Hispanic/Latinos only recently are beginning to be thought of as part of the mainstream – and that by only some segments of the national population.  It has come as a surprise to many Hispanics/Latinos, especially those who have voted Republican in the past, that many millions of non-Hispanic/Latinos do not consider those of us, who like Judge Curiel share Mexican or Puerto Rican or Central American or South American roots, as ‘Americans’.

It is not lost on Hispanic/Latinos that Republicans in the Senate have blocked President Obama’s selection of another judge,  Merrick Garland, to the Supreme Court in the hopes that a President Trump would appoint a justice to the court that would continue its recent decisions that carry an anti-Hispanic/Latino taint as the nation’s new demography exerts itself.  The court’s decision on affirmative decision on affirmative action notwithstanding, its decision that blocked President Obama’s plan to shield millions of immigrants from deportation is importantly instructive to Hispanic/Latino voters.

Hispanic/Latinos do not want to exist in a world in which a form of second-class citizenship characterizes their lives.  Messaging, then, on the part of the Clinton campaign should be aimed at Hispanic/Latino parents and grandparents and young Hispanic/Latinos contemplating raising a family to consider how their children and grandchildren exist and live their lives in the future.

The opportunity for the Clinton campaign extends to the traditional Hispanic/Latino Republican vote that usually comprises about 35 percent of the Hispanic/Latino vote.  In some states, these voters can push Clinton’s vote totals higher to bring unexpected victory in unexpected places and in unexpected down-ballot races.

Hispanic/Latino business owners would understand that Trump’s fiscal theories could wreck the economic recovery now underway and incur billions of additional debt that more and more will land on Hispanic/Latino taxpayers in the future.  Hispanic/Latino veterans are aware that Trump is all-talk about his support of veterans.  Veterans would react to a message that a disastrous Trump Presidency would jeopardize their benefits and the social security and medical benefits that the country affords their parents.   Veterans instinctively would come to realize how Trump’s domestic and foreign policies would set up the country for another round of George W. Bush’s failures.  Fallujah, anyone?

The goal to reduce the total Republican Hispanic/Latino vote in some places to near-naught and explode it in others is not fantasy.  There was a time, remember, that a Republican candidate for President in some Hispanic/Latino precincts would receive zero votes.

The Democratic ticket has an heretofore unknown opportunity to drive a series of sophisticated messages into the Hispanic/Latino community to maximize its vote.

And to sweep Trump and his view of the world from history in which the existence of more than Hispanic/Latinos eventually would be in peril.

Jesús (Jesse) Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.

Aux armes, citoyens! ¡Viva la independencia nacional!

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After almost four years, I am reclaiming my space amongst the blogheads.  In 2012, I said to myself I was finished writing on a regular basis.  But then Donald Trump came along and everything changed.  He is the demagogue Jefferson most feared would emerge at some point to threaten the republic.  The nation has dealt with other demagogic threats. The others never got this close to the White House.

It is a high moment, indeed, and it not outlandish to invoke La Marseillaise and Father Hidalgo’s cry at Dolores to start México’s revolt against Spain:  To arms, citizens!  Long live our national independence!

Recent polls indicate the Democratic presumptive nominee will win.  That historic possibility should excite us but not distract us from the possibility that the election will be close.  And though her standing among Hispanics/Latinos is high, I believe she and her strategists must handle the Hispanic/Latino vote well.  By this I mean, among other things, that she, you and I should work to amplify its impact, for it could deliver victory.  I, for one, am not yet sold on the idea that she should plan to win without a Hispanic/Latino on the ticket.

Every day, Hillary Clinton is driving a new nail into Trump’s political coffin.  Yet every day the phone rings, and I have to listen to the contagious hysteria about Trump that has infected seasoned political operatives.  In my gut I suspect they are wrong to fret as much as they do and that Clinton is in good shape.  Yet there is reason to be cautious and prudent.

I shall write in English.  Translation into Spanish will occur when and if time permits.  I have been working on another project now consuming my life, and it is amazing how aging slows down our best efforts and intentions and even bumps up against our responsibilities.

But, at whatever age, our responsibility to maintain and extend the American Experiment is perennial.

Before we are Hispanics or Latinos or Americans, we must be Jeffersonians.

 

Jesús (Jesse) Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.

At Year’s End, the Enduring HispanicLatino Story

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So the year ends and so does this blog on a regular three-times-per-week basis.  In the year that begins tomorrow, change and events will continue to rock our world.  Sadly, television too soon will break into our lives with news of another mass shooting.  The possibility that Israel will launch its already-planned attack on Iran’s nuclear installations becomes probability as each day passes.  By the end of the spring, the fragile economy might have been harassed back into recession by obdurate House Republicans whose political near-sightedness obscures the electoral razor atop their noses.  Still, despite the immediacy of these events, the most transcendental if not outright existential story for the country remains how HispanicLatinos develop socially, economically and politically.  And so from time to time a thought or two on the subject will appear in this same space.

The beginnings of the HispanicLatino storyline appear old already.  The drumbeat of demographic change has become monotony.  Yet the story is just beginning.  The objective of this blog, which began in the late summer of 2011, intended to advance foundational thought and reflection beyond the routine talking point of a Hispanic/Latino population remaking the country.  HispanicLatinos, after all, will prove more important than the next mass shooting or the combined competitive evolution in the near future of the Brazilian, Chinese, Indian and Mexican economies.  HispanicLatinos must succeed for America to survive.

The HispanicLatino phenomenon, though, is not easily captured.  It seems an apparition in slow-motion, though it is not.  Millions of HispanicLatinos are making millions of individual decisions in their lives daily – from diet to debt – that in the long run will be more important than whether the European Union survives.  The composite meaning of those decisions escapes the attention it deserves for many reasons, not the least of which is the slow, drawn-out understanding by HispanicLatinos of their importance to the country.  The failure of the majority of HispanicLatinos to not understand the historic proportion of their existence relative to the rest of the population threatens the country.  It is, in fact, a matter of national security.

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Amid the Chaos, the Fire of Promise

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The end of the year holds promising signs for the country and HispanicLatinos – unless the Republican-held House of Representatives drives the global financial markets into turmoil and drags the economy back into recession and/or various foreign crises detonate.  If not for the fiscal cliff, the nation should be able to look forward to start moving again and leaving the blight of the disastrous Bush years behind – finally.  With wars ending (and hopefully none soon aborning) and the economy slowly eating away at the remaining distressed properties in an improving housing market, the country can begin to assess what it needs to do to fix itself for the years ahead.  Finding the will to rebuild its infrastructure, expand its domestic energy supply and strengthen its educational systems, the nation can deliver on its promise.

Though it takes courage to tackle the issues at hand, a strong economy can salvage much.  With the Bush Recession slowly lifting, the oft-misused phrase “the fundamentals of the economy are strong” comes closer to being true.  No country’s economy is better positioned to explode – and burn with a flourish.  Some of the country’s travails – a plague of obesity, students saddled with hundreds of billions of dollars in debt, a corrupted Washington, a broken immigration system, an increasingly farcical Supreme Court – are redeemable.  For that precise reason, HispanicLatinos need to step up their efforts to help resolve the challenges that vex the country.

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Unreal Times Are Real for the GOP

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As the Republican party continues its autopsy of its epic failure to unseat an incumbent Democratic President laboring under the worst economy since the Great Depression, it should keep in mind the figures 124 million and 62 million.  If at least 124 million Americans vote in a presidential election, they are almost certain to put Democrats in the White House.  In truth, President Obama could have given up as many as four million of his 65.6 million votes last month and still won.  In the 48 months between the election of 2012 and 2016, another 2.4 million HispanicLatinos will turn 18 and most will be eligible to vote.  These new voters represent an increasingly politically-engaged group that last month voted more than 70 percent Democratic.  That is how real and deadly the future seems for Republicans.

In many ways the future is unmanageable for the GOP.  It is one thing to gaze at the spectacle of House Speaker John Boehner dealing with the Tea party in the Republican Caucus in the House of Representatives.  That is bad enough.  But even if Republicans at the national level can somehow moderate their views on issues of importance to HispanicLatinos, women, gays and lesbians and independent voters in general, they will have to deal with radical Republicans at the state level – which for all practical purposes in a digital, 24/7 world can produce unrelenting chaos.  Any story coming out from any state capitol or county courthouse can become a national sensation in a microsecond.  Think Joe Arpaio in Arizona or Todd Akin in Missouri.  That is what makes the 62-million figure important.

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Forward? Perhaps. Perhaps Not.

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It seems inconceivable.  Republican leaders in Washington and elsewhere do not get how dangerous the fire they are playing with is.  On almost every front – ranging from the disaster of the fiscal cliff to the submarining of President Obama’s governmental nominations to the prosecution of Benghazi to control of dangerous weaponry that kill kids to contraception to defending millionaires’ tax bills – Republicans are the ancien régime before its collapse in France.

It is one thing to not understand that the country no longer agrees with their positions on everything from taxes to gay rights to woman’s choice to climate change.  It is quite another thing to not realize that the country is ready to move on.  For Republicans, the latter is the more dangerous.  Since the country knows what it believes and thinks, when it decides to move on, it will and start leaving the past behind – and it has.

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