The Wonder (Continued)

I decided to repost this so it can headline the weekend. After their triumph at the college talent show, the Wonders get a semi-professional recording of their song, "That Thing You Do" in the Tom Hanks film of that title (see the first clip here.)  A local talent manager promises to get them airplay, and in this scene, they hear it for the first time on the radio.  This is one of the great joyous scenes in movies, and a particular fantasy for those who have dreamed this dream.  I've had the experience of hearing my record on the radio for the first time but I was alone.  Here it's group joy, as unrestrained as it can get in 1960s Main Street Erie, PA.  Liv Tyler's screams make it all work.  I could watch this clip forever.

Putting Money Where the Crisis Is

The most significant news of the week may not have come out of Washington or Iowa, but in a letter.

The letter was from the head of BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager of nearly $7 billion, to corporate chief executives.  In it he acknowledged the import of what's been happening in Australia, the Arctic and many other places on the planet, and issued a prediction.

"The evidence on climate risk is compelling investors to reassess core assumptions about modern finance," he wrote, explaining that climate change is the top concern that investors raise with BlackRock. "In the near future — and sooner than most anticipate — there will be a significant reallocation of capital."

For one thing, that means an immediate migration of capital away from coal and other fossil fuels to green energy.  Accordingly, BlackRock will "remove companies that generate more than 25% of their revenues from coal production" from the quarter of its portfolios that are actively managed. Further:

BlackRock says it will require additional reporting from the companies it invests in, including disclosure of climate-related risks and plans for operating under the goals of the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius.

"[W]e will be increasingly disposed to vote against management and board directors when companies are not making sufficient progress on sustainability-related disclosures and the business practices and plans underlying them."

As reported by Marketwatch, BlackRock's position is that unlike more familiar but relatively short-lived financial crises, the climate crisis is a truly long-term one.

“And with the impact of sustainability on investment returns increasing, we believe that sustainable investing is the strongest foundation for client portfolios going forward.”

The role of money in addressing the climate crisis has been highlighted in the fiction by Kim Stanley Robinson, beginning with the trilogy later combined for the novel Green Earth.  In those novels, global re-insurance companies were crucial in financing large-scale efforts to address the climate crisis.

Steps like this dramatic and meaningful one are necessary though far from sufficient, and depend on better judgment than most financiers seem to have.  And the scale of the problem may require even more (Robinson for example has apparently come to believe that the climate crisis will not be addressed unless capitalism itself is fundamentally changed.)  But in the onslaught of bad news on climate (like confirmation that the past decade was the hottest on record), this is  noteworthy positive news.

The Eventual Candidate

I've seen a number of stories recently about the high anxiety among Democratic voters desperate for a new President.  The times demand a President with the intellect, eloquence, political and governing skills of an FDR or an Obama.  Among those running for the Democratic nomination however, no such candidate is obvious. The 2020 election might be won by a few votes in the right places, as it was 2016. But Democrats crave a home run hitter, an electoral Joe Burrow, a superstar.  None is apparent.

That's the tenor of the stories, particularly about Iowa caucus voters.  There's something wrong with all of the leading candidates.  What if it turns out to be the fatal flaw?

It is frustrating, which is why so many are undecided.  Now that Iowans vote in just a few weeks, the anxiety increases.  The polls are tight, the number of undecideds is high.  It seems likely that many will not decide until the last minute, so for one thing, it matters what happens in the country and in the world in these next several weeks.  But even with that, the outcome may hinge on a thousand last second decisions based on...anything at all.

So it seems like a wide-open contest, at least among the seven candidates on the Iowa debate stage.  And then there are the candidates playing a different game, especially billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who is trying to make his mark in later primaries.

But is that the true state of the race?  Perhaps.  But it may also be all but over.

That's possible especially now because of reaction to Trump's Iran misadventure, which  not only made frighteningly real the dangers of an unhinged chief executive, but redirects attention to the general chaos he engenders.  Suddenly some knowledge and experience in foreign affairs has come to the fore, so it is no big surprise that some recent Iowa polls show Vice-President Joe Biden slightly ahead.

Those particular jitters may subside before the voting but the idea of an experienced, steady hand is outweighing doubts about age and Biden's possible political liabilities.  If Biden wins Iowa, and finishes first or second in New Hampshire, he's very close to the nomination.  He's the only candidate who is doing well over time in all or nearly all the primary states to come.

It's hard to evaluate the latest Bernie Sanders boom, since the Trump people are so much in favor of it, and so skillful in manipulating news and social media (which unfortunately are beginning to merge.) But Bernie does start with a fervent base. He is as ever the wild card.

 Iowa voters are fully capable of producing surprises which would boost other candidates, but Joe Biden has the best chance for an actually definitive win.

Because in the Big Picture, Biden has one current advantage that in the end is insurmountable if he keeps it--he is the only candidate popular with black voters.  He started this process that way, and none of the other candidates have changed the basic situation.

Until another candidate can secure black votes, that candidate will not be nominated.  Party officials understand that a Democratic candidate cannot win without the black vote.  It is not sufficient, but it is necessary.  Big turnouts of black voters are essential in all the key states.

Perhaps a calculation could be made that young voters are more likely to fail to vote than black voters, if they aren't sufficiently enthused by the candidate.  But young white voters showing up to vote are typically unpredictable in any case.  And any candidate who makes the climate crisis a major issue will likely motivate young voters. One would expect that Biden understands this.

The Democrat who wins the nomination will have Barack Obama campaigning beside him.  But that image may powerfully motivate Obama voters who stayed home or switched sides in 2016, if the candidate Obama is standing beside is once again Joe Biden.

I am not taking sides here.  But this is how I see the nominating process at this moment.

Probably the most substantive political article I've read this campaign season was a recent New York Times piece by political data analysts Sean McElwee and Brian F. Schaffner, who studied two groups: Obama voters who switched to Trump in 2016, and Obama voters who didn't vote in 2016.

In 2018 Democratic congressional candidates won back about a third of the millions of Obama voters who stayed home in 2016.  Half are black, 70% are women.  They appeared to be motivated by candidates who campaigned on core Democratic issues, and they were also self-motivated to vote against Trump.

About a fifth of the smaller number of voters who switched to Trump, voted for Democratic congressional candidates in 2018.  This was not primarily because they came to dislike Trump, but because they were drawn by particular issues.  The issues they favored contain some surprises: they want gun control, Medicare for All and for efforts to address the climate crisis, like the Green New Deal.  They are less progressive on immigration, race and gender issues. What they didn't want to hear about were the so-called identity issues.

These surveys strongly suggest that a strong issues-oriented campaign that focuses on the climate crisis, healthcare and gun control as well as economic issues can bring more Democrats to the polls to vote for a Democratic candidate. (The authors also note that the Wesleyan Media Project found that the 2016 Clinton campaign "aired fewer issue-based ads than any other presidential candidate since they started collecting data in 2000." )

This analysis is limited, and certainly doesn't go into the microclimates of the key electoral college states.  But it does suggest the possibility that an effective issues-oriented campaign is more important than a hero candidate.  This doesn't seem intuitively likely, but perhaps it is the key to at least a narrow victory.  Whatever solace that may bring at this point.

One perhaps off-center impression I got from the Iowa debate is this: of the candidates on stage, none is likely to ever run for President again, except if one of them is elected in 2020.  But several of the candidates who have dropped out likely will seriously consider running again.  Many hoped for a generational change election this year.  That doesn't look like it will happen in 2020.  But it will happen next time.  Assuming there is going to be a next time.

Poetry Monday: Clouds

Flying Lesson: Clouds

Focus on the shapes: cirrus, a curl,
stratus, a layer, cumulus, a heap.
Humilis, a small cloud,
cumulus humilis, a fine day to fly.
Incus, the anvil, stay grounded.
Nimbus, rain, be careful,
don’t take off near nimbostratus,
a shapeless layer
of rain, hail, ice, or snow.
Ice weighs on the blades
of your propeller, weighs
on the entering edge
of your wings. Read a cloud,
decode it, a dense, chilly mass
can shift, flood with light.
Watch for clouds closing under you:
the sky opens in a breath,
shuts in a heartbeat.

Dolores Hayden

Poem and photograph (The-clouds-in-a-race-across-the-sky-over-Eagle-Idaho-US.-©-Suzan-Bunting)  from the website of the Cloud Appreciation Society, which features many photos of clouds sent in by members.