Wisconsin

You are in your office. Your boss appears. 'Can I have five minutes?' You can hardly refuse. His face is cold and grim, like he has just been diagnosed with COVID-19. He wants to talk to you about your comments. What comments? The comments you made about Jane in accounting. You misgendered her. You called her 'he'. Look, you say, you're sorry. Jane was James when you met her. It wasn’t malicious, it was just force of habit. Maybe so, but 'intent isn't magic'. Well, you'll apologize when you next see her. Maybe so, but we can't let something like this happen again. You're going to have to take some sensitivity training — unpaid, of course, and on your own time. You want to quit. You can't.

One of the largest obstacles standing in the way of Donald Trump’s re-election is his weakness in every big city in America. Some cities produce such large vote advantages for the Democrats that a Republican simply can’t make up those votes across the rest of the state. That disadvantage is a write off in New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago because Trump is guaranteed to lose the deep blue states those cities are in. It will matter, however, in nine battleground states that will decide who wins the 2020 election. Specifically, in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the vote totals in the big cities and counties could make it nearly impossible to win those states in the suburban and rural areas.

Gov. Tony Evers’s gambit to deflect responsibility for the debacle of Wisconsin’s April 7 election by peremptorily canceling in-person voting at the last minute seems to have worked. At least judging by the reaction online, where most of the blame for the scenes of long lines at polling places was being laid at the feet of Republicans in the state legislature and the state and US Supreme Courts, but not Evers. Some distempered commentators even accused the Wisconsin GOP of endangering voters’ lives 'to protect its minority rule'. https://twitter.com/donmoyn/status/1247581715511627776 Ridiculous indeed. And Republicans in the Wisconsin legislature aren’t innocent. But the mess is mostly of Gov. Evers’s own making.

One interpretation of the midterm election results in the Rust Belt, where Democrats made substantial gains (though not across the board), is that Trump’s unpopularity dragged down Republicans. Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania propelled Trump to victory in 2016, and his inability to sustain a base of support there cost Republican candidates for state and federal office – or so the interpretation goes. There’s probably a measure of truth to this. Trump’s approval in Michigan, for instance, lags at 44 percent, according to CNN exit polls; the state re-elected a Democratic senator without much fanfare, as well as a new governor, and several well-established GOP House incumbents were ousted.

What makes a good liar? It’s a harder question to answer than you might think, partly because it’s a harder and more complex thing to accomplish than you might think. Let me begin by acknowledging that I do not have a satisfactory answer to the question. Nevertheless, as an aficionado of the sport, I admire from afar expert practitioners. And I was reminded just a few days ago that we have in our midst a grand master of mendacity. In his speech in Milwaukee on Friday, Barack Obama demonstrated once again his effortless, masterly deployment of deceit. Again, I do not say that we groundlings have been vouchsafed all the inner workings of the mechanism. But one thing is clear from Obama’s performance: brazenness is key.