Can empathy trump cruelty?

2020 continues to surprise: “Coast Guard ferries postal inspectors to arrest Steve Bannon aboard exiled Chinese billionaire yacht” was not a headline I expected this week. Remember Rule 1: It will get crazier. Meanwhile, CalFire explained this morning that they don’t have the resources to fight the aggressive wildfires sweeping parts of California… because the state’s primary firefighter crews are convicts, and COVID-19 has hit the prison system so hard that there aren’t enough healthy prisoners to go fight the wildfires. Did I mention we’re living in a failed state?

Can Biden’s empathy defeat Trump’s cruelty? More on that below, but first my convention musings:

• Does the Vice Presidential pick matter? I have insisted to you for the past two weeks that it does not. But my old boss Joe Trippi made a compelling case on his podcast this week: Trump can’t figure out how to attack the unobjectionable Joe Biden. But he is pathologically unable to resist attacking a Black woman. Trump’s attacks on Kamala Harris, besides further alienating the suburban white women Trump desperately needs, distracts Trump and makes him look weak: why is he attacking the Vice President nominee and not Biden?
• Obama’s ‘brutal’ attack: The press was all a-twitter that Obama’s speech was “the sharpest criticism a former president has *ever made* of a sitting president”… except that’s not true. Remember when Hoover called FDR a fascist? The truth is the post-WWII era is an anomaly in American history for its polite bi-partisanship. Don’t lionize…