July 26, 2024
Dear Interested Readers,
Thank You, President Biden
When I think back on the events that seem to lead to unexpected places, there is always an abrupt transition from a moment when everything seemed normal to a new unfamiliar reality. In an instant, you know that things will never be the same again. In the twinkling of an eye, history has made a quick unexpected turn. The first such event for me was the assassination of President Kennedy.
I had a late quick lunch at the Russell House Student Union at the University of South Carolina on November 22, 1963, before heading across Geene Street and walking a few yards to the right toward Davis Hall where I had a 2 o’clock advanced placement English class. As I entered the building, I heard some murmurings about Dallas and the president. I entered the classroom and took my seat. There was a mirthful chatter from the desks behind me, and I heard a “good old boy” type joking that the president had “gotten what he deserved.” There were a few nervous laughs in response to this pronouncement. Almost immediately afterward, the professor, Dr. Jack Russell, the best professor I ever had, walked into the room with a grim look on his face and tears in his eyes. He said something like, “Go away. I can’t have class. The president has been shot.” I think he glared at the fella who had been making the joke, and then turned and left us all sitting there.
There is a series of books written by Thomas Cahill entitled “The Hinges of History” which I like very much. My favorite volume in the series is How The Irish Saved Civilization. I have always been fascinated by the title of the series. It’s not the way Cahill meant to use the phrase, but “Hinges of History” seems an apt description of these moments when everything changes. What would have happened if President Lincoln had not been shot by John Wilkes Booth and could have managed Reconstruction after the Civil War? What would the discussion of race and poverty in America be like today if Martin Luther King, Jr had not been assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968? How about what would have happened if Hillary Clinton had not uttered the phrase “a basket of deplorables” referring to Trump’s supporters whom she characterized as having racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, and Islamaphobic views in a speech in early September 2016? Would we have the Supreme Court we have now if those words had been deleted from her speech by a sensitive staffer?
It feels like there have been a few hinge moments in history over the last month. First, there was President Biden’s unfortunate performance at the debate on June 27. I had the feeling of disaster before the president had finished his opening statement. He was speaking too fast and without inflection in his weak voice. When I was in practice, I believed that most medical emergencies were the acute recognition of a chronic problem. Was this the first evidence of his physical and perhaps cognitive decline or had most of us not allowed ourselves to accept that his enormous skills had been on a decline for some time?
The president’s performance in the debate and in the follow-up events that were scheduled in attempts to prove that the debate was a fluke only further confirmed as truth what some concerned observers had been claiming for more than a year. What we saw and heard between June 27 and last Sunday afternoon was a slow-motion train wreck that was painful to observe. It was very hard for President Biden and many who were close to him to act on the evidence that he was unlikely to be able to successfully labor under the immense burdens of the presidency for four more years. Accepting what is true when that acceptance requires giving up a dream and an identity is harder than pressing on for a victory that is unlikely to come no matter how hard one tries.
In retrospect, the past month, if not the past year, has been a Kubler-Ross grief process for the president. With his withdrawal from the campaign and his address to the nation on Wednesday night President Biden may now have completed the process. To remind you of the process, there are usually four steps to climb before reaching “acceptance.” Many of us have gone through those same steps with President Biden. They are:
- Denial: A common defense mechanism to protect oneself from an upsetting reality
- Anger: Often expressed when someone accepts the reality of the situation
- Bargaining: For example, “If only I had not gone to Europe and had rested more before the debate.”
- Depression: A natural part of the grieving process
- Acceptance: Recognizing that a new reality is permanent and learning to live with it.
I had a difficult time watching President Biden’s speech on Wednesday night. He looked and sounded frail. He did not have the vigor he demonstrated during his recent State of the Union speech. I found by reading the transcript of the speech that I had missed several important points. If you want to read the speech, click here.
Late in the speech, President Biden reminded us that we have always been a “work in progress” He said:
America is an idea — an idea stronger than any army, bigger than any ocean, more powerful than any dictator or tyrant. It’s the most powerful idea in the history of the world.
That idea is that we hold these truths to be self-evident. We’re all created equal, endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights: life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness.
We’ve never fully lived up to it — to this sacred idea, but we’ve never walked away from it either. And I do not believe the American people will walk away from it now.
In just a few months, the American people will choose the course of America’s future.
I made my choice. I have made my views known.
I have heard similar sentiments before. Our founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution can be viewed as describing our aspirations and adopting a methodology for moving toward the ideals the documents describe, a nation where we are all created equal, endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights: life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. President Biden is realistically telling us that we have not yet achieved the highest objectives of our quest, but our history is the documentation of our struggles toward the objective of an equitable society that offers opportunity to everyone.
No person in my lifetime has been more committed to the effort to move us toward our lofty goals than Joe Biden. Until this moment he has always drawn a lesson from his failures and rejoined the quest with vigor. Because of the unavoidable realities of age, his turn as our leader is ending, but ours isn’t. A single vote doesn’t accomplish much, but the votes of a majority committed to moving closer to our ideals can keep us on the journey toward that “more perfect Union.”
I want to thank President Biden for his more than fifty years of striving to move America closer to its founding aspirations and for working through the grief of leaving in a way that will create enthusiasm for the continued journey behind the leadership of a new leader.
If this moment is a hinge point in history, have the disasters at home and abroad that will occur during a second Trump presidency been avoided by President Biden’s withdrawal from the campaign and expressing support for Kamala Harris? I hope so for two reasons. First, I think that a President Harris could be an exceptional president and complete much of the work that President Biden had hoped to accomplish. Second, it will underline the greatness of President Biden’s acceptance of the risks associated with his continuing in his campaign for reelection. No matter what lies ahead, he has “exceeded expectations” during a difficult post-COVID recovery in a world troubled by grim wars in Ukraine and Gaza. He deserves great thanks for what he has accomplished as well as the courage to step aside and let someone else pursue his dream.
A Trump victory now that so many seem to believe that he was saved from the assassin’s bullet by an act of God will be damaging in so many ways for both the future of Democracy and for the chance that we will move toward more effective healthcare that is available to everyone. If you listen to Trump or J.D. Vance you must believe that a Trump victory followed by the implementation of the plans laid out in Project 2025 would amount to an end to the rule of law, abandonment of the principles of the Constitution that require a “separation of powers,” and the potential emergence of an authoritarian regime. At the least, it would mark an about-face on efforts to improve the delivery of healthcare and doom the efforts for improvement of the social determinants of health and the efforts to address global warming.
Shifting The Focus to Kamala Harris
With the help of liberal pundits, I have been doing a deep dive into the evolution of Kamala Harris. I suggest it is a worthwhile exercise for all of us. I learned a lot reading some of the reports from the 2020 election. I would recommend an “origin” article about her parents entitled “How Kamala Harris’s Immigrant Parents Found a Home, and Each Other, in a Black Study Group” which was written by Ellen Barry and published four years ago in The New York Times. In the article, you will learn how her father, Donald Harris, now an emeritus professor of economics at Stanford, came to UC Berkley in the early sixties from Jaimaca and met Shyamala Gopalan a Ph.D. candidate in nutrition and endocrinology from a very accomplished and influential family in India. Click on the link to Donald Harris above to see a recent picture of him and note how much the Vice President looks like him. Vice President Harris’ mother passed away in 2009 after a distinguished career as an academic and breast cancer researcher whose research explored progesterone receptor biology and its applications to breast cancer.
It is interesting for me to contrast Vice President Harris’ family history to that of Barack Obama. Both of their fathers were foreign students who came to an American university to study economics. Both fathers were distant influences because of early marital separations. Both had very strong mothers. The Vice President’s father was the first tenured Black professor in economics at Stanford. In the Wikipedia article about Shyamala Gopalan, we read:
She served as a peer reviewer for the National Institutes of Health and as a site visit team member for the Federal Advisory Committee. She also served on the President’s Special Commission on Breast Cancer. She mentored dozens of students in her lab.
In the article about the parents of Vice President Harris, there is an interesting section that discusses the family’s relationship with an African American woman who was almost a surrogate mother to Vice President Harris and her younger sister. In the article, Ms. Barry writes:
…Regina Shelton, who ran a day care center in West Berkeley …became a pillar of the young family’s life, eventually renting them an apartment upstairs from the day care center
Ms. Gopalan Harris often worked late, recalled Carole Porter, 56, a childhood friend of Senator Harris, and had high expectations for her daughters.
“Shyamala didn’t play,” she said. “Being an immigrant, five feet tall, and having an accent — when things like that happen to you, and you face stuff, that toughens you up.”
But there was always a snack and a hug at Mrs. Shelton’s. If it got too late, the sleepy children would go to bed at her house, or Mrs. Shelton would send her daughters to tuck them in at home. One of Senator Harris’s favorite stories from childhood is of preparing a batch of lemon squares with salt instead of sugar; Mrs. Shelton, her face puckered, said they were delicious.
On Sunday mornings, Mrs. Shelton would take the girls to the 23rd Avenue Church of God, a Black Baptist church. This, Ms. Porter said, was what Shyamala wanted for them.
“She raised them to be Black women,” Ms. Porter said…
What comes through in the article is that both of the Vice President’s parents were high achievers with progressive ideas. It was their activism and commitment to progressive ideas that brought them together. Although Shyamala Gopalan Harris was from a “high caste” Indian family of some means, she strongly identified with the causes and concerns of African Americans. She raised her daughters to be a part of that community and successfully transferred her passion for equality and justice to her daughters.
There has been much written since last Sunday about the Vice President’s performance in office and her failed bid for the Democratic nomination for president in 2020. The review about Harris since she became the presumptive nominee that has resonated best with me was written earlier this week by Ezra Klein and can be read in The New York Times or heard as a podcast. On July 5, long before President Biden bowed out of the election and threw his support to Vice President Harris making her the presumptive nominee, Klein had also done another in-depth review of Harris’ strengths and weaknesses in a podcast in an interview with Elaina Plott Calabro entitled “Is Kamala Harris Underrated?”
Ms. Calabro is a staff writer at The Atlantic who has traveled with Harris, and in October 2023, she published a review of Harris in The Atlantic entitled “The Kamala Harris Problem.” At the end of his most recent podcast, Klein concludes that Harris has changed and matured her political skills. Circumstances are very different now, and she has the prosecutorial background and a more refined vision of the future that may be the right defense against Trump and be the foundation of a successful presidency. If you have concerns about whether Harris is ready for the challenges of the presidency I urge you to listen to Klein’s latest podcast, and if you have time, listen to the one from July 5. Both are also available as transcripts at the same links.
I have wondered to what extent Vice President Harris’ ideas about healthcare and healthcare policy may differ from those of President Biden. In 2020, during the brief time that she was a candidate for the Democratic nomination before she bowed out before the Iowa Caucuses, she favored a slow progression toward Medicare For All that was positioned between Pete Buttigieg’s “Medicare For Those Who Want It” and the “Medicare For All” positions of Senators Sanders and Warren. After President Biden selected her as his running mate, she was obligated to support his healthcare positions which were the most centrist of all the 2020 Democratic candidates. Now, as she is mounting her campaign for president there is speculation that her healthcare positions will be more progressive than Biden’s. Nathanial Weixel published an article in The Hill late on Monday entitled “Where Kamala Harris stands on healthcare issues.” Like many of the articles this week about the Vice President, the article is mostly speculative. Weixel draws in part on her healthcare positions in 2019 and the opinions of healthcare experts who know her. He quotes Larry Levitt of the Kaiser Family Foundation:
…experts agree she is a staunch supporter of expanding ObamaCare and making health care more affordable for millions of Americans — something that is likely to be one of the biggest health care fights in Congress in 2025.
“Harris’ previous support for Medicare for All with a private insurance option is suggestive of her values, but I doubt it will be a big emphasis for her in the current campaign,” Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at KFF, a health research nonprofit, said in an email.
“I think Harris will lean much more into the Biden-Harris record on health care than policies she proposed in the 2019 primary. The political and policy context have changed quite a bit since 2019,” Levitt said.
As the campaign progresses we may not hear much about healthcare since it is not a topic that is at the top of either candidate’s list of concerns, but her past positions and past comments suggest to me that she is committed to universal access to affordable healthcare. I am hoping that at some point in the future, if a politically opportune time develops, she may once again make equitable universal healthcare a very high priority. For many of the programs and initiatives that she favors, the Senate’s filibuster is a significant barrier. In the past (2019) she favored ending the filibuster to pass “green legislation.” Whatever might happen, she must be elected first, and for the moment there is a reason for hope.
What has happened since President Biden’s two announcements last Sunday has been remarkable in the moment. I hope that the joy and sense of relief is still with us on November 6.
A Late Summer Joy
When I lived in Massachusetts we were fortunate that a previous owner of our home had placed a Rose of Sharon bush at the corner of our front yard near the driveway parking area. Over the 33 years we lived there, I came to love that bush. When we first moved into the home in early 1982 the bush was shaded by a lovely old sugar maple which had great limbs for swings for my boys. The huge tree was also one end of a “zip line” that I ran across the yard for my boys to enjoy. Unfortunately, when we paved our drive the maple tree died. We tried replacing the old maple with a new maple of significant size, but it also died. The upside to our maple tree losses was that the Rose of Sharon got much more sunshine and became huge. To my surprise, the bush began to produce two types of flowers. The usual lavender-colored blooms were joined by white blooms.
There is a Biblical references to the Rose of Sharon It may not be true that what we commonly call the Rose of Sharon today is the same plant that is mentioned in the scriptures. Today’s Rose of Sharon is not even a rose. It is a hibiscus. What I like about this plant/shrub is that it blooms for a long time. In our environment, the Rose of Sharon does not bloom until mid to late July, but it continues to be covered with blooms well into September.
When we moved to New Hampshire, I missed my Rose of Sharon. We had one planted at one side of our house in a sunny area along with a magnolia which blooms early and not for long, but it leaves are thick and together with the Rose of Sharon privacy is provided for the hot tub and the outdoor shower which I use after my daily swim. These days I enjoy the Rose of Sharon every day. I thought that I would share a picture from my Rose of Sharon with you as a diversion from all that is going on in our troubled world.
My Rose of Sharon will get plenty of sunshine this weekend. I hope that the sun will be shining wherever you are this weekend. Perhaps, you have your own Rose of Sharon to add to your enjoyment.
Be well,
Gene
