Idiot Wind: The Trump/Harris Debate

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, Presidential Debate, ABC News, screenshot.

Santa Anas in Philadelphia

The Santa Ana winds — “Devil Winds” — that blow west every Fall across the Los Angeles basin, make everybody jumpy. They are stronger and more insistent than the moist breezes from the Pacific and more than a little menacing because they bring the threat of fire. I haven’t lived in LA for more than 20 years but can still hear their rising whoosh and smell the rapid desiccation of foxtail and Eucalyptus. There’s a wind-spread fire burning right now in the hills east of Los Angeles.

But Santa Anas are also idiot winds. They dry-out your mouth, eyes and nose, making it hard to speak, see straight or even breath. It’s just possible Dylan had them in mind in 1974 when he recorded “Idiot Wind” for the album Blood on the Tracks:

Blowing like a circle around my skull
From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol….

Blowing through the buttons of our coats
Blowing through the letters that we wrote….
It’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves

Written after the Watergate hearings, and recorded just weeks after Nixon’s resignation, the song is apposite again, 50 years later. Was it an idiot wind that was blowing last night in Philadelphia?

Another great debate – not!

When Harris told Trump in front of an audience of about 75 million that in any negotiation “Putin would eat you for lunch,” she was indulging in a bit of displacement. It was she, not the Russian dictator who was dining on the former president. That was the second alimentary reference of the evening that went badly for Trump. The first – Trump’s vehement assertion that Haitian refugees in Springfield, Ohio were catching and eating local cats and dogs – was quickly refuted by one of the ABC News moderators, David Muir. He told Trump that his colleagues had called the Springfield city manager and that there were no credible reports of pets being snatched and consumed. “Talk about extreme” Harris added, unnecessarily.

And so it went. Harris mocked and scolded, Trump sputtered and fulminated. On abortion, Harris dispatched Trump’s repeated claim that “everybody wanted it returned to the states” by saying that a woman who is hemorrhaging from a miscarriage but denied a therapeutic abortion “doesn’t want that” and neither does a young girl who has been raped. Harris could have mentioned the more than one million women who obtained legal abortions in the U.S. in 2023, but those statistics remain politically taboo, at least in a presidential debate.

When Muir asked Trump if he had any regrets about his response to the January 6 riot, he predictably parried – at once claiming no responsibility for the mayhem, and that no crimes had been committed, except the dastardly shooting of Ashli Babbitt by Capital police. (Babbit’s killing was arguably needless, though she was the avant-garde of a mob attempting to storm a suite of Congressional offices.) And of course, Trump refused to concede that he had lost the 2020 election, saying he had won with a record 76 million votes. Harris’s annihilating reply was that Trump had been fired by 81 million voters.

Only on foreign policy did Trump score any conceivable points, but when a madman speaks truth, it sounds like lies. He was right that pre-invasion negotiations with Putin were fumbled, that “a deal is begging to be made,” and that the U.S. was “playing with World War Three.” But rather than engage any substantive geo-political discussion, (admittedly difficult in the allotted two minutes), Harris preferred to pontificate. She trotted out the domino theory, that a Putin victory in Ukraine would lead him to try to conquer Poland and then the whole of Europe and challenged Trump to say which side he was on. By refusing to take the bait, Trump won on substance but lost on style. He failed to follow-up and ask Harris what a Ukrainian victory would look like (a complete withdrawal of Russian forces from Ukrainian territory, including the Crimea?) and whether such a triumph was worth the likely cost – possibly including a wider European war. If not, shouldn’t the parties begin serious negotiations now? But Trump’s image of a negotiated settlement goes no further than the fantasy of himself standing before a bank of cameras and microphones, one arm draped around the shoulders of little Vladimir and the other around little Volodymyr.

Americans are focused on phony issues

ABC News and the two candidates aren’t the only ones responsible for the poor quality of the discussion at last night’s debate. The American electorate bears responsibility too. They are consistently concerned with what impacts them least, and least worried about what affects them most. Last week’s New York Times/Sienna College Poll, for example, ranks “the economy, including jobs and the stock market” (22%) and “immigration” (12%) as subjects of greatest concern, and “inequality” (3%) and climate change (1%) among the least.

Despite claims to the contrary, the overall state of the economy has improved since the end of the Trump administration. Overall growth (GDP), wages (adjusted for inflation), employment levels, and stock market valuations are up. Passage in 2021 of the Biden sponsored Child Tax Credit (part of the American Rescue Plan) cut childhood poverty in half, though refusal by Congressional Republicans the following year to renew the law, returned five million children to poverty. Well paid industrial jobs are increasing, especially in Republican states, and unions, led by the UAW, are increasing in power.

Instead of the rising cost of bacon (a food as poisonous to people as it is cruel to pigs), Americans should focus on the ongoing increase in inequality. The U.S. ranks 27^th (out of 82) in global economic mobility – well behind Slovenia, Ireland and the U.K., not to mention the Scandinavian countries. The child poverty rate remains stuck at about 16%. The overall poverty rate is 11% (defined as an individual salary below about $15,000), and the average personal savings rate is just 3% — that means almost nobody can save enough money either to buy a house or comfortably retire. To be born rich or poor in the U.S. is essentially a life sentence. Wage inequality has fallen slightly during the Biden administration, especially at the bottom of the wage distribution, but not nearly enough to indicate a significant trend. To paraphrase James Carville, it’s not the economy, it’s the inequality, stupid!

The second issue that most Americans focus on is immigration or “the border.” Nearly 30% of Americans, according to Gallup, think immigration is the most important issue facing the country, and 8 in 10 , according to a Monmouth Poll, think it is either a “very serious” or “somewhat serious” problem. Trump has staked his whole claim on the White House on “fixing the border”, including a pledge to forcibly deport some 20 million immigrants he calls “insane,” “murderers,” “vermin” and blood poisoners. (There are probably no more than 11 million undocumented workers in the U.S.) In response to the blood libel, Kamala Harris has pledged to revive a bi-partisan plan promoted by Biden – and sunk by Trump – to significantly reduce asylum claims and periodically close the southern border when the number of migrants exceeds a given level. In short, she promises to do the same as Trump, only less.

If there is a crisis on the border, it’s a humanitarian one entirely of our own making. The economic embargo placed on Venezuela has forced hundreds of thousands into poverty and exile. Failure of the U.S. to uphold democratic norms in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, unwillingness to tackle the American demand for illegal drugs, labor exploitation by multinational corporations and local compradors, and climate change have all led to mass migration from Mexico, Central America and elsewhere. In 2022, more than 150,000 unaccompanied children were met by authorities on the U.S./Mexican border, with an unknown number – perhaps 120,000 – held in some kind of temporary or long-term custody. There are too few judges and legal advocates to handle the number of asylum applicants. The crisis is not the number of migrants to the U.S., it is our poor treatment of them.

Without migration, the U.S. would have a diminishing population, reduced productivity, lower living standards, and rising inflation. Whole industries – including hospitality, agriculture, construction and healthcare – would grind to a halt, if Trump was able to implement his planned mass deportations. More than half of all U.S. farmworkers are immigrants, and nearly 17% work in the healthcare industry. Over the next decade, migrants (legal and illegal) are projected to add an additional $7 trillion to the U.S. economy. If there’s an immigrant crisis in the U.S., it’s that there’s not enough of them.

Devil wind and climate change

To nobody’s surprise, global warming – the greatest human and environmental crisis of this or any other time – received short shrift at last night’s debate. There was just one question about it near the end of the debate, hedged with the preface that the issue was of great concern to “young people.” Harris started to answer, promisingly enough, by saying that the matter was not one for the future but the present, and that myriad American were already suffering from excessive heat, storms and flooding because of climate change. But then she quickly went off track, and spoke about industrial policy, car manufacturing, and economic nationalism. She concluded by boasting about increased U.S. production of natural gas! Trump refused to answer the question at all, preferring to talk up the wonders of tariffs, and a supposed Chinese bribe of the Biden family. Neither the moderators not Harris pressed Trump to return to answer the question. That was when I again heard in my ears Dylan’s nasal rendering of the phrase “idiot wind,” the first word somehow compressed into one plangent syllable. The single issue that will most impact debate viewers – in the U.S., along the Mexican border, in Europe and everywhere else — was the one thing that could not be spoken in what is likely to be the only presidential debate.

Idiot wind
Blowing every time you move your mouth….
It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe

The post Idiot Wind: The Trump/Harris Debate appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Stephen F. Eisenman.

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