#10 Never Forget to Call a Lie a Lie

This is the next of a new series of missives on our unfinished work to restore the promise of our country and its government. Each will focus on a single element of the many opportunities and challenges that lie ahead. Each will provide three steps we can all take to build upon our huge victories winning back the House in 2018 and the Presidency in 2020. 

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Every day, we have the pleasure of having a president who is an adult, who is experienced in managing the government and who has compassion for people. The era of the daily counterpunch and the hourly lie is behind us. For now.

Are we entertaining the notion that the four-year ordeal could not possibly happen to us again? Are we letting our intensity and our advanced political skills atrophy? Can we get focused every week on what must be done on both the policy and political side? As important, can we take full advantage of the relationship between the two, making sure independent voters understand what Joe Biden is doing to battle the virus and restore the economy?

We have a good start. Americans strongly support Joe Biden’s efforts to vaccinate the country. He has good support as well on the American Rescue Plan, the initiative to restore the COVID-ravaged economy. Americans are behind most of the individual elements of the infrastructure-rebuilding American Jobs Plan, but less comfortable with those elements once they are all assembled into a large package.

With hardly an exception, Joe Biden has been pitch-perfect. He knows how important his first year in office is, and he planned for it. The policy efforts stand on their own, but it is not difficult to ascertain one of their primary political objectives. Biden intends to move millions of blue-collar workers away from Trumpism by making them a clear winner in the economic recovery, which is good for them and good for the country. On the political side, this is intended to restore our previous political strengths in Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania, where the margins of victory in 2020 were modest. Not coincidentally, restoring our strength will help us flip Republican Senate seats in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio in 2022. It will not hurt in contesting the open seats in Iowa, Missouri and North Carolina.

Biden will not ever let “When will workers return to their office building” become the question of the day, as it often is in the media. He understands that tens of millions of Americans do not occupy offices. They grow things, manufacture things, provide health care, and serve people in physical space and real time. He will not stop being president for all of us, and independent voters will appreciate it at the ballot box.

That is why Republicans across the country want to change who puts a ballot in the box. Calling the Georgia voter suppression efforts “Jim Crow on steroids” is inaccurate, as it understates by comparison the virulent earlier voter suppression history of the Jim Crow South. In 1956, because of intimidation and violence, poll taxes and literacy tests, only 27% of African Americans were eligible to vote in Georgia. For the elections just completed, 68% were registered, a higher percentage than whites.

As so often is the case, Stacey Abrams had it right. These current Georgia voter suppression efforts are “Jim Crow in a coat and tie.” Ostensibly, the Brian Kemp and legislative efforts were devised under the rubric of election reform, to help voters trust the system even more. But the same people who passed the law have been lying about nonexistent voter fraud to tear down that trust. The new law compounds the lie. There is not a single word of it that would have been written if Republicans had won the Georgia elections. Pure and simple, Brian Kemp wants fewer minority voters because they make it more likely that he and his gang will lose.

And so it goes across the country. In our most recent missive in Our Unfinished Work we outline the specific steps we can all take to fight the rampant voter suppression attempts underway. We will block or defeat the bulk of them across the country, but we cannot stop them all. The new kid on the block is going to be helpful. Motivated by the prospects of boycotts, large American corporations are joining this fight. We are not being lulled into thinking that they will always be with us, or even that they are fully with us now. Nonetheless, this involvement matters a great deal. If corporate leaders continue to call the big lie of a stolen election a lie, it may well stimulate reconsideration of the Georgia bill. If not, it will slow down the voter suppression efforts in other state legislatures.

We can build upon the efforts of these temporary political partners and do these three things:

1) Keeping the Lie from Growing
	Incredibly, the former President has developed a new routine that the insurrection of January 6 was all about hugging and kissing. In an interview with Laura Ingraham, he emphasized the “great relationships” between the 400 now arrested insurrectionists and the Capitol Police, saying the insurrectionists “walked in and walked out.” Republican Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois tweeted in response to the Trump interview: “No remorse and no regret. It is quite honestly sick and disgusting.” Representative Rodney Davis, the ranking Republican member of the House Administration Committee, charged with examining the happenings of the day, has stayed silent. Please phone him at 202-225-2371 to say that his allowing Trump’s hugging lie to stand dishonors the life of policeman Brian Sicknick who died of his January 6 injuries.
2) Support African-American Corporate Executives
	The strong corporate pushback against the Georgia bill to suppress voting did not materialize magically. It started with former American Express CEO Kenneth Chenault, who maintains and utilizes a list of fellow African-American corporate executives. “The Fierce Urgency is Now” was organized by Chenault and sent by 75 executives. Send a personal note to Kenneth Chenault’s at General Catalyst Partners at 434 Broadway, NY, NY 20013 and pass on your thanks for him spurring a movement.
3) Help Joe Biden Address Home and Community Care
	The Biden-Harris infrastructure proposal is called the American Jobs plan, but a fifth of its proposed expenditures would go to rebuilding the uneven home and community health care system that attends to the needs of the elderly and disabled. Biden does not expect this $400 billion multi-year initiative to pass in its entirety. He is trying to increase America’s commitment to home health care in the millions of instances where it is the best option. A group of organizations flying the flag of the #CareCan’tWait Coalition has put together a major media campaign to make certain we do not turn away from this challenge. A strong part of that Coalition is Caring Across America You can get regular updates and send your donation to them to help make certain Joe Biden’s proposal starts something.

The lie that the election was stolen, the lie that voter suppression is thus required, and the lie about  the January 6 insurrection will not recede naturally. We did not get to our present favorable position by expecting justice to automatically prevail. Let’s do the work that needs to be done.

David Harrison
Bainbridge Island, Washington