Presidential Material & Zabar's On a Friday

Dan Rather talks with CNN's Don Lemon

Earlier this morning I was watching an excerpt of former CBS News anchor Dan Rather's Friday evening interview with CNN's Don Lemon.

In the same calm, rational and analytical manner that made him one of the most influential and trusted television journalists of the 20th century, Rather explained why Donald Trump's childish insults about MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski are damaging to the nation.

Rather expresses his disappointment with top Republican political leaders for their willingness to ignore the deeper repercussions of Trump's irrational and boorish behavior, particularly with regards to the damage it's causing to the institution of the presidency and America's global reputation.

As he has so often in the past, Rather effectively summed up the feelings of a majority of Americans when he observed, "It's a humiliation for President Trump, it's a humiliation for our country."

This morning Democratic Senator Mark Warner told CNN's Fareed Zakaria that Trump's widely-condemned tweets about Brzezinski were "frankly, beneath the office of the presidency." and criticized the comments as insulting to women.

Trump's response was predictably shallow.

Did you see the doctored video clip Trump posted to his Twitter account this morning with a CNN logo superimposed onto the head of a man he body-slammed during a Wrestlemania event years ago?

It speaks volumes to the question of presidential material.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I was particularly taken with Mark Binelli's recent in-depth Rolling Stone interview with Democratic Minnesota Senator Al Franken.

Senator Al Franken

Franken is a stark contrast to Trump's lack of impulse control, delusional narcissism and inability to grasp the basic subtleties and minutiae of the office he occupies and its roll in the federal government.

Binelli's RS piece reveals Franken as an intelligent, thoughtful and principled politician who clearly views the office in which he serves as a platform to serve the interests of the people he represents - regardless of their political leanings.

When Trump does bother to venture out of his hermetically-sealed White House - Mar-a-Lago cocoon to meet directly with his constituents, it's not to discuss policy with them or hear their concerns.

It's simply an occasion to stand at a podium and talk about himself and denigrate those he considers his "enemies".


In Binelli's RS interview, he describes accompanying Franken to a meeting with members of the Minnesota Farmers Union in Dakota County, Minnesota on a rainy April morning.

"Inside, Franken takes questions from a roomful of farmers, mostly men, many of them senior citizens wearing plaid shirts. Franken speaks fluently about Canadian milk subsidies, crop insurance, ethanol support, potential changes in the farm bill, and Trump's secretary of agriculture, Sonny Perdue, whom Franklin, in a rare kind word for the president, considers an excellent choice."

In the article Democratic Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren describes her admiration for Franken as a political wonk who fastidiously studies and researches policy and considers it his duty to dive into the weeds of legislation.

I've yet to hear Trump comment intelligently or meaningfully on anything, let alone policy specifics.

Dan Ackroyd as chef Julia Childs in the classic
Saturday Night Live skit written by Al Franken. 

But more importantly to me, the quality that impresses me most about Franken is his razor sharp wit and piercing insight.

The kinds of things a politician must have in his or her tool bag if they plan on being president.

What stood out for me in Binelli's article was his description of how Franken's gift for comedy and his eye for humor are attributes that have helped him to stand out as one of the leading progressive voices on Capitol Hill.


The qualities that served Franken as a writer and occasional performer on NBC's Saturday Night Live for 15 years, and as the author of books like Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot, also make him uniquely positioned in the Senate to serve as one of the politicians willing to confront and fact-check the idiocracy that is the Trump presidency.

As Binelli observes: "The man with a sixth sense for bullshit taking on the da Vinci of bullshit artists...Franken has weaponized the gifts that proved so useful for comedy a sharp eye, a sharper tongue, the ability to tease out the essential absurdity of a given situation and deliver the goods with maximum impact"

I can personally attest to Franken's sharp tongue and uncanny ability to tease out the essential absurdity of a given situation having witnessed it first-hand in New York City.

This would have been sometime between 1998 and 2000 when I was living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

It was a sunny Friday afternoon in late spring or early summer and I'd stopped by Zabar's grocery store on the west side of Broadway between West 79th Street and West 80th Street after working out at the Crunch gym that was located above H&H Bagels on West 80th Street.

A Shabbat dinner 

Now as some of you may know, many religious Jews observe Shabbat, or the Sabbath, from just before sunset on Friday, until (according to Wikipedia) three stars appear in the sky on Saturday evening.

Zabar's, an Upper West Side institution since 1934, is a specialty grocery store that not only has all kinds of really good pre-cooked and pre-made foods, it offers a huge selection of gourmet cheeses, coffee, breads and baked goods, an amazing fish counter - and an array of Kosher foods.

So if you go into Zabar's on a Friday afternoon, it's going to be packed and busy, with many Jewish folks running around picking up stuff for Shabbat; often hurrying to get home by sunset.

In my years of experience shopping there people are usually very polite (especially the people that work there) but they're often rushing and on occasion, manners can fall by the wayside.

Zabar's has different entrances, and I was on the far left side of the store where there are big refrigerated shelves lined with all kinds of pre-made foods in containers that you just have to take home and warm up -it's a bit pricey but the quality is really good and it's convenient for the busy New York lifestyle.  

So I'm standing in front of this refrigerated shelf that has all these gourmet pre-made sandwiches and wraps, it was only about 3-feet wide so only 1 or 2 people could comfortably stand in front of it at one time.

I waited for this younger woman to grab something and as she scooted off, I walked up to check out the selection holding my little basket in my left arm.

By rights, I was clearly the next person and it's an unwritten rule of conduct in Zabar's because it's a bit tight in there - you wait for people to grab their thing, then you step up.

Zabar's on Broadway in New York City

So I'm looking at the sandwiches, all of a sudden this tiny little elderly Jewish lady literally elbows in front of me and positions her body in front of mine so she can inspect the sandwiches.

She's kind of squinting at the selection, and she looks it up and down with a frown, elbows her way past me and walks off sort of muttering to herself as if she couldn't find what she was looking for her or didn't like what she saw - she didn't pay any attention to me at all, didn't glance at me once or say excuse me.

Now I'm always a polite and considerate person, and will always make way for someone older, but what she did was so rude that I just stood there stunned, because most people in Zabar's are usually pretty nice.

Being a college-educated African-American man in Zabar's on a Friday surrounded by white people, I also remember being suddenly conscious of not only my race, but of the complex social invisibility that black Americans often face that writer Ralph Ellison wrote of so eloquently in Invisible Man, his National Book Award-winning work of fiction-social commentary published back in 1952.

I was sort of looking around wondering if anyone had seen what had happened, and I'm thinking to myself, "Oh my God, did she really just do that? Did she not see me, or did she just not care?"

Just as I was beginning to think that maybe I was overthinking it, I saw this dark-haired man with glasses appear next to me on my left and heard this deep voice yell out, "EXCUSE ME!!" 

The voice sort of stunned me because it had this tone of sarcasm and pointed anger in it - and I understood that this man had seen what had happened in the middle of this store and he was so appalled at the rudeness of it that he yelled out so the old woman would hear him.

I turned around and recognized that it was Al Franken; same guy I'd seen on SNL for years.

Customers at Zabar's fish counter

He was standing there glaring at the old woman (who was hustling off into the crowd pretending she hadn't heard him) and when I say yelled, I mean he YELLED that out so that everyone within earshot heard it.

Al Franken saw the absurdity of the situation and though I was a total stranger to him, he stuck up for me - but I also sensed that he was partially in disbelief that I hadn't said something to the little old lady because of her rudeness.

But as I said, I was too stunned to do anything.

I was also conscious of the fact that if I, a 6'7" black man had said something to the little old lady, people would look at me askance - and I just didn't want to fight that battle, I just wanted to get my food and get the hell out of there.

But Al Franken didn't hesitate, however small it might be, he saw a wrong and felt obliged to say something about it; in fact he was so annoyed by what he saw he didn't say anything to me.

I've never forgotten that incident in Zabar's, in fact this is the first time I've written about it, and I understand that Al Franken ran for political office because he genuinely cares about sticking up for what's right.

If the 2016 presidential elections showed us anything, it's that the establishment of the national Democratic Party worked to quash the populist progressive movement that Senator Bernie Sanders started.

My sense is that the progressive voice that was so loud in 2016 is going to be even louder in 2018 and 2020, and as a Democrat I think that voice just might be best served by Al Franken - I firmly believe he could earn the Democratic nomination for president in 2020.

It's often said that the character of a man can be judged by how he treats the person who can do the least for him or her, as a guy who was working as a bartender and dreaming about being an actor and a writer, there wasn't much I could do for Al Franken.

But he stuck up for me that day in Zabar's, and that's the quality of a real president.

Epic Mar-a-No-No: Al Franken 2020?

Mika Brzezinski's Twitter response
to Trump's buffoonery

After reading about Donald Trump's remarkably juvenile insults earlier this morning aimed at MSNBC Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, I'm officially turning my focus to the 2020 presidential race.    

It's a bit early, sure, but why not?

America's resident liar-in-chief stunned political observers by holding a $35,000-a-plate campaign funding event on Wednesday evening just over four months into his so-called presidency.

An event Norm Eisen, who served as the top ethics lawyer under President Obama, called a clear violation of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution because it was held at a Trump-owned hotel located in a building he leases from the U.S. government.

Maybe Republicans define "Making America Great Again" as totally ignoring laws that govern ethics?

If you're reading this you've likely heard that Trump's trite misogynistic comments were widely criticized by leading Republican and Democratic politicians - and Brzezinski herself shot back with a tweet (pictured above) featuring a box of Cheerios that served as a not-so-subtle shot at 45's notoriously tiny hands.

The whole debacle was made worse by Scarborough and Brzezinski's revelation this morning that Trump's politically-inexperienced lackey-son-in-law Jared Kushner personally relayed his delusional father-in-law's threat to use his ties with David Pecker, the owner of the company that owns the sleazy grocery store gossip rag National Inquirer, to prevent a piece trashing the MSNBC duo from being published if they would publicly apologize to the astonishingly thin-skinned president.

While most people would consider it beneath the dignity of the office of the president to engage in crass blackmail, is hardly a surprising tactic for Trump.

And for all the outrage Trump's latest tweet has generated, there's little question it was intended to do one thing only - to distract.

Especially given the bombshell report by the Wall Street Journal on Thursday about a May interview in which former conservative political operative Peter W. Smith admitted working with Russian hackers to try and hack Hillary Clinton's email server in order to give the information to Michael Flynn - who was serving as the national security adviser for the Trump campaign.

"Opposition researcher" Peter W. Smith

Political wonks may recall Smith, described by Wall Street Journal reporter Shane Harris as "a private equity executive from Chicago active in Republican politics",  as one of the ideological sleaze-bags responsible for dredging up unproven accusations by former Arkansas State Troopers of marital infidelity by former President Bill Clinton in the 90's.

Did Smith really sink to the same level of partisan obsession to try and actively work with Russian hackers (during the 2016 presidential campaign no less) in order to try and illegally access Hilary Clinton's private emails in order to intentionally torpedo her chances of being elected?

The WSJ, owned by Rupert Murdoch and hardly a bastion of liberal political perspective, certainly thinks so based on Harris' article published on Thursday.

I'm ready to get behind a candidate now.

And based on the political calendar, the 2020 presidential race isn't actually that far off.

Considering the disaster that befell the American people last November and the terrifying ramifications of the loony political agenda of the current Republican-majority House and Senate, 2020 is quickly shaping up to be one of the most important presidential elections for the Democratic Party in decades.

One of the more interesting political profiles I've read lately was Mark Binelli's piece on the progressive Minnesota Democratic Senator Al Franken in the June 15th issue of Rolling Stone.

From my perspective, the former Saturday Night Live writer and occasional cast-member is quickly shaping up to be the progressive front-runner for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

Think that's far-fetched?

Remember one of the normal prerequisites of any American presidential candidate (the afore-mentioned Trump excepted) is the publication of a memoir that reveals something substantive about who they are, where they come from, and what their vision for the country is.

Democratic Senator Al Franken

Franken has already checked that box having lately been out and about promoting his appropriately irreverently-titled new memoir Al Franken, Giant of the Senate.

The other morning Franken was interviewed on the Brian Lehrer Show to share his insights on the pending Republican healthcare bill, why voters are attracted to Trump and his reflections on the bedrock values of the Democratic Party.

I think this guy is the kind of president this country needs now more than ever.


Franken is a well-informed intellectual progressive policy-wonk who has acknowledged the former Democratic Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone as a political mentor and who knows and understands the minutiae of the policy that lies behind political legislation.

As his deft handling of the questioning of Attorney General Jeff Sessions before the Senate Intelligence Committee during recent hearings on Russian influence in the 2016 presidential elections demonstrates, this guy can hold his own in complex investigations on Capitol Hill.

From a progressive political standpoint this guy is the real deal.

During the Republican-engineered government shutdown in 2013, he donated his Senate salary to a Minnesota-based hunger relief organization called Second Harvest Heartland.

As Mark Binelli wrote in his June 15th Rolling Stone piece, Franken has effectively utilized his more than ten years as a comedy writer for SNL to help "shape the modern comedic voice of lefty dissent - pointed fact-checking as mocking entertainment - that would become de rigueur on shows like The Daily Show and its many spawn."  

From a progressive standpoint he can arguably be called a visionary of 21st century politics.

But more importantly, this is a guy who stands up for the common man, not because he's checking off some box, but because it's the right thing to do, it's what he believes in, and because that's the kind of man he is.

So let me close out the month of June by saying that Al Franken is the kind of man that Americans could get behind as the Democratic candidate for president in 2020 - and for what it's worth I don't say that lightly.

In my next blog, I'll share a story about a personal encounter I had with him in New York City that illustrates his natural inclination to stand up for the little guy.

Trump's Female Outreach & Tavern Caucus Results

Tavern regular "Mike" weighs in on Trump

You have to give Donald Trump credit for his ability to offend and alienate such wide demographic segments of the American populace with just one statement.

With his recent calls to arm Japan and South Korea with nuclear arms, he's evidently trying make enemies with foreign policy experts, the diplomatic community and Pacific Rim nations in one shot; the White House branded Tump's simplistic stab at nuclear strategy "catastrophic."

Despite his rather feeble effort to attempt to backtrack his comments made Tuesday on MSNBC that "there has to be some sort of punishment for women" who obtain an abortion procedure (in the event it's made illegal), he's already outraged both foes AND supporters of abortion.

The fact that he said it at all proves that being a billionaire doesn't automatically make you smart, especially given his remarkably low approval ratings with U.S. women.

Trump's thuggish, ill-tempered campaign manager Corey Lewandowski should've reminded his boss that women make up 52% of the U.S. population, but he's too busy defending himself against battery charges for grabbing reporter Michelle Fields.

Now the photo above (which I took with my iPhone) is not an actual Trump supporter, that's my friend "Mike" wearing a Trump hat pretending to be a Trump supporter the other night.

"Mike" is one of the regulars at my favorite local haunt, The Franklin Corner Tavern. There's nothing particularly special or fancy about The Tavern, in fact, it's just a relatively small U-shaped bar located inside Franklin Corner Liquors just off of Franklin Corner Road in Lawrenceville, New Jersey.

I suppose it's biggest claim to fame is that comedian and former Daily Show host Jon Stewart used to work there when he was a student at nearby Princeton University.

The online review on Yelp! pretty much sums it up: "Nice little liquor store and bar. Bar seems to attract a local/older crowd, but still a nice place to relax and have a few."

But it attracts some interesting local characters and a good conversation can always be had; and I'm much more interested in substantive conversation than in making some "scene".

The other night another regular named Jeff brought in one of those red "Make America Great Again" hats that Trump wears like some kind of costume.

Jeff confided to me beforehand that he'd bought two of them off of E-Bay to give as a gag gift for a co-worker's retirement party, but he was curious to see if giving one to "Mike" to wear inside the bar would rile up some of the progressives like me who hang out there.

Now Jeff is a Republican and an Army veteran who now works in the pharmaceutical industry.

He likes to hunt, but he's not a "gun-nut" and he's a very responsible hunter who butchers and freezes any deer he kills to eat, and he only hunts with a proper license. We often talk politics and he's got some pretty progressive views on some things; but he's a card-carrying Republican through and through - and he loves mischief.

So I went along with Jeff's Tump-hat gag when we went back inside as I was curious to see what would happen. Within minutes of "Mike" putting the hat on (see photo at top), people started making comments.

There were murmurs, snickers and some finger-pointing, of course "Mike" was in on it and he decided to not say anything, simply wear the hat as if nothing was amiss.

Within ten minutes, everyone of the 12 people sitting at the bar was talking about Trump, there are some conservative folks in there but I can tell you the consensus was that Trump was an embarrassment to the nation, a liability to the Republican party, a bigot, a misogynist and an obnoxious, boorish loudmouth.

It started to get heated, like just the subject of Trump raised the tension in the room. So finally a woman I'll call "Sharon", got up on her knees on a bar stool and announced she wanted to say something about Trump and raised her arms authoritatively for quiet.

"Sharon" is a married (once-divorced) white, forty-something mother of two who is a professor at a local college who grew up in North Carolina. We often discuss issues related to college education and she's brought her father from NC to the bar for a drink on occasion during the holidays when he visits - she's cool people, well-mannered in the southern way and very smart.

I guess it's the mom in her, but she managed to get the people in the bar quieted down and proceeded to offer a lengthy, very rational and well-spoken critique of Trump, the core of which was her deep offense at the way that he talks about and treats women and what that says about his character and his capacity as a leader - "Sharon" is conservative but she's not a Republican and she found his comments about Fox host Megyn Kelly to be repugnant.

She never raised her voice, and as I listened, I felt like she was honestly reflecting the way the vast majority of women in the U.S (those that are registered to vote and care about politics anyway) view Trump as a person and as a candidate.

When she finished, she got down off the stool, paid her tab and left with her husband and as she walked by me I high-fived her and realized that Trump has already likely lost the general election, even if he does manage to get the GOP nomination.

My sense is that women's role as "influencers" within American families and society are often underestimated. As I've mentioned, I used to work in the ad-design department when I worked at the NFL in New York back in the late 90's.

One of the core principals and drivers of the massive "Feel the Power" advertising campaign was not just to make people in general feel better about the NFL brand, it was to attract and actively court women's involvement in the game - to embrace them as part of the brand.

The extensive research we conducted to develop the campaign revealed not just that women were NFL fans, but the sometimes subtle roles they played in how the game was watched in the home on Sundays or Monday nights had a big influence on NFL fans and the way the League is perceived.

Women are often the ones making food shopping choices for game day, or the ones taking responsibility for preparing meals in the home during the games, or inviting people over - and, perhaps most importantly for advertisers; holding a huge influence in the household purchasing decisions related to what people buy to wear, eat or drink on game day.

To come back to Trump, my point is that women like "Sharon" are going to wield enormous influence over the 2016 presidential election; and I don't just mean that in terms of their being measured as a large slice of the American demographic.

They're going to wield influence over sons, fathers, husbands, brothers, nephews, cousins, co-workers and friends.

I mean, I can't speak for every American man but as a rule we can be sort of hard-headed and childish in some ways well into adulthood; but we generally listen to the women in our life - be they mothers, sisters, grandmas, aunts etc.

Fivethirtyeight blog creator-writer Nate Silver

Now as a part-time blogger and amateur political observer, no one is ever going to confuse me with Nate Silver. 

He's the brilliant statistician and writer who correctly called 49 of 50 states in the 2008 presidential election and all 50 states in the 2012 presidential election.

Check out his thoughts on how Trump's overt sexism will impact the general election in the March 29th entry on his influential fivethirtyeight blog titled, "One Weird Trick to Loose the 2016 Election: Alienate Women"

But based on listening to "Sharon", and other female thinkers, my sense is if just 50% of American women think like "Sharon" does about Trump, the sometimes-difficult-to-measure influence they wield on our society is going to mean the GOP finds a way to block him from being the 2016 candidate, or if they're stupid enough to make him their candidate, he's going to take a beating in the general election - and he may put the GOP House majority in jeopardy too.  

I think Trump is less substance than an appealing lightening rod for the deep-seated anger and frustration coursing through the majority of the American populace who've been excluded from the economic recovery enjoyed by the top 10% of this nation.

Over the course of this 2016 race, Trump hasn't improved as a candidate; he's actually devolved like some political neanderthal in reverse-evolution.

In the March 24th issue of Rolling Stone, Mark Binelli wrote a sharp political analysis exploring the 2016 president race and why Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders (unlike their Republican counterparts), have matured politically on the campaign trail and emerged as better candidates.

Candidates whose debates have revolved around substantive issues and actual policy proposals.

In his RS piece, Binelli interviewed Robert Reich, the amusingly quirky economist and former secretary of labor under Bill Clinton. Since leaving the federal government, Reich as reemerged as a pretty interesting and outspoken progressive in the mold and style of Princeton economist and New York Times Paul Krugman.

Former labor secretary Robert Reich

If you've seen any of the insightful short videos Reich has hosted for MoveOn.org as part of their efforts to address wage inequality (like his two-minute fifteen second explanation of the Republican War on the Poor and Working Families), you've seen how he blends an academic mastery of economics to the issues impacting the poor, working-class and middle-class American families.

Reich offered a really sharp analysis of the grassroots anger that lies at the core of the wide popularity of both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders; even though the two candidates are polar opposites in so many ways. As Reich observed in Binelli's RS piece:

"Trade policies have helped people at the top and taken out the middle rungs of the job ladder and pushed millions into the personal-service sector, where they're getting paid very little. When the median wage started to stagnate, the first thing a lot of families did is, the wives and mothers went into the workforce. 

When wages continued to decline , the second thing they did was work longer hours. Then, when that coping mechanism was exhausted, the third thing was to go deep into debt, many people using home loans as collateral. And when that bubble burst, people woke up to what was happening, and you begin to get, starting with the bank bailouts, a surge of anger, the Tea Party on one side and Occupy on the other. And it doesn't stop, because the political establishment doesn't recognize it for what it is. They think it's left versus right!"

I think Reich's comments reach to the heart of what's at stake in the 2016 presidential election.

His comments also help to bring a measure of understanding as to why Donald Trump holds such appeal to the throngs who pack his rallies and cheer his extremism, ignorance, xenophobia, racism and misogyny.

Trump has learned to tap that anger but the reality is he doesn't actually have any idea of what to actually do with it; which is why he has virtually no policy specifics beyond building a really big wall.

 In truth, the imaginary wall he dreams about has already been constructed.

Only it's a wall in people's minds, one he's built brick by brick with each insult, lie, arrogant smirk, baseless accusation, call for violence, violation of reporter's right to free speech and the undisguised contempt he demonstrates towards people of color and women.

So as we say farewell to March and head towards April, politically I'm feeling pretty energized about the fact that Donald Trump continues to wall himself off further from an ever-growing huge cross-section of the American electorate in part because of a relatively simple truth most young men are taught at an early age but that seems to elude him:

Treat women with respect.