Gail Collins

<h1>So the Democrats are going to nominate their presidential candidate in … Milwaukee! Let’s talk about this for a minute. It may not be the biggest news of the week, but it’s a lot more fun than analyzing Donald Trump’s budget plan.</h1>

Wisconsin, of course, is the state Hillary Clinton took for granted/failed to visit/lost in 2016. This is definitely a makeup bid. While nobody believes, deep down, that people base their vote on convention location, it can’t hurt.

“Where you hold our convention is a very strong statement of your values and who and what we are fighting for,” DNC chairman Tom Perez said in making the announcement.

Possible Milwaukee convention slogans:

A) “This Time We’re Showing Up!”

C) “More Hotel Rooms Than You’ve Heard”

Or maybe just “Let’s Meet in the Middle.” The Democrats have begun to realize that the Midwest is a problem. Clinton won the popular vote by about 2.9 million, but she lost the electoral vote due to tiny, tiny margins in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And the Democrats have not held their presidential convention in the Midwest for more than 100 years. Except for Chicago. Which is sadly known to some members of the party as “The Place Between New York and Los Angeles.”

Ah yes, St. Louis in 1916. Woodrow Wilson didn’t bother to show up, but a good time was had by all.

The civic leaders who spent the last year and a half trying to make the deal called themselves The Good Land Committee after a scene in “Wayne’s World,” where the guys meet Alice Cooper after a Milwaukee concert and ask him if he’s there often. Cooper, stone-faced, then reels off a list of factoids about the city, including that its name is “Algonquin for the good land.” The Milwaukee Public Library quietly issued a correction, explaining that it comes from “terms originating in the Ojibwa, Potawatomi and Menominee languages.”

Really, sometimes it’s hard to get this stuff right.

More possible Milwaukee convention slogans:

B) “Ninety-two Miles North of Chicago”

C) “Not Socialist at All — Ignore the Republicans!”

As soon as the site selection was announced, sniping started from the right. “No city in America has stronger ties to socialism than Milwaukee,” said the director of the Wisconsin Republican Party, veering off into a mention of Bernie Sanders.

Milwaukee did once have a few mayors who called themselves socialists, although the last left office in 1960, and their goal was not so much taking over the means of production as tossing out crooked politicians. Which of course has no relation whatsoever to anything going on today.

Now, the city has strong union ties and a kind of working-class aura. The DNC passed up the glitzier options of Miami, which is sometimes known as “The Magic City,” and Houston, which once called itself “The Golden Buckle of the Sunbelt” and is now supposed to be nicknamed “The City With No Limits,” which perhaps refers to the lack of zoning laws.

Milwaukee doesn’t have a slogan. In 1995, some promoters came up with “Genuine American,” but nobody really liked it. (“I didn’t think it was possible to come up with anything worse than ‘A Great Place by a Great Lake.’ … I think they’ve done it,” a county supervisor moaned.)

“As a city we haven’t prioritized a slogan because we can’t wrap up all of the wonderfully random experiences that make up Milwaukee in just a few words,” said Chris Jenkins of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce in a phone interview.

I used to live in Milwaukee, long ago, and I can attest that it’s a fine city full of lovely people. The wonderfully random experiences must have come along after I left.

By the way, Wisconsin’s official motto is “Forward,” which is certainly hard to argue with. Although given the Democrats’ sensitivity to the events of 2016, it might very well change that to “Ignore Us at Your Peril.” The state hasn’t really been pressing the slogan thing since it tried to drop “America’s Dairyland” in 1985. The contest for a replacement stumbled when the screening committee rejected the people’s choice of “Eat Cheese or Die.”

I really love the whole state slogan thing. Did you know Idaho’s used to be “Great Potatoes, Tasty Destinations”? Indiana went from “Restart Your Engines” to “Honest-to-Goodness Indiana,” a while back. Sounds kind of bland and I think you should feel free to blame Mike Pence, whether it was his fault or not.

But about Milwaukee. The city likes to push its connection to the brewing industry — Perez celebrated the announcement with a toast of beer. Maybe this will inspire the presidential candidates to appropriate some of the old, spirits-related slogans for their campaigns.

For instance, which wine or beer tagline would you prefer for Joe Biden?

A) “Perfect for When Friends Drop In”

OK, definitely not “You Only Go Around Once.” But still, I think we’re onto something here.

This article originally appeared in <a id="ba986818-a08b-4935-9280-024b05441531" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/opinion/milwaukee-dnc.html">The New York Times</a>.

Wisconsin, of course, is the state Hillary Clinton took for granted/failed to visit/lost in 2016. This is definitely a makeup bid. While nobody believes, deep down, that people base their vote on convention location, it can’t hurt.

Cheese! Beer! Democrats!

<h1>We now have so many potential candidates for president, it’s very difficult to talk about them without whipping out a chart.</h1>

But come on, I know you can do it. This week Michael Bloomberg took his name off the list, so we’ve hardly got two dozen.

Very sorry to see Bloomberg go. His departure came just after Fortune announced he was ranked the ninth-richest billionaire on the planet, which is 706 places higher than Donald Trump. It would have been fun pointing that out several times a day for the entire campaign.

But if you’ve got more than $55 billion, there are probably more fun things to do over the next year than introducing yourself to every person in Iowa. So let’s see if we can master what’s left of the list.

Today we’ll take it easy and consider only the 14 who have actually announced they’re running for the nomination. We will then instantly subtract the spiritual lecturer, the former tech executive and the guy-who-was-once-in-the-House. Great! We’re down to 11.

That includes two newbies, John Hickenlooper, the former governor of Colorado, and Jay Inslee, the governor of Washington. Both of them announced they were running with a lot of focus on the environment — The New York Times’ Kirk Johnson counted 10 mentions of climate change in Inslee’s 80-second video.

People, how do you feel about this?

A) Climate change is crucial, and you cannot bring it up too much.

B) Climate change is super important, but a little variety is nice.

C) Excuse me, who is Jay Inslee again?

Maybe this little presidential-candidates rhyme will help:

Two governors from the West are super

Inslee’s the one who’s not named Hickenlooper.

Six senators, too, in the presidential pack

Bernie and Elizabeth we know from way back.

Kirsten, Cory and Kamala are hard at work

Amy’s the one who used her comb for a fork.

Let’s pull more hints out of the scabbard

For Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard

Even though his best job was secretary of HUD.

We will now quit rhyming before we get to South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

No one agrees entirely on how to pronounce his name, but one of the versions the candidate seems to like is “boot-edge-edge.” In Maltese it means “lord of the poultry.”

See how much you’re learning? Wait till you throw that one out at a dinner party.

Buttigieg is the youngest candidate, at 37, and he’d be the first commander in chief under the age of 40.

Buttigieg has been pushing the age issue, arguing that millennials are due for some “intergenerational justice.” It’s getting a lot of traction — do you think Donald Trump (72) has spawned a don’t-trust-anybody-over-70 movement? If so, it’d be a problem for Bernie Sanders (77) and the still-unannounced Joe Biden (76).

Next you’ve got Hickenlooper, 67, and Inslee, 68, as well as Elizabeth Warren, 69. Historically, being a presidential candidate in your 60s has only been a problem for one gender. When Sen. Margaret Chase Smith ran for the Republican nomination in 1964, she complained that “almost every news story starts off with ‘the 66-year-old senator.’ I declare I haven’t seen the age played up in the case of men candidates.”

The Los Angeles Times reported her comments in a story headlined “66-Year-Old Sen. Smith Hits Age Talk.”

Also an L.A. Times columnist argued that age was indeed an issue because the ideal age for a presidential candidate was in the late 40s or 50s, and that was when “the female of the species undergoes physical changes and emotional distress of varying severity and duration.”

OK, this is the end of our age discussion.

Except — wait! What about Hillary Clinton? She’s 71 now, and she hasn’t absolutely totally completely ruled out running again. For everybody else, time is fleeting. We’re talking about a Democratic nominating convention that’s happening in July 2020, but there seems to be a consensus that even waiting for Easter of 2019 is very chancy.

You can tell who’s sidling up. Sen. Sherrod Brown isn’t officially in the race, but he’s been conducting a “Dignity of Work” tour through New Hampshire, Iowa and South Carolina. Truly, you could not have a better hint if he ran around the country ringing a large Liberty Bell.

Beto O’Rourke has been promising to make an announcement any second, but the most dramatic thing he’s done lately was to show up for a Metallica concert. It is possible to be too cool to rule.

Almost everybody seems to think Biden will jump in eventually. But really, Mr. Former Vice President, it’s possible to be too coy. This week a CNN focus group made up of six people said they thought you were too old-news. If you can’t win over a six-person focus group, what will you do in Hart’s Location, New Hampshire?

It’s already March. Time to get into the rhyme.

This article originally appeared in <a id="7ef96030-9891-4c11-a567-f05da6274fbc" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/06/opinion/2020-candidates.html">The New York Times</a>.

Very sorry to see Bloomberg go. His departure came just after Fortune announced he was ranked the ninth-richest billionaire on the planet, which is 706 places higher than Donald Trump.

The big race: It's time for a rhyme

<h1>So. Michael Cohen started off his testimony by declaring that the president of the United States was “a racist,” a “con man” and a “cheat.” The Republicans who were supposed to be grilling him responded by saying ... um.</h1>

Well, mainly they complained that the hearing was happening. (“I am appalled. We could be focused on actual issues that are facing America, like border security.”)

Nobody jumped up and yelled: “A racist? How dare you call this man a racist?” To be fair, one Republican committee member did demur, and brought in a black government appointee to stand there and look diverse.

But you couldn’t say there were a lot of expressions of shock. Nobody announced having it on good authority that all those checks Cohen got from Trump were not reimbursements for the Stormy Daniels payoff, but rather anonymous donations to an orphanage.

The Republicans simply argued, over and over, that the whole thing was a dumb waste of time.

“I talked to my beautiful wife back in Dripping Springs, Texas, just before the hearing. I said, ‘Don’t bother watching,’” said Rep. Chip Roy.

The hearing was before the House Oversight Committee, which is, of course, now under new Democratic control. Cohen showed the members a $35,000 check that he said the president gave him as a partial repayment for the Stormy Daniels payoff.

Nothing better than an evidence exhibit. But the public is so inured to Trump scandals now there’s almost no way to raise new excitement about Stormy’s sex-with-the-future-president story. Unless Cohen could have demonstrated that his then-boss wrote “hush money” on the check memo.

Nevertheless, there are always new things to be learned.

For instance, Cohen testified about Donald Trump Jr.’s role in the payoff deal. In passing, he said the president thought his son had “the worst judgment of anyone in the world.”

Wonder how Junior reacted to that? This was presumably before Ivanka, who’s supposed to be the bright one in the family, denounced the idea of a guaranteed minimum wage because she felt all Americans “want to work for what they get.”

Cohen claimed that in all his years of serving as Trump’s hatchet man he never once heard his boss “say anything in private that led me to believe that he loved our nation or wanted to make it better.”

That could have been a cue for Republicans to offer up a multitude of examples to the contrary. But for the most part, all we got was one white male representative after another announcing that Cohen had to be ignored because he’s due to go to “prison for lying.”

Almost everybody who knows Donald Trump appears to be going to prison for lying. Or is awaiting sentencing for lying. Or is facing charges of lying. If you are a Donald Trump intimate and the federal authorities come calling, be careful to tell the truth. Or move to Papua New Guinea.

Even for the most jaded Trump watcher, there were parts of the Cohen testimony worth discussing. For instance, he said Trump threatened legal action to make sure his old high school, colleges and the College Board kept his grades and SAT score secret.

Certainly not a surprise that Trump doesn’t want to publicize the details of his academic career. But still a great question to keep harping on, if only because it will drive him completely nuts. Maybe every day the House Democrats could make a speech about it on the floor. And introduce a C student with a sense of humor who could announce he’s proud to be following in the presidential footsteps of intellectual mediocrity.

Cohen testified that Trump had him going back and forth with Forbes magazine in an attempt to get a good spot on the Wealthiest list. While simultaneously trying to push down the income he reported for tax purposes. Let’s hope the Democrats use it as another lever to get their hands on those tax returns. Truly that would be a development even better than calling Donald Jr. to testify about his role in the Cohen payments and his father’s assessment of his judgment.

We certainly know that Cohen is not ... perfect. After all, he spent 12 years as Trump’s lawyer. Rep. Jim Jordan, the top Republican on the committee, even brought up Women for Cohen, an account put up to promote his little-known role as a “sex symbol.”

But Cohen made a pretty good witness, looking appropriately miserable and answering questions convincingly, with some balance. He told the lawmakers rumors about a mystery tape showing Trump hitting his wife in an elevator were untrue and “in my opinion that’s not something he would do.” On the other hand, he said Trump did make him call Melania and lie about the Stormy Daniels unpleasantness.

While all this was going on, the president was in Asia, dining with Kim Jong Un of North Korea. Previous negotiations with Kim have produced monster publicity and very little in the way of nuclear disarmament.

Nevertheless, Trump seems to believe this may get him a Nobel Peace Prize. He really seems to want that a lot. Maybe if the Nobel committee offered to trade it for his tax returns ...

This article originally appeared in <a id="bf0042a2-5772-46d5-925a-f6a1b3b2b28b" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/27/opinion/cohen-testimony.html">The New York Times</a>.

Well, mainly they complained that the hearing was happening. (“I am appalled. We could be focused on actual issues that are facing America, like border security.”)

Trump's a guy who's tough to defend

<h1>Time to vote for Donald Trump’s Worst Cabinet Member.</h1>

No fair just yelling “Wilbur Ross!” Our secretary of commerce appeared to be trying to sweep the field last week when he expressed bafflement that federal workers were going to food banks during the government shutdown rather than taking out loans.

Ross also volunteered that 800,000 people going without pay for a month was only “about a third of a percent of GDP. So it’s not like it’s a gigantic number overall.” I am convinced he heard that a Worst contest was on the way and wanted to nail down first place.

But let’s look at some other top contestants. For instance — after all the horrific stories about children separated from their parents at the border, what about our Department of Homeland Security chief?

“DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has earned the mantle of Worst Cabinet Secretary,” argued Austin Evers, executive director of the watchdog group American Oversight. “Nielsen has enthusiastically generated false evidence to justify the president’s xenophobic immigration policies, zealously executed those policies in ways that have shocked the world, and then brazenly lied about both.”

Nielsen is definitely a contender. I’ve had my eye on her ever since she claimed she didn’t know whether Norway was a predominantly white country.

And she’s been pretty effective in carrying out her plans, which is important when you’re part of a crew where ineptitude often cancels out bad intentions.

For instance, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos would certainly like to privatize the nation’s public schools, but she barely seems organized enough to get dressed in the morning. Still, Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, believes DeVos should get Worst points for having “basically spent her time in that office working for everyone but the kids.”

Same story for Secretary of Energy Rick Perry.Many people were offended that a job Barack Obama gave to a nuclear physicist went to a guy whose most important recent achievement was appearing on “Dancing With the Stars.” But we haven’t seen much of Perry since he learned, to his chagrin, that his job is about the safe handling of nuclear materials, not drilling for oil.

Some Cabinet-watchers are discovering, to their shock, that they miss Scott Pruitt, who won last year’s competition as the anti-environment head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Pruitt was famous for his public relations disasters. Remember security agents who were sent to pick up his dry cleaning and drove him from one place to the next in a search for a special moisturizer?

Now we’ve got EPA Acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler, a former coal industry lobbyist who’s way better at the job. Presuming you believe the job is screwing up the air and water.

“He’ll never buy lotion at the Ritz-Carlton, but the decisions he’s made are far worse than any Pruitt made,” said Scott Faber of the Environmental Working Group, ticking off a long list of initiatives, including the repeal of the Clean Power Plan and a rollback on efforts to regulate mercury pollution. “Andy knows which levers to pull, and he hasn’t let any moss grow under his feet.”

If Wheeler keeps getting his way, there probably won’t be any moss for the rest of us, either.

A quarter of the Cabinet members are the high-end governmental equivalent of temps, including the acting heads of EPA, Defense, Justice and Interior. “I like acting — it gives me more flexibility,” the president said recently. This was not a reference to his years playing a pretend chief executive on “Celebrity Apprentice.”

People who care about land conservation were unnerved when the inept Ryan Zinke was replaced by Acting Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt, a former oil industry lobbyist. Can you imagine Bernhardt and Wheeler plotting together? “They must have lunch at their own Merchants of Death table,” moaned Faber.

Still more to choose from! There’s Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar,a former drug company executive and pharmaceutical lobbyist who’s supposed to be coming up with a plan to control prescription drug prices. While we’re waiting, family planning advocates continue to reel from the department’s war on contraception and abortion.

Or Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who tried to rebrand State as the “Department of Swagger.” Really, he’s been promoting a new Swagger seal. “I thought it was a parody or a joke,” said David Wade, who was chief of staff at State during the Obama administration. But no such luck.

One challenge in picking a Worst Cabinet Member is that there’s so much competition. Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, ticked off Pompeo, DeVos, Nielsen, Steve Mnuchin (“Certainly the slimiest Treasury secretary ever”) and Housing Secretary Ben Carson.

“But the winner is Wilbur Ross,” Ornstein concluded. “Lied about the citizenship question on the census. Powerful allegations of insider trading. Dissembled about his holdings before that. And wins the Marie Antoinette award to boot.”

Don’t let all this Wilbur lobbying sway you. Your vote counts! Let me know your Worst Cabinet Member pick and we’ll crown some winners next week.

This article originally appeared in <a id="2198f646-deda-45f7-9820-48414c74f71a" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/30/opinion/trump-worst-cabinet-member.html">The New York Times</a>.

Ross also volunteered that 800,000 people going without pay for a month was only “about a third of a percent of GDP. So it’s not like it’s a gigantic number overall.”

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