After the second two-night, Democratic Party’s debate series, the incumbent president’s continuing onslaught of racist Twitter tirades, and, among yet other unspeakable things, appalling revelations from a 1971 Ronald Reagan-Richard Nixon telephone conversation, among other things, the sum of this is almost enough to turn one into a supporter of the old-style, secretive, smoke-filled room method as the preferred way to pick candidates and political leaders. Or, perhaps, it might be even better to reach back 2,000 years further to Plato and his notion of relying on a council of wise elders and a philosopher-king to rule justly and wisely – in place of what we’ve been experiencing lately.

(Maybe this cynicism comes from a lack of sleep from following such events – or perhaps it is just a realistic response to what we’ve been subjected to recently. Or, perhaps I am just following the lead of former Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner who retired in disgust a couple of years back and who told reporters the other day, “We’ve got some of the smartest people in America who serve in the Congress, and we’ve got some of the dumbest. We have some of the nicest people you’d ever want to meet, and some that are Nazis.” Hmm….)

In Detroit on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings, 20 would-be Democratic nominees sparred in two groups of 10 each. The format for those events was a kind of lightning round question-and-answer, attack-and-riposte setup among the various candidates, with questions posed by bevvies of CNN anchors and senior reporters – and with a hyperactive stopwatch. By the end of these two sessions, some things now were clear, some were now clear as mud, and some were just plain dispiriting and astonishing.

The key themes up for debate included how to untie the Gordian knot of US immigration policy – dealing with the wave of asylum seekers from Central America in a more humane way than the Trumpian use of those dreadful incarceration camps and the separation of small children from their families. But there was also much discussion of somehow working through the various candidates’ competing healthcare reform plans; focusing on plans to relieve graduates of their student debt loads; and trying to sort out what mix of economic stimulus plans, job growth plans, urban revival ideas, and future industry support ideas would work best, and how budget and tax plans can possibly deal with all these competing demands.

Well, that is fine enough as far as it goes. The debate about competing policy ideas can be a good thing. It may help citizens better understand how complex some things really are – and that there may not be one best idea for everything. But over these two days, the debates too often hinged on an over-simplistic progressive versus moderate split, mirroring the deepening fissure within the party’s leadership cadre, and among the most actively engaged of the party’s activists.

Astonishingly, the policies and record of the Democrats’ former president, Barack Obama, despite his still holding the near-universal affection of Democrats in polling, came in for more direct criticism by the jostling horde of candidates than did Donald Trump’s policies, despite the latter’s near-revulsion by those same people. Part of this was – at least during the second night – the way some of the contestants (it is hard not to think of them that way, given our increasingly debased political culture) chose to attack Joe Biden with verbal enfilade fire.

Meanwhile, Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren on the left edge of the party in the first night behaved with interesting courtesy to each other – knowing they are appealing to the same people. Putative front-runner Biden escaped with his dignity largely intact, turning in a better performance than he had in the earlier debate. The surveys that will soon be out will almost certainly reflect this. Being a front-runner with electability is a function of perceptions. One is seen as electable and so surveys can reflect that belief – but as soon as there are real cracks in that facade, that same aura can melt away. We shall see.

It was not entirely a salutary set of debates. As Washington Post reporter Dan Balz judged it, “By the conclusion Wednesday, it seemed almost as if the Democrats had decided to put their worst face forward. Their disagreements overwhelmed almost everything else. Attacks on Trump were infrequent. And the absence of a message of hope or uplift seemed a big missed opportunity.” If so, they have some real work ahead of themselves as their unwieldy field shrinks and the serious politicking sharpens focus.

Meanwhile, Trump continued his untrammelled verbal and written flame- thrower act, this time accusing Democratic Congressman Elijah Cummings (who represents a district that includes a big chunk of Baltimore in Maryland) of being a flawed, racist, arrogant, corrupt failure who has been singularly unable to fix the ills of that city, which with its urban decay and rats, is a place no rational person would ever choose to live in. (Donald famously hates rats of all types.)

Just coincidentally, much of the district’s population is African American, as is the congressman. Surprise. And in a further “coincidence”, the congressional committee Cummings heads is heading into investigations of the president. No, not precisely a formal impeachment inquiry; but it is just a step before that. Sufficiently outraged by the president’s newest rants, The Baltimore Sun, one of the US’s most venerable and respected papers, concluded an editorial on the matter by arguing it was better to have a few vermin running loose in the city than to have one resident in the White House. Smack! – as they would say in a graphic novel.

Then there were reports many of Trump’s signature restaurants and clubs have failed numerous health inspections because of unsafe food handling, roaches, mice and….rats. The blowback got worse when it was reported that Jared Kushner’ss property company (Kushner is the senior aide, first son-in-law, and Ivanka’s husband) owned numerous properties in Baltimore that were in violation of the city’s building and health codes.

Meanwhile, one of the modern Republican Party’s patron saints, the late Ronald Reagan, turns out to have racial feet of clay as well. In a tape- recording just uncovered by Tim Naftali, the first head of the Nixon Presidential Library, back in October 1971, then-California Governor Ronald Reagan had called Nixon to complain that Tanzanian diplomats at the UN had been seen dancing when that body had replaced the Chinese government on Taiwan with the People’s Republic of China. Reagan had called the African diplomats “monkeys”, unacquainted with shoes. Reagan was a vociferous supporter of Taiwan – and he wanted Nixon to do something about all this.

Of course, Richard Nixon had been unmasked over the years as an anti-Semite and a crafty, red meat flinging, race-baiter, courtesy of his Southern strategy in order to gain the votes of all those segregation-supporting whites in the South, in order to capture the White House in 1968. But Ronald Reagan? That was a surprise, and an unpleasant one at that.

And then there are the circumstances of Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, – now nicknamed “Moscow Mitch” by a growing number of people opposed to his style, policies, and limpet-like clinging to Donald Trump’s policies, whatever they are on any particular day. We shall explain his sobriquet in a moment.

When he first came to the Senate in 1984, McConnell was usually seen as a moderate, pragmatic Republican – emblematic of the party’s rise across the South. Over time, however, he has led the opposition to stricter campaign finance laws, and during the Obama administration, he worked to withhold any Republican support for major Obama initiatives and made frequent use of the parliamentary mechanism of the filibuster to block many of Obama’s judicial nominees, including Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland. McConnell called that effort “the most consequential decision I’ve made in my entire public career”.

Most recently, McConnell prevented votes on two bills intended to ensure voting security, just a day after the former special counsel Robert Mueller had warned in his congressional testimony that the Russians were attempting to sabotage the 2020 presidential elections, “as we sit here”. McConnell has received campaign donations from four of the top voting machine lobbyists in the country. The proposed bills probably would have placed burdens on the two largest electronic voting machine vendors in the United States – Election Systems & Software and Dominion Voting Systems – through new regulations and financial burdens to make their equipment more secure from tampering and hacking. These companies supply around 80% of all voting machines used in the US.

“It’s not surprising to me that Mitch McConnell is receiving these campaign contributions,” the Brennan Center for Justice’s Lawrence Norden told Sludge last month. “He seems single-handedly to be standing in the way of anything passing in Congress around election security, and that includes things that the vendors might want, like money for the states to replace antiquated equipment.”

McConnell’s efforts also seemed out of whack with his own party, especially considering that the Senate Intelligence Committee — led by Republicans —had released a report claiming the Russians had targeted voting systems in all 50 states in 2016. Oh, and just by the way, in another bit of awkwardness, McConnell is married to Elaine Chao, the Trump administration’s secretary of transportation, a person whose family owns a major commercial shipping firm, based overseas. While these various connections do not rise to the level of garden variety corruption and illegality, they look rather a lot like the kind of miasmic, dismal swamp Donald Trump had campaigned on draining out of the body politic.

But there is more to this moral untidiness. While Democrats were being consumed by their candidate debates, the Senate confirmed Kelly Craft as the new US ambassador to the UN. Politico and other media have argued Craft had used her position as the US ambassador to Canada until now to link her coal baron husband (also from Kentucky and a man with a net worth of over $2-billion who has been – wait for it – a contributor to both the Trump and McConnell campaigns) to various Canadian mining executives.

And all of this, dear and patient readers, has been a typical week in the newest version of the American political landscape. Mr Plato? Can you give us a call? DM