Irregular

 

A January ritual was for my mom to drag my brother and I down to Bloomingdale’s to hit the annual white sales (now a woke police non-compliant name). The only obstacle between us and a great deal was my dad’s one, immovable rule—the sheets on the bed at home could be any color, as long as it was white. This ran into the other immovable truth—white sheets never went on sale. Mom would politely ask the sales clerk about what white sheets might be on sale, and the clerk would politely shake their head that none were on sale, but “are you familiar with irregulars?”

Irregular sheets weren’t from some oddball company but ever so slightly not perfect—some finished stitching might not be exact or a hem was not quite at the right angle. Whatever the case, the manufacturer chose to sell them at a substantial discount rather than trash it and eat the entire cost. And so like your friendly bartender who remembers that they have a secret stash of your favorite whiskey, the sales clerk would reach to the back of the top shelf and produce these “irregulars.” Nobody was the wiser, the store made money, and my dad slept just fine. With tomorrow’s inauguration, I have that same feeling—I want to think that everything is right, but I need an expert to show me that what went wrong isn’t ruining the whole thing.

I’m no stolen election ranter, but there’s plenty out there that needs a better explanation, not just for the facts but to help put the nation at ease. This is a distinctly different time from 2000 where we were entertained by the site of a couple of civil servants with magnifying glasses trying to determine the veracity of a hanging chad. It was focused, out in the open, and at least somebody could come to a consensus. And while the Democrats could never seem to shake off the fact that George W. Bush won (weren’t all those polls saying Gore would dominate?), Congress got legislation passed to fund modernization of voting infrastructure. Of course Congress never seemed to get around to updating the Post Office so that they could get the ballots on time to that updated voting infrastructure, but change in Washington is not a rapid thing.

Unlike Joe Biden writing his own speeches, I’m happy to give appropriate credit to Scott Johnston of The Naked Dollar column for laying out the idea of a national election investigative commission. We’ve used this kind of vehicle before, and I think the 9/11 Commission serves as great standard. We all knew that, before the terrorist attacks, the CIA and FBI were legally prohibited from sharing intelligence. It was only after open hearings and a comprehensive report that we all found out the utter dysfunction between the intelligence agencies. More troubling was the utter lack of creative thinking going on throughout the government, that somehow 20 men with penknives and a few hours of flight school training killed more people than at Pearl Harbor. The upshot was a complete rethinking of internal and external security as well as refocusing how we view threats across the world.

Of course there are plenty of 9/11 conspiracists out there who will never be satisfied. So be it—they probably find puppy pictures and warm spring days a sign of mind control. But there is too much video out there of poll watchers being denied rightful access, ballots procured from under desks, at least one confirmed case of results flipped, and other questionable activities to be ignored. Add to that a mix of administrative fiats married with judicial ascension to change otherwise infallible state voter laws and you have the recipe for years of voter dissatisfaction. After the election the courts dismissed most of Trump’s lawsuits for lack of standing, which I leave to the lawyers to sort out. But it gives Congress a chance to put evidence under the brightest TV lights their hearing rooms can shine, to dig deep, and to call witnesses and make them squirm to justify their actions.

Most of the action would focus on states that Democrats run or in areas of their local control. The mistake for the Democrats would be to call this a partisan witch hunt as their excuse not to have hearings. In the end much of what we will find out will probably be that inept government employees chose the exactly wrong time to be inept—during a close election (wait, wasn’t Biden supposed to win by 11 points?) under the watch of grainy security cameras. Unless there was some 1960 Kennedy-in-Illinois action going on, the Democrats would have the upper hand every time the Republicans cry foul in the future. It’s my firm belief that the naked truth will clear the air and restore some, if not most, of the faith in our voting system. But takeover power has a way of clouding long-term judgement, and thin majorities find a way to slip into the minority in the oddest of ways, leaving only vengeance and more mistrust.

So tonight I’ll go to sleep more annoyed that we are in perpetual and inexplicable lock down than with Biden’s inauguration tomorrow. And while my wife and I have a comfortable bed with high-quality sheets, something tells me my rest will be a little bit…irregular.

© 2021 Alexander W. Stephens, All Rights Reserved.

The Untweeting

 

Well The Donald is now “permanently” banned from Twitter, and Apple and Google have quickly followed suit in banning some alternate social media apps from their respective stores. Many see this as some great moral victory, although for what greater good is unstated. I see it as a dangerous, short-sighted move that is going to backfire, but not in the ways many people think.

While I spend (too much) time on Facebook, I don’t have a Twitter account as anything worthwhile on Twitter finds its way into mainstream media, which is more an indictment on lazy reporting. But it wasn’t until two Christmases ago that I really understood the power of Twitter. At our neighbors’ holiday party, an investment banker admitted that he had no social media account and didn’t really pay attention to any of it.

Except for Twitter. This, he admitted, was the first thing he read getting out of bed.

Why, of all things, Twitter? As he explained, “I need to know what the President said first thing in the morning. It’s what the markets are following.” And there, in all its naked power, was why Twitter mattered, and how it had gotten completely out of control. It was also a story I had heard nearly 30 years ago when many of Big Tech’s employees were infants or not even born.

The story was in Michael Lewis’ Liar’s Poker, his book about Wall Street powerhouse Salomon Brothers. One particular hazing ritual was to ask the trainee class to quote the morning’s LIBOR rate. New to the industry, there was silence primarily because nobody knew what LIBOR was, and the few who did had no inkling as to why it was so critical first thing in the morning. Yelling and ranting at Marine drill sergeant levels ensued, and suffice it to say the mistake was never made again. And while the method may have been extreme, the message was clear: LIBOR was what the markets were following, and so you need to follow LIBOR.

Twitter, then, has reached the level where it is LIBOR of communication, and the problem is that those who run the company are in way over their heads. While “permanent” in the digital world is almost an oxymoron, banning Trump is the great public step in social media’s taking sides in the political debate. This won’t end well for the tech companies, primarily because they are utterly unable to take responsibility for any of their actions. In the case of Mark Zuckerberg, big tech is literally unblinking when they say their business is for the public good. To which I remind everyone that there are two options in life: clean up your act or the government will do it for you, and the latter is never the better choice.

Somewhere in Silicon Valley there’s a happy place where if the Democrats run everything, their businesses will be protected. By the paper width of a few ballots, some of questionable veracity, they got their way for now. And I wouldn’t bank on now lasting that long, and when it ends, the loss of Section 230 protections, among others, will be devastating. The bigger loss will be in talent and vision. At what point will the best and the brightest in engineering start looking elsewhere for unicorn paychecks? The point when it stops being engineering and starts to be a social movement, like banning a prominent public official. It’s the point where you are no longer what the employment market follows first thing in the morning.

What happens next? If I had to guess the finance folks at Twitter will take a long look at how banning Trump, and the loss of his followers, will affect the bottom line. You’ll know how that analysis went if Trump is reinstated because he “has agreed to reform his behavior” or some such nicety in the press release. But don’t look to Salomon Brothers or LIBOR for answers either. A few years after Liar’s Poker came out Salomon became embroiled in a scandal where they fixed the price of government bonds. The government does not look kindly at that, and Salomon was swiftly absorbed into another bank. And the paramount LIBOR? The banks colluded to fix that rate for years and it had to move to another exchange before it will be decommissioned in the next few years. Nothing may be forever, but for Jack Dorsey he might remember that Myspace was the dominant, unbreakable leader with money pouring in and talent beating down its doors. That is until it was gone in less time than it takes to type 280 characters.

© 2021 Alexander W. Stephens, All Rights Reserved.

Against The Odds

 

The New Year gavels in another session of New York’s legislature, and one thing is clear: the search for money to plug the state’s gaping deficit is first, second, and third on the agenda. Once again a Cuomo is looking to gambling to raise significant amounts of money, and once again it looks like a Cuomo will botch the whole affair.

Gambling (in the form of table games and slot machines) had long been forbidden by the State’s constitution, with then-Governor Mario Cuomo managing to push the envelope a bit by working with upstate Indian tribes to build casinos on reservation land. Never heard much about them? Not really surprising—the gaming offered tepid rewards, the locations were hard to get to, and there were no arenas for concerts.

Son Andrew managed to get through changes in the state’s constitution (an impressive feat) to legalize, in limited quantities, real casino gaming. The result? The highest grossing tables in the country lie not off the glitz of the Vegas strip but off the ass end of Aqueduct Raceway, home to an otherwise despondent horse track and even more despondent bettors. Before Covid, the only thing limiting growth there was the physical footprint of casino’s walls.

But then the sports book took everything over.

In what might be the only contribution from former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, his administration sued, and won, for the right to operate sports books outside of Nevada. Long the sole domain of Vegas, the most successful sports book in the country is now at the ass end of Meadowlands race track, home to the most despondent form of horse racing, the trotters, and across from Met Life stadium, home of the even more despondent Jets and Giants. But in all of this there is one great lesson: the tri-state area has money to bet and has shown an unbridled willingness to put its money on the table. Could there be one more, great leap?

Absolutely—your phone.

Online sports betting is now the last great gambling frontier in New York, and the Governor is enthusiastic about it. Almost. His position about the current proposal is, “That makes a lot of money for casinos, but it makes minimal money for the state. I’m not here to make casinos a lot of money, I’m here to raise funds for the state. So, we have a different model for sports betting.” This was the same model that drove the local Off Track Betting (where even I would go to put down the occasion wager on a Belmont Stakes race) out of business because the state taxed it so much that it was the only bookie that couldn’t make a profit. Even in blue New York City there was no political appetite to subsidize this government fiasco.

Some might see this as a great metaphor for Democrats vs. Republicans, that corporate profits are such a bad thing that they have to be taxed into the ground until the very business ceases to exist. Others might see the socialized medicine analogy that only government knows what is right for its people. What everyone sees, and the numbers bear it out, is some $500 million a year in tax revenue for New York State. How Cuomo thinks he is going to rake in this kind of money without the private sector working hard to make the very money he is going to tax is unclear. There’s no over/under on whether it would work given that it flies in the face of any viable business model.

Nobody should be under the illusion that New York’s economic salvation will come from DraftKings ringing on their phones. And let me be very clear that I recognize gambling, particularly the sports book, and especially a phone app, can destroy a person’s life with a few swipes. But there is a way for casinos to make money, the state to gain robust revenue, and, not incidentally, decimate the illegal bookmaking market. I’m just not betting the Governor will know how to do it.

© 2021 Alexander W. Stephens, All Rights Reserved.

A Voter’s Best Friend

In all that has been 2020, there was nice bit of comic relief during the end of the presidential campaign. In what I thought was a Saturday Night Live digital short, a series of black-and-white images of past presidents (and former VP Biden) with their dogs proceeded across the screen, with a final image of President Trump noticeably without a canine companion. The message: you can’t elect a president who doesn’t have a dog. It turns out that this gem was actually produced by a group called “Dog Lovers for Joe.” And while the impact upon the electorate was no doubt minimal, there was a significant upside compared to other efforts: it didn’t cost much to put together.

Now there’s no separating money from politics. But I am concerned that we are now at a point where people are spending mind-numbing sums to achieve nothing. For this particular election cycle, running for the US Senate has been a center of negative return on investment. Let’s look at a few particularly egregious examples:

• Amy McGrath raised some $84 million to lose to Mitch McConnell by nearly 20 points. For a few grand she could have printed posters at Kinko’s, done just as well, and used the rest to send every American household a bottle of Kentucky bourbon.
• In Iowa, Theresa Greenfield raised $50 million to lose by a relatively modest 6 points to Joni Ernst. Still, do you need that much to lose outside of a pollster’s margin of error?
• Sara Gideon raised $70 million to lose to Susan Collins by 9%. Outside of a whopping spending spree at L.L. Bean, I’m not sure how you spend that much money in Maine.
• And then there is Jamie Harrison’s $100 million blow out for a 10 point loss to Lindsey Graham. At $91 a head, he could have bought nearly a year of Netflix for each of his 1.1 million voters and saved South Carolina a lot of agitation.

This, and it’s hard to fathom, was all chump change compared to this cycle’s pint-sized king of failure, Mike Bloomberg. What he lacked in charisma, voter connection, or political ability he made up for in profligate spending. Going for the highest office in the land cost him around $1 billion (yes, a big old “B”). Throw in the $100 million he tossed around in Florida to defeat Trump and it comes up to the GDP of a fair chunk of the Caribbean. Put in a more tangible way, a squadron of F-35 fighters runs about $1.2 billion. Tax, title, and guided missiles are extra, but in this league you could shake out the spare change in the couch cushions and make up the difference.

And while I make fun of these spectacular, Democratic Party, failures, it raises a serious question: how can smart people who presumably understand how to spend money wisely can be so very, very bad at their political jobs. Some of it lies in the ego of any ambitious politician in thinking that they, and only they, can slay incumbent giants. Some goes to sloppy polling that gives candidates a false sense of having a chance. And sure, TV advertising is expensive, except in markets like Iowa, Kentucky, South Carolina, and Maine. But I fear, and really mean fear, that a political-industrial complex of advisers, consultants, election law experts, and production specialists has made the whole process about them, not the candidates. This election Pentagon has an expense for everything, a cut to take on top of that expense, and multiples to prove a point.

And now there is the matter of two run-off elections in Georgia to control the US Senate. I’m guessing each of the four candidates will spend $100 million each as a base price, not the ceiling. Perhaps the future holds that some people will resist the temptation to run merely because they can throw money around, chances be damned. Perhaps not. But one thing is true: this whole process has gone to the dogs.

© 2020 Alexander W. Stephens, All Rights Reserved.

Put A Stamp On It

 

Utterly reckless.

Completely stupid.

What were you thinking?

Suffice it to say there were even more comments whose language would not be appropriate in this family forum. And these were from my friends.

You would think I was advocating a Bangkok brothel tour without condoms. And while I did touch something young, sleek, and thin, I feel the risk was highly overrated. Last week I put my absentee ballot in the mail.

Much has been said about mail-in balloting, and most of it poorly informed. My local congressional primary was the subject of intense scrutiny, sometimes making national news. It even got a quick mention during the first presidential debate, if you were able to hear above the din of either candidate. Some of the envelopes for returning absentee ballots were business reply mail which, as it turns out, doesn’t get postmarked. This wouldn’t be a problem if one of the key factors was making sure the envelope was postmarked by Election Day. Litigation ensued and a wise judge allowed the ballots to be counted as long as they were in by the final prescribed day after the primary.

Problem solved, right? Wrong.

Turns out the biggest problem with ballots that were disqualified was that the voters did not sign the internal return envelope. That’s right, people couldn’t follow directions.

There was universal hemming and hawing, but nobody should have been surprised. The areas from where the challenger was strongest had a younger demographic, a group that may never have mailed a bill payment in their life. They wouldn’t know to read the instructions because they are so used to swiping and tapping. The incumbent’s base skewed older and probably to this day writes their account numbers on their checks before carefully sealing the payment envelope and gently placing it in the mailbox. Even if all the challenger’s votes had counted, it probably would not have been enough, but it’s a lesson I’m not sure the rest of the nation fully understands.

So was I scared of COVID at my polling place? Hardly. I may very well be out of town on Election Day and am scrupulous about keeping a perfect voting record. The top line is no contest in New York, but there is a very competitive local assembly race that could be decided by just a few votes. Plus who am I to pass on an opportunity to avoid having the government waste my time?

New York only recently discarded its Eisenhower-era pull lever voting machines with bubble scanners. The problem isn’t the new technology but the fact the poll workers probably voted in an Eisenhower election. So when the scanners go down, there isn’t a lot of expertise to fix the problem. It wouldn’t be so bad because any 12 year-old could reboot the system in a couple of minutes, but since 12 year-olds can’t vote, there aren’t many around to help. What should be a quick exercise goes on for hours.

So I began my absentee journey online, in a fit of surprisingly easy clicks that let me apply for a ballot. A few days later the paper arrived and I filled it in and made sure I signed the internal envelope. The one with the big, bold box on it that says “You must sign here.” The one that is easy to read and follow its directions. I could follow all the steps of my ballot’s journey on the Board of Elections’ website, from application, to ballot mailing, to when the Post Office got my returned ballot, to when the Board of Elections received it. There was more detail than an Amazon delivery, which could be an interesting idea for next year—order your overpriced, organic apples from Whole Foods and Jeff Bezos will deliver your absentee ballot as well.

There was one, old-fashion thing I did before putting my ballot in the mail. Pulling out my hyper-accurate kitchen scale, I weighed the envelope. The reading came in at exactly one ounce, only one stamp needed. But then I thought long and hard, and put on a second stamp in case something was slightly off and it all went wrong. What in the world would my friends say then?

© 2020 Alexander W. Stephens, All Rights Reserved.

The Covid-in-Chief

 

“America—The Reality Show” got off to a terrific start last week. In Florida, video showed a bearded man, shirtless and holding a beer in the midday sun, getting tackled to the ground by a police officer. The TV networks, bereft of original programming, broadcast two men in their ‘70’s yelling at each other, leading to the instantly meme-worthy outcry, “Would you shut up, man!” None of this would be of any interest if the characters weren’t so important. The first was a former Trump campaign manager who, in all seriousness, is now receiving some much-needed professional therapy. The latter were not Statler and Waldorf from the Muppet show but the President of the United States and the former Vice President of the United States in a campaign debate. Only the wildest of creative writers could wish for an even more improbable way to top all of this: the President caught the Covid bug. But like many things, be careful what you wish for because it might come true.

For some, Trump’s Covid proved how wildly reckless he has been at protecting his mask-less health. Others will see it as vindication as to how random the virus can be contracted, given that it took some six months for him to get sick under the “reckless” circumstances. Employing unintentional humor, left-leaning conspiracists put forth that the whole thing was a hoax so that the President would get…sympathy (a word heretofore unassociated with this administration). Take your pick.

Being President, and especially campaigning for the job, is an exhausting endeavor. You crisscross the country, seemingly fitting 30 hours into a 24 hour day. You are traveling in planes whose air is, literally, desert dry. You swing from the frozen tundra of Wisconsin to the heat of Florida in a single day, day after day. Four years ago Hilary Clinton was felled by a few fainting spells and candidate Trump suffered from what was obviously a head cold during one debate, sniffling through his answers. The Clinton camp put forth that their woman suffered from “dehydration” while the media immediately accused Trump of having a raging cocaine habit. All I know is that if a presidential candidate doesn’t get sick along the way I would be suspicious. Are they even trying?

Nobody approached traveling across the world as full-contact competition more than Bush 41. His global itineraries pushed those half his age to exhaustion while he seemed to be wound up every morning, ready for more. This all caught up to him during one whirlwind tour of Asia while at a dinner in Japan. Something went gastrically wrong and the President dive bombed a perfectly accurate vomit stream into the Prime Minister’s lap. Clearly Bush 41 needed medical attention, and the protocols in place kicked in. Apologies were made, late-night comics got some free material, and somewhere I’m sure Vice President Quayle got a call that the boss was under the weather. What I don’t recall was seeing a single line of copy blaring “Governing Crisis,” “Continuity of Government,” “Fresh Upheaval,” “Transition of Power,” or “Greatest threat to Presidential health since the Reagan assassination attempt.” I didn’t see it back then because it wasn’t true, and it isn’t true now, despite each of these quotes appearing in just in one CNN article on Friday.

Make no mistake, the President’s Covid case is of great concern. His age and weight put him in higher-risk categories, and sending him to Walter Reed hospital was a prudent move. Yes, there has been confusion about how ill Trump was on Friday, but then again he ambled across the White House South Lawn in no more or less of hurry than his other helicopter trips. No bullets had rung out, no mob of Secret Service agents diving around, no blood on his shirt. Trump’s voice was hoarse, he was running a slight fever, and he was run down. Under any other imaginable circumstance a President running for reelection might simply need to get some more sleep and cancel an event or two. Given the President’s prognosis, this is probably what is going to end up happening, albeit with more swabbing than the deck of a Navy ship.

So with four Tuesdays left until the election, where does this all leave us? Those in the know have seen Biden move away from his Rose Garden (or really, basement-in-Delaware) strategy and visit some battleground states, events with scattered supporters and a few campaign signs taped up in the background. Why? The President and Vice President Pence were, up until the weekend, ramping up their travels, with multiple rallies across different states every day. These may not be the 15,000-person extravaganzas of old, but 5,000 people outside an airport hangar a couple of times a day starts to add up. With all the accompanying local media coverage for each visit, it’s a potent weapon that the Democrats underestimated four years ago.

And with some rest and an otherwise clean bill of health, how will the President emerge? Trailing in tight races, he could go all out. His campaign organization knows how to put together events in record time and with Hollywood production values. The spending spigot will open and ads will flow freely. His followers, having survived this scare, may see it as a second chance to pull out an election victory. A man facing the final act of his political life will be focused and reenergized for the last month of his last campaign.

Many in this country, even around the world, may have wished for the President to get a taste of his own Covid medicine. My advice would have been to be much more careful what they wished for. As Japanese Admiral Yamamoto so famously observed about America after Pearl Harbor, “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”

© 2020 Alexander W. Stephens, All Rights Reserved.

The 25% Solution

 

There’s an old ad that starts, “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV.” It’s a parody on the endless stream of medical TV shows and has been the subject of any number of spoofs itself. Go to any restaurant and your waiter may be a struggling actor yearning for any role, even playing a doctor on TV. Here in New York City, it seems that this make believe is now reality. Beginning today the city’s eateries are allowed to have patrons eat indoors, but before anything may commence your server has to take your temperature and pronounce you fit enough to eat. Forget Obamacare—it seems M.D. now means marinara deliziosa.

Some 25,000 restaurants in the Big Apple, and over 300,000 of their employees, have been robbed clean by Gov. Cuomo, allowed only to provide takeout or delivery. Eventually restaurants in town could add sidewalk dining or sheds in the street. As a summertime diversion, it was all kind of fun—Mardi Gras comes to Manhattan. Nobody had a job, or if they did it was all “remote working at home,” and you could drink on the streets without much of a hassle from the cops. There was a vague Parisian café scene, well that is if the French liked traffic zooming by inches from your table and the leaking stench of garbage bags surrounding you.

Make no mistake, though, the party has been a Potemkin village. Where half a dozen waiters would roam inside in addition to a host and a bartender or two, now there was but one waiter and a manager, the latter doubling as busboy and drink maker. Doing the math, the luckiest of places might put out 25% of their chairs—chairs that had to be back inside by 11:00 PM. Not exactly a recipe for success in the city that never sleeps.

25% is also the percentage of seats that are now allowed for indoor dining. Beyond the expense of hospital-grade ventilation and other requirements more suited to a surgical suite, restaurants have to close indoor dining at midnight. If there seems to be no rhyme or reason to any of this, there isn’t. For months the city has been at an infection level that officials have considered safe for indoor dining. In fact the rest of the state has had indoor dining at 50% capacity, in some counties for months. It’s enough to drive a man to belly up to the bar and try ease this pain with a drink—except drinking inside bars will remain banned.

Why are the Governor and Mayor at war with the food industry? I have no idea. You wonder if this would be so very, very different if they were up for reelection in five weeks. They claim that unlike the rest of the state, the city’s restaurants pose a special health hazard. Pre-Covid, the greatest hazards have been slow service or the eventual, overpriced bill. But breathing is breathing, be it in Brooklyn or upstate Broome County. How one is worse than the other is a legal mystery, one soon to be unraveled. Lawsuits about this very point—how areas with the same infection rates can be treated so differently—have been filed and are making their way through the courts. It will be interesting to see how Cuomo’s lawyers will try to wriggle out of this logic, and if any judge will buy it.

Alas the battle may already be over. While the Mayor has offered outdoor dining as a year-round option, he also says that any enclosed outdoor tents can only have…25% capacity. While enjoying a beer and snack in winter’s cold is an après ski tradition in Park City, Utah, frozen alfresco dining off of Park Avenue isn’t likely to catch on. And with 90% of the city’s restaurant’s unable to make rent last month, 25% capacity, inside or out, is financial bleeding that any doctor—medical or financial—cannot fix. Even on TV.

© 2020 Alexander W. Stephens, All Rights Reserved.