Jonathan Martin (1) (1977–)

This Will Not Pass
Author: Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Publishing Date: 2022
Pgs: 466
Dewey: 320.973 MAR
Disposition: Irving Public Library - West Campus - Irving, TX
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REVIEW MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS
Summary:
The shocking, definitive account of the 2020 election and the first year of the Biden presidency by two New York Times reporters, exposing the deep fissures within both parties as the country approaches a political breaking show more point.

This is the authoritative account of an eighteen-month crisis in American democracy that will be seared into the country’s political memory for decades to come. With stunning, in-the-room detail, New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns show how both our political parties confronted a series of national traumas, including the coronavirus pandemic, the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and the political brinksmanship of President Biden’s first year in the White House.

From Donald Trump’s assault on the 2020 election and his ongoing campaign of vengeance against his fellow Republicans, to the behind-the-scenes story of Biden’s selection of Kamala Harris as his running mate and his bitter struggles to unite the Democratic Party, this book exposes the degree to which the two-party system has been strained to the point of disintegration. More than at any time in recent history, the long-established traditions and institutions of American politics are under siege as a set of aging political leaders struggle to hold together a changing country.

Martin and Burns break news on most every page, drawing on hundreds of interviews and never-before-seen documents and recordings from the highest levels of government. The book asks the vitally important (and disturbing) question: can American democracy, as we know it, ever work again?
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Genre:
Non-fiction
Politics
Political Parties
America
Elections
Civics
Government
History
Democracy
Behind the Scenes
Dystopia

Why this book:
Because Nicole Wallace suggested it. And Cadi said she wanted me to read it so she didn’t have to.
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The Page 100 Test:
ω ◄ - balls…good…bad…sweaty…
❚█══█❚ ◄ - this requires heavy lifting

The Feel:
This is a heavy read on a heavy subject.

Reading this gives me anxiety.

Favorite Character:
Likable characters are thin on the ground in this book.

Least Favorite Character:
Considering Biden's role in the Obama administration to hold everything back and maintain the status quo, Pelosi saying that Obama was jealous of Biden is ridiculously disingenuous. Think that quote also plays to all the things that I dislike about both of them.

Least favorite characters: Donald, Don Jr, Eric, Ivanka, Nancy, Lyndsay, Joe, Kamala, Joe, Chuck, Steve, etc, etc, etc. This is watching the sausage of an American disaster being created.

Kamala comes across as haphazard. But looking at her Presidential campaign and her Senate office, she is who we thought she was. Biden's senior Old White Guys Advisory Club isn't helping keeping her in a box, picking her advisors,

Favorite Quote:
“House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith from Washington told his fellow Democrats that he believed that there was zero chance of a coup in part because Trump lacked the intellectual wattage and administrative wherewithal to carry one out. By his reckoning, Trump was more far more interested in branding his shiny, new Space Force and repainting Air Force One than in drawing up plans for an American junta. After all, said Smith his perception of trump was that he was a ****ing moron.” ...damn...that's on Page 8. But that sells his sycophants short.

Former Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam - Trump is "the first post-truth candidate" inventing an alternate reality for his voters to live in.

Hmm Moments:
"In Congress, both Pelosi and Schumer were badly diminished figures, sapped by a year of navigating the party's internal rifts." Well, maybe it's time for new leadership. The concept of national party over regional or state interests is a dying concept. We need a new paradigm for congressmen and senators who go to Washington and seem to forget the people that they really represent until election time. The Junior Senator from Cancun is a perfect example of this. Same with the congresswoman from San Francisco. The Dems especially have forgotten that all politics are local. The GOP is leveraging the local to do the same thing the Dems are, though, in service to their demagogue. The lack of 50-State strategy has bitten the Dems over and over, whether the lesson has actually been learned or not remains to be seen.

Calling the Ball:
"Biden has appeared too often captive to the arcane internal politics of his own party, prone to undermining his own arguments, and too tangled in indecision about his priorities to speak plainly to the country about what they are." ...well, duh. He is who we thought he was. Biden’s congressional career shaped him. He still looks at Congress like it functions like it did in the 80s. “I’m just a Bill” has left the building, and it shouldn’t have. But the backroom dealing of that era was an insult to the American ideal too.

The Canadian UN Ambassador speculating on Trumpism and the rifts in American political life said that this is indeed who America is now.

WTF Moments/RUFKM Moments:
Manchin commented during stimulus negotiations that his fellow West Virginians would just spend that money on drugs.

Meh / PFFT Moments:
Not just this book, but overarching, the idea that there are only two Americas. There are 20 or more Americas living in an uneasy alliance with one another.

For someone who was supposed to be as globalist as Biden has been presented as both by himself and the media, his blaming his advisors for not seeing the collapse of the Afghan government and military is ludicrous. He should have known that his advisors were full of shit about the stability of both. Hell, I'm just an amateur student of history and I saw that coming.

The Sigh:
It's amazing how whiplash fast McCarthy went from agreeing with the calling for impeachment, to censure, to photo op ass kiss in the week of January 6, 2021.

This book is depressing. Reading the insurrection and coup-lapse of America is horrifying. Reading the GOP pussifying itself before their golden calf is disheartening. Readings about the elder conservative leadership of the Democratic Party preferring to get in bed with moderate Republicans rather than their supposed progressive compatriots is demoralizing. Reading about that same leadership wanting to marginalize up-and-coming progressives in the party is dispiriting.

Turd in the Punchbowl:
Ron Kind, centrist(there's that f'n word again) Democrat Congressman from Wisconsin announced he was going to retire because he was weary of left-wing grandstanding. ...dude, you've been in the House of Representatives for 13 terms. GTFO.

Juxtaposition:
This points a spotlight at the dystopian horror of the Right and at the fatuousness of the Left, and the pompous egotism of almost everyone who wins an election to Federal office with very few exceptions. The thin line that we hang by is in question; is it the cord of the Statue of Liberty’s robe or is it a noose hanging from a tree?

During the VP search, Biden said of Harris that she didn't seem to know who she wanted to be. ... ...really, Joe. Try looking in a mirror, dude. Damn.

Schumer was described as the young leader of the Democrats in Congress at 70. Biden not trusting Schumer based on his branding him as a chameleon when he first joined the Senate where Biden was already an old hand in the long, long ago. A chameleon calling another chameleon a chameleon.

The media writers and politicians all need to stop referring to the right wing of the democratic party as the central Wing there is no Central wing if there is a central Wing it's the ones we're referring to as the left now if they were truly the left and the socialist that everybody is freaked out about that would be something but a “left wing” Democrat today would be a centrist 40 years ago.

The "centrists" in Congress and many elements in the Biden White house seeing progressives as the enemy more than the right is a problem. It also explains the schism coming in the Democratic Party. The GOP isn't the only party courting schism.

The Unexpected:
This brings home the concept of making the best bad choice that the political parties continue to saddle us with. The national party has too much power in the choosing of candidates for national office and steering policy. All politics are local only insofar as getting elected, whether you have to lie and mislead the locals or not. And deals between people in the Legislative and Executive branches are made to be broken.

So, I Was Right:
It's like Kevin McCarthy is competing with Ted Cruz to see who is more spineless.

So Biden still holds a grudge against Obama and Clinton for boxing him out of the 2016 candidacy. Well, that sounds just like the Joe that I know.

Missed Opportunity:
Could’ve been subtitled: the fragility of American Democracy and watching the sausage get made.

Get Off My Lawn:
Sigh. Poor Nancy. ...bullshit. Oh noes, instead of governing by fiat or arm twisting, she had to make deals and faced a real question about whether she would get the Speakership or not. And because of that, she’s, behind the scenes, considering whether this is her last turn as Speaker. Biden, Pelosi, Schumer: the top of the Democratic Party needs new blood.

The hypocrisy of some of these GOP leaders and members is astounding. Do they not think that all of this is going to not come back to bite them in the next election cycle? You could take this book and use it as campaign slogans against these guys.

Movies and Television:
Appeasement, the GOP story after January 6th, starring Lindsey Graham and Kevin McCarthy as Quisling and Chamberlain.
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Pacing:
Well paced writing.

Last Page Sound:
There's not a hopeful enduring this book. It is dark and foreboding.

Conclusions I’ve Drawn:
It’s a good book. It’s well written. But be prepared to have it depress the living hell out of you.

This book could've been called "They Are Who We Thought They Were".

Things I’d Like to See:
Congresspeople who have to watch “I’m Just a Bill” from Schoolhouse Rock every morning before they go to work.
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I picked up this book after listening and viewing several interviews with the authors and I would say this book is pretty much as described. The widely reported bombshells are present, although they appear within a wider context. I was impressed by the reporting and in-depth interviews the authors did to create a real sense of how many politicians conceptualized the moments covered in this book. What did frustrate me, however, was the authors clearly did not know when to end the book - the show more narrative meanders and several times I felt like I was listening to a college professor who keeps lecturing long after the allotted hour. I'm certain political junkies will get a lot out of this book, but there's likely little that would appeal to others. show less

Last in the Playbook 2012 series by Politico. They need to be read in order and are an attempt to provide some analysis of events surrounding the reelection of President Obama in 2012.

There are some nuggets that never made it into the news, or at least the news that escaped my attention. Then again, by October, I was so thoroughly saturated with 48 hour-a-day commentary and news that I was tuning it all out.

For someone with supposed administrative ability, Romney made some serious mistakes, show more some of them one can't help but wonder if the decisions were pushed because they profited his advisers. Political consultant Stevens, for example, made a bundle on the side because it was one of his companies that was hired to run the IT operation and to book the ads, yet they paid five times more for their ads than did the Obama campaign. The IT groups creation, "Orca," never worked the way it was supposed to.

As George W. Bush proved in 2004, a twenty-first-century campaign can recover from a flawed, polarizing front man. But it can’t bounce back from mismanagement and poor planning. And Romney’s billion-dollar effort seemed less an enterprise run by a corporate turnaround artist than a family business undermined by its founder’s misguided vision of the marketplace—in Romney’s case, the composition of the American electorate. Romney was brilliant at raising cash; sources on both sides of the race had never expected him to nearly match Obama’s cash machine dollar for dollar, but he very nearly did. Yet he didn’t quite know how to spend it and seemed to mistake micromanagement for management, getting bogged down in minor details that never came within a mile of Obama. One example would resonate with his staffers after it was all over. Following the primary, Romney instituted a point system that assigned a specific numerical value to each event—rallies, speeches, fund-raisers, and so on. The more labor-intensive the event, the more points it was assigned. Romney’s instructions to his assistant were that he was not to exceed nine hundred points on a given day, the better to manage his time. Romney would allocate his time based on the point system, but it was often time not well spent.

Obama's lack of business experience was an asset. Rather than micro-manage, he left the details to his "battle-scarred" veterans of the 2008 campaign, which, ironically, had never shut down and just kept working on fine-tuning their ground operation. The Citizens United decision that had everyone in an uproar probably helped, as did the efforts of Republicans at the state-wide level to suppress voting groups likely to vote Democratic. It mostly rallied the troops and brought more people out. (I personally thought Citizens United was the correct decision from a fee speech standpoint and that the controversy had much more to do with the message rather than the money. The Constitution makes it clear that freedom of association is a basic right and that those groups have freedom of political speech, especially. But then I believe the more speech the better. And to argue the money is not speech is ludicrous.) The way the money was spent was far more important, and the Obama decision to get out ahead of the game and begin campaigning against Romney even before he had the nomination made a huge difference.

In the end it was God voting for Obama that made the difference. Given the two Hurricanes, one making a mess of the Republican Convention schedule (and thank you Clint Eastwood) and Sandy validating the role of the federal government (not to mention Romney's earlier comments regarding the irrelevance of FEMA) and it was clear God wanted Obama to win. Challenge my logic. :) show less

"Leaders in both parties have found the shadow of the last presidency has been longer and darker than they anticipated...."

This book covers the time period from the 2020 election through the end of the first year of the Biden presidency. Part 1 includes the pre-election phase, with Trump mismanaging the pandemic and Biden attempting to unify the Dems. Part 2 covers the time period from Election Day through the second impeachment trial, including January 6 and Inauguration Day. And Part 3 show more covers February 2021 on, as it becomes increasingly apparent that our two-party system remains unstable. The book concludes that after the first year of the Biden presidency we are not together again. And I would add that almost another year further, we are increasingly further apart.

This one is informative and well-written, if you can bear reading about this stuff. show less