Chaotic Victory Is Better Than Static Defeat
By
Leonard Zwelling
In her column on Saturday, July 13 in The Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan recounts how the Democratic Party was coming unglued. Not now. In 1948.
The progressive wing had its own party with Henry Wallace as its presidential candidate. The hard right wing of the Dixiecrats was running Strom Thurmond. “The New Deal coalition that lasted 16 years had fallen apart.” And, lest you forget, the actual President of the United States at the time was running, too. That was Harry Truman.
In a completely disordered convention in Philadelphia, Truman wrestled the nomination for himself and then surprised the country with an ever more enthusiastic whistle-stop tour on trains so he could meet the people.
It was a very fractious convention and the smart set thought Truman couldn’t beat the Republican Thomas Dewey. But, he did.
Noonan’s point is that today’s Democrats should not fear an ugly fight in Chicago at their convention. Chaos at the convention does not mean defeat in November.
As this blog has said before, Mr. Biden needs to gracefully step aside and allow the convention to determine who will run against Donald Trump. If Biden really feels that Trump is an existential threat to the United States, then do the right thing and get some younger blood in the race.
It may turn out that a messy convention cripples the potential nominee and he or she cannot recover. That’s part of the system. Staying long after your sell by date is not part of the system and Mr. Biden is last month’s milk.
This election and all elections are about tomorrow and Mr. Biden’s tomorrow does not reflect what the country needs now which is the youthful enthusiasm of 1960 after Kennedy’s election. That energized the space race, got us through the Cuban Missile Crisis, and mobilized the young people to get involved in politics.
Again, I am going to argue that a similar process must take place at MD Anderson.
It should be automatic that when a hurricane hits Matagorda Bay, MD Anderson brings in the ride out team, raises the floodgates, and cancels clinical activity for everything but in-house emergencies. That’s how it was done in 2005 during Hurricane Rita. Even though she didn’t hit us, the precautions taken by Drs. Mendelsohn and Burke and the team leader Linda Lee were appropriate. It was all prepared for. The food was there. Our orders were clear. Once we were activated, the ride out team did its job. Had this happened with Hurricane Beryl, there would have been no damage within MD Anderson and patients would have known 24 hours in advance that their clinic schedules had been altered and MD Anderson was not going to take in any clinical revenue on that Monday. In 2005, I heard no talk about clinical revenue, but rather it was all about patient, staff, and faculty safety. Even the BW couldn’t come to work and she was the Chief of Pediatrics. She wasn’t on the ride out team, so she stayed home.
It appears from the outside that no one at Anderson with the proper experience was in charge of the hurricane response system or that person made a lot of bad decisions that confused faculty, staff, and patients alike.
In the end, this miscommunication and general foul up falls to the feet of the president. Too bad there’s no convention to find a new person for that job.
