Jebberish

Think Progress' Judd Legum swears George W. Bush was sworn in as President of the United States on January 20, 2001.  "Contemporaneous reports," he argues, "suggest that America’s arcane election rules and a favorable Supreme Court ruling handed the election to Bush, even though he lacked popular support."

Legum even displays a 2001 calendar (below) which indicates that early September of 2001 came about some 7-8 months after Bush allegedly took the oath of office (photo below) in Washington, D.C. that January.  Additionally, he contends, there is evidence that Mr. Bush during that period routinely received the Presidential Daily Brief, which in one case was titled "Bin Laden Determined To Strike in U.S."  "Taking into account all the evidence," he contends,"it seems more likely than not that George W. Bush was president on September 11, 2001."

It shouldn't be necessary to explain all that. But it is if you're the guy Florida voters were daft enough to have elected their chief executive in November, 1999 and re-elected four years later.  At the second presidential debate, following criticism of President George W. Bush by Donald Trump, John Ellis Bush responded "You know what? As it relates to my brother, there is one thing I know for sure, he kept us safe."

There is, as was pointed out afterward, that slight complication of "9/11."  The younger Bush, attempting to follow the footsteps of the President who thought that PDB was no big deal ("All right. You've covered your ass, now"), may not fully comprehend the enormity of the terrorist attack which killed north of 2900 Americans. However, he should remember "9/11," which has become part of the American lexicon. (Perhaps he thinks it is a competitor of 7-11, but two hours later.)

Last Friday, Donald Trump- without even having read Legum's piece- made the outrageous claim "When you talk about George Bush — I mean, say what you want, the World Trade Center came down during his time.  Blame him or don’t blame him, but he was president. The World Trade Center came down during his reign.” He added "I’m not blaming George Bush. But I don’t want Jeb Bush to say, ‘My brother kept us safe,’ because September 11th was one of the worst days in the history of this country."

On Monday, Trump went a little further, maintaining 

They knew an attack was coming.  George Tenet, the CIA director, knew there would be an attack, and he said so to the president and said so to everybody else that would listen....

The FBI, the NSA and the CIA weren’t talking to each other.  They weren’t talking because they didn’t like each other. They had a lot of problems getting along — and that’s leadership. You know, you have to get your three main agencies to talk to each other.

Nero-like, George W. Bush fiddled while Rome burned- or, rather, cut down brush at his ranch while he knew a major terrorist attack was likely to be launched against the nation he had been almost elected to lead.   Nonetheless,  brother John wrote "In the latest episode of the reality show that is Donald Trump’s campaign, he has blamed my brother for the 9/11 terrorist attacks on our nation. That Trump echoes the attacks of Michael Moore and the fringe Left against my brother is yet another example of his dangerous views on national-security issues."

Oh, he is so losing this fight, as well as the nomination he thought he was entitled to. It is, though, too easy merely to criticize Mr. Bush because he ignores the most deadly terrorist attack ever upon the country. Unfortunately, if John had limited support of his brother to the notion of having kept the USA safe following the attack of September, 2001, he might have gotten a pass, unjustifiably, from the media and even the leading GOP presidential contender.  On All In with Chris Hayes Friday, Josh Barro explained

And I think what Jeb means when he says he kept us safe, I think it`s related to the sort of deranged approach that a lot of Americans on all parts of the political spectrum have had to terrorism in the wake of September 11th, which is there came this idea that terrorism is common and is a leading source of mortal threat to Americans. 

And the fact that we have not had another major terrorist attack since September 11th is therefore a demonstration of extraordinary effort by the government to prevent such attacks. 

In fact, attacks like this are extremely rare. It was not a normal thing there would be an attack like this and the fact that there was not another attack like that during his presidency or during President Obama`s presidency is not a demonstration that something materially changed in how good we were preventing these things. 

But a lot of people do think that. They think it was extraordinary that there were no further similar terrorist attacks on American soil.

So maybe we should be grateful that John Ellis Bush, ignorant of recent American history, overprotective of big brother, or flat-out lying, went overboard in defending Bush 43. Ultimately, he has a right to read history. He has a right to interpret history or even to erase it from memory. But he has no right to re-write history, even if he is from the House of Bush.






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Reagan: Lowering The Bar Like No Other

When Ronald (6) Wilson (6) Reagan (6) died in 2004, Peggy Noonan, the late president's speechwriter columnist for The Wall Street Journal (of course), penned a love letter to the ex-president. She remarked

It's not hard to imagine him now in a place where his powers have been returned to him and he's himself again -- sweet-hearted, tough, funny, optimistic and very brave. You imagine him snapping one of those little salutes as he turns to say goodbye. Today I imagine saluting right back.

And those were the most nuanced things she had to say about the 'ol lug.  While still a great writer and yet with the WSJ, Noonan is bold enough neither to condemn Donald Trump's nastiness nor to praise him. Instead, she comments

The only thing I feel certain of is how we got here. There are many reasons we’re at this moment, but the essential political one is this: Mr. Obama lowered the bar. He was a literal unknown, an obscure former state legislator who hadn’t completed his single term as U.S. senator, but he was charismatic, canny, compelling. He came from nowhere and won it all twice. All previously prevailing standards, all usual expectations, were thrown out the window.

Mr. Obama lowered the bar. He did, she no doubt believes, especially as compared to her hero, the 40th President.   Of the latter's 1980 campaign pledges, she once adoringly (as always, elegantly) wrote: "Done, done, done, done, done, done, and done. Every bit of it."

I don't know about Reagan's campaign pledges but I have little doubt he accomplished what he set out to do.  With a chart he credits to the Center for American Progress, Thom Hartmann explains

when GM was our largest employer and our working class were also in the middle class, CEOs only took home 30 times what working people did. The top tax rate for all the time America’s middle class was created was between 74 and 91 percent. Until, of course, Reagan dropped it to 28 percent and working people moved from the middle class to becoming the working poor.

Other policies, like protective tariffs and strong labor laws also help build a middle class, but progressive taxation is the most important because it is the most direct way to transfer money from the rich to the working poor, and to create a disincentive to theft or monopoly by those at the top.

History shows how important high taxes on the rich are for creating a strong middle class.

If you compare a chart showing the historical top income tax rate over the course of the twentieth century with a chart of income inequality in the United States over roughly the same time period, you’ll see that the period with the highest taxes on the rich – the period between the Roosevelt and Reagan administrations – was also the period with the lowest levels of economic inequality.

You’ll also notice that since marginal tax rates started to plummet during the Reagan years, income inequality has skyrocketed.

Even more striking, during those same 33 years since Reagan took office and started cutting taxes on the rich, income levels for the top 1 percent have ballooned while income levels for everyone else have stayed pretty much flat.

Aided by another chart from the Center for American Progress, Hartmann noted that union membership started to decline in 1967 but began to plummet in the first Reagan Administration.

The plunge was no coincidence.  In an interview last year, Joseph McCartin, Professor of History at Georgetown University, recalled

Labor was a prominent power in 1981. When the air traffic controllers went out on strike 33 years ago yesterday, on August 3, 1981, the labor movement was still seen as a central force in American government and politics. Both parties, Republican and Democrat, saw labor that way.

It was an important moment in American history, though, because Ronald Reagan was in the first months, really, still, of his presidency. He'd been inaugurated in January, 1981. And he was in the middle of rolling out what we call the Reagan revolution. And Reagan wanted to really turn back the clock, you might say, to an approach to American government and politics that was pre-New Deal. And part of that meant reorganizing the relationship between government and the labor movement.

The PATCO strike happened at this important turning point in American history, and it left a very profound legacy, because, as you say, Ronald Reagan first threatened those strikers to return to work within 48 hours of their walkout, and when they did not, he fired them. Not only did he fire them; he permanently replaced them. And with that action, he sent a powerful message that many employers even in the private sector acted upon after that, and it was a period of getting tough with the union movement that a really marked a profoundly important turning point.


The confluence of the beginning of the Reagan presidency and the downturn of economic indicators is stunning. Dave Johnson displays three graphs (the first from Emmanuel Saez via whitehouse.gov, the third from Federal Reserve Z-1, Bureau of Economic Analysis): the increasing share of total income flowing to the top 10%; the decline in the U.S.A.  personal savings rate; the decline in savings of the American people.

President Reagan got "tough" with PATCO and declared "They are in violation of the law, and if they do not report to work within 48 hours,they have forfeited their jobs and will be terminated."  As the media and the right, including Peggy Noonan, swooned, the legend of the swashbuckling, macho president was born. Organized labor, and the workers it represents, hasn't been the same since. Or as Noonan herself would put it: done, done, done, done, done, done, and done.

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Eyes Firmly Closed

The Response Action Network each week asks "our newsletter readers what they think about the issues facing our nation." From its website:

Digby comments "in case you haven't noticed, the Republicans are really eager to get their war on. It's really what they love."

The Response Action Network doesn't make it clear whether these questions, among the fourteen (14) posed, were asked only of Republicans.  However, there are at least three reasons to question Digby's conclusion, two aside from the realization that only two of the questions posed are related to war.

One of those is Lindsey Graham.  The South Carolina senator has called for "pulling the caliphate up from the roots" with the deployment of 20,000 USA soldiers to Iraq and Syria.  The only candidate sufficiently specific, bold, and reckless to advocate ground forces, Mr. Graham is at less than 1% in GOP presidential preference polls.

That certainly doesn't prove that the popular base of the Republican Party disagrees with Graham about the Mideast. In fact, remarkably, most Americans- and an overwhelming majority of Republicans- want to send ground soldiers to fight ISIL in Syria and Iraq. But it is very likely that most Republicans are not especially motivated by the issue of Mideast policy or foreign policy generally.

That is probably a factor. Additionally, though, some of those Republicans may not be aware that Graham thinks as they do about a military solution in the region.   Many are startingly ignorant of political issues.   Recall that a few weeks after the 2012 elections Public Policy Polling found

that 49 percent of Republican voters believe that ACORN stole the election for President Obama. That's down from the 52 percent who thought that ACORN stole the 2008 election, although as PPP points out, the decline is "smaller than might have been expected,given that ACORN doesn't exist anymore." Indeed, the community organizing NGO shut down in 2010 under relentless pressure from Republicans....

There are other, less remarkable, examples of Republican voters not having a clue. They include most of them being unaware that health care costs have risen more slowly than previously since enactment of the Affordable Care Act. A more notorious example is of Republicans believing the President of the United States was not born in the USA.- yet, as Hendrik Hertzberg once wrote

The dismaying truth is that birtherism is part of a larger pattern of rejection of reality that has taken hold of intimidating segments of one of the two political parties that alternate in power in our governing institutions. It is akin to the view that global warming is a hoax, or that the budget can be balanced through spending cuts alone,or that contraception causes abortion,or that evolutionis just another theory, on a par with the theory that the earth is six thousand years old.

Supply-side economics. Planned Parenthood. Climate change, childhood immunization. It's not only war and peace, and probably not primarily that, but across-the-board a stunning and often willful, ignorance of facts.








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Undignified Death To A Campaign

Salon's Gary Legum says it's time for John Ellis Bush to throw in the towel or shuffle off to Buffalo (not a bad town, if you discount the snow and the wind) because his presidential ambitions "are off the twig, they have kicked the bucket, shuffled off this mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible." He notes

It’s possible that something unforeseen could happen, that Donald Trump and Ben Carson could implode and Bush will pick up enough of their supporters to make himself viable again. So he’ll keep going, out of stubbornness, delusion or both. But as the race stands now, there is nothing left for him to do but make his concession speech. Or, seeing as how he can’t open his mouth without gibberish pouring out of it, have someone else do it for him.

It is even bleaker for Bush because if Trump and Carson were to implode, Ted Cruz would be ready to pick up the pieces and challenge Marco Rubio.

It's over for Bush, and there should be no dry eyes.  Early this year, Michael Kruse talked to Michael Schiavo about the 1990 effort by then-Florida governor Bush to defy the courts and Terri Schiavo's wish for dignity in death,  He wrote

I hope George W. Bush is president some day,” former Republican Party chairman Rich Bond told the late Marjorie Williams, writing for Talk magazine in September 2000. “I know Jeb will be.”

“I want to be able to look my father in the eye and say, ‘I continued the legacy,’” he told the  Miami Herald in 1994.

John Ellis Bush wanted to be able to say he "continued the legacy" like you or your neighbor might hope to get down to Home Depot, Loews, Safeway, or the neighborhood  drugstore.   Not to keep America safe, help restore the middle class, do what he can for veterans, the disabled, or children who might grow up in poverty, but continue the legacy. The presidency of the United States was to be used to satisfy some inner need of the son. The behavioral psychologists can sort it all out.

There was to be no stopping the dynasty, and in fact we did get the calamitous presidency of John Ellis' older brother.  But Republican voters are not yearning for another Bush and no tears should be shed.   Kruse recognizes John Ellis' "unartful comments on a handful of subjects suggest a man either saddled with a patrician’s tin ear, or a guy trying on the persona of a hard-right Washington hater and failing miserably."

Maybe both - sometimes on the same issue, as convenience dictates (video from The Young Turks below).  Bush certainly possesses a patrician's tin ear. And as Kruse noted in his article, "he ran for governor of Florida— as an ultra-conservative, a 'head-banging conservative,' as he put it —and lost. In 1998, he ran again, sanding those hard-right edges— and won." Throughout his career, John Ellis Bush has alternately put on the cloak of hard-right conservative and sensible moderate.   Neither has worked because, in the end, he has his family's name, incomparable access to big money, and nothing else.













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Reason To Brag

We know him from his boasts.

Back in 1987 he wrote "The Art of the Deal is 'the No. 1 selling business book of all time.'" (Hardly.)

At the National Press Club in 2014, he maintained "I have great feelings of compassion and helping people." In January of this year, he tweeted "So many people have told me that I should host Meet the Press and replace the moron who is on now. Just too busy, especially next 10 years!" (That would take him to the end of his second term as president.)

Shortly before announcing his candidacy, Donald Trump vowed if he became president he would be the "greatest representative of the Christians they've had in a long time." When he did announce his candidacy, it was “I will be the greatest jobs president God ever created" (not only the best, but annointed by God).  That wouldn't be surprising because "the blacks love me" and "I have a great relationship with the blacks. I’ve always had a great relationship with the blacks" (the blacks?). And of course "the Hispanics love me" (those who don't like border walls, presumably).

There are the endless boasts about leading in the polls, such as when in late July he tweeted "Public Policy Polling (PPP) has just come out with a major poll putting me #1 with Hispanics- leading all Republican candidates. Told you so" (a double brag-:I'm number 1 and in your face!). They rival in frequency the numerous boasts about his wealth.

Asked by The Hollywood Reporter a couple of months ago "What was the last thing you apologized for?"  Donald Trump replied "it was too many years ago to remember. I have one of the great memories of all time, but it was too long ago."

Donald Trump is not a modest man.  But now he has something really to crow about. Alex Isenstadt of Politico reports

CNBC is moving to accommodate Republican presidential campaigns over their demands for the Oct. 28 debate.

On Thursday evening, the Republican National Committee, which has been working with CNBC on the format for the debate, which will be held in Boulder, Colo., began calling around to campaigns to inform them that the program would be no longer than two hours total, according to two sources involved in the talks.

RNC officials also said that CNBC is considering format changes to allow some form of opening or closing statements.

An RNC spokesman, Sean Spicer, declined to comment other than to say: “All debates involve a process of a conversation by the RNC, the candidates and the network. We have been having a very constructive ongoing dialogue with all of the candidates and CNBC.”
CNBC declined comment.

The negotiations followed two contentious conference calls that were held on Wednesday and Thursday in which multiple campaigns expressed concerns about CNBC’s planned format for the coming debate – particularly the network’s stipulation that candidates not be allowed to give opening and closing statements.

The RNC may have had a discussion with "all of the candidates." However, Eisenstadt writes "several campaigns" (emphasis mine) "threatened to boycott the forum if their demands were not met."  Toward the end of the article, we are reminded "Aides to Trump and another leading candidate, Ben Carson, have said that they will not participate if the debate is longer than two hours, including commercials, and if it doesn’t include opening and closing statements."

Not surprisingly, "Trump fired off a celebratory tweet early Friday morning, saying that '@CNBC has just agreed that the debate will be TWO HOURS. Fantastic news for all, especially the millions of people who will be watching!'”

In this case, though, Trump had reason to brag.  This move wasn't initiated by several campaigns, but by the camps of Donald Trump and Ben Carson.  Their two candidates clearly had the most to lose by a lengthy debate not only because they are ahead of the pack, but are less informed than the other aspirants (which is quite an accomplishment).

Call it a Trump victory over the RNC or over a major network, NBC, owned by the spectacularly mighty Comcast. Either way, it's not his first, but his second, conquest since formally announcing for the Oval Office.

Following the first GOP debate, in which Trump slammed Megyn Kelly for asking a "ridiculous" and "off-base" question,  he charged (video below) on CNN that the anchorperson was "highly overrated" and a "lightweight" and at the debate had "blood coming out of her wherever."  He did not retract his remark or apologize.  Kelly, devoid of self-respect (otherwise, of self-awareness), remains at FOX News while Trump still pops up on the network.






For many Republican voters, nothing is more important than strength and success. Trump stood up to the cable news rating giant and won. He now has stood up to NBC and the RNC and won. Despite Donald Trump's enormous failings as a human being, he is what he always has claimed to be: a winner.







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Pay It Now Or Pay More Later

Steve M. believes Hillary Clinton won last night's Democratic debate because those he terms "the damn pundit gatekeepers," who value style over substance  believe she was triumphant, and that counts in the march to the presidency.

Mark Halperin believes Senator Sanders "appeared rattled and defensive when Clinton went after him. Struggled to engage his rival in a commanding way, often staring straight ahead rather than meeting her face to face;"  the National Review's Jim Geraghty argues Sander's "style doesn’t transfer well to a broader audience" while colleague Jonah Goldberg slams the Vermont senator because he "honestly thinks that presidential campaigns are won with a Ron Paul-like focus on the issues, as he defines them. And, he’s simply afraid to go for the jugular." Chuck Todd contended that Hillary Clinton was primed and ready, unlike Sanders, who "was totally unprepared. He treated this like something he'd done before."

There was insufficient attention paid by "the Kool Kidz" to issues, which is hardly unprecedented and aided by the relative lack of disagreement among the candidates.  Typical was climate change, which every candidate seemed to recognize as substantially man-made.

Lincoln Chafee wasted no time, in his opening remarks labeling climate change "a realt hreat to our planet" and in closing remarks listing it as "among the many challenges facing us."  Former Governor O'Malley linked climate change to the "cascading threats" of ISIL and of a nuclear Iran.  Front-runner Clinton cited "the opportunity posed by climate change to grow our economy" and claimed she has been "in the forefront of dealing with with climate change." Her main rivalasserted "claimate change is real, it is caused by human activity." Even the somewhat more conservative former senator Jim Webb was more progressive and realistic than any Republican candidate (save possibly Lindsay Graham, under 1% in polls), explaining as a US Senator he "was an all-of -the-above energy voter" who "introduced legislation to bring in alternate energy as well as nuclear power."

Still, something was missing in the plea of Democratic candidates not to ignore global warming. David Frum wrote in February, 2014

Congratulations: If you're reading this, there's a good chance you still have electricity. Unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of Americans hit by winter weather in the South this week couldn't join you. And ice and storms making their way north threaten loss of power stretching to Vermont.

Why do Americans tolerate such outages?

They are not inevitable. The German power grid has outages at an average rate of 21 minutes per year.

The winds may howl. The trees may fall. But in Germany, the lights stay on.

There's no Teutonic engineering magic to this impressive record. It's achieved by a very simple decision: Germany buries almost all of its low-voltage and medium-voltage power lines, the lines that serve individual homes and apartments. Americans could do the same. They have chosen not to.

The choice has been made for reasons of cost. The industry rule of thumb is that it costs about 10 times as much to bury wire as to string wire overhead: up to $1 million per mile, industry representatives claim. Since American cities are much less dense than European ones, there would be a lot more wire to string to serve a U.S. population than a European one.

Cost matters.

But now reflect:

1. There's reason to think that industry estimates of the cost of burying wires are inflated. While the U.S. industry guesstimates costs, a large-scale study of the problem conducted recently in the United Kingdom estimated the cost premium at 4.5 to 5.5 times the cost of overhead wire, not 10 times.

2. U.S. cost figures are a moving target. American cities are becoming denser as the baby boomers age and opt for central-city living. Denser cities require fewer miles of wire to serve their populations.

3. Costs can only be understood in relation to benefits. As the climate warms, storms and power outages are becoming more common. And as the population ages, power failures become more dangerous. In France, where air conditioning is uncommon, a 2003 heat wave left 10,000 people dead, almost all of them elderly. If burying power lines prevented power outages during the hotter summers --and icier winters -- ahead, the decision could save many lives.

4. As you may have heard, many Americans remain unemployed. Joblessness is acute among less educated workers, many of whom used to work in the depressed construction industry. Burying power lines is a project that could put many hundreds of thousands of the unemployed to work at tasks that make use of their skills and experience.

The interest rate for government and large utilities was low in February, 2014 (prime rate graph and chart from moneycafe.com). The prime interest rate at the time was 3.25%. It has remained 3.25%,

It's not too late to begin laying the groundwork for getting utility lines underground, to avoid periodic weather-related disasters like the one that befell Liberty, MS in June, 2014 (photo below from The Clarion-Ledger). It won't happen, of course; Republicans want to spend less money on virtually everything but the Pentagon and  Democrats are terrified of the "tax-and-spend" label. Meanwhile, we will continue to consider ourselves first-class while we are burdened with a power grid that is second-rate. And so it goes for the most exceptional of exceptional countries.

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No Help From Her

Debbie Wasserman Schultz is the GOP's secret weapon.

At the annual meeting of the Democratic National Committee in August, Jonathan Martin of The New York Times noted on CNN, "The Obama-controlled DNC could not pass a resolution this weekend expressing support for President Obama's Iran deal. It's a bit of an embarrassment for the administration, seeing as how it's his party. He appointed Debbie Wassserman Schultz."

An embarrassment, indeed, recognized Charlie Pierce, who observed

This is not the first time that she has put her parochial interests ahead of her party. Back in 2008, when she was running the DNC's "Red to Blue" project, she famously abstained from supporting three Democratic challengers to incumbent Republicans – the Diaz-Balart brothers and the ever-insufferable Ileana Ros-Lehtinen –friend to terrorists who blow up passenger jets – because she was friends with all three of them.

In the run-up to the 2008 congressional campaign, Wasserman Schultz, then co-chairperson of the DNC's Red to Blue program, and Republican Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen had

lavished compliments on each other at a Washington luncheon with Miami-Dade commissioners. "I can't say enough good things about Ileana Ros-Lehtinen; she has been my friend since I was first elected to office," Wasserman Schultz said, noting she relied on Ros-Lehtinen's advice to help balance the demands of elected office and motherhood.

Lending credence to the notion the chairperson actually may be a stealth Republican, last month 

A senior state Democratic Party official likened the national party chairwoman’s tenure to a “full-fledged dictatorship,” amplifying growing unease among some top Democrats about party leaders’ efforts to restrict the number of candidate debates during the presidential primaries.

Deb Kozikowski, vice chairwoman of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, said the chief of the Democratic National Committee, US Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, had done a disservice to grass-roots volunteers by allowing Republicans to dominate the airwaves for the last month.

“How do I tell these really dedicated Democrats who work really hard from top to bottom that debates for our presidential candidates are restricted, and they’re there watching all these Republicans get all this air time?” she said. “I think about the folks at the grass roots who work day in day out, no money no glory, because they believe in democracy with a small ‘d’ and the Democratic Party with a large ‘D,’ getting bombarded with all these Republican candidates.”

Interviewed by MSNBC, Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, a vice chairwomanof the DNC, stated "More and more people on the ground from states all across the country are calling for more debates, are wanting to have this transparency and greater engagement in our democratic process at a critical time, as they make the decision of who should be the next person to lead our country,"

Wasserman Schultz and her lieutenants evidently aren't listening to those people. Now Gabbard

said she was disinvited from the first Democratic presidential primary debate in Nevada after she appeared on television and called for more face-offs.

Ms. Gabbard confirmed on Sunday that her chief of staff received a message last Tuesday from the chief of staff to Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the chairwoman of the national committee, about her attendance at the debate. A day earlier, Ms. Gabbard had appeared on MSNBC and said there should be an increase beyond the current six sanctioned debates...

“It’s very dangerous when we have people in positions of leadership who use their power to try to quiet those who disagree with them,” she added. “When I signed up to be vice chair of the D.N.C., no one told me I would be relinquishing my freedom of speech and checking it at the door.”

Now that one of the few Democratic debates is about to be held, the image of the Party may begin to improve.  But not necessarily, as displayed below by the photo illustration from Juliana Jiminez and photos by Scott Eisen/Getty Images and Darren McCuollester/Getty Images.  Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab and professor in Stanford's Department of Communication, explains

CNN is partnering with a virtual reality company to enable viewers at home to feel like they are actually at the Las Vegas debate.

Granted, only a few hundred thousand people in the United States have virtual reality headsets at home, and of those who do, it could be a far smaller number who will actually watch Hillary Clinton square off against her main challengers Sen. Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley. But there is a risk that one or more of the candidates could look less than flattering, and that the image could go viral, creating an awkward storyline the candidates would typically want to avoid.

The fascinating question for me is why did the candidates agree to this when there is nothing to gain by participating in a debate broadcast in virtual reality?

New technologies bring new risks. In the first televised presidential debate in 1960, Richard Nixon’s ashen and sweaty appearance and frumpy ill-fitting suit made him look like he’d been “embalmed … before he even died,” then–Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley said while the dapper, bronze-complexioned John F. Kennedy appeared the clear winner, even though most viewers agreed that Nixon performed better on the issues.

It may be a stretch to call this a potential Nixon moment, especially this early in the Democratic primary. But virtual reality presents a separate set of challenges that the candidates likely haven’t considered.

First, if Clinton or Sanders wants to win in the virtual reality version of this debate, they’d better negotiate for the middle podium. In live-streamed, stereoscopic video—a cutting-edge technology that will be used Tuesday night—typically there is a sweet spot.

Toward the edges, a viewer will see less depth, something like seeing out of one eye. Close one eye and look down at your hands on the keyboard for 20 seconds. Then open your eyes and, “pop,” you will see the benefits of stereoscopic vision. 

Candidates closer to the center of the camera’s field of view will literally stand out more than those on the edges. A reach toward the camera by a candidate on the periphery may make his or her arm look stubby.

On the flipside, candidates can’t hide. The viewers will get to choose where they look, unlike the regular television viewing audience which relies on the CNN producer to decide on the camera angles. In virtual reality, those who want to spend two hours scrutinizing Sanders’ every facial tic and micro-movement can do so. The probability of YouTube-viral gaffes just went through the roof.

Then there is the issue of time. Candidates shouldn’t just lobby to stand in the center of the stage—they must speak first. Virtual reality displays can cause simulator sickness. Over time, a person’s visual system gets fatigued triggering nausea, dizziness, and disorientation. I have researched the psychological impact of virtual reality for almost two decades, and to date I haven’t worn a head-mounted display for more than 30 minutes. Tolerance for simulator sickness varies across people, but watching a two-hour debate in virtual reality will make many people feel ill.

CNN is trying to be a pioneer in a technology that is about to go mainstream. That is admirable. But this is the wrong experiment. Live-streamed virtual reality is a brand new technology, and there are bound to be some hiccups. Perhaps a pointing gesture will get distorted into a plastic man–like stretch, or a lean toward the camera will get exaggerated in depth and cause a horror-show flinch response by the audience. Remember, the volume of a scream—“Yaaahhh!!”— was enough to end Howard Dean’s campaign. 

Put aside all the jokes about Donald Trump's hair and bombast, Ben Carson's hatred of Muslims, John Ellis Bush's floundering campaign, and Carly Fiorina's utter failure at her last job, 10-11 years ago (no, not enough jokes about that one). When all is said and done and Marco Rubio (or some other candidate who has been a loyal Republican and held office) is nominated, the Republican freak-show unfolding in public will enable the mainstream media to portray the GOP nominee as a moderate reflecting mainstream values.

Mediate exults that the few people who will experience virtual reality watching the debate "will be able to feel like you’re really there in the room with Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and other people you haven’t bothered to learn the names of yet." However, it's no bargain for the candidates, who are being played for suckers not only by CNN, but by the DNC chairperson who had to have signed off on this. If she were a Republican operative the last few years, she couldn't have done a better job.  

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