Harold Evans/Reuters
We have a year and seven fretful months before the Democratic Party’s national convention decides its nominee for president in July 2020. In the last race, the Republicans fielded 17 major candidates. The smart money was on Florida Governor Jeb Bush. He dropped out in February 2016, too choked up to mention Donald Trump, who emerged as the clear nominee that May. Tricky business, this forecasting, but here’s a pick of some air-worthy kites.
WILL A SEAL DEBATE A SHARK?
The first question, as important as whether candidates have eaten pork belly in Iowa, is how they match up on a debate stage with Trump. The Democrats need someone who can command him to back off, or freeze him with a smile when he repeats the “Jaws” trick of circling his opponent, as he did with the much shorter Hillary Clinton while she took her turn.
So in 2019, look for Retired Admiral William McRaven. He’s not running as of yet, but he has a memoir coming out in May that’s going to remind everyone what a hero he is. The SEAL commander surely has the best resumé entry on the planet: he planned and commanded the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, although according to Trump it would have happened a “lot sooner if he’d been in charge.” Sure.
In person the brave, brainy and eloquent former University of Texas System chancellor is cool enough to repel any fusillade from a president who doesn’t let a clean fact stand in the way of a crude insult. Trump tested the customary restraint of military brass when, seemingly out of sheer cussed pique, he stripped former CIA Director John Brennan of his security clearance. Remove mine, too, said McRaven, addressing the president in the Washington Post: “Through your actions, you have embarrassed us in the eyes of our children, humiliated us on the world stage and, worst of all, divided us as a nation.”His steadfast character and impeccable national chops may be just what Americans want after the traumatic resignation of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.
Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff of California is the rising star who could step in as the Atticus Finch candidate. Never has there been a more timely need for an unequivocal exponent of justice. Schiff will come into his own in election year as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, rational and unblinking in his analysis of the legal swamp that’s immersed the president in at least half a dozen investigations. As Schiff puts it in the New Yorker, “Trump has created a constituency for people who are not running around with their hair on fire.”Howard Schultz is the man who made you addicted to your Caffé Americano or cold foam cappuccino. He is big and brash enough not to be fazed by Trump at full steam. As the former CEO of Starbucks, he’s a genius marketer and a genuine job creator — 277,000 at last count — and the release of a new book in February will be the likely opening shot of his presidential campaign.
Oprah Winfrey has said she’s not running, but her Nov. 1 performance on the stump for Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams was so emotionally powerful it showed she could be a female Obama on steroids. The “Draft Oprah” movement could be too deafening for her to resist.
WHAT CLIMATE CHANGE?
The World Meteorological Organization forecasters are ahead of us in giving names to hurricanes and storms that will arrive in 2019. Start with Andrea, who may be a friendly type, and end with Wendy and who-knows-what. Climate change deniers will observe the usual rule: the more extreme the weather, the more quickly they will change the subject. No matter that dried-out California saw its deadliest and most destructive fire season on record this year, killing at least 86 people, burning nearly 1.9 million acres and reducing a town of 26,000 to ash. Nor that hurricanes Florence and Michael pounded the East Coast, killing scores and causing $33 billion in damages.Public opinion has veered toward acceptance of the underlying science. In August, a scientific paper warning that earth was barreling toward a permanent “hothouse” state went viral, notching an unprecedented 270,000 downloads in just days. In the following months, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and U.S. government published their most dire climate assessments to date, their warnings underscored by deadly heat waves and headline-grabbing temperature records. Meantime, global carbon emissions picked up like a “speeding freight train” after a three-year plateau.
But short of an early flood at Trump’s Mar-a-Largo resort, crusaders for action in 2019 and beyond will have to challenge the entrenched power of fossil fuel companies if they ever want to move the needle. Global warming denial did not spring into being organically; it was conceived of and nurtured by the extractive industries who block or slow change to stay in business.
As investigations by the Los Angeles Times and others have revealed, Exxon privately acknowledged a “general scientific agreement” on anthropogenic climate change as far back as the 1970s but resolved to muddy the waters, lest the revelations threaten its business model. It found eager allies in the Republican Party. Frank Luntz, a consultant for George W. Bush, put it bluntly in a private memo: “Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.”
All this supposed uncertainty has made an impression on Trump. His synthesis of the science of climate change boils down to this: “I believe there is weather. I believe there’s change and I believe it goes up and it goes down, and it goes up again. And it changes depending on years and centuries, but I am not a believer and we have much bigger problems.”