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New: Landmark Application for Harris Home Will Not Be Filed For Now

Keith Burbank, Bay City News Service

Thursday March 11, 2021 - 03:13:00 PM

An application will not be filed to make U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris' childhood home in Berkeley a historic landmark, the man working on the application said Wednesday.

Steven Finacom, a member of Berkeley's Landmarks Preservation Commission, heard from the property owners Tuesday who are concerned greater attention to the home will disrupt the lives of neighbors.

Finacom said the property owners are part of a family that has been in Berkeley for a long time, and he thinks they place a high value on the connections they have with their neighbors.

"Berkeley does not require owner support for landmark designations, but in this case, and given the tumultuous times, I'm happy to honor the request of the owners and will not pursue submitting the landmark application," Finacom wrote in an email.

Last Friday, City Councilmember Kate Harrison announced a resolution she said the council would consider Tuesday related to the landmarking of Harris's home.

The resolution aimed to clarify that homes like Harris's are eligible for historic landmark status. But Harrison said earlier this week she was withdrawing the resolution after receiving clarification from city staff.

Harris was born in Oakland but spent most of her childhood in Berkeley. She was part of the city's first voluntary school integration process, according to Harrison's office.

Finacom said he will continue his research on the home Harris spent part of her childhood in "because it's a fascinating piece of Berkeley history, dating back to about 1910 and there are stories of other Berkeley families to be told, along with the Gopalan-Harris family."

While it was unclear to some whether Harris's home qualified for Berkeley's historic landmark status, Finacom referenced a city statute that makes it clear.

Under Section 3.24.110 of the Landmarks Preservation Ordinance, structures qualify if they have either educational or historic value.

"History may be social, cultural, economic, political, religious or military," the ordinance says.

Some people have mocked "the idea of recognizing the childhood home of Kamala Harris as a City of Berkeley Landmark," Finacom said.

People "should keep in mind that there are scores of formally designated historic buildings and sites around the country that honor the birthplaces, homes, and other sites associated with past Presidents and Vice-Presidents of the United States, and other notable political figures," he said.

"Many of those buildings have some of the highest levels of national preservation recognition, as National Historic Landmarks, or National Historic Sites," he added.

The U.S. Department of the Interior is now considering George W. Bush's home in Midland, Texas, for adoption into the national park system.

So, considering Harris's Berkeley home for a historic designation is fully mainstream, Finacom said.

"In fact, discussion of this contributes to an important and necessary process of expanding that mainstream to honor and preserve places associated with the lives of People of Color," he said.

Often, those places in Berkeley are very humble "such as small homes, apartment buildings and modest storefronts, usually in the Berkeley flatlands," he said.

Harris's home in Berkeley "is a physically undistinguished and rather ordinary home in far west Berkeley," according to Finacom's email.

"There is as much value in, and as much to learn from, that little stucco rental home where Kamala Harris grew up as there is in Abraham Lincoln's childhood log cabin or Franklin Roosevelt's opulent family estate on the Hudson," he said.

Why the Droste Resolution is Bad History, Bad Planning and Bad for Berkeley

Becky O'Malley

Sunday March 07, 2021 - 05:00:00 PM

So, last week we introduced the concept of the Pandemic Putsch, the quick and dirty drive by real estate speculators and their elected enablers to take the power to regulate land use away from local governments. We focused on the Berkeley version, helmed by District 8 Councilperson Lori Droste, aided and abetted by Mayor Jesse Arreguin and endorsed by a majority of the City Council with a resolution that was green-washed, black-washed and hogwashed with more than a spoonful of saccharin to make it go down.

The good councilpersons have been fooled by the, shall we say, unique version of Berkeley’s Black history promulgated by Droste and her YIMBY allies. Much of what she purports to know about the topic happened before she was born, certainly before she moved to Berkeley from her hometown of Centerville, Ohio (pop. ~23,000), so let’s review the facts.

She claims, for example, that Berkeley is the birthplace of single family residential zoning, and further, that the primary purpose of SFR zoning in Berkeley was to prevent African Americans from buying houses in Berkeley. In fact, Berkeley was indeed one of the earliest places to zone for single family homes, but the main purpose of the early 20th century legal device of residential zoning was to separate homes of all kinds from noxious industrial uses.

My old friend Marc Weiss explains all this in his seminal book The Rise of the Community Builders, a book councilmembers should be required to read before opining on zoning law.

Key quote: “Indeed, some of the more sophisticated zoning laws, such as Berkeley’s, actually created exclusive industrial use districts to protect factory owners from complaints and lawsuits by low-income residential neighbors.”

Residential zoning has never been only“single family”. Residential zoning has accommodated many kinds of buildings and living groups with a variety of classifications such as the multi-unit R2 zone. Already in Berkeley R1 zones now allow up to 3 units in the right circumstances.

In Berkeley, like many college towns, many of the so-called “single family” houses near campus became all sorts of group homes—rooming houses, shared rentals, communes, co-ops and more. Many Berkeley widows rented spare rooms to a student or two. Home-based occupations like music lessons and psychotherapy have always taken place in Berkeley’s “single family residences” with or without the law’s explicit blessing.

Residential zoning of all kinds has certainly had racist side effects in expensive areas, but the principal racist tricks in the first half of the 20th century were restrictive covenants on deeds, enforced by the real estate industry. These were employed to exclude those of non-European descent and even Jews from buying in the fancier districts, accompanied by claims of protecting property values. Chinese people were a particular target of exclusion in the early years as would-be home buyers, though not as servants.

These practices were legal until 1963, when the Bay Area’s first African-American Assemblymember, Berkeley’s William Byron Rumford (elected in 1948) succeeded in getting the Rumford Fair Housing Act to become state law.

Enacted at the state level despite opposition from the California Real Estate Association, the Apartment House Owners Association, and the Chamber of Commerce, the Rumford Act banned racial discrimination in housing transactions. Those industry groups quickly succeeded in getting Proposition 14, which was intended to overturn the Rumford Act, passed as a ballot initiative in 1964. But Prop.14 was subsequently overruled by the U.S. Supreme Court, upholding the Rumford Act.

Anyone who thinks that the history of race relations in Berkeley began and ended with the zoning code of a hundred years ago should bone up on Berkeley’s later history, especially William Byron Rumford’s role. Among other things, Rumford took part in Berkeley’s efforts to secure the release of our Japanese-American citizens who were interned during World War II, while also working to secure housing for the southern Blacks who migrated here during the war to work in defense plants. My daughters heard stories of that period of Berkeley history from an African-American teacher at Berkeley High whose family lived in the flatlands home of an interned family during the war and gave it back to them when they returned.

A statue of William Rumford has recently been erected on Sacramento Blvd., across from the site of the pharmacy he owned there for many years after his service in the Legislature.

It’s true that real estate interests and developers persisted in their illegal exclusionary practices well into the 1970s despite the law. Ying Lee, future Berkeley Councilmember , who is Chinese-American, told me that in the ‘60s she and her math professor husband, John Kelly, were prevented by real estate chicanery from buying a house on the same Elmwood block where both Councilmember Droste’s family and mine now own homes, even though it was contrary to the Rumford Act.

There were in this period, to be sure, some heroic individuals in real estate who actively tried to promote housing equity—Arlene Slaughter notable among them. Eventually their efforts to end discrimination largely succeeded. For decades distinguished Black citizens of means have made their homes in the Elmwood: Judge Thelton Henderson, Judge Henry Ramsey and many more. Neighbors on our block have included both African- and Asian- Americans in all the close to 50 years we’ve been here.

But at the same time the percentage of Black residents of Berkeley has shrunk from about 30-35% to about 5-10%. Why should that be?

CM Droste’s draft legislation, now in its third revision, is based on undocumented claims that upzoning areas now zoned for “single family residential” to allow four or more units on each lot will be the solution to what she defines as Berkeley’s “housing crisis”. But Berkeley has already has met 124% of a state-mandated quota for building market rate housing, so we don’t need more of that.

Berkeley has just gotten too expensive. What we have is not just a "housing" crisis, we have an affordable housing crisis, and more accurately a low-cost housing crisis.

The real problem is that too many people who work in Berkeley are paid too little to live here. What makes this look like a racial crisis is that underpaid workers are disproportionately black and brown, just as they’ve always been. Similar housing situations now exist in many American cities, not just Berkeley, because of the financialization of residential properties, as vulture capitalists snap up distressed homes, bundle and market them to rich investors, often international.

We also have a university addicted to impossible expansion of enrollment with scant consideration of where all these students and their attendant service workers will live.

Now smaller houses in south and west Berkeley, the ones currently or formerly occupied by people of color, are the ones with developers’ targets painted on them. It won’t be the houses in the hills which will be torn down, of course--much of Berkeley’s prohibitively expensive housing stock is in hill areas with steep, narrow, winding streets, where fire risk will preclude adding more buildings.

What the quick and dirty members of the development industry (yes, the same kinds of folks who tried to sink the Rumford Act all those years ago) count on is acquiring the remaining “single family “ homes in Berkeley’s flatlands, often these days lower-priced rentals to multi-generational families of color, demolishing the existing house to build four or more small units, and most likely selling them as pricey condos to tech commuters or renting to groups of students.

And meanwhile the tenant family must move to Vallejo, or Antioch, or even Tracy and drive for hours to work in Berkeley.

It’s not just people of color who are suffering from this distorted housing market—even working white families are getting priced out. Home prices go up, and wages don’t.

The problem is not zoning, it’s income disparity. The adjacent graph tells it all.

Meanwhile, the chattering classes have swallowed Wiener and Droste’s disinformation hook, line and sinker. They love what they perceive as a man-bites-dog story: "Progs finally side with developers! Who knew?"

(For a particularly goofy example, see:

How Berkeley Beat Back NIMBYs : is California finally ready to accept a more sustainable way of life? )

But converting single family homes in neighborhoods created by redlining to investment opportunities for the global ultra-rich is not reparation for decades of discriminatory real estate practices. It’s dishonest to claim that it is, but that doesn’t stop data-free neo-liberal pundits posing as progressives from doing so.

What’s needed, among other things, is real reparations, a genuine attempt at financial redress for the generations descended from enslaved people who have long been deprived of the opportunity to build family wealth by a discriminatory marketplace. And also, we need a lot more low-rent housing for those at the bottom of the income scale--and absolutely no more market-rate (i.e. very expensive) housing for the privileged. Affordable workforce housing could be co-ops, government subsidized social housing, conversions of larger building—there are lots of viable options if excess profits are off the table.

One more point: the kind of spot re-zoning that the Droste resolution backs is dreadful planning, no matter what the objective. It could well be time to take an overall look at zoning for use, now that our work-at-home experiment has been in place for a year/ Mandating instant over-the-counter permits administered by staff without neighborhood input is no way to make correct decisions.

This discussion was supposed to be Pandemonium Putsch 2.0, exploring how San Francisco’s State Senator Scott Wiener and associates, including Senator Nancy Skinner, have been (dare I say it) conspiring at the state level to end local control of land use in order to enrich the development industry. But this is at best Putsch 1.5—the state chapter will have to wait.

Meanwhile,former Berkeley Planning Commission Chair Zelda Bronstein and Tim Redmond at 48hills.org have been doing a great job of covering the Bay Area regional story, and livablecalifornia.org , a statewide advocacy organization, has an excellent website with current news from Sacto, including factsheets on the latest proposed revisions of Wiener and Skinner's ongoing assaults on local control.

NIMBYs No More

Sunday March 07, 2021 - 04:43:00 PM

It's time that the New York Times and other publications stopped using the term "NIMBY" as a pejorative directed at those with whom they disagree about housing policy. It's no more appropriate than traditional ethnic slurs, and it's historically misguided. Not In My Back Yard was the slogan of the heroic mothers who finally exposed pollution at Love Canal.

Farhad Manjoo's attack in the New York Times on Berkeleyans who doubt that ending single family zoning will end our low-cost housing crisis was rife with factual errors. In particular he badly mischaracterizes former Councilmember Cheryl Davila as being "more skeptical of new housing." She's a plain-spoken middle-aged African-American whose principal sin was being skeptical of the blandishments of the White developers who funded Terry Taplin's successful campaign against her. She's been a strong and vocal supporter of social housing and other solutions which are not based on trickle-down economic models. She's well to Taplin's left politically, but no sucker.

Evidently Farhad Manjoo only talked to Taplin. The unanimous Berkeley vote on the zoning proposal was just a resolution, not an ordinance, simply announcing the Council's support for apple pie (gluten-free, of course). The devil, as always, is in the recipe.

Funny Numbers Mar the Quadplex Upzoning Argument

Thomas Lord

Sunday March 07, 2021 - 06:25:00 PM

Income Table

Cool Climate Nonsense

Thomas Lord

My Recreated Bar Chart

Thomas Lord

My Adjusted Bar Chart

The quadplex upzoning item fast-tracked to council by members Rigel Robinson (D7) and Lori Droste (D8) contains some (to me, shocking and alarming) fabrications in the cornerstones of the authors’ arguments in favor.

Race-washing

The account of history they offer is highly distorted and, by misrepresenting actual racialized oppression, it “race-washes” the quadplex item, falsely presenting it as a major anti-racist move. People other than myself are already speaking about that and I won’t dwell on it here because it is too complicated for a short note. I will note that the policy promoted in the item originates with YIMBY corporate and major investor sponsors - big banks, large corporate developers, and so on - and so ironically, if we we are to believe the racial justice claims made in this item, we must accept those corporations as sudden and unexpected champions of racial justice. You know, Citibank for justice, I guess.

Deeply flawed economic analysis

The memo for the item argues that recently constructed duplexes, triplexes, and quadplexes house surprisingly low income households, and thus building more will mostly serve lower income households. The gist of the argument is summarized in the first table from the memo.

The table purports to show median household incomes, broken down by housing typology (number of units) and year of housing construction. I think most people would find some of those numbers at least a bit surprising. They would be correct to think something is amiss.

The first detail to note is the citation in the caption, which reads: “American Community Survey, 2014-18, Public Use Micro Data Set, US Census”. A few notes, first the survey in question is customarily referred to as “5 year American Community Survey, 2018”. Second, the data source cited is not called a “Public Use Microdata Set”, it is called a “Public Use Microdata Sample”. These errors would not mean much were it not for one “small” detail:

The Public Use Microdata Sample cited simply does not contain data from which the table could be computed, even in principle. The table appears to be a complete fabrication, or the product of very faulty methodology. The memo does not say who actually prepared the table (it seems to come from the YIMBYs online but I am not certain). Droste has not provided any explanation of the methodology behind the table. The YIMBYs and author of this measure can easily show me up, if I am wrong. I will gracefully concede if they can. They know this. They have not attempted to defend what appears to be a fabricated table.

Bogus environmental claims

The third leg of the stool supporting the quadplex effort is an environmental impact analysis which, in the memo, is summarized in a bar chart. The memo describes the bar chart this way:

“Last year, climate researchers in Berkeley quantified local and state opportunities to reduce greenhouse gases from a”comprehensive consumption-based perspective." The most impactful local policy to potentially reduce greenhouse gas consumption by 2030 is urban infill. In short, Berkeley can meaningfully address climate change if we allow the production of more homes near job centers and transit."

Neither the underlying paper from the research group in question, nor their web site, makes that claim. Whoever wrote that paragraph misrepresents what that research was even trying to explore.

Comically (or tragically) the second image offers a screenshot from that research team’s website (coolclimate.org), shown here.

The graph is nonsense. I’ll explain why. First, let me note that I can easily recreate that same table. The tool used to do so is accessible from this page:

https://coolclimate.org/scenarios

If you poke around there, you’ll find a link to the interactive tool for creating such a table, a link to a tutorial about how to use that interactive tool, and a link to the underlying publication from the team that built the tool. YIMBYs started blasting that same graph ever since the tool was first published - though amusingly at least one local YIMBY has been deleting his old tweets where he mentions it. Anyway, here is my recreated bar chart with more of the context shown.

Please notice the “sliders” underneath the graph. They represent local assumptions about the “adoption rate” of the planned outcomes of a given policy category. Frankly, the research team did a poor job of explaining how they define “adoption rate” but as you can see, the setting of “adoption rate” for urban infill policies is set for around 70%. I believe that is supposed to mean that by 2050, 70% of new housing in Berkeley will be built in what are today’s lowest carbon footprint neighborhoods - mainly the R1, R1A, and R2 neighborhoods in the flats.

Why is that slider set for 70%? No particularly specific reason. It is just the default, used for every city included in the study. The entire point of this tool is that policy makers are supposed to make reasoned estimates of how those sliders should be set locally, and look at that resulting graph. The quadplex memo does not do that or attempt to. It appears that whoever wrote that section of the memo just had no idea what the tool was about or what its output means.

To illustrate, here is a graph that results if we think that, no, not so much new housing will be built in those areas. This seems plausible to me because even with upzoning, it won’t be economically attractive to redevelop expensive, existing detached housing. My expectation would be that upzoning mainly leads to the destruction of rent stabilized properties.

I have shifted the “urban infill” adoption rate to about 15%, leaving all other settings the same. Notice how “Urban infill” policies have a greatly reduced alleged impact in my adjusted bar chart.

By playing with those sliders, the bar graph can be changed radically. What are the “right” settings? Who the hell knows - the tool and the methodology behind it is simply not well enough documented to make a principled decision – but the default settings, used by Droste et al., miss the entire point of the tool by failing to contemplate local conditions.

Once again, Droste et al. have haughtily cited research that simply does not even claim to offer the data they describe in their conclusions.

In other words, the Environmental Sustainability section of the memo also appears to be a complete fabrication. Droste et al. can again show me up by giving a robust and convincing description of their reasoning and methodology, and I will gracefully concede if they can do so.

Is this quadplex item an example of all the seriousness and competence with which D8 and now the whole city is being represented by council? We are surely in sorry shape, if so.

Major Public Policy Decisions Should Be On Ballot

Barbara Gilbert

Sunday March 07, 2021 - 09:15:00 PM

The proposed rezoning is a huge public policy decision and should be put on the ballot and all candidates need to make their positions clear. A so-called "community process" is nothing more than a managed process with paid facilitators and a pre-determined outcome, worthy of a fascistic managed democracy/populism. I resent the fact that ambitious politicians looking for a signature issue and backed by newly-"woken" speculators and developers are claiming the moral high ground on a very complex and consequential matter.

I think it takes a lot of hubris and political ambition to endorse such a change when we are in the midst of an unheard of health and economic crisis the outcome of which is unknown. We have no idea about future demographics, housing needs/costs, local economics. If this rezoning is a good idea, it can await more temporal input about the ongoing health/economic crisis. Those of you who have reservations about the re-zoning should have voted/acted accordingly instead of now reaching out to naysayers to bolster your credentials and reservations.

Also, I think your recent actions re: converting "generous" Arch Street rental apartments into smaller less livable "units" was a sad example of the future you envision for Berkeley. More people in smaller spaces! More units on which speculators can collect rents! Or "only suitable for students". At some point we will need to shrink the populace' BMI so they can squeeze in.

I'm for keeping quiet peaceful single family neighborhoods, open to all who can afford it, without ongoing construction chaos and immediate quality of life and environmental detriment. There are admittedly many persons who will be unable to share in this, but that is the way of the world and has never changed. Unlike some present and past City officials, most SFR homeowners don't have a country retreat to escape to.

U.S. Should Hold MBS Accountable

Jagjit Singh

Monday March 08, 2021 - 11:58:00 AM

President Biden’s response to MBS’s role in the brutal torture and murder of Saudi dissident Khashoggi was extremely disappointing.

Desperate to deflect blame, MBS threw former deputy head of Saudi Arabia’s General Intelligence Presidency “under the bus” and said he was the ring leader responsible for the killing and named several other Saudi officials.

Biden said it was up Saudi Arabia to determine the path forward on their future leadership. Do US officials plan to host and shake hands with one the world’s worst assassins? What happened to the much touted American values?

While the U.S. continues to pummel Iran with unjust crippling economic sanctions for a 2015 nuclear treaty that America failed to uphold, the Biden administration is giving MBS a free pass. Swift action is paramount given King Salman's age and poor health.

Failure to punish MBS puts Saudi exiles in grave danger and gives carte blanch impunity to the crown prince who would likely go after dissidents with renewed vigor. One such dissident who chose to go public is halid Aljabri, the son of a former senior Saudi official who is living in exile in Canada and whose siblings, Omar and Sarah, are being held hostage in the kingdom.

Joe Biden speaking in November 2019 during a presidential debate promised emphatically” to punish the senior Saudi responsible for Khashoggi murder.”

Tough words! So Joe, to what happened to your 2019 pledge? You promised a “recalibration of U.S. relationship with the Saudis. No Joe, what is needed is a recalibration of your moral compass?

It is puzzling to understand why Saudi Arabia is considered to be close ally of the U.S.? In a race to the bottom of human behavior, one plausible reason is the necessity of selling military hardware in exchange for their cheap oil. But that does not hold muster given U.S. independence of imported oil. If the US military supply chain is interrupted there is little doubt the French and Brits swill only be too happy to fill the vacuum to allow the Saudis to continue slaughtering more Yeminis. Jesus, Allah-God must be watching in horror. I urge readers to phone the White House, tweet (POTUS), and demand President Biden adheres to his 2019 pledge. Furthermore, please demand the U.S. and NATO impose a tight arms embargo on Saudi Arabia to prevent further loss of life.

Modi’s Government Targets Climate Activist

Jagjit Singh

Saturday March 06, 2021 - 01:38:00 PM

Amidst the raging COVID pandemic threatening the lives of millions of Indians, the Modi government is squandering precious resources to silence climate activists like Dishi Ravi. Ravi has been charged with sedition, incitement and involvement in an international conspiracy including but not limited to: protests by Indian farmers, the global pop star Rihanna, threats against yoga and chai, Sikh separatism and Swedish climate activist, Greta Thunberg.

Heaven forbid! Is Dishi threatening to ban my morning cup of delicious chai? Really? Perhaps, Modi harks back to the good old days when he was a happy chaiwalla!

By using the shotgun approach, hoping one the lubricious charges would stick, the BJP government has exposed itself to world-wide ridicule and condemnation. Cartoonists and editorial writers must be having a field day with the Dishi-Modi saga unless they are too terrified of Modi’s secret police. What happened to the India that boasted to be the world’s largest democracy?

Following nine days of intense interrogation (perhaps a new form of police filibustering?) the presiding judge released her issuing a scathing criticism of gross police misconduct stating the report was , “scanty and sketchy”, and there is not “even an iota” of proof to support the charges. Well said sir!

Much like the US, absurd anti-democratic loony conspiracy theories gain speedy traction on American social media platforms like Google, Facebook and Twitter, closely knitted WhatsApp’s groups, and private Zoom sessions. The Indian government has also used these media tools to turn the public against popular movements like the farmers' protests and climate activists. In practical terms these activists are voicing concern for the poor and survival of the planet emulating the spiritual messages in our sacred scriptures. After all wasn’t Jesus an ultra-leftie? Didn’t Guru Nanak target the insidious caste system denouncing the high-low construct of modern day Hinduism?

Indian politicians should applaud these brave activists, embrace democracy and abandon their satanic schemes. With all the tools of tyranny at its disposal, India is on the knife edge of descending into a nation of gross intolerance and mayhem. The Delhi riots targeting the Muslim minority in 2019 is just a small example of what might follow. Not a single indictment has occurred even though the guilty, including the Delhi police, are well known. Fear and intimidation continue to haunt the Muslim victims and the community at large.

At the same time, these social tools have been used in a coordinated pro-government messaging campaign to turn public sentiment against young activists' and farmers' protests , often in clear violation of the guardrails social media companies falsely claim to have erected to prevent violent incitement on their platforms.

India should follow Europe’s role in demanding these American companies exercise more stringent oversight or face heavy financial penalties.

In a country where online hatred has occurred with chilling frequency and ferocity, human-rights activists are warning that India could easily descend into an intolerant autocracy aided and abetted by social media platforms much like the pogroms against Rohingya in Myanmar.

March Pepper Spray Times

By Grace Underpressure

Sunday March 07, 2021 - 06:00:00 PM

Editor's Note: The latest issue of the Pepper Spray Times is now available.

You can view it absolutely free of charge by clicking here . You can print it out to give to your friends.

Grace Underpressure has been producing it for many years now, even before the Berkeley Daily Planet started distributing it, most of the time without being paid, and now we'd like you to show your appreciation by using the button below to send her money.

This is a Very Good Deal. Go for it!

THE PUBLIC EYE: Trump 2.0

Bob Burnett

Sunday March 07, 2021 - 09:47:00 PM

Donald Trump's February 28th Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) speech gave us a good idea of what to expect from him for the next two years. The speech introduced Trump version 2.0; not all that different from Trump 1.0. Bad news for the GOP.

Here are the big themes in Trump 2.0 and their implications for the 2022 midterms.

1.Trump's continuing to push "the big lie." Throughout his CPAC speech, Trump contended he won the November 3rd election: "I got more votes...they used COVID as a way of cheating... The Democrats used the China virus as an excuse to change all of the election rules without the approval of their state legislatures...This election was rigged and the Supreme Court and other courts didn't want to do anything about it." [Audience response: "You won. You won..."]

Trump will continue to push the big lie. It may help him with his base but for the other 75 percent of the electorate it's old news.

To remain a political power, Donald needs media attention. The big lie won't get him air time anywhere other than the usual GOP propaganda outlets (Fox, OAN, and Newsmax) -- Trump's CPAC speech wasn't carried by the other media outlets.

2. Republicans will use their experience of the 2020 election as an excuse for voter suppression. Trump said, "Another one of the most urgent issues facing the Republican Party is that of ensuring fair, honest, and secure elections." He outlined several steps: "One election day." In other words, no early voting or mail-in voting. "We must have voter id." "We need universal signature matching." Trump contends that he lost the 2020 election because of voting abuses. (The CNN fact-checker (https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/28/politics/donald-trump-cpac-speech-fact-check/index.html) pointed out that Trump's claim has been refuted.)

Question: In 2022, What will Republicans stand for? Answer: Voter suppression.

3. Trump wants Republicans to purge their ranks of GOP Senators and Representatives that voted for his impeachment: Senators Burr, Cassidy, Collins, Murkowski, Romney, Sasse, and Toomey; Representatives Herrera-Beutler, Cheney, Gonazlez, Katko, Kinzinger, Meyer, Newhouse, Rice, Upton, and Valadao. Of the 7 Republican Senators, only Alaska Senator Murkowski is up for reelection in 2022. (Burr and Toomey are retiring.)

Of the ten Republican House members that opposed Trump, all ten can expect Trump-based primary opponents. Congressman Valadao represents California swing district 25. Valadao defeated his opponent, T.J. Cox, by 1500 votes -- after losing to Cox in 2018 by a smaller margin. In 2022, if Trump finds a proxy to run against Valadao, that probably ensures a Cox victory.

Taking revenge on Republicans who voted for Trump's impeachment is not a winning strategy. It will further diminish the GOP.

4. Trump defined "Trumpism." "What it means is great, great trade deals... It means low taxes and eliminating job-killing regulations... It means no riots in the streets. It means law enforcement. It means very strong protection for the second Amendment.... It means a strong military and taking care of our troops... We stand up to political correctness... we reject cancel culture." (Trump conveniently ignored the January 6th insurrection when he said, "[Trumpism] means no riots in the streets.")

From the perspective of a 2022 Republican candidate, Trumpism means loyalty to Trump. Trumpism doesn't subsume a distinct set of policy objectives; except for cutting taxes, opposing immigration, and (of course) not wearing masks. In 2022, Trumpism will not be a winning strategy; Voters will be most concerned about jobs, healthcare, and climate change.

5 Besides complaining about the 2020 presidential election, Trump spent the largest portion of his 90-minute speech talking about immigration. "When I left office, just six weeks ago, we had created the most secure border in U.S. history... Joe Biden has triggered a massive flood of illegal immigration into ur country, the likes of which we have never seen before...Biden's radical immigration policies aren't just illegal. They're immoral."

Trump pivoted to Biden's "pathway to citizenship" initiative and argued: "The democratic immigration bill is a globalist con. You take a look at the corporatist, big tech attack on hardworking citizens..."

From the perspective of a 2022 Republican candidate, Trumpism means opposition to Biden's immigration policies. Once again, this will not be a winning issue in 2022. (By the way, most voters approve of Biden's pathway-to-citizenship initiative (https://www.pollingreport.com/immigration.htm).)

6. Despite the recent surge of ultra-cold weather in most of the U.S., Trump didn't talk about climate change. (Of course.) But he did reiterate his opposition to the Paris Climate accords. "Joe Biden put the United States back into the very unfair and very costly Paris Climate Accord without negotiating a better deal....I could have made an unbelievable deal and gone back in, but I didn't want to do that."

From the perspective of a 2022 Republican candidate, Trumpism means opposition to Biden's climate policies. Not a winning position.

7. Trump didn't talk much about Biden's proposed "American Rescue plan." Trump said: "The Democrats now say we have to pass their $1.9 trillion boondoggle to open schools, but a very small part of it has to do with that. You know where it’s going... it’s going to bail out badly run Democrats."

From the perspective of a 2022 Republican candidate, Trumpism means opposition to the American Rescue Plan. Not a winning position -- two-thirds of voters support this plan.

8. Trump presented a (familiar) cartoon image of Democrats: " The mission of the Democrat party is to promote socialism... ultimately leading, unfortunately, to communism... Their party is based upon unvarnished disdain for America."

From the perspective of a 2022 Republican candidate, Trumpism means opposition to Democrats because they "socialists."

9. Republicans have become the Party of "White Grievance." Writing in the Washington Post, Republican columnist Michael Gerson (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-gop-is-now-just-the-party-of-white-grievance/2021/03/01/67679480-7ab9-11eb-85cd-9b7fa90c8873_story.html) observed: "One of the poisonous legacies of Donald Trump’s presidency has been to expand the boundaries of expressible prejudice. Through the explicit practice of White-identity politics, Trump has obviated the need for code words and dog whistles... The party has been swiftly repositioned as an instrument of white grievance. It refuses to condemn racists within its congressional ranks. Its main national legislative agenda seems to be the suppression of minority voting."

"White grievance" may be emotionally satisfying for Republicans, but it won't produce a viable political movement.

Summary: Besides complaining about the 2020 presidential election results, Donald Trump's CPAC speech provided a sketchy outline of what it takes to be labelled a "Trumpism" candidate in 2022. Above all, fealty to Trump. Beyond that, opposition to all Biden policies, Rejection of "cancel culture." And white grievance.

Trump 2.0 is a tired reworking of Trump 1.0. On November 3rd, Trump 1.0 lost by 7 million votes. Trump 2.0 will appeal to Donald's acolytes but no one else.

Bob Burnett is a Bay Area writer and activist. He can be reached at bburnett@sonic.net

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