Angela's story.

Angela, a friend I have known for many years, called last week to tell me her story.[1]  She was raped when she was 14 years old.

"He was a popular boy. No, actually, he was 18, not a boy.  He was a senior on our hometown high school football team. He was from a respected family. He was one of my brothers’ close friends. I was 14 years old. He was just supposed to give me a ride home."

She never said a word to anyone. She did not report it to the police. She did not call the FBI. She lived in the real world.

"I lived in a small, rural town that lived for Friday night high school sports, and high school sports heroes. I would have been shamed, blamed, not believed, diminished, insulted, my reputation ruined.

"I would have risked social relationships. I would have risked familial relationships. I would have risked those all too important college recommendation letters from the powers that be in every high school.

"Yes. I kept my mouth shut. I said nothing."

Sexual assault and learning to listen to victims has been an area of societal growth over the past years, but this week demonstrated how far we have yet to go. I grew up in Boston, where rumors of sexual abuse of boys within the Boston Archdiocese were flatly denied for years before the dam finally broke. As men, those boys could offer little ‘corroborating evidence’ of the crimes against them. At the end of the day, the Church – and society at large – was forced to recognize that the lack of such ‘evidence’ did not mean that the crimes were not real.

Republican Senators on the Judiciary Committee chose from the very beginning to evade acknowledging this. And, make no mistake, it was a choice; denying the validity of Christine Blasey Ford's story was a matter of political expediency. South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham demonstrated the urgency of the political moment when he became a vocal leader of those Senators who prefer to dismiss Dr. Blasey Ford’s story, and chose to set aside his own searing experience as a military prosecutor of rape cases while in the Air Force

"I tried rape cases that still bother me," Graham wrote in 2016, "including the prosecution of several GIs who had gang raped a young German girl. She was just destroyed by it. I learned how much unexpected courage from a deep and hidden place it takes for a rape victim or sexually abused child to testify against their assailants. Trying to get a scared, confused, little kid or a young woman who feels the best part of her life is over to recall a memory that their every psychological impulse is trying to suppress is not something you forget. It has stayed with me ever since."

Like that German girl, Angela feared the impact of confronting her assailant. She did not say anything, determined not to let her rapist ruin her life.

"I would have been the victim. It would have been my fault. All of the boys would have rejected me. The teachers would have been uncomfortable around me. The ones who were also sports coaches would have been angry, and my lifeline to something bigger than my little hometown would have slipped away. No, I kept my mouth shut because speaking as a victim would have only driven me deeper into the victim experience." 

Instead, as a 14 year-old girl, alone with the pain of the rape she had just endured, she steadied her courage and fought to keep her focus on her future.

"Had I spoken out at that point in time, it was clear to me that my lifeline to something bigger and better would have been cut. I needed to stay on my feet. I needed those references and teacher recommendations if I was going to make it out of that small town.  And I did make it out and, with a lot of hard work, graduated from Princeton, then Harvard Business School and have had a long career now in tech and entrepreneurship.

"But back then, no, I did not say a word. When I was 14, the price was too high. But it was all wrong."

Angela only told her story this week for the same reason that so many other women have come forward to tell their stories. Because decades of silence do not mean that something did not happen. Because lack of 'corroborating evidence' does not mean that a crime did not occur.

"I knew that if he was suddenly nominated for a lifetime appointment to the pinnacle of justice in our oh-so-wounded democracy, yes, I would come forward now. Any person who lacks an innate respect for those more vulnerable in their midst belongs not on the Supreme Court."

Angela told her story because of the deep pain she is experiencing in the wake of the Kavanaugh debate. She has come a long way, a successful entrepreneur, with a beautiful family. Yet here we are in 2018 – almost four decades after that otherwise ordinary afternoon when she stepped out of that car, all alone – and she finds that her children are subject to a national spectacle that tells them, "yet once again, to keep their mouths shut if they are harmed."

Years later, Angela did tell her mother. But almost four decades have passed and she never told her brothers about their friend, who raped her. He moved on with his life, seemingly oblivious to the impact that afternoon in a car had on her. "He sent me a friend request on Facebook. Really?"

With the week's respite they have been granted, each Senator should step back and take a lesson from the experiences of the Catholic Church. The desire to ignore the reality of sex crimes in one's midst is powerful; but the lies and cover-ups will only deepen the personal and political consequences for each of them, for the Senate, and for the Court – just as it did for the Boston Archdiocese.

As hard as it may be for those in the midst of the battle to believe, this is not just about politics. It is about the secret pain carried silently for decades by millions of women –young girls like Angela and the German girl that Lindsey Graham represented years ago – who were told by society "to keep their mouths shut." And it is about choosing to stop perpetuating a society that forces victims to remain silent as a matter of self-preservation.

____________________
[1]  Angela worked with me on the writing of this blog. Her name and some identifying details were changed at her request.

Follow David Paul on Twitter @dpaul. He is working on a book, with a working title of "FedExit! To Save Our Democracy, It’s Time to Let Alabama Be Alabama and Set California Free."

Guerrilla warfare in the GOP.

As Crazytown erupted last week with the publication of excerpts from Bob Woodward new book, Fear: Trump in the White House, and the anonymous op-ed published in the New York Times, it was easy to dismiss the lurid stories of deceit and betrayal as just more evidence of the chaos and backstabbing that has characterized the Trump White House since the beginning. Jeb Bush, the early frontrunner for the Republican nomination, warned early on during the Republican primaries that Donald Trump was a chaos candidate who would be a chaos President. And so he has turned out to be. What's more, by all accounts he likes it that way.

There is certainly nothing earth-shattering in hearing more stories quoting anonymous sources about senior administration officials trashing their boss. Even before Michael Wolff published Fire and Fury earlier this year, we had been treated to stories of Rex Tillerson, John Kelly and Jim Mattis – along with any number of lesser lights – making snarky comments behind Donald Trump's back. No doubt Bob Woodward brings greater credibility and attention to detail to bear on the subject than Wolff did, but as troubling as the widely circulated stories from Woodward's book might be, none of it is particularly surprising.

The anonymous op-ed mirrors Woodward's accounts of senior Trump officials taking it upon themselves to undermine the President's agenda. The salience of the op-ed, however, is not the shock value of the insubordination of top Trump officials, or even suggestions that the President is unfit to serve; rather, it is the author's defense of a tight knit group of "adults" within the administration who are "choosing to put country first" as they seek to subvert what they view as Donald Trump's worst instincts. These are, the author, submits, the heroes of the Trump era.

But the truth is, their opposition is not rooted in a higher calling of service to the nation. It is about politics, pure and simple, and reflects the dilemma that the Republican Party has faced since Donald Trump won the GOP nomination over two years ago.

In the spring of 2016, two-thirds of Republicans polled suggested that they could never vote for Donald Trump for President. Yet, by the time Election Day rolled around, the lion's share of GOP voters dutifully fell in line. Today, Trump's approval rating among Republicans is among the highest for any Republican President on record. Nonetheless, for many Republicans – like the op-ed author – that support remains equivocal. The op-ed applauds the President's success in delivering on tax cuts, deregulation and increased military spending, even as it trumpets the success of the "resistance" in undermining Trump's efforts to deliver on those policies that are most loved by his base, but which the "resistance" find morally objectionable. 

The author's stance reflects that of many in the GOP, most notably Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell. The two congressional leaders have made no bones about using Donald Trump to pass long-standing priorities of Ronald Reagan's GOP – cutting taxes and regulation, confirming conservative judges, and boosting military spending – even as they have quietly sought to undermine the President in those areas that have the most emotional resonance for his core supporters, and which constitute the essence of Trumpism – building the Wall, shutting down DACA, cutting back both legal and illegal immigration, getting out of trade agreements, and the like.

There is a war simmering in the GOP, just as the op-ed describes a guerrilla war inside the Trump administration. For decades now, the Republican Party has been a coalition of numerous groups with diverse interests. Half of those in the GOP who support the President do so because they believe in him. They believe in what he does. They believe in what he says. And they believe in who he is. They are the base of the Republican Party that have loved Donald Trump since the days when most Republicans said they could never vote for him. The Trump base tends to be white, less educated and less well off than other Republican voters. Within the GOP coalition, they are the descendants of the southern and white working-class voters that Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan brought into the party, and who formed the political base of Pat Buchanan's Peasants with Pitchforks insurgency in the 1990s.

The other half – like Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and the author of the op-ed – support the President not because of his rhetoric, but because of what he has delivered for them. They are, for lack of a better word, the Republican establishment. Steve Bannon got it right this week when he described the actions reported in the op-ed as a coup by the Republican establishment against the ascent of Trumpism.

At some point, that war has to break out into the open. Despite all the talk about Donald Trump owning the Republican Party, he is going to wake up one morning and realize that he – and his core supporters – have been had. They did all the heavy lifting to get him to the White House, but it is Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and wealthy Republican donors – who supported Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz in the primaries – who have gotten everything they ever wanted from his Presidency. Meanwhile, due in large measure to the efforts of Ryan, McConnell – and the cabal of senior officials described in the anonymous op-ed – the President has been able to deliver relatively little for those voters those who have been most loyal to him.

Follow David Paul on Twitter @dpaul. He is working on a book, with a working title of "FedExit: Why Federalism is Not Just For Racists Anymore."

Artwork by Jay Duret. Check out Joe's political cartooning at www.jayduret.com. Follow him on Twitter @jayduret or Instagram at @joefaces.

What if Andrew Gillum actually didn't win?

Earlier this month – which seems like eons ago in the current political landscape – Florida Democratic Senator Bill Nelson caused an uproar when issued a statement suggesting that Russian hackers pose a threat to voting systems in several Florida counties, and had the ability to wreak havoc on upcoming elections. Nelson had been briefed on the matter by Senators Richard Burr (R-NC) and Mark Warner (D-VA), the co-chairs of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

There was nothing particularly new in Nelson's comments. Four months earlier, Florida's other U.S. Senator, Republican Marco Rubio, raised similar concerns about the vulnerability of local election systems. And this past July, at his press conference announcing the indictment of twelve Russian military intelligence officials for their efforts to undermine the 2016 Presidential Election, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein described continuing Russian intelligence operations targeting state election systems and software providers.

Nonetheless, Florida Governor Rick Scott expressed outraged at Nelson's warning. Scott – who is running for Nelson's Senate seat and currently leading in the polls – suggested that Nelson's claim of a Russian threat was an election dirty trick of sorts. Scott did not state exactly what he viewed Nelson's ulterior motive to be – nor did he acknowledge that Rubio and Rosenstein had raised similar concerns – he only demanded that Nelson "put up or shut up"; that Nelson either present evidence proving that the threat was real or admit that his comments were an election ploy.

As if on cue, the day after Scott's outburst, a group of kids participating in a voting machine hackathon at DEFCON 26 – an annual hacker convention – threw gasoline on the Florida controversy. In just ten minutes, an 11-year old boy, Emmett Brewer, hacked into a replica of the Florida state election website and changed the voting results. And Brewer was not alone; in all, 35 kids participating in hackathon successfully manipulated election results on replicas of election sites from 13 battleground states.

The DEFCON hackathon was intended to bring public attention to the continuing vulnerability of state election systems, and it did. The National Association of Secretaries of State – those obscure state officials responsible for overseeing actual voting – were understandably embarrassed by the DEFCON results, and insisted that their sites would have greater security than the replica sites that the young hackers successfully hacked. In any event, the officials pointed out, state election sites only publish the results of elections; they are not the voting machines where actual votes are cast and tabulated. Those officials, however, missed the point. They chose to disregard the utter chaos that would ensue should fake results be published on an official state site in the wake of elections, only to have a secretary of state come out some number of days later and declare that the published results were not correct, and that the real winner was not the person that the public had come to believe had won.

The Nelson-Scott kerfuffle and the DEFCON hackathon were the first things that came to mind last Tuesday evening when I heard that Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum had upset three challengers to win the Florida Democratic Party gubernatorial primary. The Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party was ebullient in the wake of Gillum's surprise victory over the mainstream frontrunner. Earlier that day, before the votes were in, a post on Nate Silver's hallowed 538.com political prognostication website had described Gillum as the fourth of four entrants in the race, "dogged early on by poor fundraising and an FBI investigation into his city hall." Now he was the party nominee.

I had no reason to believe Andrew Gillum was not the actual winner, but as I considered the New York Times post-election headline, Andrew Gillum Shocked Florida With a Primary Win, a voice in the back of my head kept asking, how do we know who actually won? 

In our electoral democracy, the credibility of voting systems is the coin of the realm. We accept election results, in part, because the consequences of not accepting them are so dire. In 2000, after an excruciating recount – and the 5-4 Supreme Court vote in Bush v. Gore that called an end to things – George W. Bush defeated Al Gore to win Florida by 537 votes out of the total 5,963,110 total votes cast. After weeks of hand-to-hand combat on the ground – with arguments over butterfly ballots, dimples and hanging chads – one thing was clear: no one could state with certainty which candidate a plurality of voters had actually intended to vote for. The simple truth is that when six million votes are cast, the margin for error is greater than 0.01%. But we accepted the results and moved on.

The Florida recount in 2000 has had numerous consequences. It laid to rest any doubts that the Supreme Court is a political institution. Indeed, in the wake of Bush v. Gore, it seemed safer to question the partisan action by the majority on the Court – or Ralph Nader's third party run for that matter – than to focus on the larger implication of the Florida vote: the inherent inexactness of voting systems themselves. If one concludes that voting systems do not reliably transmit the intended will of the voters – and that the reported results of elections lack credibility – the viability of our winner-take-all electoral democracy quickly comes into question.

That, ultimately, was the implication of Bill Nelson's cautionary words, as well as why it raised Rick Scott's hackles. As the frontrunner in a Senate race, Scott has little interest in taking his eye off the prize that lies within his grasp to ponder the implications of the threats to the integrity of our election systems that Rod Rosenstein laid out in July. Nor are we, riven as we are by political animosity, capable of rising to the challenge that Rosenstein laid down at his July press conference: “When we confront foreign interference in American elections, it is important for us to avoid thinking politically as Republicans or Democrats, and instead to think patriotically as Americans. Our response must not depend on which side was victimized.”

From the vantage point of someone weaned in Philadelphia politics, Rosenstein was making a seemingly untenable ask. Politics is a blood sport focused on a single objective: Winning. There is no prize for coming in second, for fighting a good fight, or for following the rules when the person that beat you didn't. Since the founding of the Republic, we have come to accept all manner of tactics in pursuit of victory in democratic elections. In Philly, it seemed as though anything that increased votes for your candidate or suppressed votes for your opponent was fair game, from the wads of cash distributed as "walking around money" on Election Day to get your folks to the polls, to throwing voting machines down the elevator shafts of high-rise housing projects to suppress votes on the other side. Anything, in the name of winning – as long as it didn't land you in jail.

At the national level, tactics ranging from the use of wedge issues and coded language to motivate one's own voters, to voter suppression in myriad forms to suppress voting on the other side, to gerrymandering legislative districts to tip the scale in favor of the party in power, have been facts of democratic life, at least as far back as the famously nasty election of 1800. That year, Thomas Jefferson played on the resentments of rural and southern voters toward urban, Northeastern elites to topple President John Adams, as Jefferson surrogates questioned whether Adams was really a Christian, accusing him both of being an atheist and a closet Muslim. Little, it appears, has changed.

Rod Rosenstein is now insisting that we set aside this long, partisan history and collectively understand the threat that Russian operations represent. He is arguing that our commitment to liberal democracy must supersede the passions and partisan identities that drive democracy on the ground.

No doubt, he is right. Liberal democracy and thinking patriotically, as Rosenstein defines it, is elemental to what it is supposed to mean to be an American. But, it may be that Vladimir Putin has a clearer grasp of our political realities than Rod Rosenstein does. Liberal democracy – the bane of Putin's world view – is an intangible concept that appeals to the better angels of our nature. In contrast, democracy on the ground – the world in which Putin has sought to intervene – is messy, passionate, and often driven by our worst instincts and emotions.

Indeed, for many Americans, the line that Rosenstein is drawing may seem arbitrary. For those who have historically been disenfranchised by any number of domestic political strategies that have manipulated our elections – such as voter suppression, unlimited money, or domination by elites, to name a few – foreign meddling may not look as qualitatively different as Rosenstein suggests.

For others, particularly those embroiled in the winner-take-all of electoral politics, looming threats to the nation take a back seat to threats to one's own election. Were Rick Scott thinking patriotically when faced with Bill Nelson's warning words about the threat Russia poses, he could have simply embraced Nelson's words; after all, Nelson wasn't actually accusing Scott of anything. But, immersed as he was in the middle of a high-stakes electoral contest, the notion of agreeing with his adversary probably never crossed Scott's mind.

If Putin was looking to continue to wreak havoc in our politics, helping Andrew Gillum win on Tuesday would have been a good next step. Just look at how things have played out. Within hours after the results were posted online, racial animus was in full bloom, and within days virulently racist robocalls from white supremacists were up on the air, further stirring the pot.

And Russian intelligence operatives would not have had to actually tamper with voting machines to achieve that outcome. They would only have to be able to do what the kids at DEFCON did, and manipulate how the votes were reported online. After all, just imagine the pandemonium and rage that would tear the Democratic Party apart if one day next week, Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner were to announce that his website had indeed been hacked, that the wrong results had been posted online, and that the actual winner was the establishment candidate, the pre-election polling frontrunner, Congresswoman Gwen Graham.

Follow David Paul on Twitter @dpaul. He is working on a book, with a working title of "FedExit: Why Federalism is Not Just For Racists Anymore."

Artwork by Jay Duret. Check out Joe's political cartooning at www.jayduret.com. Follow him on Twitter @jayduret or Instagram at @joefaces.