Posted Tuesday night, March 19. 2019. Updated below, Thursday night, March 21.

Unconventional candidate for the Democratic nomination for President in 2020 Andrew Yang rallies the troops to fight the War On Normal People. Undated photo by Nanette Konig via Yang’s campaign website.
Andrew Yang has been getting a lot of calls lately.
His inquirers — donors, supporters, journalists — usually want to talk to him about robots and free money and something he calls “human-centered capitalism.” But first, they all ask some version of the same thing: “So, who is Andrew Yang?”
And it’s a fair question. Because most people don’t know the answer.
But this week, Yang, an entrepreneur and veteran of the tech industry, became the latest — and, perhaps, least likely — Democratic presidential candidate to meet the requirements necessary to appear in the party’s first debate in June.
It’s quite the coup for an insurgent, little-known 44-year-old running in his first-ever campaign, and it may reveal as much about our current political juncture as it does about Yang himself. The 2016 election blindsided the establishment and blew up its ideas about who can run for office — and it also may have paved the way for another neophyte to wind up on a crowded debate stage, next to a half dozen senators and a former vice president. ---from the Washington Post, Friday, March 15, 2019.
Let’s pretend for a minute that at least half of that crowd won’t have been chased out of the race by June because they can’t raise enough money, I’m not keen on having a debate stage full of candidates standing in a chorus line stretching from wing to wing. I’ve read articles, posts, and tweets by folks who think this will be a good thing for us Democrats. It will show off our diversity and the depth of our bench.
Worked well for the Republicans in 2016, didn’t it?
The debates shouldn’t be a Benetton ad. And with so many people, there’ll be no time for any of them to make any sort of serious points. What are they supposed to do up there then, hold hands and sing “We Are the World”? And yes I know these references are outdated. Forgive me. I’m old. But so’s Biden. So’s Bernie. So’s Warren. And Hickenlooper. And Inslee, although he looks pretty good for 68. We wouldn’t be showing off our diversity. We’ll be showing our age.
I don’t have any real complaint with these candidates as individuals or with just about all the others. Beto’s not wowing me, and the less said about Tulsi Gabbard the better, but other than that…
I’m leaning Kamala because she seems fiercest. My sentimental second choice is Mayor Pete because he strikes me as the smartest and the most serious and he reminds me of Pop Mannion. Booker's third. Then Warren. Then Gillibrand. I’m not real keen on either Biden or Bernie. They’re each on their separate nostalgia trips. Bernie is running a mostly I Woulda Won campaign. He doesn’t realize his moment has passed and he’s done as much as he can to move the debate to the left. Biden has nothing to offer Democratic votes in 2020 except that he was Obama’s VP. Of course I’ll vote for either one if he winds up the nominee. I’d vote for Yang, and with real enthusiasm, I just doubt I’ll get the chance.
I say Bootigieg strikes me as the smartest of the announced candidates, but if he’s smarter than Yang it’s only by a couple of IQ points. And Yang is as full of ideas as Warren with, it looks like, even more detailed policy statements on offer. The big idea he’s been grappling with for years and that drove him into the race to make part of the debate is what to do about the fact that automation is putting more or more people out of work permanently or at least forcing them to take low-skilled, low-paying, no benefits and no future jobs in the service industry. This is a practical version of the philosophic question the poet and essayist Wendell Berry has been asking, What are people for? What do we do when the machines and the computers and the money take over and human beings aren’t needed to generate wealth or even to keep other human beings alive? What do we do when we don’t need each other anymore? This to me is the question of our age because the rich greedy bastards who control the money and therefore the economy and therefore the government have as their answer: To make money for the rich greedy bastards.
We’re here to do that in two ways: by our under-compensated labor and then with our spending what little the owners and bosses begrudge us on over-priced goods, services, and toys. And once we can’t do either, we’re good for nothing. There’s no more use for us. There’s no more point to us. We might as well put ourselves out to sea on ice floes.
The rich greedy bastards think we should best die and decrease the population.
Yang is running to “Put Humanity First.” He has plans for what we can do to give ourselves worth and usefulness instead of letting the owners and bosses throw us away as we become worthless and useless to them, and a key component of his proposed solutions is a universal basic income. At the moment I can’t tell how effective he’d be at putting his solutions to work---that is, I can't tell how good a president he'd be. His background in business, the health care industry, and philanthropy make me think he’d an excellent future Secretary of Labor, but you can’t run for Secretary of Labor.
Maybe Harris and Warren and Booker and Bootigieg and Gillibrand are taking notice.
I hope so.
I do like the title of his latest book,though: “The War on Normal People” . and I just put it on reserve at the library. And you gotta love that his counter to those goddamn red MAGA caps is a navy blue one that says MATH.
Here’s something else I like this about him:
Yang, who lives in New York City and was born upstate…
Upstate means way up the Hudson River, a hard left at Albany, and fifteen miles over on the Mohawk to Schenectady.
My home town.
Well, close. I grew up on its suburban border---the houses right behind the old Mannion homestead are in Schenectady and so were most of the stores we walked to or took a bus to shop. My grandfather worked at the GE plant downtown. And it may be Yang’s father did too. It’s more likely, though, that he worked at the Research Lab, which is in my hometown, and there he might have known Uncle Merlin’s father. The Yangs might very well have lived in our hometown along with hundreds of professionals---scientists, engineers, accountants, and managers---who worked for GE, including Pop Mannion. [Note: Neither Yang’s Wikipedia entry nor his own campaign website give his parents’ first names or mention where he grew up. Neither say whether his father, who worked at IBM as well as GE, was with GE before or after IBM, whose main research center is right across the Hudson from here in Poughkeepsie, or how long he worked for either. Andrew might have lived in the Schenectady area for a very short time after he was born and spent his formative years in this area. His website doesn’t even mention his father’s connection to GE.] Yang is far too young for me to have known him. He was four years old when I left town for good. But before he went into academia, Pop ran the computer department at GE’s Knolls Atomic Power Lab. KAPL’s campus is next door to the Research Lab’s but they might as well be in different counties. Both do classified work for the Feds and they’re kept apart not just from each other but from the surrounding neighborhoods by guards, and dogs, and barbed wire. [Ok, I may be exaggerating about the dogs and barbed wire. But not about the guards, and there were definitely fences that were high and forbidding if not topped with razor wire. Rumor had it they were electrified though.] So the two sets of scientists and engineers didn’t cross paths at work. But they mixed socially, and given the way circles of acquaintance are drawn, Pop might have known Yang’s father too. Not through work though.
Yang Sr is probably a good deal younger than Pop or Merlin’s dad---in fact, he’s likely closer to my age than to theirs. Uncle Merlin’s father’s career at GE and Yang’s might have overlapped. But Dick Merlin was in ceramics and Yang was a physicist and he might not just have worked on a different floor, he might have worked over the fences and past the guards at KAPL. If he did, he very likely arrived well after Pop left. They still might have known each other, however, if not professionally then through their involvement in the community. As town supervisor, president of the historical society, and a member of the library board and the many other organizations and clubs he was involved in that made him the least retired retired man in upstate New York, Pop knew practically everybody in the area.
This is a long-winded way of saying, there’s a good chance there’s only one degree of separation between me and Andrew Yang and I get a kick out of that. Not enough of a kick to make me want to vote for him in the primary. Like I said, I probably won’t get the chance anyway. He’s going to be on the debate stage and he may even last through to the early primaries, but he’s not likely to still be in it when New York’s primary rolls around next spring. Still, I’m rooting for him to at least put up a good fight.
But it’s this bit in the opening of Reis Thebault’s profile of Yang that sticks in my craw:
It’s quite the coup for an insurgent, little-known 44-year-old running in his first-ever campaign, and it may reveal as much about our current political juncture as it does about Yang himself. The 2016 election blindsided the establishment and blew up its ideas about who can run for office…
Who can run for office?
There are rules?
I mean beside the only two the Constitution sets: candidates have to be thirty-five when they take office and they have to be natural born citizens?
Once more with feeling.
The wonder isn’t that we have someone like Donald Trump in the White House. The wonder is we didn’t put one there sooner.
Kooks, scoundrels, knaves, villains, and fools have run for every office since there have been offices to run for, including president. A few of them have been their party’s nominee. A few of those have been elected President. Howard Schultz’s way wasn’t paved by Donald Trump. It was paved by Ross Perot. Trump’s way, meanwhile, was paved by Strom Thurmond, George Wallace, Pat Buchanan, and Sarah Palin.
“Unconventional” candidates have come along from time to time, candidates like Yang with no political office on their resumes and whose professional backgrounds would not at first glance have seemed to have prepared them for the highest office in the land. Perot’s one, of course. Pat Robertson. The recently departed Lyndon LaRouche. And for any Democrat over forty the name Ralph Nader has become a proverb and a byword.
But then there was Wendell Wilkie, one of the best persons to have been nominated by either party in the last hundred years, and thank God for him because without him the Republicans might have nominated another unconventional candidate, the fascist and anti-semite Charles Lindbergh.
Thebault is very young. It appears he graduated from college only three years ago. He earned his master’s only last year. But I’m sure he knows all this. So I wonder, if that wasn’t just a throwaway line, what he was getting at? It sounds like a subrosa swipe at Trump but it may also be a knock on his older colleagues not just on the Post’s political desk but on the political beat for all the media at large. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s tired of hearing from those Boomer and Gen X veterans that…
IT WASN’T OUR FAULT!
We had nothing to do with!
It just happened!
It had nothing to do with the way we covered him! He’s simply a genius at manipulating the news cycle.
Who thought he had a chance anyway?
Who knew what he stood for? How were we to know when to take him seriously and when to take him figuratively? What did it matter anyway if he was never going to win? Besides, she was fatally flawed. Inauthentic! Over-prepared! A CLINTON!
At any rate, we won’t make the same mistake again.
But did you see his latest Twitter-tantrum? Isn’t it amazing how he gets away with this shit?
Hope I didn’t give you intellectual whiplash with that transition. But I didn’t really veer off the subject, because I’m imagining Thebault hearing around the office and at lunch and on the campaign trail stuff like this:
Yeah, that’s an interesting question and the universal basic income might be workable solution, but isn’t it socialism? Won’t that cause him problems winning over centrists? And what about him accepting campaign contributions in bitcoin and the fact that Nazis like him? Won’t those things give him trouble with progressives?
Why don’t you write some columns about that?
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There have been too many of them to call them “unconventional,” but it’s actually kind of odd when you think about it that we’ve elected so many generals president of our democracy. We’ve been lucky that none of those generals tried to president like they generaled. Not even Andrew Jackson, although he was probably the most tempted to. Of course William Henry Harrison didn’t live long enough to face any temptation that way. Neither did James Garfield but it’s likely he would have been the very opposite of tempted that direction. Generaling is something he did during the Civil War because he was good at soldiering the way he was good at everything he put his hand to, including teaching. He’d have probably proved just as good at presidenting, if he’d lived---if his doctors hadn’t killed him. He survived being shot. He couldn’t survive 19th Century American medical procedure. You can read about in Candice Milliard’s excellent “Destiny of the Republic”, if you haven’t already, and if you haven’t, I recommend you get right on it!
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To read the whole of Thebault’s profile of Yang, follow the link to “Andrew Yang is running for president. Haven’t heard of him? You will soon.” at the Washington Post.
“The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future” by Andrew Yang is available in hardcover and for kindle at Amazon and as an audiobook from Audible.
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Updated to reflect the brakes slamming on my enthusiasm: I don’t know how much stock to put in this analysis of Yang’s policy positions. The writer is Jeremiah Johnson, the director of an organization that calls itself without irony the Neoliberal Project. I’d never heard of it before following the link from Mike the Mad Biologist’s invaluable daily digest. But from what Johnson writes, it looks to me that if anybody is a neoliberal it’s Yang, so it’s not promising that the director of the Neoliberal Project thinks he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. What bothers me more, though, is that it appears that Yang is another business person who thinks government can and should be run like a business. This is why we shouldn’t long for more “unconventional” candidates. Making laws is not like making widgets.
But this is an even bigger let down:
Dem presidential hopeful Yang agrees to interview with Ben Shapiro over anti-circumcision stance
I don’t know if I’m more disappointed that Yang is giving legitimacy to that Right Wing attention-whore or that he chose that subject to talk about as his presidential campaign is starting to get traction.
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