Monthly Archives: September 2022

1995-2009 TSI: AdDept Client: Macy’s West

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Department store chain based in San Francisco. Continue reading →

I have been putting off the writing of this page for the last few months. Macy’s West was a big and important client, but my memories of most of the people and the projects that we did for them are hazy. To make matters worse, I have found very few notes about the installation and no photos whatsoever.

Macy’s flagship store and Union Square.

Macy’s was acquired by Federated in 1994 shortly after both companies emerged from bankruptcy. TSI had been pitching Macy’s West, the division that was administered in San Francisco, about purchasing an installation of the AdDept system for some time.

I am pretty sure that the original inquiry from Macy’s West came from Gary Beberman, who had been our liaison for the very first AdDept systems at Macy’s East in New York City (described here) and who had also consulted on the installation at Neiman Marcus (described here). He and his wife, who also worked at Macy’s, had moved to the Bay Area, and Gary had taken a job at Macy’s West. The advertising department was looking for a system, and Gary recommended that AdDept be considered. He told them what we had accomplished in Manhattan and probably also mentioned things that could have been done but weren’t.

I vaguely remember doing a demo in San Francisco, and I think that Doug Pease might have come with me. I have a vague recollection that someone from the I. Magnin stores, by then managed by Macy’s West, was in attendance. It may very well be that the Macy’s West advertising department was able to use an AS/400 that had formerly been used (probably for accounting) by I. Magnin.

In the first few years most of our dealings were with Gary. I did quite a bit of consulting on my trips to San Francisco, but he did most of the training of the users in San Francisco. Since they used hardware they already owned, we were not involved in quite a few aspects of the installation that we often were.

That arrangement was positive in that it allowed me and the rest of the people at TSI to spend more time on more productive activities. The down side, however, was that none of us at TSI had a good feel for how well the installation was going. Macy’s West seldom called for support and used AdDept for fifteen years. Our association stopped only when the corporate bigwigs brought all of the administrative functions to the Big Apple.

My visits to Macy’s: I made a half dozen or so trips to Macy’s West over the years. I flew to San Francisco on whatever airline had the best rates at the time. It might have been United, Delta, or American. The flight back was always on a red-eye.

The advertising department at Macy’s was located in a building that was a few blocks from the huge store in Union Square. It might have been on Fremont St. I stayed at a Holiday Inn that was on either Mission St. or Market St. I don’t think that the hotel is still there. It may have been sold to another chain.

I did not rent a car; I took BART from and to the airport, and I walked from the hotel to Macy’s headquarters. I may have taken a taxi once or twice. I only remember one meal that I ate in San Francisco. Gary Beberman and I walked to one of his favorite restaurants that was, I think, in Chinatown. I remember no further details. My meals on other occasions were probably grabbed in passing from fast food places.

I am pretty sure that on one occasion I took the cable car from the turnaround on Powell Street up to the top of the hill. I did not visit the Cable Car Museum. It was in my price range. So, either I did not know about it, or I might have been pressed for time.

The people: I only have notes and memories of two people whom I worked with in the first twelve or thirteen years. Emily White was the Senior VP of the advertising department from May 1996 to October 1998. Doug knew her from their time together at G. Fox in Hartford. I later worked more closely with her at Meier & Frank in Portland.

Around the turn of the century there was a major upheaval in the department. This is what I wrote in 2000:

They have recently undergone wholesale personnel changes. We have done a lot of work for them designing interfaces. We have designed very few reports. They must use a number of queries to create reports. The original training was done by Gary Beberman, who lives in San Francisco, and was our first liaison at Macy’s East.

I do not have a good feel for what they are doing at Macy’s West. I imagine that they could benefit a great deal from a few days of our time.

Dan Stackhouse was our liaison in later years. He was in charge of the local network used in the department. He did not really know much about either the AS/400 or the AdDept system, but he was able to gather specs for new projects for us and address connectivity issues.

I remember that Dan was fired by Macy’s, and he sued them over this action. He asked me to submit an affidavit explaining our relationship. I did what he asked, but I doubt that it helped his cause much. I searched the Internet for references to his lawsuit. I did not find much.

AxN: Because of Gary’s close involvement with the project, almost all of the work that we did for Macy’s West was in the establishment of interfaces with their corporate accounting systems. We customized very few reports for them.

One very unusual project was the coding and installation a menu that could be used by people in the merchandise departments to look at information about their ads. They set up user IDs for each department or group that were restricted to the programs and queries available from this menu.

The only other project that I remember in much detail was involved with AxN, TSI’s system for sending and managing insertion orders for newspaper advertising space. Unlike Macy’s East1, the people in San Francisco were very enthusiastic about delivering insertion orders via the Internet.

TSI’s initial contact with the newspapers that would hopefully be subscribing to the service was a letter written by me and signed by someone at the advertising department. I remember vividly that the woman whom we asked to sign it had no additions or changes to the letter, and she definitely wanted us to send it. However, she did not want to take the time to sign the letters herself. She said, “You can just sign them.” So, for the first and only time in my career I added the role of forger to the long list of activities that I did for the company.

The AxN installation at Macy’s West provided TSI with a few far-flung clients. Macy’s purchased Liberty House, the chain of department stores and resort-wear stores based in Hawaii, in 2001. One of those stores was in Guam, and the Pacific Daily News subscribed for several years.

The last trip: My last trip to Macy’s West was for two days at the end of July 2007. I learned that Sheila Field was the Senior VP of marketing. She had in fact been there for several years and before that at Foley’s in Houston, where I spent a lot of time in the mid-nineties. I never had met her, and she was also not available on this occasion. I did meet with many other people. I did not do a great job of learning names. Here is the unedited list from my notes:

Sheila Field.

Sheila Field2 is the Senior VP. She is from Foley’s. I almost certainly know her, but I did not get to see her on this trip. Kedar Stanbury3 is in finance, which means planning at Macy’s West. So is Von Jones4. Their boss is Chuck Allen5. The business office manager is Gary Veran6. His assistant is Diane _______. Laurie Hamilton7 is the print media director. Jennifer Hung8, Kelly ____, and Terry _____ work for Laurie.

They reported quite a few anomalies that they had been living with. I made it clear that they should report these to TSI. We always fixed things promptly. They gave me a list of areas that they were interested in using AdDept for:

  1. Contracts.
  2. Work group limitations for purchase orders. Does this even work? They want to make sure that the direct mail people create nothing but direct mail purchase orders. Do we have a way to do this?
  3. Components.
  4. Foley’s effectiveness (advertising productivity) reports.
  5. Expense invoice upload.
  6. Co-op upload.
  7. Month end:
    1. Media accruals.
    2. Non-media accruals.
    3. Prepaid to expense.
    4. Prepaid reconciliation.
  8. Run lists.
  9. Stage’s Internet ads.

The plan was for me to return in “a few weeks”. I cannot overstate how psyched they were for using AdDept more productively. My notes stated that I thought that they would approve whatever programming was needed for every item on the list.

Alas, the plan never was carried out. In February of 2009 management of all advertising for all Macy’s divisions was consolidated in New York. Within a few years none of the people mentioned above were still working for Macy’s. I don’t think that any of them made the transition to New York.

This consolidation was a major blow to TSI. I knew that there was little or no chance of persuading the consolidated Macy’s to use AdDept. Macy’s West was a big client for both AdDept and AxN.

1. For some reason Macy’s East never used AdDept for insertion orders. They did not even use it to print copies. Instead they called each paper and described each ad that they wanted to run to the newspaper’s rep. It baffled me that they could not appreciate how much faster and easier it would be to use AdDept, which had all of the information on the order, to send orders to all papers at once. Everyone who used AxN—both newspapers and advertising departments—were very happy with it.

2. Sheila Field’s LinkedIn page can be found here.

3. Kedar Stanbury’s LinkedIn page is here.

4. Von Jones’s LinkedIn page is here.

  • Von Jones
  • Chuck Allen
  • Gary Veran

5. Chuck Allen’s page is here.

6. Gary Veran’s LinkedIn page is here.

  • Lauri Hamilton
  • Jennifer Hung

7. Laurie Hamilton’s LinkedIn page is here.

8. Jennifer Hung’s LinkedIn page is here.

2005-2013 TSI: The Billion Dollar Idea

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I am not sure when the Billion Dollar Idea began to coalesce in my brain. After the first few years of the twenty-first century it was becoming obvious to me that the rapid consolidation of the number of large retailers … Continue reading →

I am not sure when the Billion Dollar Idea began to coalesce in my brain. After the first few years of the twenty-first century it was becoming obvious to me that the rapid consolidation of the number of large retailers had drastically diminished the prospect for sales of the AdDept system. So, I was constantly on the lookout for ways to apply TSI’s assets in a potentially profitable manner.

Here is a list of what I thought that the company’s most valuable assets were:

  • The ability to deliver high-quality custom programming expeditiously.
  • The proven ability to design functional databases.
  • A good understanding of all forms of advertising except for Internet advertising, which was still experimental and rapidly evolving.
  • A good understanding of retail concepts.
  • A growing understanding of U.S. newspapers.

The market that I had long coveted was the development of a universal database for storing medical histories. Because of the complexities involved in such a task, most software developers would shrink from it. However, even then I could see that there must be many billions of dollars at stake. Maybe TSI could claim at least a small share, which would, of course, not seem small to us. However, in order to make any sensible plans, the company would need some sort of entrée into the market. That is, we would need client #1 first, and I could not imagine how that might come about.

So, I tried to think about where we might use our knowledge of advertising and newspapers. At this point I should explain the sources of profit for newspapers. The revenue from subscriptions and single-issue sales never came close to covering the costs of newspapers. Newspapers have always relied strongly on income from advertising, which mainly came from three sources:

Sunday newspapers were jammed with inserts.
  • Display ads within the text of the newspaper were called “ROP”1, which stood for “run of press”. These ads were billed by the amount of space used, either in pages (or fractions thereof) or in column-inches. Advertisers might pay extra for color or for prime positions, such as in the sports section or the back page of the main section.
  • Classified advertising included help wanted and personal ads.
  • The preprinted flyers that were stuffed into some issues of the paper were called “inserts”. They were billed by the size (number of pages or weight) and the quantity, and the distribution in thousands of copies. Some large papers allowed for selection of distribution by zip code or some other method.

Later, as their circulation numbers dropped, a third option called “polybags” was embraced by many newspapers . These were plastic bags that served as flimsy raincoats for inserts that were delivered willy-nilly to people without subscriptions.Sometimes the inserts were enclosed within an abbreviated edition of the paper that often contained news of mostly local interest.

TSI’s department store clients were almost always the largest purchaser of ROP ads in each of their newspapers. The AdDept installations had required us to learn how to handle the most complicated contracts and ROP strategies. Inserts seemed relatively simple to us. We knew almost nothing about classifieds.

One aspect of inserts struck me. They had nothing to do with the contents of the newspaper. Whereas the ROP ads had to be fitted into the spaces not taken up by news and other articles,2 the inserts were totally independent of the paper’s content and of one another. Therefore, the inserts could just as easily be delivered by any other organization with the infrastructure to do so.

The newspaper’s advantages was that it was contracted by the readers’ subscriptions to deliver the papers anyway, and so the papers incurred only minimal additional costs. The printing was done elsewhere. The inserts were just stuffed into the middle of each copy of the newspaper. For the newspaper they were almost pure profit.

On the other hand, many advertisers ran exactly same insert in a very large number of newspapers. ROP ads could be sent electronically to the papers, but the inserts needed to be physically delivered. That process must necessarily be both expensive and subject to errors.

It seemed to me that any organization that had a large number trucks and drivers in every market could potentially compete with the newspapers for the insert business provided that:

  1. The trucks and drivers were available every Sunday, the day that inserts were ordinarily delivered.
  2. The inserts could be packaged in an attractive manner so that they were bound to be opened and read.
  3. By minimizing the number of locations to which the advertiser must deliver, shipping costs for them could be held to a minimum.
  4. Key advertisers could be persuaded that they would receive both lower shipping costs and more targeted marketing for the same cost.
  5. A foolproof system could be devised for online ordering that would automatically do billing or Electronic Funds Transfer. To my knowledge TSI was the only company that had developed a sophisticated system for ordering of newspaper advertising.

It seemed to me that three organizations could surely meet the first four criteria: Federal Express3, United Parcel Service, and the U.S. Postal Service. Adjustments would be necessary, but all of the requirements are close to their core business. I was pretty sure that, with the proper hardware, TSI could handle the fifth item. At least I was willing to consider making such a commitment.

I thought a lot about how such a project could come into being. I would need to set up a meeting with a high-level executive at one or more of the organizations. This was a big stumbling block. Over the years I had dealt with a large number of influential people. Most of those relationships were quite good, but none of them, at least to my knowledge, had much to do with any of those organizations or any other group with a large number of trucks. I could put a letter in the mail, but when no one responded, then what?

I fantasized about getting a meeting with Fred Smith, the founder and CEO of FedEx. I had heard that as a young man he had had a difficult time persuading people of the practicality of his concept of a central hub in Memphis for deliveries all over the country. It was based on a paper that he wrote for an economics class at Yale.4 My idea—of advertisers bringing their inserts to the nearest FedEx office instead of bringing them to every newspaper—was no more off-the-wall than his had been, and he was now worth billions.

I could envision workers wearing red and blue delivering “FedExtra” packages all around the country on Sunday mornings. People would tear open the packages like Christmas presents.

If I did manage to get someone to take a meeting, I would need to make a compelling presentation. It was hard for me to figure out how I would do it. I would need to downplay the difficulty of implementing a delivery system and emphasize (1) the large amount of revenue that was potentially at stake and (2) the importance of a customized ordering system (which we had sort of developed with AxN).

I just could not visualize how I could make this work. I was confident of my abilities to assess whether a system that a potential client described could be feasibly implemented by TSI. However, in this case I had to convince the prospective client that it had the wherewithal to implement part of the system but not a critical aspect of it. If I were in their shoes, I would either dismiss the idea out of hand, or I would ask for more time and then call my IT department to see if they could handle the fifth step.

I was not even sure that I could convince anyone of the feasibility of the project. None of the groups that might be able to pull this off were accustomed to dealing with advertisers who used print media. They would need to locate the people who buy the service from the papers and convince them one at a time of the superiority of the new approach.

Someone would need to provide the capital. I certainly did not have it. I did not even have knowledge sufficient to indicate that $X of capital would be required, and it could likely be made back in Y years. That is what people generally want to hear at the first meeting.

I had a strong suspicion that the companies that distributed flyers that contained lots of manufacturers’ coupons would be key. The other companies would probably want their flyers to be in that package because that was the one that frugal buyers would seek out. We might need to give the coupon distributors a discount.

UPS workers were Teamsters. Gulp.

I could anticipate other difficulties as well. Both the USPS and UPS were heavily unionized. Making deliveries on Sunday would probably be a very big deal. FedEx was not as heavily unionized, but its pilots were, and this project would likely affect them a lot. I could foresee that it would provide the shipping company with a lot of business, but it might complicate its relationship with its labor force. We could be of no help in that regard.

One good aspect was that the project could be rolled out market by market. There was no need for a national launch. When the second market was launched, presumably the national advertisers from the first market would be happy to participate. Only the local advertisers would need to be recruited.

So, I put a lot of thought into this idea but no effort beyond a little research. I still think that the project could probably have been done. I needed to find a partner who had worked at a large newspaper and was familiar with both the difficulties of working with the advertisers and the difficulties involved in obtaining the flyers and assembling them. Together we might be able to construct a presentable business plan. Unfortunately, I never met such an individual and for several years I had my hands full with AxN and AdDept.

A big concern for me at the time was that, if the project succeeded in wresting the insert business away from the newspapers, many of them would go out of business, and the country would lose its major source of investigative journalism. In retrospect it seems risible that I would suppose that turning trees into pulp would always be the principal source of information for people.

When I started thinking about the project I was in my late fifties. A few years later my penchant for finding new worlds to conquer abated.

1. Although ROP is a true acronym and the periods were almost never included when it was written, I never heard anyone pronounce it as a one-syllable word. It was always called “are oh pee”.

2. On a visit to the Springfield Union News/Republican I learned that actually the papers were often laid out the other way—the ads were placed first, and the text was placed in the empty spaces that remained. The editor told me that they once had held a space open for an missing Filene’s ad that right up until the very last minute before press time.

3. I was able to locate no reliable information (both advertisers and newspapers were vague) as to how much money was spent annually on inserts. $20 billion per year was my best estimate.

4. Smith’s paper received a C. The concept must have seemed outrageous in the mid-sixties.

2021 Part 1: The Aftermath of the Election

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Savior or villain?

Deciding how to approach this subject was very difficult. Just listing the events of early January of 2021 would be one possibility, but the period was so bizarre and such a unique moment in American history that it seemed necessary to supply a good deal of context. At the center was, of course, Donald J. Trump. Almost half of the country considered him a great president, if not the second coming of Christ. The rest of us looked at his very well-documented history and recognized a spoiled rotten, lying, cheating, cowardly, philandering, racist, misogynistic, selfish, godless, bullying criminal whose only association with any government should be in the confines of the penal system.

The first group was apparently convinced (or let themselves believe) that the election had been rigged or stolen or some combination of both. How did they come to this conclusion? I don’t know. All of their lawsuits (save one) were dismissed out of hand even by judges that Trump had appointed. Perhaps they were prompted by Trump’s continued insistence over the preceding few months that the only way that he could lose was if the election was rigged. Some were probably swept away by the enthusiastic reception he got at his carefully staged rallies. Some may have been persuaded by Fox “News” and other media outlets that served as megaphones and echo chambers for his claims. Some may have been persuaded by their pastors that the preservation of the (white) Christian religion required that this psychopathic narcissist be elected.

Trump himself set the stage for this. He has always called himself a winner. He started his business with his nine-figure inheritance, but his whole “empire” was on the verge of bankruptcy. Many of his companies ended in abject failure. His TV show won a few Emmys, but they lost in the last few years to The Great Race because, according to him, the elections were rigged.

Hilary Clinton got three million more votes than he did in 2016. He never accepted this fact even though his hand-picked people could find no evidence whatever to support his oft-repeated repeated lie that he had somehow won the popular vote. To the best of my knowledge he has never admitted that he made a mistake or even a questionable decision. Everything that he does is as “perfect” as the phone call that he made to Volodymyr Zelensky on July 25, 2019.1

To me he was a dangerous and evil person. Fortunately he was not very smart, and he was stunningly ignorant.

Loeffler and Warnock.

Georgia: Most eyes were on the runoff election on January 5 for the two U.S. Senate Seats. Rev. Raphael Warnock was challenging the incumbent Republican, Kelly Loeffler (who had been appointed by the governor), and Jon Ossoff faced off against the incumbent Republican David Perdue. The polls showed indicated that both races would be too close to call.

Ossoff and Perdue.

Trump traveled to Georgia and held a few rallies, but he did not really promote either Republican candidate or even attack the Democrats. Instead he insisted without any evidence that he had been cheated, both in Georgia and in the other “swing” states. The people that he mostly attacked were two Republicans, Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. He also called on both of them to resign.

Trump had telephoned Raffensperger on January 2. He urged him to use any means he could to overturn the election in Georgia. Raffensperger recorded the call. Trump’s exact words were “What I want to do is this. I just want to find, uh, 11,780 votes, which is one more than [the 11,779 vote margin of defeat] we have, because we won the state.” He also phoned officials in at least two other states to urge them commit election fraud and overturn the authenticated results.

The two attorneys who had crafted and presented many of Trump’s losing lawsuits, Sidney Powell (a woman) and Lin Wood (a man) held a rally in Alpharetta, GA, in which they encouraged Republicans not to vote in the runoff election! Perhaps some Republicans were persuaded. In any rate both Warnock and Ossoff were elected on January 5. So, after the two winners took their oaths of office, Congress contained fifty senators from each party.

January 6: While most Democrats were celebrating the victories in Georgia and fashioning their legislative agenda, Trump and his minions focused their attention on a ceremony that always occurred for the Capitol. A joint session of the Congress was scheduled for 1 o’clock on January 6 to receive the electoral counts from the states. The President of the Senate, Vice President Mike Pence would then presumably utter the words that made the election official: “The announcement of the state of the vote by the president of the Senate shall be deemed a sufficient declaration of the persons elected president and vice president of the United States.” This ritual had been performed after each election. When it was implemented in the eighteenth century it took days to get from some states, where the votes had been counted and the electors chosen, to arrive at the capital. As long as one candidate had a majority of the electors, there had never been any controversy of note.

Trump and/or his minions had long ago targeted this day as the final step2 in preventing Biden’s inauguration. Their primary hope was to pressure Mike Pence into refusing to validate the results. The secondary hope was to pressure the states, some of which were controlled by Republicans, to submit an alternate slate of electors who had supported Trump.

Trump had tweeted at 1:42 in the morning on December 19, making reference to an analysis by Peter Navarro3: “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

National Public Radio posted a timeline of the events of January 6 in and out of Washington. It can be viewed here. It is stunning to read because it makes it very clear that this was an organized and coordinated attempt to thwart the wishes of the people—Trump lost by eight million votes!—and violate the spirit and letter of the law through the deployment of a bunch of deluded fascistic vigilantes.

A rally was scheduled to take place on the Ellipse just south of the White House. Trump addressed the crowd,a large percentage of which were outfitted in camos and military gear, in person. He stood in front of a line of American flags. The White House was visible behind him. He spoke for an hour, which was rather short for him. He emphasized that the election had been stolen from him and that it was up to patriots like those assembled in front of him to fight—a word that he used in one form or another twenty times in the speech—for a just resolution of this outrage.

He concluded his speech just as the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, was convening the joint session. His last words were “We’re going to the Capitol. We’re going to try and give them [Republicans] the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.”

Too far for ‘Ol Bonespurs to walk.

Needless to say, Ol’ Bonespurs had no intention of personally leading his ragamuffin army to the Capitol. Instead he returned to the White House and tweeted. His twenty-five tweets for that day have been archived here.

The plan did not work, but it was almost a disaster. The attack on the Capitol was not repulsed until after 6PM. After many interruptions by right-wing congressmen Pence finally uttered the magic phrase at 3:43 on the morning of January 7. Because of the outlandish lies and the dog-whistle calls for violence Facebook and Twitter both suspended Trump’s accounts.

The articles of impeachment.

On January 11 a single article of impeachment charging Trump with “incitement of insurrection” against the U.S. government and “lawless action at the Capitol” was introduced to the House of Representatives. It was passed two days later with ten Republicans and all the Democrats voting in favor.

Although almost every senator—even Lindsey Graham—had denounced Trump’s attempted coup, the vote in the Senate for conviction on February 13 was 57-43, far short of the 67 votes needed for conviction. Most Republicans argued that even the process of impeachment would do more harm than good and/or that it was not legal to impeach a former president. Few, if any, had much to say about the criminality of Trump’s actions.

Over the next two years almost one thousand people were charged with crimes related to the attempted coup. Hundreds pleaded guilty or were convicted. At least one hundred have been sentenced to prison. Two leaders of the Oath Keepers were convicted of seditious conspiracy. Trump has several times promised to consider pardoning everyone involved in the attempted coup if he is elected president in 2024..

1. The first impeachment of President Trump is described here.

Proud Boys.

2. I had feared that Trump would just not leave. I hypothesized that he would gather together the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and others of their ilk and order them to protect him. He might even order members of the armed forces and/or the Secret Service to join him in a coup. I was not a bit sure that the military could be counted on to defend the orderly transition of power after the president, their Commander in Chief, had been calling the election “rigged” (by a party not in power!) for at least six months.

3. Navarro’s training and experience are in economics, not statistics. However, he was never shy about voicing radical opinions beyond his expertise. He was also one of the most vocal advocates of the worthless drug hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19 and disparaged actions endorsed by the public health community.

2020 Part 2: The Election

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The year 2020 began with the two major parties facing contrasting challenges:

Zelensky and his principal phone.
  • The Republicans had only one serious candidate, President Trump, who had just been impeached by the House of Representatives because his telephone call with the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, clearly indicated that he was holding up military aid passed by Congress in hope that Zelensky would do him a political favor first. At that point the Russians had already seized Crimea and had covertly invaded eastern provinces. The party held a few early primaries but called off most of them for lack of interest.
  • The Democrats, on the other hand, had a large number of candidate, probably too many. The front-runner was Bernie Sanders, the liberal senator from Vermont who was not afraid of being labeled a socialist. The party had eleven so-called debates among the candidates! It also had a large number of heavily contested primaries.
Republicans were expected to toe the line.

The impeachment trial occurred in the Senate from January 22-February 5. The Democrats asked for the ability to call witnesses. 51 Republicans voted this request down. In the end all of the Republican senators voted against the charge of contempt of Congress. Mitt Romney was the only senator to vote in favor of the charge of abuse of power.

On January 14 a “debate” was held among six Democratic contenders in Des Moines, IA. Senators Sanders, Klobuchar, and Warren, Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, the Mayor of South Bend, IN, and someone else participated. I did not watch. I have always found these events too embarrassing to watch.

Popular in Iowa and New Hampshire.

During the impeachment trial the senators all needed to stop campaigning in order to attend. The Iowa caucus on February 3 was a gigantic mess for the Democrats. They tried to use an app, but it malfunctioned. Later they recanvassed and determined that it was a virtual tie between Sanders and Buttigieg.

The New Hampshire primary was on February 11. Sanders and Buttigieg split the eighteen delegates evenly. This was bitter news for Warren, who expected to do well in a neighboring state.

Biden and Clyburn.

For some reason the media decided that the most important primary was in South Carolina, a state in which no Democrat could possibly win at any point in the foreseeable future, on February 29. It turned on the endorsement of Jim Clyburn, the most powerful Democrat in South Carolina, allegedly because Biden promised to appoint a black woman to the Supreme Court if elected. After Biden’s victory in South Carolina, Klobuchar and Buttigieg dropped out and endorsed Biden.

Bloomberg did poorly in the debate.

On March 3, Super Tuesday, Biden won ten states, Sanders won four, and Mayor Mike Bloomberg won American Samoa. Warren and Bloomberg dropped out, leaving only Biden and Sanders as serious candidates. I was astounded and quite disappointed that the best that the party could come up with were two guys who were even older than Trump! He could even claim to be the youthful candidate.

A week later Biden won four fairly large states, and Sanders prevailed only in North Dakota.

Most of the remaining primaries were postponed or, in New York’s case, canceled because of the rapid spread of COVID-19. All of the center-left candidates gave their support to Biden. Not even Senator Warren1 endorsed Sanders.

On June 15 Louis DeJoy became postmaster general. He immediately implemented cost-saving methods including banning overtime and the removal of mail sorting machines. Because of COVID-19 many states began to expand or even require mail-in balloting. On July the Postal Service announce that it would not be able to meet some state deadlines. On August 18 in response to lawsuits from several states DeJoy rolled back his cost-cutting measures, but most of the sorting machines targeted for removal were already gone. On August 21 and 24 DeJoy testifies before the Senate and House that the USPS will do its job. On September a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction prohibiting DeJoy’s changes because they were “politically motivated”.

This guy probably survived the Tulsa rally.

On June 20 Trump held his first rally in Tulsa, OK. Attendance was far short of Trump’s prediction of almost a million. The actual attendance was probably less than ten thousand. Herman Cain was there without a mask. He got COVID-19 there or somewhere else and died on July 31. Despite the rising death count due to the pandemic, Trump continued to hold rallies both indoors and outdoors throughout the summer and fall. God only knows how many of his own followers died because of his election strategy.

Bernie campaigned hard everywhere.

The last primary in the nation was in Connecticut on August 11, the same day that Biden announced that his running mate would be Kamala Harris. Because I had voted by mail a week or so earlier, that did not affect my choice. The options were Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Uncommitted. I voted for Uncommitted. Biden got nearly 85 percent of the vote. My candidate got 2.26 percent, which was more than Tulsi Gabbard received. This may have been the least important vote in the history of elections.

The convention started six days later. The Republican show began on August 24. Because of the fact that the results were predetermined and COVID-19 was still rampant, the parties did not really convene. Instead, they both took advantage of the free TV time to put on shows promoting their ideas and people. Of course, the Republicans only had one idea (more of the same) and one exalted person.

I did not watch any portion of either convention. I saw a few clips on Twitter.

On September 1, more than two months before the election, an article on the news website Axios stated that if more Democrats than Republicans voted by mail—as seemed very likely—any results from election night might falsely skew toward a landslide victory by Trump.

It is hard to believe in retrospect, but much of the media attention during the summer was on Black Lives Matter protests concerning police violence and the response from right-wingers. They had better optics than Trump’s ceaseless rallies and Biden’s masked drop-in visits.

On September 18 Ruth Bader Ginsburg died at age 87. She was a remarkable woman, but her refusal to retire during the Obama administration was, to me, unforgivably arrogant. It has exacted a huge cost.

On September 26 Trump nominated federal circuit judge Amy Coney Barrett to succeed Ginsburg on the Supreme Court. At least eight attendees at the nomination ceremony subsequently tested positive for COVID-19.

The New York Times on September 27 published summaries of Trump’s tax returns for fifteen years, in ten of which he paid no income tax. Trump, of course, dismissed the article as “fake news”.

On September 29 the first extremely chaotic presidential debate took place. At least eleven people involved in it got COVID-19. I did not watch, and I did not get COVID-19.

Both Trump and his wife tested positive two days later. The following day Pence and his wife tested positive. Trump was taken to Walter Reed Medical Center where he was treated with dexamethosone and remdesvir, which were not generally available at the time. While still in the hospital he took an unmasked victory lap in his limo. He was released after three days and pronounced himself “immune”, but he was still experiencing coughing fits on October 8.

The second debate was canceled because Trump refused to participate unless it was face-to-face.

Trump began making personal appearances on October 10, and shortly thereafter he started to appear at rallies throughout the country. Biden’s campaign was much more low-key, and Biden almost always wore a mask.

On October 26, a week and a day before the election, the senate confirmed Amy Coney Barrett. One Republican, Susan Collins of Maine, and all Democrats vote against her.

On October 27 the White House science office released a memo that said that “Ending the COVID pandemic” was the greatest accomplishment of Trump’s career. Someone in the White House staff had apparently read a newspaper or listened to the news at some point in the last few months. The statement was quickly withdrawn.

Throughout the summer and the fall Republicans filed lawsuits in many state courts in an attempt to throw out various kinds of ballots or extensions of time periods for voting. This strategy was understandable. For the last three decades whenever the turnout was high, the Republicans had lost, and the demographics had worsened for them considerably. A primary element of their strategy had been to restrict voting in every possible way. On November 1 and 2 a Republican suit to dismiss 127,000 drive-through votes in Harris County, TX, was rejected by the the Texas Supreme Court and a federal judge.

On November 1 and 2 Trump attended ten different rallies in swing states! Since he seldom spoke for less than an hour, I wonder how his handlers got him to all of those places. Pence and the Democrats campaigned a lot less.

On election day, November 3, the voting and counting went smoothly almost everywhere. However, the USPS previously claimed that 300,000 ballots that it had received had not been scanned as delivered. It then disobeyed a court order to search for them.

At 11:20 p,m. Fox News named Biden the winner in Arizona, the first state to flip from the 2016 results. Trump and the Republicans were furious at the network for doing so. They had been painting a picture of a Trump landslide from early returns from early returns that mostly did not count mail-in ballots. This was exactly what the Axios article predicted.

At 2:30 a.m. on November 4 Trump claimed “Frankly, we did win the election.” It was lie #30,001 of his presidency, perhaps the biggest one of all. At 6 p.m. the Associated Press awarded Wisconsin and Michigan to Biden. He therefore needed to win only one of the four remaining states: Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, and Pennsylvania.

On November 5 a bevy of ludicrous lawsuits by Trump supporters in those states were dismissed while the counting continued.

Rudy Giuliani at the Four Seasons (Total Landscaping).

On November 7 all the major networks reported that Biden won Pennsylvania and therefore the election. The Republican litigation machine, however, was just getting warmed up. It filed more than sixty lawsuits challenging the methods or the results. All but one was rejected; it was a ruling that extended the deadline for receipt of mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania for three days. The effect was negligible.

When all was said2 and done, the election was not a close one. Biden received more than seven million votes than Trump, and the margin in the Electoral College was 84. Of the last four states only North Carolina went into Trump’s column.

So, then President Trump graciously conceded defeat and, like all of his predecessors, participated whole-heartedly in a smooth and seamless transfer of power and responsibility.

Uh, not exactly. Trump, who had also claimed that he had been cheated by a rigged Emmy award system3 and that he had actually won the popular vote in 2016, never conceded defeat. Instead, he insisted that he had been the victim of what he called “The Big Steal”. Several aides later claimed that they heard him say that he would never leave the White House.

He was still there at the end of 2020. A description of the electoral brouhaha of 2021 can be found here.

The other races: The Democrats lost some seats in the House of Representatives, but they still maintained a majority.

The Republicans had controlled the Senate, but the Democrats picked up a few seats, which brought their number up to 48 from 45. The two seats in the state of Georgia remained to be decided in a special runoff election to be held on January 5, 2021. Rev. Raphael Warnock challenged Kelly Loeffler, who had been appointed senator by Governor Brian Kemp in January of 2020. Jon Ossoff vied for the seat that had been held by David Perdue for six years. Since Biden had carried Georgia, it was considered plausible that the Democrats might unseat one or both incumbents. However, Biden’s victory margin was only 17,000 votes.

What a contrast between the two candidates! Loeffler and Perdue were both CEO’s who were accused of using insider information when they both unloaded large quantities of stock just before the market crashed. Warnock was a black pastor, and Ossoff was a Jewish documentary film producer and investigative journalist. No black man had ever been elected to the Senate from a former Confederate state. Both Perdue and Loeffler loudly proclaimed that they had actually won in November, and they called for the resignation of Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger. He told them (and later, Trump) to go pound sand.

The key would be turnout. Republicans did everything they could to suppress the turnout. I joined many others in supporting Stacy Abrams’s Fair Fight campaign to get out the vote. I sent them $100. It worked. Both Warnock and Ossoff won. Warnock defeated Loeffler by more than two percentage points. Ossoff’s margin was smaller, but it exceeded Biden’s margin over Trump.

So, the Senate would consist of fifty Republicans and fifty Democrats. Ties would be broken by the President of the Senate, who was the newly elected Vice-President, Kamala Harris. No one foresaw this outcome.

1. I was hoping that I might at least get a chance to vote for Warren in the primary. She seemed like the only candidate with specific ideas. The other reasons that I liked her were enumerated here.

2. Well, actually a lot more was said and done in the fantasy land of Trump supporters.

3. During the last debate with Hilary Clinton Trump claimed that the presidential election was probably rigged. Clinton replied that he had made the same charge against the Emmy awards. Trump’s “reality” show, The Apprentice, was nominated for four Emmy awards and lost to The Great Race each time. I never saw either show, and for all I know, the results may have been rigged. It certainly would not surprise me if most of the voters hated Trump. Practically everyone who ever dealt with him despised him.