The Tribune

With CHARLIE HARPER

Just when it looked like things couldn’t get any worse for the Democrats playing bumper cars in an increasingly futile food fight to oppose President Donald Trump in November, things got quite a bit worse.

First, there was the debate on Tuesday night. If you missed it – and it’s completely understandable if you did – there were some real fireworks. Elizabeth Warren may have hit Mike Bloomberg below the belt. The rest of the debaters tried to really get after so-far front runner Bernie Sanders. Joe Biden finally turned in a competitive performance. But most pundits felt there was too much internecine warfare and not enough attention paid to the man they all want to beat. Maybe we have to get through this stage before President Trump takes his proper place in Democratic crosshairs.

But there is real concern among Democratic leaders. Their concern is Bernie Sanders, the irascible, independent Vermont maverick senator whom colleagues dislike but who over the past five years has become the darling of a younger generation of activists and voters whose disenchantment with current American life and politics has driven them to embrace his fantastic remedies.

In connecting with such profound youthful discontent, Sanders is reminiscent of two key American political figures from the last century. One of these, Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy, staged a renegade run for the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination, precipitating bloody riots at the Democratic convention in Chicago that summer.

Mainstream Minnesota senator Hubert Humphrey eventually prevailed at that Chicago convention and faced Richard Nixon for the presidency. Nixon won fairly easily, and then in 1972 Nixon faced George McGovern. The South Dakota Democrat was a war veteran and heir to much of the enthusiasm that McCarthy had generated with his strong opposition to the hugely unpopular Vietnam War. The Democrats, having rejected McCarthy in 1968 but still lost, nominated McGovern in 1972. He was crushed. Nixon coasted to re-election by a huge margin.

That was the great irony of Watergate: Nixon was so far ahead of his opponent that the Watergate burglars’ dirty tricks were almost laughably unnecessary. But the scandal their activity sparked drove Nixon from office.

So, five decades ago, facing a deeply flawed Republican presidential candidate in Nixon, the Democrats twice allowed themselves to be undone by the power and noise of their own left wing.

Just like it looks like they are about to do all over again this year. They are facing a boorish buffoon who obscures his own not inconsiderable accomplishments with astonishing rudeness and insensitivity. This President’s disregard for comity and precedent offends most American voters, according to polls, and even his most ardent supporters spend much of their time explaining, justifying and rationalizing his bizarre behaviour.

The spreading coronavirus and Trump’s inept response to its growing danger look like the Dems’ most promising current chance to knock him off his perch: Maybe the stock market will tank and knock the props from under Trump’s major claim to worthiness for re-election. But if you’re the Democrats and that’s your best political shot, you may be in some serious political trouble.

On the other hand, it’s never over ‘til it’s over, Yogi Berra supposedly said.

Michael Bloomberg certainly hopes so. The former New York City mayor and business billionaire is advancing up the presidential primary popularity polls by self-financing a series of clever ads directed at Trump, his main target. Bloomberg hasn’t distinguished himself yet in the Democrats’ debates, but with Sanders starting to draw fire away from him, Bloomberg may not suffer too much damage.

In fact, it looks like if relative centrists like Bloomberg, Amy Klobuchar and almost forgotten but not yet gone Joe Biden can just stay in the race for a while, all the Sanders socialist sentiments and statements of admiration for Cuba under the Fidel Castro, etc., etc. may well up to cripple his candidacy.

If that happens before July and the Democrats manage to nominate a moderate without shedding too much blood at their convention in Milwaukee, they might have a chance at pushing out Trump, after all.

But their historical track record doesn’t lead anyone to feel particularly optimistic about their chances of doing so.

When you are friends with the coolest men on the planet

Do you ever fantasise about being best friends with someone famous? What would it be like to be a confidante to Denzel Washington, Michael Jordan or Meryl Streep? How about Beyonce, Halle Berry, Sir Sidney Poitier or Tom Cruise?

Imagine that someone like that trusted you, respected you and sought you out for advice or just hanging out. How cool would that be?

A E Hotchner knew exactly how cool that would be. This not-quite-famous author and screenwriter, who passed on recently at the age of 102, could credibly claim to have been the best friend of both Nobel Prize winning American author Ernest Hemingway and Oscar winning actor Paul Newman.

Hemingway and Newman were certainly among the American males most envied and admired during the last half of the 20th Century.

Hemingway was married several times and lived for stretches of his life on his wives’ money. He lived in places like Paris, Havana, Key West and Sun Valley, Idaho – and spent lengthy periods of time in Bimini.

The man led a legendary lifestyle, and his spare prose and storytelling prowess fostered a cult-like devotion among his millions of fans. He was at times the world’s most popular author.

An action junkie, Hemingway personally experienced World Wars I and II and the Spanish Civil War, and wrote about each.

He also lived in Bimini from 1935-7 and wrote The Old Man and the Sea and Islands in the Stream based partly on his experiences there. This significant local connection with Hemingway promises lucrative results for a future Ministry of Tourism campaign when the inevitable “Papa” Hemingway revival blooms months or years from now.

Piercingly blue-eyed Newman won his long overdue Oscar in 1986 after six earlier nominations, playing against his own cool, laconic, stoical type in The Color of Money. He had by then been for 30 years the epitome of cool. Men envied him and women swooned for him.

In the 1960s and 1970s and beyond, Paul Newman was an actor who could carry a movie. He did so dozens of times, perhaps most notably in dissolute roles opposite Patricia Neal in Hud and Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. He partnered several times with Robert Redford, another Hollywood star unfairly criticised for being too good looking as he grew into powerful and sophisticated roles.

With Redford in The Sting and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Newman crafted memorable performances that will long endure in movie lore.

He was also married for 50 years to beautiful and perhaps even more talented actor Joanne Woodward. Of their long, faithful relationship in a business hardly known for lengthy marriages, Newman once quipped “Why go out for hamburger when you have steak at home?”

Back to Hotchner, who met Hemingway in Havana in 1948 on a writing assignment for a magazine. Hotchner was 31 at the time. Hemingway was 48. The two men formed a fast friendship as Papa wrote Across the River and Into the Trees. It was to be the first of several books Hotchner edited for the prolific Hemingway.

“I knew him better than I knew my own father,” Hotchner said years later. “He was certainly my best friend and my co-adventurer.

“I thought, when I met him, this is the way to live, the way he (Hemingway) lived,” Hotchner told an interviewer. “So, I quit my job to be near him. That’s why I was always available.

“I’d say the most vital thing I learned from him was this: Don’t fear failure, and don’t overestimate success.”

The two remained close until an increasingly paranoid and depressed Hemingway killed himself with a shotgun in 1961 in Sun Valley.

Six years earlier, Hotchner had met Newman when the actor replaced legendary rebel James Dean in a TV production of a Hemingway short story. The two men discovered they were near neighbours in the New York bedroom community of Westport, Connecticut. They also liked to drink and hang out.

Around Christmas in 1980, after a few drinks, they decided to bottle their own concocted salad dressing as a gift for friends. The result was a $500 million food operation under the name Newman’s Own, which still operates and produces various foods in addition to the signature salad dressing. All profits are distributed to charities.

Hotchner, among his various publications, wrote biographies of his two great friends. He also studied playwriting with Tennessee Williams and enjoyed long friendships with legendary American writers Dorothy Parker and George Plimpton, as well as with actress Doris Day, who for many years was known as America’s sweetheart.

If someone is indeed known by his or her friends, Hotchner may be the all-time champion.