A Greek tragedy of inattention

From Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson, More Than “One Damn Thing,” with Bill Barr.

Barr has always been impressive in his capacity to listen to the whole question and then respond in paragraphs calling on a wide knowledge set and a disciplined logic.  He is also impressive in his precise use of language and in his clarity of categories.  

Double click to enlarge.

I did like this exchange because it clarifies Barr's line of thinking and also explains the disconnect between Trump and Barr on the election results.  

The journalist Salina Zito once observed about Trump

The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.

Barr thinks and speaks in paragraphs.  Trump communicated loosely around themes, phrases, sharp digs, humor, mockery.  Reading his transcripts were hard work trying to bridge all the jumps and non sequiturs.  Listening to his speeches, the exact same content, could be quite entertaining.  Listening to him, glossing over the disconnects, you could take him seriously and enjoy what was being said (or not).  Journalists, being word people, always tried to take him at his jarring and disjointed words and never took him seriously.  They never had the courtesy of trying to understand him.

Most the nation are listeners, not writers.  They took Trump seriously for what they heard him getting at in his speeches.  They never bothered to read the transcripts because that wasn't particularly relevant.  

Barr observes:

The Democrats used Covid as an excuse to skew the playing field towards themselves.  One of the problems here is that people are mushing together three different concepts.  

One is, the rules you are going to go by; are you going to have mail-in ballots, are you really going to enforce deadlines about ballots that come in late and all that kind of stuff. And they made those rules, they were not adequately fought by the Republicans.  They got in place.  Once those rules are set, you are stuck with those rules unless you have challenged them in court and won.  That can be unfair but that's not illegal.

[snip]

Then the second set of things are rules that are meant to protect against fraud such as anti-harvesting rules, where someone goes around and collects ballots and then drops them in the ballot box.  Or, observers from both parties in the polling station.  Those are meant to protect against fraud

If those are violated, that's bad, the person that violates them should be punished.  But it doesn't necessarily mean that the votes are automatically thrown out.  You still have to show that the votes are illegal votes.  

I do think that there was harvesting going on where it shouldn't have been going on.  I don't think it's at the magnitude people are suggesting and frankly I don't think it affected the outcome.  But the point is, once the election is held and over, it's hard to go back and cure that.  

The third thing is fraud.  That is where people who are dead vote, people who aren't qualified, their votes counted, you put in false votes, or you take out good votes and suppress them.  There is no evidence of that.  

Yet from the very beginning, when he went down from the residence, he started talking about fraud.

So three categories:

• The rules governing the state elections
• The degree to which those rule were violated
• Outright fraud

I would be willing to wager that Trump used Fraud as a superset covering all three categories whereas Barr was obviously making a clear distinction.

And I also agree with Barr.  There is always mickey-mouse outright fraud that occurs across the nation, dead people voting and the like.  Was that more common in 2020?  Reasonably likely.  Was it enough to make a difference, almost certainly not at the national or even state level.  Possibly at the fringe of very local races.

Was there rule violation?  Pretty clearly; egregious in some places, minor in others.  Particularly with regard to ballot harvesting.  Again, enough to swing the election?  I am reasonably confident it did not.  In combination with the rats and mice fraud stuff?  Possible, but I think unlikely.

It is Barr's first category where I think the election was won and lost.  This is battle field prep.  You pick the high ground.  You position your opponent in marshy ground and with barriers to escape (creeks, rivers, escarpments, etc.). You make sure the sun is in your opponents eyes, not your own.  Standard battlefield considerations.

I am sure Barr is right.  Republicans and Democrat operatives spend the year in advance of a major election fighting these battlefield prep skirmishes so that each will be most favorably positioned.  I am also guessing that he is also correct that Trump was not steeped enough in operational details of elections to understand or properly weight the importance of this predicate activity.  

It quickly emerged after the election that most the disputes, at least it seemed to me as a remote observer, were not so much about outright fraud, but about local election laws being ridiculously and unfavorably skewed against Republican candidates.  Even though the rules were ridiculously shaped and unfavorable, you can't change them after the fact.

I suspect that Trump would have won on a level playing field.  But he lost on the playing field of Inattention.  It was a Greek tragedy in that his own faults subverted him.

Was there fraud and rule braking - of course, as there always is.  Was it enough to sway the election.  Pretty certainly not.  Possible but unlikely.

The claim of Fraud and Steal only hold water if you explicitly include shady rule changes intended to benefit one party over the other.  Some of these occurred illegally at the last minute.  Most of them were legally passed six and twelve months in advance.  Given all Trump's tailwinds and all Biden's headwinds, it is very probable that Trump would have won had he had a team taking care of the blocking and tackling of election rules state-by-state in advance.  But he did not.