Tom Keane

Can Anything Stop Trump?

Gadfly extraordinaire Ann Coulter lost no time after the attacks in Paris, tweeting in the immediate aftermath: “They can wait if they like until next November for the actual balloting, but Donald Trump was elected president tonight.”

Democrats and especially Hillary Clinton should take note. Trump may not, in fact, win the 2016 presidential election, but the odds of him being the Republican nominee continue to grow. And if he is the nominee, he won’t be a pushover.

Trump is the candidate that, Rodney Dangerfield-like, never gets respect. Political observers (me included) first viewed him as a crackpot, seeing his rise in the polls as a kind of déjà vu from 2011 and 2012. Back then, if you remember, Mitt Romney was the presumptive favorite. Yet for weeks on end, one or another untenable candidates would pop to the top: Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry and Herman Cain. This time around, it appeared, Jeb Bush (or some other more mainstream candidate) was Mitt Romney. Voters would flirt, but eventually they’d settle down.

Meanwhile, establishment — and even some non-establishment — Republicans couldn’t believe that primary voters were latching on to the real estate mogul. It wasn’t clear, for one, that he really was a Republican. He was a Democrat back in 2001, only switching to the GOP in 2009 — and during the years, he’s donated to a variety of candidates, seemingly without regard to party affiliation. Then too, his positions were wildly out of keeping with much GOP orthodoxy: He favored tax increases on the wealthy and he wasn’t particularly disapproving of abortion. Moreover, he was rude and aggressive, violating the Party’s supposed 11th commandment: “Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican.” Trump derided Sen. John McCain’s war hero status, ridiculed Bush as “low energy,” called Carly Fiorina ugly (“look at that face!”) and said Ben Carson was little different than a child molester.

At the same time, Democrats were thrilled. Wacky Republicans such as Trump, they figured, just drove voters their way. On top of that, Trump was alienating key demographic groups, most notably Hispanics with his harsh rhetoric on immigration and description of Mexican arrivals as “rapists.” And indeed, the numbers seem to bear that out. For instance, one recent poll found only 11 percent of Hispanics viewing Trump favorably.

All of that may be true. Yet it’s time to acknowledge that Trump isn’t going away easily.

Unlike the merry-go-round of four years ago, when candidates rose and fell in voters’ favor on an almost weekly basis, Trump has been atop the national polls since mid-July — a full four months. He’s no longer a flash in the pan. Nor is there some magic wand that GOP insiders can wave to make him depart the scene; smoke-filled rooms are a relic. As Romney advisor Eric Fehrnstrom observes, “in a campaign nothing happens by accident. It has to be made to happen.” If Trump is to be pushed out, someone has to be around to do it. And none of the field, right now, seems to have that ability.

So what happens if Trump really does get the nomination and goes face-to-face with (presumably) Hillary Clinton?

Some Democrats might relish the prospect. Trump is a clown, they reckon, unthinkable as a national leader. Democrats, of course, would never support him. Centrists would recoil at his demagoguery. And Hispanics — 27 percent of whom voted Republican in 2012 —  would flee the GOP, becoming perhaps as certain a Democratic vote as are African Americans. Hillary could win in a landslide, a lopsided result akin to Johnson versus Goldwater in 1964.

Don’t be so certain. National polls currently show Clinton beating Trump in a head-to-head contest, but only by an average of less than 5 points. Moreover, it’s not national results that matter; presidential elections are decided by swing states that might go either way, including Florida, Virginia, Iowa and Pennsylvania. All of these are fertile ground for Trump’s blend of outrage, populism and revolt against the establishment — as well as his uncanny ability to identify the Zeitgeist of the moment (such as Paris) and make them his own. Add to that Clinton’s own failings — nearly 50 percent view her unfavorably — and you get the makings of a real contest.

President Donald Trump? The unthinkable becomes quite thinkable indeed.

This column was first published in Cognoscenti on November 23, 2015.

‘F’ For Faulty: Rating The New Restaurant Letter Grade System

Boston — belatedly — is joining the crowd, promising to start rating restaurants by the familiar letter grades (“A,” “B” and “C”) that appear in the windows of dining establishments in New York, Los Angeles and numerous other American cities.

The grades are a source of consternation to restaurateurs. They worry that spot inspections can trip them up on a bad day. They wonder about rules that sometimes seem arcane and senseless. And some fear, as well, that grades are more a function of who you know or who you pay off ( not, of course, that something like that could ever, ever happen in Boston…).

Meanwhile, the public loves the grades. They’re simple and easy and can be a source of much amusement too, especially when highfalutin places (such as, in one celebrated case, Thomas Keller’s Per Se in New York) get “Bs” or “Cs.”

What’s less certain, however, is that the grades improve public health.

Of course, Boston’s grades won’t tell you whether the food is delicious. That’s the job of critics and carping diners posting on sites such as Yelp and Open Table. Rather, the city’s report cards are ostensibly about whether a dining establishment is safe: that is, whether the food you consume might send you to the hospital or — gulp — even the morgue.

How often does that happen? The Centers for Disease Control figures 1 in every 6 Americans get sick from food-related illnesses each year, and that about 128,000 of those are hospitalized or die. The CDC also estimates that perhaps (and this is a big perhaps) just over half are from dining out. That’s about 65,000 diners sickened each year, which seems a scary number until you realize how frequently we eat out. Americans consume more than 30 billion meals a year outside of their homes, meaning that about 99.999 percent of the time we don’t get seriously sick from restaurants. That’s a safety record I bet few other industries can match.

Still, as they say, one is one too many, so in theory the grading system should be welcomed because it will help make our meals even safer. Yet Boston’s introduction of grades doesn’t mean anything substantive is changing.  Inspectors will go out as frequently as they did before, checking to see if eateries are complying with complex health codes. The grades are just a shorthand way of summarizing the results of those inspections.

Right now those inspections can be found online at a section of the city’s website called the “Mayors Food Court.” It makes for interesting reading. To take one example, on August 21 inspectors visited Kenmore Square’s Eastern Standard — recently called “a perfect restaurant” by the Boston Globe — and found 14 violations. Most were minor but one was deemed critical (the aioli for the calamari wasn’t kept sufficiently cold). Luckily for Eastern Standard, on re-inspection a week later, most (but not all) of the violations had been resolved; the self-styled brasserie was allowed to stay open.

Sounds like a “B” to me.

As a fairly regular Eastern Standard customer, quite frankly, I don’t care. Within the food industry, there’s a strong sense that health inspections are more about complying with complicated and sometimes outmoded rules than they are about safety. Last month, for example, food poisoning at a San Jose restaurant made 80 sick — even though the establishment had recently passed inspection.

And in any event, a “B” or “C” grade says little about the relative safety of that restaurant compared to one with an “A” — it’s more a PR problem than anything else. All of those getting grades are, in fact, safe (at least as how “safe” is defined by the city’s code). If inspectors felt a place posed an immediate health threat, they wouldn’t grade it; they’d shut it down. Indeed, the stuff restaurants get cited for on the Mayors Food Court are usually far less troublesome than what we do in our own kitchens. When I cook, for example, I don’t use plastic gloves when I handle food, I serve cheese at room temperature and I let meat rest for a while after it’s cooked. And I don’t like my aioli cold.

Come to think of it, maybe I’ll never eat at home again.

And one final worry about the grades. Yes, food-borne illness is a concern. But the biggest health concern with food is not about how it’s prepared but rather what we eat. American diets are too heavy in calories, carbs and sugars. Fast food places such as McDonald’s routinely get high grades — the chains have lots of experience making sure they comply with codes. But just because your local Golden Arches has a big “A” proudly displayed in its window, that doesn’t mean you should, you know, actually eat there.

This column was first published in Cognoscenti on November 13, 2015.

Turkey Day Without A Side Of Shopping? God Help Us

I thought we had this settled. Thanksgiving was the carbo-loading kickoff to the Christmas — I’m sorry, holiday — buying season, an opportunity to load up on the sustenance necessary for the rigors of the malls. Now, REI, the outdoor goods merchant, is turning traitor to its retail brethren, telling us not to go shopping on Thanksgiving Day or even, for God’s sake, on the day after. And to make its point, it’s saying it won’t be open either day.

This is nothing less than consumerist sacrilege. Shutting the store doors  on one of the nation’s busiest shopping days? Is REI — with more than $2.2 billion in sales and more than 140 stores — crazy? Is it trying to start a trend? And if it succeeds, then what are we supposed to do? Sit around and spend some time talking to our relatives?

Please, no.

A brief history. Thanksgiving started as a day to be grateful, but somehow we transformed it into one of the more arduous occasions of the year. Rather than, say, staying at home and offering up a quiet prayer of thanks to whichever deity (or non-deity) we recognized, we instead thought it would be a good idea to get everyone together — distance be damned. As a result, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving became the busiest travel day of the year, chock full of traffic jams, flight delays and missed connections. We now come together — many for the first time in a long while — in the surliest of moods.

We then decided that we might as well serve each other the oddest meal ever. Seriously, folks, here’s what we get: Jell-O with mini marshmallows and shredded carrots, boiled-to-death whole onions, bizarre casseroles (cream of mushroom and canned green beans?), various mashed squashes and root vegetables in multiple hues of orange, and wines in a box. The pièce de résistance, of course, is roast turkey, a meat so bland and flavorless that the highest praise it can fetch is that it’s “moist.” (And that praise, by the way, comes rarely. The bird is usually so desiccated that it can only be made edible by the addition of something we call “stuffing.” Stuffing, as near as I can tell, is just bread cooked in the cavity of the bird because, as we all know, nothing beats a good combination of wet bread and dried-out poultry.)

That deadly combination — bad travel, bad food and bad drink — unsurprisingly produce a day of conflict and infighting. Sex, politics and religion hold center stage. Aunt June feels compelled to wax on about illegal immigration. Uncle Henry wonders about nephew Tom and his girlfriend living in sin. Grandma recounts an embarrassing story involving bed-wetting. Soon everyone is at each other’s throats, vowing never to see each other again — until, after a year has passed and memories have faded, the whole cycle repeats itself.

To save us from this, the country’s biggest retailers decided to send us to the stores. Rather than a day of family-induced misery, they figured, why not buy stuff? That way, instead of dwelling on each other’s foibles, we could spend our time scanning ads and making gift lists. Thus we got Black Friday which, after a few years, began to eat away at Thursday. Malls started to open at midnight, then at 6 p.m., and soon, the retailers were doubtless hoping, we’d just spend all of Thanksgiving Thursday in the stores, perhaps grabbing a turkey sandwich at a Subway in brief memory of what once was.

And now along comes REI trying to upend the whole thing.

Make no mistake, that’s the agenda. REI wants to bring back Thanksgiving. It may even want us to spend Friday together, too. How far could this go? Might folks, having spent a couple of days not buying things, start to wonder about the whole holiday shopping season? Might they begin to think that perhaps Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanzaa, et. al., are about something other than what you buy and what you get? Might the mad rush of commerce, a mainstay of the economy, end altogether?

I trust you see the disaster that looms. REI — and the revolution it seeks – must be stopped!

This column was first published in Cognoscenti on November 4, 2015.