election

Tuesday November 6, 2018

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday November 6, 2018

‘Full Trumpism’: President’s apocalyptic attacks reach new level of falsehood

President Donald Trump is painting an astonishingly apocalyptic vision of America under Democratic control in the campaign’s final days, unleashing a torrent of falsehoods and portraying his political opponents as desiring crime, squalor and poverty.

August 18 2017

As voters prepare to render their first verdict on his presidency in Tuesday’s midterm elections, Trump is claiming that Democrats want to erase the nation’s borders and provide sanctuary to drug dealers, human traffickers and MS-13 killers. He is warning that they would destroy the economy, obliterate Medicare and unleash a wave of violent crime that endangers families everywhere. And he is alleging that they would transform the United States into Venezuela with socialism run amok.

April 13, 2018

Trump has never been hemmed in by fact, fairness or even logic. The 45th president proudly refuses to apologize and routinely violates the norms of decorum that guided his predecessors. But at one mega-rally after another in the run-up to Tuesday’s midterm elections, Trump has taken his no-boundaries political ethos to a new level — demagoguing the Democrats in a whirl of distortion and using the power of the federal government to amplify his fantastical arguments.

In Columbia, Missouri, the president suggested that Democrats “run around like antifa” demonstrators in black uniforms and black helmets, but underneath, they have “this weak little face” and “go back home into Mommy’s basement.”

February 25, 2017

In Huntington, West Virginia, Trump called predatory immigrants “the worst scum in the world” but alleged that Democrats welcome them by saying, “Fly right in, folks. Come on in. We don’t care who the hell you are, come on in!”

And in Macon, Georgia, he charged that if Democrat Stacey Abrams is elected governor, she would take away the Second Amendment right to bear arms — though as a state official, she would not have the power to change the Constitution.

Unmoored from reality, Trump has at times become a false prophet, too. He has been promising a 10 per cent tax cut for the middle class, though no such legislation exists. And he has sounded alarms over an imminent “invasion” of dangerous “illegal aliens,” referring to a caravan of Central American migrants that includes many women and children, is travelling by foot and is not expected to reach the U.S.-Mexico border for several weeks, if at all.

With his breathtaking cascade of orations, tweets, media appearances and presidential actions, Trump has dictated the terms of the political debate in the final week of the campaign even though he is not up for reelection for two years. (Continued: Hamilton Spectator) 

 

Saturday November 3, 2018

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday November 3, 2018

‘Edge of the knife’: Trump drags divided states of America towards his midterms reckoning

Maureen Osiecki remembers the shock of Donald Trump winning her home state, Michigan, on his march to the White House. “My heart died,” she says of that night nearly two years ago. “My father turned over in his grave.”

Pittsburgh synagogue shooting: suspect Robert Bowers charged with 11 counts of murder

On 6 November, Osiecki gets her first chance to formally pass judgment on the Trump presidency. The midterm elections will decide control of Congress and could give the commander-in-chief a black eye. Few can remember midterms taking place in an America so perilously divided – underlined this week by pipe bomb packages sent to leading Democrats and a massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue – or with a president so actively stoking the culture wars as an electoral strategy.

“He’s a pig,” said Osiecki, a 76-year-old retiree from a city planning department, sitting with friends in a Wendy’s restaurant in Pontiac. “No feeling, no empathy. My father was a Republican but we got along and didn’t call each other ‘horseface’.” 

The midterms, which early voting indicates could have their highest turnout in decades, are always more or less a vote of confidence in the sitting president. But Trump has put himself front and centre. “I’m not on the ticket, but I am on the ticket, because this is also a referendum about me,” he told supporters in Southaven, Mississippi.  “I want you to vote. Pretend I’m on the ballot.”

Where his predecessors have sought to build bridges and unify, he has embraced the politics of polarization across gender, race and culture lines in the hope of firing up his base, tacitly acknowledging he has lost a vast swath of the nation for good. The midterms will provide the first official measure of whether the sum of love for Trump is exceeded by the sum of hatred.

Amy Walter, national editor of the Cook Political Report newsletter, told an audience at the Washington Post this week: “The best way to think about where we are today is that we’re having elections in two different Americas.” (Continued: The Guardian) 

 

Tuesday October 23, 2018

By Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday October 23, 2018

The Eisenberger train rolls on

Fred Eisenberger handily won the so-called “LRT referendum” election to become the city’s first repeat mayor since amalgamation.

But it is still unclear whether his signature project, a controversial $1-billion light rail transit line, will survive the election of a council that remains badly divided over LRT.

The veteran politician, 66, fought off a surprising challenge from Vito Sgro, a behind-the-scenes Liberal organizer who was not well known but ran a well-organized “Stop the Train” campaign hinging on the use of LRT cash for other infrastructure.

Eisenberger told jubilant supporters at his Upper James Street headquarters that there was a “fair number” of votes cast against LRT — “but we got more.”

“I see that as a mandate for us to move forward on LRT,” he said to a huge cheer from supporters squeezed into the room. 

The veteran politician, who has served two terms as mayor separated by a defeat, repeatedly rejected the notion that LRT was the defining campaign issue. But Monday night, he told The Spectator “for those who wanted to make it a referendum, well, I consider this a referendum.”

It’s possible the fraught debate helped push up voter turnout in 2018 to an unofficial 38 per cent — not fantastic, but an improvement from last election’s dismal showing of around 34 per cent.

The LRT is backed by an unprecedented coalition of politicians, businesses, developers, education and health institutions, unions and anti-poverty groups.

But that establishment support certainly did not translate into a unified council. (Source: Hamilton Spectator) 

Alternative Outcomes

As with most elections it’s never easy to fully prepare the perfect cartoon for the end result. Less complicated about the 2018 Mayoral election, compared with previous campaigns, was the fact that it was a two person race among a full slate of fringe candidates. Yesterday, I drew up three scenarios, all involving the proposed LRT. Full disclosure, two of the versions were revisions of cartoons drawn for the 2014 municipal vote which never went to print. The one which ran above, dubbed “happy Fred”, was the more celebratory version for Mayor Eisenberger – it was also the last cartoon I created, thinking it was the least likely cartoon to be used.  The version I put most effort into was “sad Fred”, showing him asleep at the levers as his train glided off a cliff.  If the numbers had been tighter between the Mayor and his main challenger Vito Sgro, I thought sad Fred would work best by reflecting his downplaying of LRT as a major issue in 2018. There was only one Sgro victory version, and as the first, and perhaps only depiction I ever draw of the man, it was the first cartoon I drew yesterday, showing him above the neck, and full-faced. Yesterday morning as people began casting ballots, Vito Sgro was viewed as a very possible candidate to topple Eisenberger and take Hamilton on a future course without LRT. While the project is by no means a for sure thing for this city, with several anti-LRT councillors returning or elected, it’ll take a Mayor with a mandate to champion it among council and the Doug Ford government. It has been more than 10 years since the offer of $1 billion was presented to Hamilton to upgrade its transit system, I think it’s time to get it moving once and for all.

…It has been a loooong conversation on making LRT and enhanced GO Transit a Billion dollar reality in this city.  Here’s a gallery of transit cartoons from the past 10 years or so…

October 23, 2018
August 14, 2018
October 25, 2013

Not to mention these from 2010 and before:

              

 

Thursday October 4, 2018

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday October 4, 2018

LRT Cartoon Gallery

I don’t think I’m the only one to declare that this has got to be the quietest, and indeed, dullest municipal election Hamilton’s had in a long time. As ground is supposed to be broken for a billion dollar LRT system, politicians are waffling in their support, and advocates for & against are huddled in their echo chambers. Mayor Fred Eisenberger claims it’s not even the top issue of the 2018 campaign. With a new unpredictable government in charge at Queen’s Park saying do what you want with the $1B, which the previous gov’t said was only for LRT, there’s a lot of uncertainty about what is coming Hamilton’s way, despite having spent $100 million, and years talking about it. It’s as if people are done talking about it, on either side of the debate, and maybe an election is the wrong time to whip up voter attention, especially when only 35% of them will even bother to cast a ballot.