Lady Gaga – "The Star-Spangled Banner" (2021)

Oh say does that star-spangled banner yet wave

O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

Did you watch President Biden’s inauguration on TV last week?

I didn’t – but don’t think that had anything to do with who was (or wasn’t) being inaugurated.

This 2 or 3 lines is about politics, but it’s not political.  Like all 2 or 3 lines posts, it is strictly nonpartisan.  

Of course, some of you will find a partisan implication in what follows.  If you do, that’s on you – because there is no such implication in what I wrote.  (I wrote the damn thing, so I should know.  Right?)

Bernie Sanders at the 2021 inauguration

Of course, some of you would find a partisan implication if I said “Have a nice day!” or “That dress makes you looks fat.”  I could deny it until I was blue in the face, and you wouldn’t believe me.  

So I’m not going to waste any more of my breath. 

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A counterfactual historian attempts to more fully understand an important historical event by thinking about how things would have been different if that event had not happened.

For example, a British historian named Milton Wardman once wrote an essay titled “If Booth Had Missed Lincoln,” which theorizes how American history might have been different if John Wilkes Booth had not assassinated Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in 1865. 

Wardman’s essay didn’t have a happy ending.  He thought that the radical Republicans who dominated Congress in the years immediately after the Civil War and Lincoln would have clashed because Congress would have wanted to severely punish the South while Lincoln would have favored a more forgiving policy.  

Wardman speculated that the House of Representatives might have even ending up impeaching Lincoln, just as they impeached Lincoln’s Vice President and successor, Andrew Johnson, who escaped conviction in the Senate by a single vote.

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Today I’m going to speculate about how the 2020 presidential election might have been different if Hillary Clinton had defeated Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.

As I’m sure you recall, Clinton almost did defeat Trump.  If she had only carried Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, she would have won the electoral vote by a 278-260 margin.

The 2016 electoral vote map

Carrying three additional states might sound like a tall order.  But all of those states had favored the Democratic candidate in each of the previous six Presidential elections.

And Trump’s margin of victory in those states in 2016 was razor-thin.  If as few as 38,872 Trump voters in those three states had voted for Clinton, she would have carried them and won the election.  (By the way, that number represents only 0.06% of the 62.984,828 voters who cast their ballot for Trump in 2016.)  

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If Clinton had been elected President, the membership of the Supreme Court would certainly not be what it is today.  

There can be no doubt that she would have nominated very different people to the Court than Trump did.  Trump was able to get all three of his choices for the Supreme Court confirmed because Republicans were in the majority in the Senate throughout his term.  

But unless you assume that the Democrats would have taken the Senate in the 2018 midterms – a very unlikely proposition – it’s possible that no one would have been confirmed to fill the three seats that Trump was able to fill in his first term.  

Think about where the Supreme Court was in 2016 before Justice Scalia unexpectedly died.  Its members included four conservative justices, four liberal justices, and Justice Kennedy, who was often the swing vote.  

When Scalia died, President Obama’s tried to replace him with a considerably more liberal justice – which would have shifted the balance of power on the court.  The Republicans in the Senate balked, and the seat remained vacant until after the 2016 election.

Trump replaced Scalia was a relatively conservative judge, restoring the status quo as far as the conservative-liberal balance went.  But if Clinton had been elected, there’s no way she nominates a conservative.  If couldn’t have gotten a more liberal nominee confirmed, she might have just left the seat open – after all, that would have resulted in the liberals continuing to outnumber the conservatives.

Trump and Clinton debating in 2016

The same scenario might have played out when Justice Kennedy – the Court’s least ideological member – resigned in 2018.  Clinton wouldn’t have appointed a conservative to fill his spot, and the Senate wouldn’t have confirmed a more liberal nominee.  Leaving Kennedy’s seat open would have left the Court with a four-three liberal majority, which might have been just fine with a hypothetical President Clinton.

The balance of power on the Court would have shifted in 2020, when liberal Justice Ginsburg died.  Assuming that Clinton and the Senate Republicans continued to be at loggerheads – the Senate refusing to confirm a liberal Clinton nominee, and Clinton refusing to nominate someone more conservative – we might have ended up with only six sitting justices, divided equally between liberals and conservatives, at least until after the 2020 election.

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 Let’s go a little further down “What If?” Avenue – shall we?

In 2018, the Democrats regained control of the House of Representatives – which led to Trump being impeached.

Would the Democrats have taken the House of Representatives back from the GOP in the 2018 midterms if Clinton had won the Presidency in 2016 instead of Trump?

No one knows the answer to that question for sure.  But the party that holds the White House almost always loses House seats in the midterm election that comes two years later.  

Democrats lost control of the House in both Bill Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s first midterm elections, so it’s hard to believe that history would have flip-flopped in 2018 if Hillary Clinton had been elected President two years earlier.  The odds are that the Republicans would have maintained their majority in the house.  In fact, odds are they would have expanded their majority.

Would a Republican-controlled House have investigated and otherwise harassed – or even impeached – our hypothetical President Clinton, much like the Democratic-controlled House investigated, harassed, and impeached President Trump?

Does a bear sh*t in the woods?

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Stalemate and gridlock would have been the order of the day in your nation’s capital with a Republican Congress and a Democratic President.  Forget new legislation on immigration or climate change or anything else controversial.

And forget the 2017 tax reform law.  There’s no way she would have signed off on anything close to the bill that was enacted by the Republican Congress.  

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Let’s fast-forward to 2020.

If Clinton had been elected in 2016, there’s no way she doesn’t run again in 2020 – and there’s no way Trump doesn’t run again in 2020 as well.

Clinton would have had about a 99% chances of getting renominated – it’s hard to imagine a scenario (short of death or an incapacitating illness) where she doesn’t get renominated.

Trump’s being nominated in 2020 after losing in 2016 is a slightly less certain proposition.  I’d say he would have had only a 98% chance of getting the GOP nod.

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So who would have won a hypothetical Clinton-Trump rematch in 2020?

Studies have found that the economy is a major factor that affects how people vote.  Incumbents almost always get re-elected when voters generally feel good about the economy – which is the case when unemployment is relatively low.  But if there’s recently been an economic downturn, voters are more likely to boot the incumbent out of the White House.

Let’s assume that the economy would have been in roughly the same pre-pandemic condition under Clinton as it was under Trump – who achieved record-low unemployment levels.  

I’m assuming that the 2017 tax reform law wouldn’t have been enacted under my hypothetical Clinton presidency.  That law gave a real boost to the economy, but I’m willing to believe that unemployment  would still have been in reasonably good shape even without the 2017 tax cuts.

So Clinton would have likely entered 2020 as a favorite to win a second term.  But then came covid-19, which turned everything upside down.

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Can we agree that the 2020 election probably came out the way it did because of covid-19?

Remember where we were a year ago, prior to the pandemic.  The economy was humming along, and we know how important a factor that is in presidential elections.  The impeachment kerfuffle had ended not with a bang, but with a whimper – I wouldn’t say being impeached made Trump stronger, but I don’t think it significantly weakened him.

But everything changed when covid-19 slipped out of China and devastated the United States and most of the rest of the world.

“The Oregon Trail” game (2020 edition)

Both Trump and Clinton would have entered an election rematch with a hardcore base of supporters who wouldn’t have voted for the other guy even if hell had frozen over.  But there would have been at least some undecided voters who wouldn’t have been locked into one candidate or the other.

And given how close the 2016 election was, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to believe that those fence-sitters would have held the balance of power in the 2020 election – and that the typical fence-sitter would have based his or her decision on how well he or she believed the incumbent had performed with regard to the pandemic.

Tune in to the next 2 or 3 lines, which will examine the evidence and then speculate wildly about how much success a hypothetical President Clinton would have had with covid-19.

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I already told you that I didn’t watch the recent inauguration.  But I did see a recording of Lady Gaga singing the national anthem – which almost made me gag-gag.

Celebrities in general need to learn that singing the national anthem is NOT all about them.  Lady Gaga should not have used an attention-getting gold-plated microphone, and she should not have worn a Halloween costume to an inauguration.  

One female commentator who actually liked her performance described her outfit as “a massive gold brooch, pinned on what looked rather like the top half of a wetsuit, with a vast crimson skirt”:

Above all, she should NOT have sung the damn song in 4/4 time instead of the usual (and correct) 3/4 time!

Here’s what Bo Emerson had to say about her performance in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

While Lady Gaga didn’t indulge in the vocal gymnastics that tempt many interpreters of the anthem, she did offer one innovation, singing the song in a different time signature than usual.

The old melody that Francis Scott Key borrowed is in 3/4, which is an unusual meter for an anthem.  Gaga used an arrangement that adds an extra beat to every measure, turning it into a 4/4 rhapsody.

I asked friends online whether they noticed, and some couldn’t tell the difference.

[NOTE: Bo Emerson’s friends must be deaf, or unable to count to four even with help of their fingers.]

To be scrupulously accurate, Gaga sang the first 16 bars in 4/4, the next four bars (“and the rockets red glare. . .”) in a deceptive 4/4 that pretended to be 3/4, the next four bars (“gave proof through the night. . .”) half in 3/4 and half in a rubato stop time, the next four bars (“oh say does that Star Spangled Banner yet wave . . .”) in 3/4 and the last four bars in Eastern Standard Time.

This is not the first time a new interpretation has heralded a new president.  Beyonce used a similar arrangement at Barack Obama’s 2013 inauguration.

[NOTE: Does Bo not realize that Barack Obama was not a new president at his 2013 inauguration?  He had held office for four years when Beyonce let it rip eight years ago.] 

It’s not a small change, and unlike the overdone melisma that many singers apply to the song, it’s not unwelcome.

[NOTE:  I second the “overdone melisma” emotion.  Not so much when it comes to “not unwelcome.”]

Three-quarter time is for waltzes.  Almost everything else we listen to is played in a meter that can be divided by two. That’s why our national anthem, an old drinking song that ends in a question, is an unusual piece of music.

Unlike the Spanish, German, Russian and French national anthems, you can’t march to it.  You pretty much have to stand still and sing. . . .

Is 4/4 a better choice for a song that represents a whole nation? Certainly the stomping 4/4 of “La Marseillaise” (see “Casablanca”) rouses the heart.  It also celebrates watering your fields with the blood of tyrants.

Our anthem is less gory. . . . What I like most about it is that it’s not a song about combat, but a song about perseverance.

Click here to watch Lady Gaga singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”