"Against All Odds"
"Against All Odds"
I know it's unlikely anything crazy like this could happen in the 2024 run for the U.S. presidency, but...these is crazy times
I’m thinking about sending Mark Cuban another email.
The first one was sent some 10-or-so years ago. Here in Nashville, there’s a popular annual tribute concert recreating The Last Waltz, the Martin Scorcese-directed film documenting The Band’s 1976 farewell concert in San Francisco.
The original event was a star-studded affair. In addition to The Band’s old bandleader, Bob Dylan, making an appearance, guests included everyone from Neil Young—whose performance went down in infamy for featuring a prominent chunk of cocaine dangling from his nose—to Neil Diamond, whose performance went down in infamy for Neil Diamond being asked to sing at The Band’s farewell concert.
So it’s a blast for the indie/Americana local music community to align each year and celebrate the film that many consider to be the greatest music documentary ever made.
Which made me think someone should take on a similar production featuring artists more famous than just East Nashville-famous. And they should film it for broadcast on a cool music-friendly cable channel—not unlike Mark Cuban’s AXS TV.
I had a few angles I thought might help get a pitch email through to Mr. Cuban, whose AXS email address I already had (he doesn’t hide it).
He is a fellow IU grad.
The drummer for the band I was touring with at the time, the legendary Bill “Smitty” Smith of Truth & Salvage Co., was brothers with (hell, they’re still brothers) Casey Smith, the head trainer of Cuban’s Dallas Mavericks NBA team.
The folklore was that Cuban took pride in reading all his emails, and answering most of them.
And if you believe that silly rumor, well…you should, ‘cuz he did respond, thusly:
the problem with replicating a set list is that its going to be super expensive to get sync rights.
ifyou can clear everything so that we can repeat it and you guys can sell it, then i will talk to our folks about doing it
of course you would have to get the big names participating so we have a hook, but we are open to it
and it would also be a plus if you could get any of the original guests to sit in and recreate
m
And then I brainstormed with some video producers and followed up with higher-ups at AXS but Truth & Salvage’s album release was coming up and…nothing ever happened with it.
But I’ve been a fan of Cuban’s for a long time, so I got a kick out of just getting a reply.
Since Trump got in the 2016 presidential race, there’s been speculation as to whether Mark Cuban might like to throw his hat in the ring too, seeing as many thought of him as the ultimate nemesis of The Donald.
Last I heard, he considered getting in in 2020, but ultimately his family was lukewarm on the idea and that was plenty reason for him to avoid wading into any sort of high-stakes political waters.
But just search online for “mark cuban president” and it’s apparent there’s still a lot of intrigue around the idea that he might change his mind. Bill Maher tried flattery on his Club Random podcast, saying Cuban would make a great president, but once again the Shark Tank dealmaker said there’s no way.
[Below is the full Club Random episode, I can’t find the spot where he says the above but they especially discuss politics at the beginning and at the end—and the whole thing is totally worth watching…]
Sometimes I feel people like Oprah, or Tom Hanks, or Jon Stewart, or even Matthew McConaughey (who could at least be the governor of Texas) are kind of being selfish by not running for office. There’s just no way Oprah or Hanks would not win if they ran for president. And who knows, maybe they’d be awful, or maybe their true inner selves are far different from their public selves and they’d get corrupted like so many other initially well-meaning politicians do.
But I doubt it. And what’s more, my theory is that they are so universally popular (well…maybe not Jon Stewart, but Hanks and Oprah for sure) that they could run as independents. Or even better, start a third party.
Now, political know-it-alls like the Pod Save America guys (who I like, but they are very smug about stuff like this) say the only function a third party will ever have is to drain off support from either a Republican or a Democratic candidate just enough so that the opposing party wins. “Yes, a third party is the future,” they say, “and always will be.”
[NOTE: None of the Pod Save guys said that, it’s actually a quote from House of Cards, whose last season I am about to start after taking about a year to get through the series. Because I only watch it when I run on the elliptical out in my he-shed in the backyard. Although I run a lot! Really! But I don’t always watch House of Cards when I run. It’s gonna go down as one of my favorites, though.]
Anyway, all’s I know is that with a country this size and with this much diversity, it is preposterous to have just two political parties. Which Cuban agrees with wholeheartedly—but he also told Maher that IF he ever ran, he’d run as a Republican. Mainly because he could “[eff] with them more,” he says. I guess the idea is he could be more disruptive and get the GOP to shape up more than he could the Dems.
I don’t hold it against Cuban that he doesn’t want to run, though. Because, besides his family considerations, another reason he says he isn’t keen on running is because he feels he can do more for the country in the private sector. And he’s proving to have a strong case with efforts like his Cost Plus Drug Company.
Says Cuban on the Cost Plus website:
We started this company as an effort to disrupt the drug industry and to do our best to end ridiculous drug prices.
Every product we sell is priced exactly the same way: our cost plus 15%, plus the pharmacy fee, if any. When you get your medicine from Cost Plus Drug Co., you’ll always know exactly how we arrived at the price you pay. And as we grow and our costs go down, we will always pass those savings on to you!
And it seems to be for real. For instance, I’m not going to tell you what drug, but I used to pay $210.60 every three months for it before taxes and shipping, and with Cost Plus I pay $7.50!! (OK fine, it’s my embarrassingly superficial hair growth pills. But far more expensive and critical drugs are sold by the company, too.)
So, his starting that company seems pretty great. And even though he says he is simply an independent businessman, and doesn’t claim any team when it comes to politics, there sure are a lot of things he supports that I like. Forgiving student debt to boost the economy. Ranked-choice voting to stop rewarding extremism, especially during primaries. Handing all politics over to women, exclusively. (He’s kinda kidding on that last one, but, kinda not.) Et cetera, et cetera.
So what the hell, I know he says he won’t do it, but maybe I will write Cuban. And go down in history as the guy who got him to run for president with the following pitch:
First, Mark (may I call you Mark?), you gotta tell your family that this is too important not to do. They’ll understand. Surely they will! (Won’t they?)
I’ll leave the convincing to him, but second: ask for a meeting at the White House with President Biden. The mission: ask him to consider a partnership presidency.
In the Bill Maher podcast episode linked to above, Maher actually mentions a “co-presidency” in passing. He was saying that by now there’s gotta be some kind of artificial intelligence that can just find the two smartest people in the country and make them president and vice president. And then, he jokes, he and Cuban, when selected as, indeed, the two smartest people in the country, will have to flip a coin to see who gets to be president.
Or, he says, they could just “co-direct” the country like the Coen brothers co-direct movies—they could be co-presidents. And that’s my idea! Which I totally had a week before I watched this Club Random episode! Which is so…random!!
But seriously, this moment in history is too consequential to screw around with. In applying the Dean Moore Deal for Democracy, Cuban and Biden wouldn’t technically both be president. Cuban would run and be the sworn-in president, but Biden would be by his side as much or as little as he wanted to be, serving as a consultant. But as far as Cuban’s concerned, Biden would effectively be co-president, even though Cuban would be making the final decisions.
I know, Biden would never agree to it. He wants to run. But dangit, it’s just too risky. And something nutty like this might be the only way to convince him not to.
Ageism sucks, and it is particularly unfair in this instance, considering all the accomplishments of the Biden Administration under impossibly difficult conditions. Unfortunately, one of the difficult conditions is that Biden sometimes acts his age, or older.
To be fair to those who are worried about the age thing, it’s something we’ve never experienced before as a country—an 80-year-old president who would be 86 at the end of his second term. So it’s just a very big leap of faith to take.
With the Dean Moore Deal for Democracy in place, Biden will still be making decisions alongside Cuban and “finishing the job” on his biggest priorities as he said at the State of the Union he wants so badly to do. (Or at least he’ll finish the job on the directives he and Cuban agree on.)
And hey, if it works, and Biden makes as much of a difference as an executive consultant in the Cuban-Biden-Whitmer Administration (or whoever Cuban picks as veep) as he has as president, Biden will prove that age really ain’t nothin’ but a number, it’s the person who matters.
And I really do think Cuban would win. As my buddy Jay Dmuchowski pointed out to me (Jay gets co-creator credit on this CeeGee for contributing the article title and the following missive), Cuban’s commitment to responsible capitalism that isn’t steered by rampant greed would appeal to legitimate Republicans (i.e. “Republicans Classic”) and conservative-leaning independents alike. And then all the stuff I like about him that I mentioned above would appeal to the other side of the aisle.
It’s worth thinking of non-political-establishment tactics like this, because it needs to be all-ideas-on-deck—the polarization we’re experiencing as a country is getting less and less sustainable by the millisecond. The New York Times writer David French gave an example in a recent column:
“About two weeks ago, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia kicked off a conversation about a “national divorce,” and it hasn’t really stopped. Greene says she doesn’t mean a true national division, but rather an extreme form of federalism, in which red and blue states essentially lived under completely different economic and constitutional structures while maintaining a nominal national union.
The very idea is absurd. It’s incompatible with the Constitution. It’s dangerous. It’s unworkable. It would destroy the economy, dislocate millions of Americans and destabilize the globe. Even in the absence of a civil war—it’s beyond unlikely that vast American armies would clash the way they did from 1861 to 1865—national separation would almost certainly be a violent mess. There is only one way to describe an actual American divorce: an unmitigated disaster, for America and the world.
It could also happen. It’s not likely, but it’s possible, and we should take that possibility seriously.”
Each side thinks the other side is “hateful,” “racist,” “brainwashed” and “arrogant,” as the French piece also reports. “Arrogance,” I believe, is the one that’s most worrisome.
When someone feels disrespected or not taken seriously, that’s when they get defensive, and in many cases, the most deeply bitter and vengeful. The worst thing we can do is ignore the fact that “the other side” feels undervalued and disrespected. Because you can’t debate that fact, that they feel that way. Like it or not, they feel that way! And it’s up to you to decide whether you care enough to resolve the conflict or not. If you do care enough, you have to accept that, regardless the reason, “the other side” is distressed, and then try to come up with a strategy to make them not-distressed.
I keep writing “the other side” in quotation marks because I refuse to (fully) believe we have to be doomed to remain on opposite sides forever. Therefore I don’t even want to say “the other side.” I don’t want to promote the concept.
And yet, as of this moment, extreme division IS A FACT. Tens of millions of Americans identify strongly with one side and tens of millions of Americans identify strongly with the other. As French says, “At this moment in history, there is not a single important cultural, religious, political or social force that is pulling Americans together more than it is pushing us apart.”
I have to take my own advice and accept that bleak reality, too. And I do want to fix it. So I guess the place I need to start is to begin gaining more understanding of where the other side (see, no quotation marks!) is coming from, and how they got there.
Yours,
~Dean