Today is the one year anniversary of Donald Trump’s impeachment. One year is not that long ago. Yet it seems almost like a lifetime. I’ve been watching discussions about whether it was worth it, what impact it had on the 2020 election and whether the Democratic opposition’s strategy looks good or bad in retrospect.

On this point intra-Democratic bickering is still hung up on whether it was a mistake or not to keep impeachment narrowly focused on President Trump’s extortion scheme in Ukraine. It’s not like there weren’t other things President Trump had done that could merit removal from office. Little more than six months earlier the Mueller Report had included voluminous evidence that the President had obstructed justice at the very least.

So why limit an impeachment inquiry to just his latest crime?

You’ve likely seen the reports (in the Times, Politico and Axios) of this White House meeting yesterday involving Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and various administration officials in which President Trump seemed to back increasingly outlandish and illegal ploys to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election, the results of which are now certified, final and over. What is buried a bit in most of these stories is that Mike Flynn was at the meeting too.

Given her wild conspiracy theories and the litigation she’s pursued around the country, the focus on Powell is understandable. Trump is reportedly considering making her a “special counsel” to investigate the election, whatever that might mean. But I think we need to see Powell as essentially a creature of Mike Flynn, at least inasmuch as she holds Trump’s attention. It’s Flynn who has had a unique connection to and hold over Trump going all the way back to 2015.

Quarantine has forced some of us to spend quite a lot of time in isolation with some … unique characters to say the least.

But President Trump — who, unlike the rest of us, has spent little time actually quarantining since COVID-19 first hit the U.S. — is actively choosing to keep the company of out-there characters.

Yesterday, as the news set in that President Trump had pardoned almost everyone involved in the Russia scandal, I saw an editor at one of the big political publications say that with this step President Trump had taken one more step in erasing the Mueller probe. This is wrong. And explaining why it’s wrong gives me another opportunity to reaffirm my belief that knowledge, a public accounting of what happened is far more important than punishment for individual wrongdoers.

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In twenty years of doing this, one thing that strikes me again and again is the critical importance of naming things in politics. If the question is advocacy and persuasion few steps are more important than effectively and consistently naming the key developments, agenda items, threats and prizes and raising them in the public consciousness. There are few things – things that can be controlled by people involved in politics and campaigns, as opposed to the tides of historical change we are awash in – more important for Democrats to do a good job at in the next two yeas.

You know some examples of this. The ‘death tax’, for instance. Conservative operatives took the unglamorous and unsympathetic cause of trust fund kids and gave it a title with punch, ready understandability and even an edge of justice. In politics like everything else you simply must put your best foot forward. Just showing up or just doing a good job is never enough. You have to tell your story. You have to make sure people with a lot else on their plate know what you’re doing, why you’re doing it and why it might be important to them that you succeed. That starts with naming things. That makes the thing visible and tells a story about it embedded in the name.

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Since we spoke last the two Georgia Senators have endorsed $2,000 checks. Senate Democrats called for a vote and Mitch McConnell refused to allow a vote.

There it is. McConnell blocks motion to vote on Democrats' $2,000 relief checks bill. pic.twitter.com/iYceWbNxiU

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) December 29, 2020

I heard a very knowledgable hill reporter say that McConnell doesn’t care how unpopular this is in the country. He only cares about the majority and saving those two Senate Republicans. This doesn’t add up to me. I’ll say first that I don’t think these races will come down to stimulus checks. But the races are close enough that it could come down to anything and everything.

There’s a fascinating and perhaps ominous article this morning in the LA Times about health care workers who are refusing to take or at least reluctant to take the COVID vaccine. There’s a range of reasons from reasons from things that might strike some of us as irrational to the general hesitancy of not wanting to be first to other things that have some logical basis. One nurse the reporters interviewed is six months pregnant and noted (which I believe is true) that the vaccine hasn’t yet been tested on pregnant women. I don’t know if there’s any clinical reason why this vaccine could operate differently in pregnant women. But I certainly know that many pregnant women and expectant fathers are highly cautious about anything that can disrupt a pregnancy.

I think we fool ourselves, are less than honest with ourselves, if we treat COVID vaccine hesitance or resistance as just a new version of the anti-vaccine activism we’ve seen for the last couple decades. It’s clearly connected to that phenomenon and is fueled by the climate of doubt it has created. But this is a new vaccine and (in the case of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines) uses a novel vaccine approach. Being wary of going first in such a case is simply not the same as refusing vaccines which have been administered literally billions of times and have track records of short term and long term safety going back decades.