Bob Neal

Contrast Monday, which will be the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington, with Wednesday of this week, the first televised debate among Republican presidential candidates.

On Aug. 28, 1963, a quarter of a million people rallied at the Lincoln Memorial for the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.” On Wednesday, eight Republicans who would be president debated in Milwaukee. One event displayed accountability, the other its absence.

Let me explain.

The March on Washington called for accountability in our government and was highlighted by Dr. Martin Luther King, whose public persona epitomized accountability. The debate was notable for the absence of Donald Trump, who epitomizes the lack of accountability.

Back in 1963, the very presence of 250,000 people in one place, the logistics of getting them there and keeping order, the big names (including Noel Paul Stookey of Maine and his colleagues in Peter, Paul and Mary) was a loud call to Congress for accountability,

To its credit, Congress responded. Within two years, it passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, also known as the Public Accommodations Act, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, both landmarks.

And, a greater proportion of Republicans than Democrats voted for each bill in each house of Congress. Should those bills come up today, you can bet that wouldn’t happen.

Well before the march, King made clear his take on public accountability. In the “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” scribbled in the margins of a newspaper and on toilet tissue, he wrote:

“An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.”

That is accountability, all too often nowhere in sight these days. And that brings us to Trump, the king of unaccountability. Just a couple of examples.

The people of Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, 30 minutes from the debate hall in Milwaukee, were promised 5,000 jobs in a new Foxconn (Taiwan) factory deal that Trump ginned up. In 2018, he used a gold shovel to turn dirt launching the project. Today, it’s mostly an unused glass bubble.

Five years later — as Kelly Gallaher, head of a local government watchdog group, told the Washington Post — the factory site “just looks to me like sort of a low-rent Epcot Center. What almost turns it into comedy is that they were renting it out for banquets.”

That’s right. The factory site is for rent for banquets. The people of Wisconsin went into hock for $500 million to lure Foxconn. Racine County, which includes Mount Pleasant, voted by 3 percentage points for Trump in 2016 and didn’t hold him accountable in 2020 when it voted for Trump over Joe Biden by 4 points.

Second example. Trump promised to save 800 jobs at a Carrier manufacturing plant in Indianapolis. With some strong-arming and tax credits, the jobs did not go to Mexico.

“These companies aren’t going to be leaving anymore,” Trump said at the time.

But the Indianapolis Star reported in 2020, “In Indiana alone, more than 20 manufacturers have moved production to foreign countries since Trump took office, resulting in at least 3,000 job losses.” Hoosiers apparently didn’t hold him accountable. Twice, Trump got 57% of their votes.

As conservative columnist Bret Stephens said on Monday in The New York Times, “The truest thing Trump ever said is that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and his base would stick with him.” Stephens went on: “The proper way to understand his appeal isn’t by studying normal voter behavior. It’s by studying cults. In a cult, the leader is always, simultaneously, a savior of his people and a victim of a vast and shadowy conspiracy.” And not held accountable.

No person hewing to a conspiracy theory has accountability. That’s because evidence doesn’t matter to them. Remember the guy who shot up a pizza parlor in Washington, D.C., because the QAnon conspiracy had told him the pizza joint was a center of child exploitation? QAnon need not be accountable, it need only spin and spew its idiocy. Someone will hear its call to arms.

Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, also writing on Monday in The New York Times, called on the candidates to show accountability and withdraw if their wheels begin to spin. “They need to see if they can catch fire this fall, and if they can’t, they need to step aside, because winnowing down the field of candidates is the single best chance to stop Mr. Trump.”

Let’s give the final words on accountability to Carlos Lozada of The Times. The indictments against Trump “capture the progression of transgression evident in Trump’s political campaigns, his presidency and its aftermath, with each escape from accountability yielding a bolder and more reckless iteration of Trump.”

To Bob Neal, accountability means attaching your name to your opinion. He ignores comments on news sites by people who use aliases. If the opinion is nameless, the comment is likely useless. Neal can be reached at bobneal@myfairpoint.net.