It has been a bad year for liberals. Beyond bad, perhaps.
The tone was set when Donald Trump won the presidency by taking a few hotly contested districts, winning via the Electoral College while failing to garner a majority of votes nationwide. The win reflected a divided nation, echoing Al Gore’s loss 16 years earlier, when Gore outpaced Republican George W. Bush by half a million ballots but lost the electoral vote.
Since the election, despite a “resistance” movement that has notched a few surprising wins in the courts and at the ballot box, Dems have taken major hits over the past 14 months. To name just a few:
>> Watching conservative Neil Gorsuch take a spot on the Supreme Court (after the GOP Congress stalled the selection submitted by Trump predecessor Barack Obama).
>> Shaking their heads as Trump golfed and traveled his way through the year — actions Fox News commentators didn’t say a peep about, though Obama had drawn heavy fire from the conservative-allied news organization when he golfed or vacationed in Hawaii, his birth state.
>> Fighting off repeated attempts by the Republicans to repeal Obamacare, only to see it gutted in a tax reform bill that heavily favored corporations and the wealthiest Americans.
>> Witnessing the fall of a liberal hero in Minnesota Sen. Al Franken, who resigned after multiple accusations of unwelcome kissing and groping.
When Trump was elected, the dread was so strong that some took solace in the idea that his term might be short-lived, that he’d quit because the job was harder than he realized or that he’d be driven from office by one of the scandals surrounding him (sexual assault accusations, business conflicts).
Liberals had visions of impeachment hearings dancing in their heads, with star turns by the emoluments clause and the Hatch Act. But that all proved to be delusion, and as a result, 2017 turned out to be one lousy year for the left.
SO HOW can Dems cope as a downer year comes to a close and enter 2018 with some semblance of hope? Among the options are lashing out, looking for distraction and taking comfort in nostalgia for happier days. All of those will be available Sunday at the Blaisdell Concert Hall, when Bill Maher makes his seventh annual appearance in Honolulu. This year, he brings guests Bob Saget and Reggie Brown.
“People are anxious for someone to be very mean to this president, and I am that man,” Maher proclaimed in a recent phone interview from Los Angeles.
Maher, host of the topical HBO talk show “Real Time,” said the first year of the Trump administration has gone even worse than he expected.
“I don’t even know where to begin,” Maher said. “First thing I do every day is check my phone and ask, ‘Oh, what did the mental patient do now?’ And every day there’s something.”
Maher sees hope in recent election wins for Democrats in Alabama, Virginia and New Jersey, but he is also cautious in his optimism.
“(These election results) showed the resistance isn’t just people talking,” Maher said. “They’re actually showing up where they need to show up, at the voting booth. So I’m hopeful that in 2018, which is the one that really counts because we gotta flip this Congress so there’s a check on this maniac, I think they are gonna come out in record numbers. I don’t wanna say more because I don’t want people to get complacent. I want them scared. They should be scared because this is just the first year. It’s gonna get worse.”
As bad as 2017 has been, Maher said the trip to Hawaii is always one of the highlights of his year. After the New Year’s Eve show in Honolulu, he does one on New Year’s Day on Maui. For the third year, the trip includes guests, and Maher has always said he brings only people he knows he’ll have a good time with.
“It’s something I look forward to more than I could tell you,” Maher said. “Thanksgiving I start to get excited about Hawaii. … To be able to go to Hawaii and be with these people for four or five days and do great shows and entertain people and have a vacation, it’s the best way to end the year and start a new one.”
WHERE MAHER might help his heavily liberal audience vent about the state of the government, Saget aims to help them take their minds off it.
Though busy with TV and movie projects, Saget said in a phone conversation from Los Angeles last week, “I’ve been touring more because the way the world has gone in the last two years, I just needed to make people laugh so bad, like it’s a mission.”
Most widely known as iconic TV dad Danny Tanner on the 1990s sitcom “Full House,” Saget has since shed that squeaky-clean image with a stand-up act that Maher calls “family-friendly sick humor.”
Saget credits his father for that sense of humor. In his latest special, “Zero to Sixty,” he weaves tales of his father telling him inappropriately bawdy jokes at a young age. His parents, since passed, were supportive of his comedy. Their reward? To wind up in his act, much to their embarrassment.
In his special, he relates a dirty joke he told about his parents on “The Tonight Show,” involving a camel in Israel.
“I would say these horrible things,” Saget told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, “and sometimes they would like it, and sometimes they would be like, ‘Please don’t say that.’ … It’s kinda selfish being a stand-up if you’re talking about your parents in that regard, but my dad would find it funny, because he would go like, ‘Oh, man, what have I created?’”
Saget said he’s looking forward to joining his friend of 30-plus years for the trip to Hawaii, which he’s visited many times.
“I like Bill and we never get to hang out. … This is a fun thing for me. I’m really excited about it.”
BROWN IS the least-famous member of this weekend’s slate, but even those who don’t know they’ve seen him may have seen him. Maher kind of wishes his appearance could be a surprise, but he let the cat out of the bag back in August that the Obama impersonator would fill out the bill.
“He’s not just the best Obama impersonator ever,” Maher told the Star-Advertiser. “He’s the best political impersonator I’ve ever seen. … This year, above all, people are just pining for the former president, after we got a year look at this orange clown, this maniac, this demented person who’s running the world. There’s such nostalgia for Barack Obama.”
Brown first heard when he was 21 that he bore a resemblance to this state senator who played basketball with Brown’s brother at a gym in Chicago. His life changed on the same night Obama’s did in 2008.
“We were sitting at home having an election party at my place in Chicago and the news came in, and I didn’t believe it,” Brown said in a phone conversation from Los Angeles. “The second I saw it on Fox News … we jumped on our bikes and rode to Grant Park with a megaphone and got up in front of the whole sea of people that he was speaking in front of and I was just like, ‘Yes we can,’ ‘Change has come,’ doing all his little tag lines.”
That night begat a career for Brown, who mostly does corporate comedy gigs.
“It’s kinda low-key what I do, almost like Superman. When I put on the suit everyone knows who I am, and when I take it off I kinda blend in.”
Brown says sound and look are both important parts of the impression.
“It’s always been his speaking pattern first and foremost, because no one talks like him, outside of maybe William Shatner on ‘Star Trek,’” Brown said. “It’s the tone of his voice, his body language and just the way he carries himself, which is as a man of confidence and dignity and integrity and respect.”
