It will remain unfinished

Do you know the Portrait Monument? Do you know who is supposed to be the last face?

Oct 18, 2024

Where was I? It’s Friday and this is my first post all week, so some of you regular readers may be asking if I had fallen off the face of the earth. (Some of you were hoping I did—I am kidding.) I was in Washington, D.C., for no more important task than to lead an expedition of three teenagers to burrow into the ceremony, mystery, and grandeur of our nation’s capital. We did things that fifteen-year-olds find not to be taxing to their bones, like a moonlit late night walking tour of the National Mall and the Tidal Basin monuments (8.5 miles).

The Portrait Monument, U.S. Capitol Rotunda. Photo by Steve Berman

We enjoyed a personal Capitol tour, just our small group of four. Kudos to Rep. Rich McCormick (R-GA 6)’s warm staff. Without a doubt, John, the intern who led us, was the finest tour guide we could ever find. Walking into the Rotunda for the first time, the look of wonder and amazement on those teen’s faces (and mine!) was worth every bit of the 22 miles I hiked on this trip. D.C. is a walking city. And let me add one more thing: if you go to Arlington National Cemetery, don’t pay to ride a tram if you’re capable of the easy walk to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Arlington House (Lee’s former estate) and the other notable sites there. Walk.

In the Rotunda, there are many famous statues and tremendously important (if sometimes inaccurate) paintings, but one I had not really thought about is called the Portrait Monument, and it is unfinished. On the monument, busts of Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony are featured. And there’s a hunk of uncarved marble sticking up from the back. According to the Architect of the Capitol history, the monument was accepted by Congress as a gift from the National Women’s Party in 1921, in honor of women winning the right to vote in U.S. elections. Why anyone would bar women from voting in the first place is a mystery to 20th century me, but I can understand it was a different world before I was born.

On your own time, you can read up on your history of Lucretia Mott, a preacher (another area where I don’t understand keeping women out) and women’s suffrage activist; Susan B. Anthony, who everyone knows as the face that graced the failed U.S. Dollar coin, but also was a leader in the suffrage movement; and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who wrote the women’s bill of rights. But it’s not these icons of equal rights I want to discuss. It’s the unfinished part in the back of the monument.

While the sculptor, Adelaide Johnson, meant the unfinished portion to symbolize the ongoing nature of the equal rights movement, one interpretation that has gained legs is that the face of first woman elected as President of the United States will be carved there. There is no official proclamation for this, but it seems well known in the Capitol, and tour guides repeat the claim regularly to visiting tourists. I heard it myself from our guide.

So is it true?

Sort of. Congress owns the sculpture. Originally, it was displayed in the Crypt, which is the vaulted and columned area beneath the Rotunda, bearing the weight of the floor and statuary above it. The Crypt is loaded with all kinds of art, including pieces that can’t be placed in Statuary Hall due to weight restrictions. A lot of art that was previously in the Crypt or displayed elsewhere (or in storage) has now ended up in the Capitol Visitor Center (I call it the theme park—please exit through the Gift Shop). In 1921, the Portrait Monument was installed in the Crypt and displayed there until Congress ordered it moved to the Rotunda in 1997.

All it would take is a congressional resolution to commission a sculptor to add a face to the existing monument. There’s no evidence that Hillary Clinton had designs on adding her head to the monument, but I’m sure she had more than noticed it, since it was under her husband’s time in the White House when Congress elevated it to its current prominent location.

And now, Kamala Harris, who spent several years as a senator before moving into the vice presidency, has surely thought that her visage might permanently adorn a monument to women’s rights, ensconcing her gaze in the Capitol Rotunda for all future generations, when she wins. That is, if she wins.

Here is the hard part: winning. In the last month or so, I have observed something that should trouble the heads of the Harris campaign. I commented last week that it might be too soon to claim that Harris has peaked too soon. I now feel it’s not too soon to say that. Harris has peaked too early, and she is in the inevitable down swing from that peak, helped by events she has no control over, but benefit her opponent.

The problems for Democrats, and Harris, are easy to define with certain ethic groups, but harder to quantify in terms of actual votes in swing states. Everyone knows that Harris is going to win big in blue states, which is why many Democrats are railing against the Electoral College, which gives Republicans hope in an otherwise very blue nation, because the blue states are more populous. The real problem for Harris is knowing exactly where Donald Trump’s ceiling is, and is it higher or lower than the polls reveal.

Events raise the ceiling for Trump. Especially when the events show Israel winning in spite of (and in defiance of) all the “peace” talk, much of which is coming from the White House. Harris is in the unenviable position of trying to satisfy people with “peace” who really mean that Israel has no right to win, or to exist. In another realm, Democrats, and the Biden administration, like to pretend that the statistics about the border they gather based on apprehensions are the only statistics that matter. They pretend that the number of illegal immigrants (the ones who were not apprehended) is basically zero, and only immigrants who have “encounters” with the Border Patrol are counted, even if the ones who aren’t counted are in the country.

Countering the horrendous lie that Haitian immigrants are eating pets and deserve to be summarily deported with a coverup that claims the border, and those very refugees who are placed by the Office of Refugee Resettlement in converted motels, warehouses, and anywhere else people can be made to live, are not a problem for anyone is bad politics. Trump has the advantage that everyone knows he makes stuff up and presents the most extreme distortion possible when discussing any problem. Harris has no advantage because she is running as “normal” and isn’t expected to promote enormous lies to support her rhetoric.

But the Biden administration is running on enormous lies, and Harris can’t play that truth card because she’s literally part of the Biden administration. The public takes notice.

Harris will—and has—out-raised, out-knock, and out-organized Trump. But in the end, all those things count for little when Trump is leading in all the battleground states. The polls don’t lie, but they don’t tell us everything. Within 30 miles of Washington, D.C., I drove through parts of Maryland that teem with Trump 2024 signs. Trump continues to fill, and overflow, arenas in the Atlanta metro area of Georgia. Harris and Gov. Tim Walz’s swings through south Georgia are largely forgotten.

Early voting has started. We are within 3 weeks of Election Day. There’s little time for any shift of momentum, and Harris has peaked too soon. Reversing that would take events, and events are favoring Trump. All the competent campaigning in the world can’t lower Trump’s ceiling, and events are what raised it in the first place, if only by a tiny amount. But a tiny amount will decide this election, as close as it is.

America has to have a yearning, an appetite to put that last face on the Portrait Monument. I don’t see it. Maybe it’s evident in certain places, or in certain bubbles, but those aren’t the ones I move in, and perhaps not in the states that matter. I see this election as the same referendum on one man as was the one in 2020. Except in 2020, Trump was the incumbent, and Biden was the “stop Trump” candidate. In 2024, Harris is neither the incumbent, nor is she the change candidate, try as she might. This is still a referendum on Trump, but the hunger to put Kamala Harris in the White House is, at best, lukewarm, outside her viberarium (yes, I made up a word, so what?).

I know, there are partisans out there. I see yard signs, vehicle wraps, and people who are adamant that their fervency for Harris is replicated around the nation. Only it isn’t, not unless you count all the voters who won’t vote for Trump in Harris’s column. Some might be, but I don’t see enough of them right now to move the race from “razor close” to “Harris wins.”

I’m going to say it: Trump has a better than 50 percent chance of winning this election, and the closer Election Day gets, the more that percentage slowly creeps up.

We will know the result in around three weeks (barring some weird Year 2000 stuff). All the scaffolding workers are beginning to build on the Capitol face for the coming inauguration might not be for the person who will be carved into the unfinished marble of the Portrait Monument. Instead, it’s more likely that sculpture will remain, as it has been for 103 years, unfinished.

ISRAEL “SETTLES ITS ACCOUNT” WITH YAHYA SINWAR. The IDF has confirmed through DNA, dental records, and fingerprints, that it has definitely killed Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas. This completes Israel’s current campaign of vengeance and decapitation of its enemies. With tens of thousands of Gazan civilians killed or injured, and an equal or greater number of terrorists eliminated, Israel has few enemies on its borders left to fight, at least enemies with names the public has heard.

This would definitely be a good time for peace to break out. Then again, it might be difficult to find someone with whom to actually negotiate, since Israel has made it a habit to kill anyone with the authority to do so. It was only a matter of time until Sinwar was killed, and Israel hopefully has a plan for what happens next. My worry is, they probably don’t. Israel has been operating on the basis of having a big bad enemy to name for so long, that once the wolf has killed all its hunters, it doesn’t know enough to go after other prey.

The proper thing to do is a version of the Marshall Plan: rebuild Gaza, and work to pay reparations to Beirut in exchange for their expulsion of Hezbollah, and their useless U.N. “peacekeepers” on the Israeli border. But blood feuds have a way of continuing even when all of one family is wiped out by the other.

It will remain unfinished

Do you know the Portrait Monument? Do you know who is supposed to be the last face?

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