A month or so ago, I thought I detected a slight Biden zeitgeist zephyr after the State of the Union speech…and we’ve seen a minuscule improvement in a few of the polls in recent weeks. The polls are, of course, meaningless at this point, but the conventional wizards are taking what they can get: Arizona and Pennsylvania do look stronger for the Dems, and there’s even a possibility of a bluish North Carolina, given that the Republican candidate for governor there is a hateful nutter who will be very bad for local business if elected. (No more big conventions for you, Charlotte.) The Republicans are stepping all over themselves when it comes to abortion (Arizona, again)—even Trump, who rarely screws up on culture issues, has gone all political on this—tossing it back to the states, throwing it in the face of the true believing pro-lifers. (Yes, yes, everything Trump does is political—except for issues that involve his self-regard— but he usually manages to mask his cynical pragmatism in a cloak of anger and outrage. He’s stuttering on abortion.)
So Democrats may be feeling a tiny bit better this week…but I’m reading a different, downcast set of tea leaves. Nothing you can read from the polls. Or events in the economy or the world. But I’m thinking about how things will look in the fall when a congeries of dark forces will manifest themselves. It’s a fool’s errand to anticipate October, no doubt. Anything can happen between now and then, especially with two geriatric candidates, but let me enumerate:
The Republican business establishment is sliding back into line. Tom Edsall has the goods, as usual, today in The New York Times. Even the oligarchs who expressed outrage after January 6 have crawled back inside the gilded tent. There are two theories about this, which sort of overlap. One is greed: the oligarchs figure Trump will lower their taxes and Biden will raise them. The other is more nefarious and, therefore, plausible: The oligarchs are scared Trump will come after their businesses if they don’t grovel. People like Jeff Bezos and Michael Bloomberg—and maybe even Taylor Swift—are going to be facing regulatory and litigation hell if Trump wins. He will dictate their demise on day one. In anticipation of that, patriots like Eric Levine, Nelson Peltz, Robert Bigelow and Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase have prostrated themselves at the feet of Orange Jesus. “You didn’t expect that?” A good friend and brilliant economist and extraordinary pessimist said to me. “Jamie Dimon is a total piece of shit. He only cares about himself. That’s true of all those guys.” No doubt, but most of those guys cast Trump into the Outer Darkness after January 6—and very publicly so. I was hoping that would stick. It was, after all, an attempt to overthrow the government of the United States. I was hoping for a gathering of the American establishment next fall—people like Peltz and Dimon—to stand tall, perform on TV (including Fox) and in ads warning the public: Trump will destroy our democracy. He will far worse than last time, a vindictive Banana Republic caudillo. I still have hopes for the leaders of the US Military—Generals like Petraeus, Mattis, McMaster, Milley, Kelly and Jack Kean—to unite and tell the American public why a Putin stooge shouldn’t be President. But then, I was hoping those guys would unite and nuke Tommy Tuberville, whose abortion-related hold on military promotions gutted the next generation of general officers. I mean: You guys couldn’t even summon the moxie for a joint op-ed? You let a mortal ignoramus do serious damage to an institution you love and the rest of us desperately need? It leads me to this conclusion: In the end, an American Establishment united against authoritarianism is a dog that will not bark next fall.
Speaking of Putin, he wants Trump to win. Xi Jinping probably does, too. Bibi Netanyahu certainly does. And who knows where Mexico’s Lopez-Obredor and the Iranians stand? Foreign policy usually doesn’t matter in American politics, but these guys can make trouble next fall and make Biden seem even weaker than he currently does. They can gin up crises. Putin could launch a fall offensive in Ukraine; Xi could menace Taiwan. Bibi could be Bibi. Closer to home, the authoritarians could deploy their hackers, deep-fakers and disinformatia specialists to boost Third Party candidates (as the Russians did in 2016) and slag Dems. Every last one of these—even Xi, despite Trump’s anti-China rhetoric (Donald did flip-flop on Tik-Tok)—would rather see an isolationist U.S. President than an internationalist like Biden. The bad guys have the power to make Grandpa Joe seem weak in the world.
Inflation isn’t going away—at least, the perception of it isn’t. I figured that if the Fed lowered interest rates over the summer, there might be an impact on public optimism (especially if mortgage rates came down). But that seems less likely now, given the recent set of inflation numbers. I am assured, by those who know, that the long-term trend is in the viable neighborhood of 2.5%. Maybe it is. But elections don’t happen in the long-term. They happen just after the summer driving season and it’s a safe bet that OPEC—the Saudis prefer Trump/Kushner over Biden; the other oilies will follow suit—will act to juice prices in the coming months. Vacationers will be pissed and steaming this summer.
The Democrats continue to listen to out-of-touch activists in the black and Latino communities. Crime is not an issue among white liberals (less than 30% think it is), but it is among the black middle and working classes (more than 70% think it is). Refugees continue to stream across the border, to the dismay of most Latinos who came here the hard way. Will there be an ugly police shooting this summer? Will there be some sort of atrocity at the border? Will Joe Biden seem any more decisive?
The media will continue to act like confused, defensive ninnies. There was an extraordinary piece about NPR in The Free Press this week, by a longtime NPR producer named Uri Berliner, who has not been fired yet. He slammed the Quinoa Radio Network for pushing the Russia-collusion theory, and deep-sixing the Hunter Biden Laptop and Wuhan covid lab leak stories. Worse, he described the panicky response within NPR after the George Floyd murder in 2020:
Given the circumstances of Floyd’s death, it would have been an ideal moment to tackle a difficult question: Is America, as progressive activists claim, beset by systemic racism in the 2020s—in law enforcement, education, housing, and elsewhere? We happen to have a very powerful tool for answering such questions: journalism. Journalism that lets evidence lead the way.
But the message from the top was very different. America’s infestation with systemic racism was declared loud and clear: it was a given. Our mission was to change it.
“When it comes to identifying and ending systemic racism,” [Former NPR CEO John] Lansing wrote in a companywide article, “we can be agents of change. Listening and deep reflection are necessary but not enough. They must be followed by constructive and meaningful steps forward. I will hold myself accountable for this.”
What crap. NPR and most other mainstream media outlets not only didn’t question the legitimacy of Black Lives Matter, the activist group leading the “anti-racist” charge that summer, they refused to question the obvious moral deficiency of BLM, which protested the handful of blacks killed by police officers but refused to acknowledge the overwhelming majority of violent black deaths, which are caused by black criminals. This is an ideological obscenity, a purposeful omission in order to avoid any criticism of black gang-bangers. On top of that, it turned out that various leaders of BLM are financially corrupt and others celebrated the Hamas atrocities of October 7. I may have missed it, but I’ve yet to see a major expose of the BLM scam. Nothing on NPR. Nothing in The New York Times. Quotidian Americans probably don’t pay close attention to these details but they definitely sense the media lean toward the politically correct—that is, away from the world as they perceive it. That is, away from reality. As long as they assume the media skews that way, the attempts by Biden to tell the truth about Trump will run into strong zeitgeist headwinds.
There is the passive nature of the Biden Administration itself. Why is Merrick Garland still Attorney General, even though there are clear indications that the President is furious with him? Why is the southern border is still open? Why aren’t there any wild-ass anti-Trump cowboys in the campaign? Why do Democrats think that abortion will be enough to win the election? Why do Democrats take comfort in the fact that they’ve raised a ginormous amount of money, even though money doesn’t mean all that much at the presidential level? The galloping delusion in the face of a second Trump term is both infuriating and predictable from a party that has accepted, and promoted, nonsense from its activists for decades.
I could be wrong about all this. I’m probably wrong about some of it. And there is always the fact that Biden is running against the single worst person to run for President in American History. But don’t buy the blip in the polls—and don’t expect that abortion is enough to overcome an awful lot of negative factors in the coming months. Biden is in trouble. He needs to talk to people outside his inner circle—and then take action—if he’s going to have a chance in November.
When Things Were Better
I owe the late Richard Goodwin a lot. He hired me as his assistant at the Rolling Stone Washington bureau in 1974. I was 28 and awestruck. I also owe him for the inspiration of the remarkable speeches he wrote for John and Robert Kennedy in the 1960s. Now, his wife Doris Kearns Goodwin—have we actually known each other for 50 years, Doris?—has done what great historians do: she’s gone rummaging through his papers and written about in a wonderful piece for The Atlantic. In these droopy times, it reminds me why I became obsessed with politics when I was a teenager. I especially loved the story about an impromptu speech that an exhausted John F. Kennedy gave late at night, to 10,000 at the University of Michigan during his 1960 presidential campaign:
How many of you who are going to be doctors are willing to spend your days in Ghana? Technicians or engineers, how many of you are willing to work in the Foreign Service and spend your lives traveling around the world? On your willingness to do that, not merely to serve one year or two in the service, but on your willingness to contribute part of your life to this country, I think will depend the answer whether a free society can compete.
If you’re wondering, after my last posting here (Only You…), why I’m so obsessed with national service, it’s because he asked. Very few politicians have done so since.
Cowboy Carter
Beyonce is an astounding American musician. The girl takes risks. I’m still assimilating what Sanity Goddess and I heard last night, when we listened to her new album, which means it must be pretty good. It certainly is haunting, gut-breaking and serious as a lost lover who left because you don’t know why.. It is not the “country music” album that was hyped. And yet it is country music: Our Country.
Pitch Time
If you like what you’re reading, you might consider joining the gang:
Richard Goodwin wrote a terrific memoir/history, Remembering America. Reflecting on those times and that administration, one wonders who, exactly, are the lightweights in the Biden inner circle? Surely his leaning ultra left (“progressive”) since taking office has much to do with who’s got his ear on a regular basis - as yet an untold story.
Joe -- I know I'm supposed to be reading pieces that challenge my thinking (and I do, the WSJ for one) but I'm going to stick with Mr. Sanity Clause, where you going deeply (and in an entertaining way) where I would if I had your experience, skill and contacts.