Comes now Joe Biden, promising the restoration of White House calm and, more hopefully than realistically, an end to our civil strife. For the specter of nuclear war, substitute that of the coronavirus, which is more than a specter. In his talk last night, Biden projected the diligence and empathy Americans want in a president in times of trouble.I think Biden should adopt this Steve Earle song as his campaign theme. It even includes his position on no-Medicare-For-All-never-no-matter-what:
Otherwise, however, there’s no way the 2020s will resemble the 1950s. The consciousness of our huge levels of inequality already demands and will require major change, all against a background of demographic transformation. If a President Biden has the manner of Ike, he must have the substance of FDR or LBJ (well, the domestic-policy LBJ).
Look around
There's doctors down on Wall Street
Sharpenin' their scalpels and tryin' to cut a deal
Meanwhile, back at the hospital
We got accountants playin' God and passin' out the pills
Yeah, I know, that sucks that your HMO
Ain't doin' what you thought it would do
But everybody's gotta die sometime and we can't save everybody
It's the best that we can do
Meyerson's point on Biden and Eisenhower is about how SQJ tries to invoke a stereotypical, imagined, Father Knows Best, ideal version of the 1950s as seen by comfortable white people:
Comes now Joe Biden, promising the restoration of White House calm and, more hopefully than realistically, an end to our civil strife. For the specter of nuclear war [in the 1950s], substitute that of the coronavirus, which is more than a specter. In his talk last night, Biden projected the diligence and empathy Americans want in a president in times of trouble.Andrew Gawthorpe recently warned against assuming that the COVID-19 fiasco will crater Trump's popularity, such as it is (Be careful. Trump may exploit the coronavirus crisis for authoritarian ends Guardian 03/14/2020):
Otherwise, however, there’s no way the 2020s will resemble the 1950s. The consciousness of our huge levels of inequality already demands and will require major change, all against a background of demographic transformation. If a President Biden has the manner of Ike, he must have the substance of FDR or LBJ (well, the domestic-policy LBJ). [my emphasis]
In short, nothing in Trump’s record – or that of his ardent base, whose political support is all he cares about – can lead us to believe that he will use his power to protect and serve all Americans equally in a time of unprecedented crisis. He might look like a deer in the headlights right now, but soon enough he will snap back to the unreality he lives in and deploy the only political trick he knows: rallying his base, abusing his power, trashing his foes. Many Americans will have to deal with the reality of a president who is not only incompetent to defend them but doesn’t even regard them as legitimate Americans worthy of protection. This epidemiological crisis is also a political one. We should prepare to defend against both.
Yet the diagnosis of polarization - true enough as far as it goes - obscures what makes that polarization so destructive. Elite discourse frequently implies that the two parties are mirror images of each other, as if both were moving at the same rate toward the political fringes, shedding norms and principles as they did so. But this is simply not what is happening. The core problem is not equal polarization but asymmetric polarization.I was with him until the last paragraph, which could be read to mean that it's great that the Democrats are willing to compromise with hardcore rightwing Republicans for the sake of Compromise, and that the only problem is that the Republicans haven't adopted the same attitude.
The Democratic Party has moved modestly leftward, mostly due to the decline in the party's presence in the South. But it still aspires to solve problems and so is relatively open to compromise. (For example, Obama's signature health-care law, now so reviled by Republicans, was built in considerable part from past Republican proposals.) By contrast, the Republican Party has moved dramatically rightward and now represents a radically disruptive force that the U.S. political system is ill equipped to contain. [my emphasis]
No, the problem is that we have a Citizens United campaign-finance regime in the US which allows essentially unlimited campaign contributions by the wealthiest. That creates this "asymmetric polarization" situation in which the Republicans see maximum reason to be radical and intransigent on issues prioritized the One Percent. And for the Democrats to continually compromise/surrender to those positions. In the partisan political dynamic, the Republican Party is in a long and still continuing trend of self-radicalization and the Democrats refuse to take that radicalization as being as serious as it is and are still resisting developing targeted and effective strategies to counter it. It's not a question of manners.
Charlie Pierce tries to look on the bright side in Joe Biden Is a Party Man. Will He Go Along With the Party's New Progressive Direction? Esquire Politics Blog 03/16/2020:
Biden’s career has spanned the entire stretch of the Democratic Party’s nearly 50-year retrenchment. Already scared away from progressive policies by the destruction of George McGovern in 1972, the Democrats saw Jimmy Carter, hardly a progressive champion, lose to Ronald Reagan in large part because huge pieces of the old New Deal coalition fled to him. This scared Democrats for another three decades. The party committed itself to half-measures, and to a little discreet whoring after corporate cash. Only now, with the proof staring them in the face that the policies that began with old Dutch lead only to the abyss, have substantial parts of the Democratic Party returned to the party’s post-FDR roots. [my emphasis]And we are seeing SQJ making verbal concessions to Elizabeth Warren's proposal to correct some of the harm that Biden was active in imposing on the country with things like his bankruptcy bill. But even in his Sunday debate with Sanders, he was taking his hardcore anti-Medicare-for-All position and indulging in cheap McCarthyist redbaiting against Sanders. Biden's a conservative. He can be counted on to fight for progressive policies on anything. Yes, if the Democratic base can bring enough pressure on him if he manages to get elected, he may have to concede. But it will be because he's forced into doing it like Nancy Pelosi was forced, reluctantly and belatedly, into proceeding with impeachment proceedings against Trump.
Digby Parton also warns that we don't see any real signs yet that the Trump Cult, aka, the Republican base, are losing faith in their Führer (Are the Trump voters getting nervous? Nah. Hullabaloo 03/16/2020):
According to the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released on Sunday, Trump’s job approval stands at 46 percent, exactly the same as it was last month before the crisis really hit. His core fans truly do believe he’s doing a heckuva job. And because of that, they see this unfolding crisis differently than the rest of the country ...Digby reads polls. This is a very useful thing for political commentators to do.
People keep saying that this is Trump’s Katrina, referring to President George W. Bush’s bungling of one of the worst disasters in U.S. history. But it pays to remember that Bush’s approval rating also didn’t fall much in the immediate aftermath of that storm. He was right where Trump is at the time, mired in the low 40s. That rating briefly dipped in the two months after the disaster hit and then bounced back up to 43%. It wasn’t until the next year that he drifted down into the 30s.
Maybe it took a while to sink in for Republican voters that their hero was failing them, and perhaps the same thing will happen with Trump. If this epidemic hits their own communities - and it will hit everybody’s - you’d think the Trump bubble might finally pop. I wouldn’t count on it. Their devotion runs deep and I’m not sure anything can break it, not even a disaster of unprecedented scale like this one. He could let their grandmother die of COVID-19 on Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes. [my emphasis]
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