Coronavirus Will Be the Real Swing Voter in November

Less than four months before the 2020 presidential election, America is the laughing stock of the world and the Trump/Pence regime has demonstrated its incompetence in dealing with the pandemic. "Old Europe" so demeaned by many of the right, has done a far better job and is reopening on a much sounder and safer basis.  Meanwhile GOP led states - especially Texas, Florida and Arizona where governors heeded Trumps demands to reopen to save the economy and Trump's reelection chances - things are dire.  In Texas the GOP dolt in the governor's mansion has indicated that perhaps a new lock down will be needed and belatedly officials are pleading for Texans to wear masks.   Ignoring the recommendations of health care experts to satisfy Trump' narcissism and self-centered focus is having deadly consequences.  In this nightmare situation, Andrew Sullivan suggests where things are with the virus come November will be the real swing determinant in the presidential election.  The choice will be between the horrifically incompetent Trump/Pence regime and Joe Biden and whoever his VP choice turns out to be.  Many will feel, if nothing else, Biden - who actually will listen to medical experts - is the safer choice.  Here are highlights from Sullivan's column:

If you want to see the appeal of Joe Biden, I urge you to watch a recent appearance on ABC News. It was tweeted out, in a doozy of a self-own, by Sean Hannity no less. Grandpa Joe is in front of a window that looks out on a calming, summery garden. His speech just a little bit slurry, he says the following to the camera: “All the talk in the last 20 years about driving down the rationale for unions, all of a sudden, this phrase ‘Everybody’s been woked,’ well, guess what, the rest of the working-class people in America have been awakened and realized, ‘Whoa, why, because I work at a fast-food restaurant that I have to sign an agreement that I will not compete, a non-compete agreement, that I will not go across town to another fast-food restaurant to try to get a raise?’ What in the hell is that about?”

He somewhat inartfully makes a good point about the weak leverage workers have at the bottom end of the income scale, he speaks in simple language, and, rather wonderfully, he proves he doesn’t really have a very good idea what being “woke” is. He appears completely normal, unthreatening and reassuring.

[T]he decision largely to get out of the way of Trump’s constant bouts of self-destruction has so far seemed a smart one. Trump is currently losing this election, and there’s no reason to intervene in any major way. And if the election really is a referendum on Trump, then it is very hard to see how the president can win at this point. The only word for this administration’s handling of a dangerous epidemic is catastrophic. The first wave is becoming a tsunami in the South and Southwest.

The economy, already cratered, could very well falter again in the next few months if new shutdowns are forced upon us, and even if they’re not, workers and consumers are simply not going to have sufficient confidence to rebound when the virus still lurks. The comparison with Europe is devastating. Even those countries that have done poorly, like the U.K., now look like success stories compared with America. The only mildly good news is that the death rates have not yet reflected the soaring infection rate. . . . All one can say politically is that a new jump in death rates would render Trump’s reelection even less likely than today. How does he win an election with a 200,000 death record looming?

So what could go wrong? The press went apeshit over Trump’s Mount Rushmore speech, decrying its divisiveness, bigotry, base-pandering, and so on. But when I read the transcript (forgive me, but my mental health couldn’t endure actually watching the speech itself), I could see what he was trying to do, and it isn’t strategically crazy.  In the surge of emotion after the murder of George Floyd, rhetoric on the left kept upping the ante.

I don’t believe for a second that this loathing of the Founders is felt much in the broader Democratic Party — but that doesn’t mean some protesters and media figures haven’t already given the GOP plenty of ammunition. And although the public has been generally supportive of police reforms, there’s always a point at which attacks on law enforcement can backfire.

The culture war is always there, and Trump is an expert in igniting it.

But a few things defuse this, I think. One is that the electorate of 2020 is nothing like that of, say, 1968 — and these core law-and-order and cultural appeals have less traction than they once did. Trump’s main achievement in immigration policy has been to permanently stigmatize the whole idea of lowering immigration to help the working poor, thus actually moving the U.S. to the left on the issue. Voters are also a bit more sophisticated than they may have been: Polling suggests that many Americans understand, for example, that “Defund the Police” is shorthand for reforming them.

Another reason Biden might avoid a culture-war election is that every issue has now been subsumed into or dwarfed by the pandemic and unemployment crisis and a fight over trans rights, say, seems peripheral in contrast. And then there’s simply Joe Biden’s affect, record, and faith. It’s hard to see this lifelong Catholic really conniving with neo-Marxist atheists pledging to “dismantle whiteness.” He’s clearly not in favor of allowing crime to run rampant in the streets. He has made a critical distinction between Confederate statues and those of the Founders, and he has insisted that any removal of monuments be done peacefully and democratically. It’s just hard to paint him as a stalking horse for Ilhan Omar, as some on the right hope to. It doesn’t work.

I suspect, the veep choice will be more important than usual. No men need apply, Biden has told us. No white women either, perhaps, if Amy Klobuchar’s withdrawal from consideration turns out to be dispositive. And the nonwhite woman who will therefore be nominated will have yet another burden: Because of Biden’s advanced age, and the likelihood of his serving only one term, she will be deemed the future leader-in-waiting. The GOP media-industrial-complex will define her pretty quickly as the person who is really in charge and try to run against her, rather than against Biden.

I hope Biden is figuring out how to counter this obvious strategy and doesn’t walk into a trap. Kamala Harris? Susan Rice? To be honest, I don’t know. But if the Trump narrative is that Biden’s surface centrism disguises a resurgent far left, and that he’ll be a puppet of the woke, the veep choice may matter more than it otherwise might.

Trump’s last gambit will be the debates. Tom Friedman is obviously a bit worried that Biden might stumble in a mud fight with the one-man clown car he’ll be up against. And I see his point.

But the virus will be the real swing voter in this election. The sheer scale of the health crisis, and its current trajectory, obviously sweeps every other issue before it, as it should. It sure hasn’t ended the culture war, which at the elite level is arguably more intense than ever, but it is in the driving seat of the economy, and that is almost always dispositive. If we enter November closing in on 200,000 deaths, with the toll rising, and in a virally caused economic slump, I just can’t see how any incumbent can get elected, and I’m usually pretty good at seeing the worst.

The only way Trump can win is to ignore the pandemic or lie about it. He is trying both right now, and neither tactic is working. And as it becomes clearer and clearer that the U.S. is now a disgraced and humiliated outlier in the developed world in its tackling of the virus, Trump’s ultimate responsibility for this dismal response and thereby our struggling economy will be harder and harder to deny. . . . Which suggests to me a Biden and Democratic landslide is no longer out of the question.

The world is laughing at us, when they are not crying at what we have become. And if that isn’t the Trumpiest reason to vote against Trump, I don’t know what could be.

America Is Failing Its Children and Youth

We hear incessant bloviating (lies is a better term) from the White House about "making America great again." yet Trump's trade war is inflicting serious harm on both American manufacturing and farmers are being decimated financially. Yes, many of these individuals/businesses back Trump and arguably deserve whatever befalls them.  What is less covered by the media and far too many politicians is the reality that statistics increasingly show that America, now more than ever, is failing its children and youth.  "Old Europe" - so much maligned by the far right and Republicans - now affords significantly more upward social/economic mobility to its citizens than America now offers to its citizens.  Infant mortality continues to be far higher in America - the United States ranks 37th in terms of child well-being - and the costs are astronomical both in terms of cost and lost lives and lost potential.  With Democrat presidential candidates debating as I write this blog, let's hope that some part of the debate focuses on America's youth.  A column in the New York Times looks at this pressing problem.  Here are excerpts:

[I]gnoring the welfare of our young is a day-to-day problem in America, where our children are falling behind those in other wealthy countries.

On Thursday, 10 Democratic presidential candidates will debate. It would be a natural opportunity to provoke a national conversation on the subject. But a question about child poverty hasn’t been asked at a presidential debate in 20 years, not since a Republican primary debate in 1999, according to the Children’s Defense Fund.

UNICEF says America ranks No. 37 among countries in well-being of children, and Save the Children puts the United States at No. 36. European countries dominate the top places.

American infants at last count were 76 percent more likely to die in their first year than children in other advanced countries, according to an article last year in the journal Health Affairs. We would save the lives of 20,000 American children each year if we could just achieve the same child mortality rates as the rest of the rich world.

Half a million American kids also suffer lead poisoning each year, and the youth suicide rate is at its highest level on record.

These problems have been magnified under President Trump, though American policy has shortchanged children as a whole for decades. The Census Bureau reported this week that the number of uninsured children increased by 425,000 last year.

Trump also gave the green light to a pesticide that I call Dow Chemical’s Nerve Gas Pesticide. Formally called chlorpyrifos, it is associated with brain damage among young children. Over the objections of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Trump administration claims it’s safe. So when will we see it sprayed in the White House to handle cockroaches?

James Heckman, a Nobel laureate in economics at the University of Chicago, calculates that investments in early childhood programs for at-risk kids have an astronomical return, because of improved productivity and reduced spending on police forces, courts, jails, special education and health care.

Likewise, one study found that each dollar invested in reducing lead poisoning among children pays for itself at least 17 times over.

Here’s a suggestion for the candidates: Embrace a landmark report this year from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine that outlines how to reduce child poverty by half over 10 years. This can be done: Britain under Tony Blair halved child poverty in less than a decade.

The national academies calculate that a combination of job programs and child allowances could cut child poverty in half in the United States at a cost of about $100 billion a year. Yes, that’s a lot of money. But child poverty has an economic cost in crime, lost productivity and other expenses that is at least $800 billion a year, the academies report. The real question isn’t whether we can afford to act, but whether we can afford not to.

We don’t lack the tools to help, or the resources. The challenge is just that in our political system, children don’t count — and never get mentioned in presidential debates.

“Kids don’t vote,” notes Nadine Burke Harris, the surgeon general of California and an expert on the lifelong costs of childhood trauma. “They require us to speak for them.”

The Myth of the "American Dream"

Most Americans - and likely most immigrants whether documented or not - believe in the so-called "American Dream" - the idea that through hard work anyone can rise to wealth and influence.  Increasingly, the reality is something quite different from Americas' ideas about upward social mobility (it's higher now in "Old Europe" than in America) and wealth inequality.  Indeed, most Americans would be shocked - or perhaps sickened - if they really focused on the reality of American society.  Yet the myth of the "American Dream" persists and allows plutocrats and their minions in elected office to continue the push to return America to a new Gilded Age that is wonderful for the wealthy, but frightening for most of us.  A piece in Salon looks at the reality and how the "American Dream" acts as an opiate for the masses.  Here are excerpts:

Multiple studies have shown that Americans seriously underestimate the degree of inequality in the U.S. economy. As Slate’s  Jordan Weissman noted in September, subjects in one test “estimated that the top 20 percent of U.S. households owned about 59 percent of the country’s net worth,” when in truth the number is closer to 84 percent. Moreover, the same study shows that even if the wealth of the U.S. economy was distributed like they’d believed, most Americans would still consider it too unequal. And these findings were consistent across many social groups; from Republicans to Democrats, from men to women, from the rich to the poor. No matter your vantage, it seems, Americans’ perception and their reality is not in sync.

[W]hile the gap between perception and reality was most pronounced in Americans, people from other developed (and increasingly unequal) economies also came up with ideal distributions that were markedly different from their countries’ actual status quo. What separates Americans from others, though — what makes inequality of this kind sustainable in the U.S. in a way that in other democracies isn’t; what makes the gap between perception and reality that Rock alluded to so difficult to bridge — is their faith in one of the greatest branding exercises in human history. I speak, of course, of the American Dream.

The American Dream isn’t new, of course, and it didn’t pop up as a response to the great divergence that started in the early 1970s. It’s been around for more than 100 years, and there really was a time, during the late 1800s, when rising wages and rags-to-riches stories made the theory at least plausible. But as the aforementioned U.C. Davis researcher Gregory Clark has found in a recent (paywalled) study, even if the American Dream was real in the past, it’s no longer operational today. “America has no higher rate of social mobility than medieval England or pre-industrial Sweden,”

Currently, the gap between perception and reality in U.S. society is papered over by the American Dream and its vow that regular people, through hard work and perseverance, will be able to get ahead. That dynamic won’t change until more Americans realize that the American Dream today is just an empty promise. But if that ever happens, the 1 percent and the stewards of government will have a whole lot more trouble on their hands than Chris Rock’s hypothetical riots.

Like religion, the "American Dream" is a great tool for keeping the masses docile and working for the powers that be and a system that is all too often rigged against most of us.  Of course, the 1% and their political whores like it that way.