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.

Why the GOP May Lose Everything

All of these Republicans need to be forced into retirement.

I try to not get overly optimistic, but the 2020 elections have the possibility of  dealing the Republican Party and Donald Trump a horrific defeat and loss of control of both houses of Congress and the White House.  If it comes to pass, it will be most deserved and a repudiation of an agenda that has benefited the very wealthy and in the final analysis little or nothing to the vast majority of Americans. Indeed, the entire GOP game plan has been to use racism and religious extremism to dupe working class and middle class Americans to vote against their own best interests. The gambit worked in 2016, but signs indicate that 2020 may prove to be a different ball game, especially with the coronavirus pandemics underscoring the need for the very programs and policies the GOP wants to destroy. A column in the Washington Post looks at the rapidly changing outlook for the GOP come December.  If the economy continues to suffer and there is a second wave of the virus, things could get even worse for Republicans - and deservedly so.  Here are excerpts:

Montana Gov. Steve Bullock (D) says that when he first announced he would run for the U.S. Senate, he “didn’t know what Montana and the country was going to look like in the short period thereafter.” With the covid-19 crisis, all his time has been taken up by being a governor, not a candidate. So far, that has only helped him in his campaign to unseat Republican Sen. Steve Daines.

In Maine, House Speaker Sara Gideon, a Democrat seeking to end the long career of Republican Sen. Susan Collins, says the pandemic has “laid bare the inequities that already existed” and underscored the need for a “vision of what it means to work together and for each other instead of trying to sow divisiveness.” This brings home Gideon’s case against Collins’s willingness to ally with President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), two of the most divisive figures in American politics.

Colorado’s former governor John Hickenlooper, a Democrat with a good chance of ousting incumbent Republican Sen. Cory Gardner, expresses a sense of gravity about this campaign that he never felt in his races for mayor of Denver or governor.

And Democrat Cal Cunningham, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan who is facing incumbent Republican Sen. Thom Tillis (N.C.), says that many North Carolinians today feel “an urgency that did not exist prior to March of this year” about “health coverage . . . about jobs, the economy.”

Issues that were once “percolating for many” are now “personal for everyone.”

If Bullock, Gideon, Hickenlooper and Cunningham all win, Democrats will likely take over the U.S. Senate and end McConnell’s days as majority leader.

And they are not the only challengers with a decent shot at Republican seats. In Arizona, Democrat Mark Kelly has been running ahead of Republican Sen. Martha McSally, and Republicans face vulnerabilities in Iowa, Georgia, possibly Kansas and perhaps even in South Carolina. McConnell, though favored, faces a spirited opponent in Amy McGrath, a former Marine fighter pilot. Only one Democratic incumbent, Sen. Doug Jones of Alabama, is an underdog. Having disastrously bungled the pandemic, Trump is not only falling well behind former vice president Joe Biden in the polls; he could also be creating a tidal wave that would give Democrats unified control of the federal government’s elected branches.

Hickenlooper and Gideon are running in states Trump lost in 2016, and the president’s increasing vulnerability in Arizona and North Carolina could open the way for Kelly and Cunningham.

My conversations with four of the top Senate challengers suggested that the coronavirus crisis has reinforced core arguments that helped the Democrats win the House in 2018, particularly around access to health care, while also increasing the saliency of inequality — in both economic and health outcomes — as a mainstream concern.

At the same time, Trump’s brutal belligerence has turned Democratic candidates into missionaries of concord. This allows them to be implicitly critical of the president and reach out to his one-time supporters at the same time.

If the GOP does lose everything, it will be because the Trumpian circus-plus-horror-show is entirely off-key for an electorate that has so much to be serious about.

After Trump's Malfeasance, Biden Must Show He Can Do Better

Joe Biden in Philadelphia on March 10. (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)

With Donald Trump having failed the test of protecting America from a pandemic through both his disbanding of the national security pandemic team and slashing positions and funding for the CDC on top of his gutting of many other agencies now needed to stem the Covid-19 economic downturn, Joe Biden's mission is to make the case that he would (i) put together a first class administration with competent individuals rather than grifters and sycophants, and (ii) would better manage future threats.    A column in the Washington Post by a former Republican and Never Trumper lays out this situation while taking shots at both Trump but also those in the right and GOP who seemingly have had lobotomies or suffered from a brain deadening illness as they pander and suck up to Trump while downplaying the seriousness of the Covid-19 pandemic.  Here are column excerpts:

As yet, it is a disease without a name. But the symptoms are obvious. The patient begins by playing down a gathering national disaster — say a pandemic. . . . . The patient then takes this as an opportunity to complain that the threat was exaggerated all along. . . . Success in opposing a challenge is thus interpreted as evidence the challenge never existed.

Perhaps this should be known as the Ingraham illness — as in Laura Ingraham, who recently demanded “we want answers” because the casualty count from covid-19 is lower than initially predicted. I’m more inclined to diagnose bubonic Bennettism — for William Bennett, who has likened covid-19 to the flu, grumbled about national overreaction and claimed the global outbreak “is not a pandemic.” . . . .As education secretary and as head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Bennett often reminded us that liberals of great learning could be guilty of destructive silliness. Now he is demonstrating that the same is true of cerebral conservatives.
 In reality, there is a series of asymmetrical threats that the United States needs to prepare against. They include terrorism and pandemic disease. They also include cyberaggression against U.S. democracy, criminal gangs of international reach, climate disruption and refugee flows that foster despair and radicalism. And there is the threat of nuclear proliferation. And the threat from an increasingly belligerent China. We need U.S. leaders who can prevent mass casualties from deadly pathogens and chew gum at the same time. In the last presidential election, Americans chose a leader who has problems even with the second half of that challenge.

President Trump only inhabits the performative present. He neither learns from the past nor anticipates the future. He values blind loyalty above foresight or expertise. He was unprepared for the coronavirus and will leave the country less prepared for every gathering threat that does not arrive on his watch.

We need U.S. leaders who won’t minimize dangers that don’t neatly fit their preconceptions. Leaders who take the world as it is, and plan for a world that could go wrong in a hundred horrible but predictable ways.

More than any other value or talent, Joe Biden must show preemptive competence on American security. I understand his current need to solidify support from his party’s left. I appreciate the appeal of his empathy and decency. But in light of the coronavirus, this is his one thing needful: to assure Americans that he and his White House team would protect the country from the full range of global dangers. Now or soon, Biden should further reveal the depth and range of his defense and foreign policy advisers, chosen from both the Obama and George W. Bush administrations. (Of all the elements of the Bush administration, defense and foreign policy staffers are most likely to join a national unity team.) Biden should put them to work on a series of brilliantly boring policy addresses and white papers on emerging threats. And Biden should be actively persuading, through intermediaries, respected military and intelligence figures who served in the Trump administration to publicly support him. These endorsements could be announced to great effect around convention time, when the task turns to persuading independents and suburban Republicans. When the accretions of the presidency are removed, national security, broadly defined, is the job. Trump has made a mess of it. Biden would do better. His task is to demonstrate it.

In reality, almost anyone who bothered to listen to experts, pick appointees based on competence, not ideology of the size of campaign contributions, and educate themselves on issues and policy could do a better job than Trump.  With Biden's experience he has the ability to do far better than Trump.  He needs to package this message and begin its dissemination now.  

The Question the Mueller Report Has Not Answered: Why?

A piece in The Atlantic by David Frum, a former Republican, looks at the question that the Mueller report has seemingly failed to answer.  Why Putin's intense desire to see Trump elected and why Trump's willingness to go along with the effort.  There are few things Putin does without expecting a payback of some nature, so what did he expect to gain other than seeing the USA run by an incompetent regime?  The Mueller report has not answered this question and we can only hope that congressional investigations find the answer to this important question.  Here are column highlights:

Good news, America. Russia helped install your president. But although he owes his job in large part to that help, the president did not conspire or collude with his helpers. He was the beneficiary of a foreign intelligence operation, but not an active participant in that operation. He received the stolen goods, but he did not conspire with the thieves in advance.

This is what Donald Trump’s administration and its enablers in Congress and the media are already calling exoneration. But it offers no reassurance to Americans who cherish the independence and integrity of their political process.

The question unanswered by the attorney general’s summary of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report is: Why? Russian President Vladimir Putin took an extreme risk by interfering in the 2016 election as he did. Had Hillary Clinton won the presidency—the most likely outcome—Russia would have been exposed to fierce retaliation by a powerful adversary. The prize of a Trump presidency must have glittered alluringly, indeed, to Putin and his associates. Why?

Did they admire Trump’s anti-NATO, anti–European Union, anti-ally, pro–Bashar al-Assad, pro-Putin ideology?  Were they attracted by his contempt for the rule of law and dislike of democracy?

Did they hold compromising information about him, financial or otherwise? 

Were there business dealings in the past, present, or future?

Or were they simply attracted by Trump’s general ignorance and incompetence, seeing him as a kind of wrecking ball to be smashed into the U.S. government and U.S. foreign policy?