Saturday, November 07, 2020

Sights In The Rear-View Mirror

Points worth considering:

“The 2020 election, it appears, was a staggering repudiation of Donald Trump,” Podhoretz argues. “Of him. Personally. You’re not hearing this right now because the right is in denial about the results…. And you’re not hearing it because liberals are too busy expressing continuing shock and outrage inside their bubble…. that anyone could even cast one vote for the man. And yet, it’s true.”

Fair enough.  I didn't think anyone would vote for the man.  Obviously they did.  Obviously I don't understand that.  My failure to understand that doesn't alter reality, anymore than Trump's failure to understand he's lost, alters reality.  The difference is, I'll struggle to accept reality.

“Joe Biden is on track to receive more than 80 million votes — nearly 20% higher than Barack Obama’s previous record in 2008,” Podhoretz explains. “Hillary Clinton received 66 million votes in 2016. Biden may best her total by close to 30%. Clinton won 20 states in 2016. Obama won 24 states in 2012. Biden may end up winning 25 states.” 

Let those numbers sink in; they are important.

Biden, according to Podhoretz, “just wasn’t Donald Trump — and that proved to be enough to generate 80-plus million votes. That followed a 2018 election in which 62 million Democrats cast ballots and flipped the House blue — 9 million more than Republicans and a level of turnout for a midterm the likes of which we’ve hardly ever seen.”

Podhoretz wraps up his article by noting that Maine’s Susan Collins, Iowa’s Joni Ernst, South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham and other incumbent GOP senators who were “thought to be doomed or nearly doomed” were not voted out of office. But millions of voters, he says, were determined to rid the White House of Donald J. Trump.

“The fact that Washington Republicans weren’t ditched — combined with Biden’s colorlessness and lack of an agenda — means that the astonishing turnout among Democrats and independents was driven by one overwhelming objective: to drive Donald Trump from office,” Podhoretz writes. “And that, it seems, is the only clear message of the 2020 election.” 

I'm not as dismissive of Biden as that.  I do think most of the turnout was a repudiation of Trump, though. And, in retrospect, it was a resounding one.  The dream of cleansing the Augean stables was always ridiculous.  But if Trump represented creeping fascism and totalitarianism and the end of the republic and representative democracy, the people were not having it.

And let's face it, the Democrats pretty much ran on the idea that the people who took to the streets for George Floyd were the majority of voters in the country (they weren't) and that running against Trump would win the down-ballot races (it didn't).  So the Democrats need a new strategy (or, more likely, strategies); but it wasn't a total loss (I'd argue the support for Trump in covid afflicted counties is not reason to write those people off, but to be concerned.  In the midst of crisis, the last thing you want is discontinuity and the uncertainty of change.  You've got enough of that already.)  Besides:

Gotta take what you can get.
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1 comment:

  1. The Thought Criminal10:17 AM

    It's going to take all of the political experience and skill we can muster to fight off the attempt to tea-party Biden, which is what they will do and CNN and the networks will help them do it. Wolf Blitzer pivoted a couple of weeks back to their accustomed practice. I wonder if the Supremes will get rid of the ACA now or if they'll just cripple it, I don't think they can afford to not get rid of Row and marriage equality, they've got to think of their base too. I hope the House Judiciary Committee does some of the investigation Sheldon Whitehouse would have gotten to conduct if the Senate had flipped. They've got as much subpoena power as the Senate does. The corruption that has staffed the Courts with incompetent fascists has got to be exposed,though it's clear about half of the electorate is perfectly fine with even the most blatant of corruption. We are reliving the antebellum period and the gilded age of corruption. Grover Cleveland was about as corrupt as the Republicans were, Blaine of Maine being one of the most corrupt.

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