psycho-babble sticks
Imagine it were 2004. An official report comes out about President George W Bush. It exonerates him of wrong-doing, but in the process of doing so characterized his decisions as being based on his relationship with his father, a n over-correction to not make the mistakes of his father’s term in office and to show him up, with some added dimension of needing to show up Jeb Bush after a long career of him being presumed the heir Bush apparent. Skip a few years and the report adds some things about him clinging to women in the administration as some need for the maternal.
Effectively Biden was just handed an exoneration letter, which did as much. The headliner grabber of senior old fart was the cherry on top for a whole pile of crap about his long history of thinking himself a very important figure, and that is how the report characterized his keeping of lots of documents — just one egomaniac refusing to shred anything — why won’t this guy shred documents, damned it?
Both President Trump and President Biden present curious hypotheticals on the nature of the presidency and what I want, find acceptable, against public opinion. The problem is they are hypotheticals, and get buried by the actuality — if Trump were this and only this and not that, that would be an interesting president and not a harmful one. One with characteristics that were slammed that a different president who does things I actually want to see. Ditto a bit with Biden — an anti-Trump in the sense of quietly does his business without huge fanfare “look at me!” events, the big brouhaha tonight is him not doing the Superbowl interview — as though I care to see any Superbowl interview. Will we as a nation ever be willing to “Keep Cool with Coolidge?”. Deflecting any “cult of personality”, the problem there being the sense that there is a reason. Still a chance with Biden – – he only needs the nation to affirm him at the two and four year points, and then only against the competition.
We see the first thrust of what will be an unrelenting one note campaign on Biden, and I do not know that it can be successfully parried. I have seen this story play out already. Nothing wrong with Biden — I will not give a straight forward opinion on his presidency, but I can say he is not equipped for the performance aspect of the job. He is going to continue to make mis-speaks, casually referring to one foreign leader for a different one and referencing old leaders instead of new ones all in passing — and his re-election counts on the public not caring against the backdrop of this getting hammered away constantly and wrapped in a knowing prior of ” everyone holds this except brain dead partisans! “. Good luck on this bet. Or — hold on tight, the negative appeals are going to have hold as much or more than the positive appeals, and it is a tough ask.
If I had my way, I would switch Biden out for Kentucky governor Andy Beshear right now. And, no, I know little about Beshear except for two things – – one, he is politically within bounds of mainstream Democratic politics, or — he is not the last Democratic governor of Louisiana. And two: political instincts in winning twice stateside in Kentucky are transferable to winning the necessary voting bloc in Pennsylvania Michigan Wisconsin. The dreariness of the 2020 slate of Democratic candidates showed up a pile of candidacies lost in the twitter-sphere, not seeing the Internet was not real life. So. Biden it was. Barely elected, and with a sizable chunk able to move to him with an assumption that — he will stand for a term. This is the “every thing for every one” nature of coalition building to get to the 270 electoral votes — we need different people to think they are voting for different things and not necessarily what the other people voting with you are voting for. The two shadow candidates — Newsome and Harris– have obvious political drawbacks. (They will run against a “poop in the streets of San Francisco” with Newsome, and Harris has the unfortunate habit of talking to the public like they are ten.) Today I see Ramaswamy play his kooky “They are going to swap in Michele Obama!” game. Doing his best Dick Morris “Hillary versus Condi” fever dream of storytelling that titilates even as it has no basis in any reality.
I do wonder with Biden if there aren’t a couple things with the Eisenhower campaign that can be studied. Lean into the internationalist — “He has met world leaders, has the respect of blah blah.”. Or, more so than Trump. In the necessarily bunch of contradictory polls that are getting scoped out with a micro-scope, the ” winning the oldsters” number states at us — isolationist Trump shredding the Reagan legacy — why did they vote for Reagan again? Funny times, all.