A Lump of Coal

This Christmas Eve, many economists and pundits are predicting a continuously improving economy for 2024 and a job market that remains strong,  as more of President Biden's investments in infrastructure start to be implemented.  So certainly, despite low poll numbers, President Biden must have greatly improved chances for re-election going into the new year, right?

Actually, none whatsoever.  Inflation remains stubbornly high, despite early signs that it's cooled off, and people have been struggling with the high cost of living, and short of robbing a giant snow globe full of money in a shipping mall court,  there's no way to beat it.  Which means there is a way for Trump to beat Biden next year.  This is all reflected in polls taken over the past several months, and a leading pollster made this plain in talking with Jim Acosta of CNN.

"What the President currently is doing, is still talking about progress," he said to Acosta. "And you can’t talk about progress when three-quarters of the country think we’re on the wrong track. So you have to stop on the notion that we’re making progress. You have to get where people are, and where they are is on the rising prices.  They need to stop with their own voters and say, 'We get it. If inflation is the biggest problem, we get it. We know. We know what you’ve been through. We’re in touch with that. Here’s [how] we’re dealing with it.'"

The pollster's name?  Stanley Greenberg.  If that name sounds familiar to you, that's because is married to U.S. Representative Rosa DeLauro, a Democrat from Connecticut.  Which happens to work out fine, because Greenberg is also a Democrat.

So this is a Democratic pollster saying that Biden has the whole damn thing all wrong.  A Democratic pollster.  And he didn't say all of this on Fox.  He said it on CNN. 

This all contrasts sharply with the Biden campaign's attitude, as reported by Gabriel Debenedetti in New York magazine.  Debenedetti's article essentially explain that, while Democrats and even some Biden insiders are more or less running around screaming that the sky is falling, Biden himself is like, "Calm down, people - I got this."

What he got is a lump of Christmas coal, boys and girls. The Biden campaign is carrying on as if everything's hunky dory, ignoring discontent in the nation at large, dismissing dissent in the Democratic ranks,  and convinced that Donald Trump will immolate himself politically.  If that sounds like the modus operandi of the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign in 2016 to you, congratulations - now you know what I'm driving at.  And you also understand why I'm hoping to use my passport to get out of the country before Trump takes over in January 2025 - and before Trump invalidates all U.S. passports to prevent a human capital outflow and to avoid the indignity of the world seeing Americans leave en masse a country that's supposed to have had its greatness restored.  (More on that later.)

And don't tell me how the Biden re-election effort is going to bounce back or get its mojo working, because I've come to a decision: I don't want to hear it!  😬

America On the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

The latest presidential polls from the New York Times and Siena College dropped this past Sunday like an atomic bomb.

Many Democrats thought President Biden's poll numbers would change as a result of his steady leadership.  In fact, this poll shows that Biden's numbers have changed - for the worse. shows Trump ahead of Biden in five out of six swing states - Arizona, Georgia, Michigan Nevada, and Pennsylvania - and in Wisconsin, Biden is ahead by only two percentage points. Trump is trusted more on the economy - this despite the rapid economic recovery from the COVID crisis.  Trump is trusted more on national security - this despite his praise of Hezbollah and his desire to sell out Ukraine to end the war in eastern Europe.  Trump is even seen as being more mentally aware and acute than Biden - this despite referring to a possible third world war as World War II, referring to Barack Obama as if he were still President, and confusing Sioux City, Iowa, where he recently campaigned, to Sioux Falls, South Dakota.  (Hey, sure, honest mistake, they're only 87 miles apart, in two separate states,  both along Interstate 29, why not?  Yes, that was sarcasm.)

And he's ahead of Biden despite promising to lock up his detractors and political opponents and his plan to sic the military on anti-Trump demonstrators as soon as he returns to power by invoking the Insurrection Act and declaring martial law!   

How is this possible, you ask?  Let me answer that question with a question of my own.  How do you think "Two and a Half Men" lasted twelve seasons on television?

If I may expand on that . . ..  A lot of people in this country are really stupid, and Trump has proven time and again that P.T. Barnum was right.  Like most demagogues, Trump knows how to zero in on the gullible and use any verbal trickery to make them swallow the grossest delusion and buy the mean and stunted fruit he's selling them.  But there are other Trump supporters who are not stupid at all, believe it or else.  They've been on the losing end of an economy that has rewarded wealth and taxed work, which is what supply-side economics is.  Most of the areas in this country that have suffered over the past several decades are parts of the country that the coastal elites have looked down on.  Heck, some of these areas are just a few miles inland from either coast; New Jerseyans are dismissed as "bridge-and-tunnel" riffraff by New Yorkers, and Bakersfield, California, a locus of country music that resembles Nashville in the desert, is only 112 miles from LA but light years away.  The people in these areas are tired of being forgotten and ignored for so long by people who seem to think that they're superior to anyone else.  That famous Saul Steinberg New Yorker cover from 1976 sums it up.

Hey, I can relate.  Remember, I was a Martin O'Malley supporter when New York intellectuals and Hollywood A-listers wanted Hillary Clinton to be President. 

It's these people in the forgotten areas of America that President Biden needs to reach if he has any chance of winning re-election in 2024, and as Steve Schmidt recently noted, he's done an abominable job of it.  Schmidt says, and I agree, that "Bidenomics," the President's derivative catchphrase for his economic policy, is the greatest branding disaster in modern American politics.  (Let's go brandin'!)   Biden has spent the past few months telling ordinary Americans how good they ought to feel about the improving economy, but so many problems in the economy persist in the aftermath of the pandemic - mainly inflationary pressures - that no one is feeling good about the economy, and even those who do only have to watch TV news to be reminded about how the country is slipping into chaos between mass shootings and a coarsening culture.  Americans don't like being told what to feel or what to do about anything.  If you disagree, I have some metric-conversion mandate memos from the Carter administration I'd like to show you.  Use your brain.        

That's the last thing Democrats at the national level seem to want to do.  Although President Biden's policies have done a world of good for the country and the economy, not to mention the world, the Democratic Party at large, thanks to the misguided centrism that Bill Clinton imbued in the national party, is so beholden to Wall Street interests for the past thirty years that Democrats in Washington, who scaled back Biden's Build Back Better program down dramatically to the point where it looked next to nothing like Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, almost resemble Republicans.  Meanwhile, the actual Republican Party is planning to eviscerate democratic norms and institutions, and the media keep reporting on the personalities and quirks of the leading presidential candidates as if it were just another election that can be condensed into horse-race metaphors.

There may still be time to turn all of this around, but unless the White House and the Democratic National Committee get their acts together,  this country is inevitably going to speed toward fascism.  

Is Biden Back?

President Biden got stuff done at the G20 summit in Rome.  He secured a trade deal with the European Union regarding steel and saved Americans jobs threatened by retaliation against Trump's now-canceled tariffs.  He and other world leaders also agreed to stop subsiding coal use internationally to combat climate change. 

And none of it seems to matter.

Biden's approval ratings have sunk to just above 40 percent, and he's lower in the Gallup poll at this point in his Presidency than any other modern President except Trump.  His reconciliation bill is still stalled in Congress - even after he pleaded with Democrats not to embarrass him be failing to pass it on the cusp of his trip to Europe.  And then there's that pesky gubernatorial election in Virginia between Democrat Terry McAuliffe   and Republican Glenn Youngkin.

Youngkin is on fire as his campaign focuses on state and local issues with national implications, such as education, even as he sidesteps associations with Trump without offended in Trump voters.  Is this going to be a victory that pivots momentum back to the Republicans in the 2022 midterms? Going into the midterm campaign season, things look pretty bleak for Democrats overall due to the lack of distrust between the liberal and moderate wings.  To hope they can put aside their differences and concentrate on their commonalities may be wishful thinking, though I have one simple message for both progressives and moderates.  Win one for Biden dammit!  Tomorrow may be your last chance to get these infrastructure bills done!    

So is Biden back, given what he's managed to accomplish this past weekend and what he may be able to pull off once he gets home?  The general consensus is that the infrastructure package will pass, sooner or later, but preferably sooner.  (Unless Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema in the Senate have even more demands.)  He could be helped by declining COVID cases and a slightly improving economy.  And regardless of what happens in Virginia, Democratic victories in this year's other marquee elections - governor of New Jersey and mayor of New York City - are all but assured.  Phil Murphy and Eric Adams will likely win those elections, and two out of three not only ain't bad, it's much better than what happened in Bill Clinton's first year in the White House, when Republicans George Allen, Christine Todd Whitman, and Rudolph Giuliani won a clean sweep of the Virginia governorship, New Jersey governorship, and New York City mayoralty races - the latter two candidates defeating Democratic incumbents on the ballot.  But then, we should be prepared for surprises - Whitman won her election in an upset.      

So let's hope Biden has sunk as low as he can go.  For now, he's going to be in Glasgow for COP26 to see if the planet can finally solve climate change once and for all.