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.