Anyone reading this under—well, under fifty, I’m afraid—may not get the reference, to the once famous Democratic victory song, which goes back to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, but getting Donald Trump out of the White House is sweet indeed, though taking the 2020 election results as a whole, it’s rather like sitting down to eat a beautiful filet mignon accompanied by a handful of week-old French fries and a dried-up turnip that strangely resembles Mitch McConnell, to be washed down with a glass of cold dishwater. Because it’s that bad.
Yes, that wonderful Big Blue Wave that was going to wash all our problems away turned out to be, well, a wash. The Democrats can still win a tie in the Senate if they can win two special elections in, you know, Georgia. Yeah, that’ll happen. Plus that big, fat dominant House majority we were dreaming of? Gone with the wind, an ill wind indeed.
It’s believable to me—very—that without COVID-19, Donnie would have been home free. Andrew Sullivan tells us in his “Weekly Dish” email
One of the more revealing results from the polls this year came in the answers to the core question made famous by Reagan: “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” In previous campaigns to re-elect the president, Reagan was re-elected in a landslide with only 44 percent saying they were better off, George W. Bush won with 47 percent and Obama succeeded with 45 percent. For Trump, a mighty 56 percent said they were better off now than when he took office — a fundamental along with incumbency that should have led to a landslide re-election — and yet he still lost.
Would that have happened without the virus? I wonder. It’s quite possible that Trump would have pulled out another electoral college win, if not a plurality. Without the virus he could have conducted a much more vigorous campaign, which Uncle Joe probably would have felt compelled, and one can wonder, a lot, if he would have been up to it.
Of course, the other joker in the deck was the explosion of violence across the U.S.—anarchist smashing and burning on the part of “antifa” whites and a sad regression to sixties-style looting among blacks. An election without COVID-19 and with looting would probably have been an easy win for Trump, while the reverse might have given us donkey folk the blue trifecta we were dreaming of.
Over at New York, Eric Levitz tells the woke folks that they’d better wake up and smell, well, the dishwater: “The 2020 Election Has Brought Progressives to the Brink of Catastrophe”. This is, of course, pretty much music to my ears, but I suspect most of the folks Eric is targeting ain’t listening. As a lot of people are saying, given a Republican Senate—which I suspect is pretty much a given—Biden will have no choice but to govern from the center right if he wants to govern at all—or, more to the point, whether and if Mitch McConnell wants him to govern at all. During the Obama years, Republicans were eager to wreck the country in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. In relatively “good times”, they’ll have even less reason not to misbehave, and simply refuse to approve any of Biden’s nominees for any position whatsoever. Let the government grind to a halt! Who needs it anyway?
It’s very unlikely that Biden will convince anyone that he’s two-term material. The Democrats, as Eric points out, have a very weak hand. But since the current “New Left” has only been existence since 2016, and didn’t win anything until 2018, they certainly aren’t going to throw in their cards in 2020. Well, it could be a hell of a lot worse. For the time being, I’m just eat my damn filet. It does look good. Damn good!
Surf & turf for me! Biden &
Harris are beautiful people.