Category: Politics

It’s looking pretty good today that Joe Biden will be the (presumptive) President-Elect within a day or two. Our long national nightmare is almost over.

(Well, except for the fact that tens of millions of people voted for racist impeached Donald Trump and his fascist ideology this month. We’re going to be living with that horror for the rest of our lives.)

Biden is no liberal’s ideal President, but he represents bringing competence and professionalism back to the executive branch, and showing Trump’s ineptitude and grifting the door. That’s certainly worth something. But Biden and his team have a lot of work ahead of them, which will be complicated if the do-nothing Republicans hold the Senate. (Why do we elect people to government who don’t believe in governing? sigh) The first hundred days are often seen as a bellwether for how well an administration hits the ground running, and Biden is going to have a lot to do. Here are some of the things I see him having to deal with in his first three months:

Getting all the bugs out of the White House: Trump and his people have been incompetent grifters, and there’s good reason that he personally – if not his sycophants – is deeply beholden to Vladimir Putin and perhaps others. The access he’s surely given to many of America’s enemies, as well as his rampant (here’s that word again) incompetence likely means that many of the executive branch’s physical assets (buildings, computers, maybe even personnel) are likely deeply compromised to those enemies. I have no idea what will be involved here, but I bet Biden’s team will be deploying a legion of people to make the White House secure again. We’ll probably never hear (well, not in my lifetime) just how bad things were, but there’s going to be a lot of taxpayer money spent fixing these security holes.

Besides which we’ll probably be hearing for years about state secrets the Trumpists sold during his term.

Implementing a federal response to COVID-19: The Trumpanistas have been famously inept at responding to COVID-19, and by the time Trump leaves office (angels sing) over a quarter of a million Americans will have died from the virus, many of which deaths could have been preventable with even a barely competent response. There’s probably not a more urgent crisis facing the nation today. There will likely be a high-profile component of this effort – for example, executive orders and public relations campaigns around physical distancing and masks – but the real work will be behind the scenes, restoring the compromised government agencies which respond to pandemics, installing leaders who work from the science, coordinating logistics to provide support and supplies.

Perhaps most importantly, the federal government will be crucial to deploying a vaccine across the nation once it’s available. Trump was so incompetent that if he’d been reelected, I fully expected his ineptitude would have delayed effective distribution by a year or more. Having a basically competent administration in place means we might be able to end quarantine sometime in 2021 or early 2022 (which is what Dr. Fauci has been estimating). Under Trump it would have probably been 2023, and with lots more death before then. (I’m sure Fauci was keenly aware of this risk, but there was no value in him coming out and saying it.)

Financial support to people affected by the pandemic: This is more in Congress’ wheelhouse, and so far it’s done a terrible job of supporting the millions who have been rendered unemployed and who have lost their health insurance.

If the Republicans retain control of the Senate then I think we can forget about significant aid to ordinary Americans in the next two years. But there may still be measures that Biden can take using his executive authority. After all, Trump tried to redirect funds to his lunatic anti-immigration policies, so perhaps Biden can do something similar to provide aid to Americans. This is incredibly important, but also incredibly hard without Congressional action.

Brexit: One of our closest allies, the United Kingdom, is also being led by an incompetent grifter (Prime Minister Boris Johnson), and is currently in the throes of disconnecting itself from its closest allies and economic partners, the European Union. The U.K. has been waiting for the results of the U.S. election (for what, it’s unclear), but the U.S. can have some influence – perhaps a profound influence – on shaping Brexit, even at this late date, as well as influencing how the U.K. and our other allies interact with each other after Brexit. Brexit is also going to be a huge tragedy for many U.K. citizens, and is likely to lead to further upheaval (Scotland is likely to pursue leaving the U.K. again, and it’s really unclear what’s going to happen with Northern Ireland). A sane U.S. government can help mitigate some of that upheaval. This is not to say that we’re going to – or should – swoop in and be saviors, but doing what we can to prevent the worst from happening to our oldest ally seems like the rational and humane thing to do.

Rebuilding our reputation with the rest of the world: Trump has badly damaged America’s standing in the world with his racist, narcissistic, isolationist behavior. We’re no longer the de facto leader of the western world – and it’s not clear who is. Germany, by default, perhaps. Biden has the opportunity to start rebuilding our influence in and trust of the world. But it’s going to be a long road: America has elected one xenophobic nutjob, and could easily do so again, so it’s only natural that our allies make contingency plans for when they can’t rely on us. This is a project which is likely to last longer than Biden’s term in office, but the global culture we live in makes it essential that we play a role in it.

Meanwhile, many other western nations sees America’s democracy as rather backwards. That’s not something Biden can fix, nor is it something we’re likely to fix any time soon, but it doesn’t help our reputation and efforts to improve our standing, either.

---

Wrapping up, Trump has left Biden and America in a deep, deep hole, and it’s going to take a lot of work and time to dig out of it. Biden might only be a one-term President as he’ll be almost 82 when the 2024 elections arrive, but he has the opportunity to lead America through one of the greatest crises it’s faced since World War II. I don’t know whether he’s up to the task, but he’s the one whose task it is. So, we shall see.

But at least now we have hope. With Trump, there was none.

The biggest revelation for me from the election has come from pieces like this:

• “Why Obamacare enrollees voted for Trump” (Vox.com)
• “Trump voters didn’t take him literally on Obamacare. Oops?” (Washington Post)

The revelation is this: People can be told something, understand what they’re being told, be presented with evidence of it, even have the speaker say that this is something they want to and are going to do, and just flat-out not believe it. In this case, Trump saying that the Affordable Care Act needed to be repealed (and replaced, but with no suggestions as to what it would be replaced with), which is entirely plausible considering repealing the ACA has been a cornerstone of Republican priorities in Congress for the last 4 years. There’s no good reason to think the Congress and Trump wouldn’t repeal it, yet people voted for him despite feeling the ACA is valuable and important.

Maybe this characteristic of voters has been obvious to everyone else, but it was a surprise to me. (And, frankly, I haven’t generally observed politicians, analysts, pundits or other voters acting as if they realized this.)

Most voters I think vote for a candidate expecting they will renege on – or may be flat-out lying – about some of their campaign statements, since that is, unfortunately, part and parcel of politics (and political reality) for most candidates. But it seems remarkable to me to vote for someone expecting that one of their key statements, about something which is important to one’s life and health (literally), is something they’d go back on.

(It’s easy to feel schadenfreude for people in the articles, but I think we should have more empathy than that; I think things are going to get pretty rough for a lot of Trump voters in the next few years, and no one should take joy in that.)

To my mind, this puts a stake through the heart of any “best interests” argument about voters (most of which I’ve found pretty weak anyway): Clearly large numbers of voters either don’t vote in their best interests, and one reason is that some of them simply don’t believe that a candidate will act against those interests even when the candidate flat-out says that they will.

I don’t know what this means for candidates’ campaigns, elections, political organizations, analysis, punditry, or just plain watching all of those. But I find it unnervingly weird that many people voted to delete Obamacare (much as they voted for racism) even when that’s not what they wanted. I know that choosing a candidate is a matter of compromise, but geez.

A week ago, as the Cubs and Indians were heading down the stretch of the final game of this year’s World Series I tweeted this:

If you’re the kind of person who believes in karma or other such things, there’s an explanation you can consider. Alternately, maybe the gods just decided to stick a metaphorical fork in Nate Silver’s eye.

I, myself, do not believe in such things – I was making a joke since I was rooting for the Indians. So my topics today are: What happened, and what happens next?

What happened?

I have a pretty simple – even reductionist – view of how Presidential politics works: That the largest single factor is how the electorate views the state of the economy at the time of the election. There are a lot of voters who are “locked in” to one party, and among those who aren’t, the state of the economy is the biggest determining factor in whether they turn out to vote, and who they vote for. In particular, I believe that if they perceive the economy to be bad – especially in their region (“all politics is local”) – then they will tend vote for the major party candidate who is not from the party of the sitting President. Regardless of what’s going on elsewhere in government, in a Presidential election, the party of the sitting President gets the blame.

I also feel that incumbency is a significant factor, so even if the economy is bad, the incumbent has a built-in edge which a non-incumbent candidate of the same party of the sitting President does not have.

There are some other nuances, but fundamentally I think Bill Clinton’s campaign got it right in 1992: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

So, I think that the Republican Congress has been engineering the recovery from the last recession to be weak, so that large swaths of the electorate felt that the economy basically sucks, even though it doesn’t suck for a lot of people. Yeah yeah, lots of job growth, but it’s been not so much tepid job growth as growth of tepid jobs. So the marginal voters who turned out to vote – i.e., the ones that matter – came out and held the Democrats responsible, because the sitting President is a Democrat. I think this has been a deliberate strategy on the part of the Republican leadership, and while Trump displacing their establishment candidates isn’t what they’d planned (primary politics is a very different kettle of fish from the general election), they’re probably pretty happy with the outcome overall.

Would Bernie Sanders have won where Hillary Clinton lost? I doubt it. And I think polls showing otherwise are no better than wishful thinking for his supporters. (I voted for Sanders in the primary.)

Why did the polls and analysts get it wrong before the election? Heck if I know. But the economic news over the last 2 years made me think that the Republican nominee – whoever it was – would have a better chance of winning this election than a lot of people gave them credit for.

Anyway, here we are: President-Elect Trump.

What happens next?

As usual John Scalzi said a lot and said it better than I can. But I have a few more things to say:

First, I think people who voted for Trump for economic reasons are – ironically, tragically – the least likely citizens to be helped by his programs. Trump doesn’t care about the little guy, and I think his talk about bringing back jobs was just rhetoric; he’s interested in helping himself and his fellow tycoons to make money off of everyone else, legitimately or not. Trump isn’t an “outsider”, people like Trump are the reason government has insiders – they exist for people like Trump. If you’re not like Trump (white, male, rich), then don’t expect to see a whole lot of help from the government in the next four years.

Second, while the Supreme Court and the repeal of Obamacare are getting a lot of the press, what really scares me is that in the next 4 years the Republicans might turn their attention to repealing Social Security and Medicare, two of the greatest and most successful government programs in the history of humanity. Certainly I’m not counting on them being around when I retire, at this point. And after helping care for my mother these last few years, I really cannot stress enough just how wonderful a program Medicare is.

(A friend said that Trump has pledged not to abolish Social Security and Medicare. Even if he said this, I bet he doesn’t care enough to stick to that. And the Congressional Republicans definitely want to get rid of them.)

Finally, this:

Every Presidential election I’ve voted in has been tremendously stressful to watch the night of the returns. When Clinton and Obama won each of their two terms, it was a big relief because, although I found them each far from perfect, they were better than the alternative. When George W. Bush won each of his two terms, it was difficult to see how I was going to get up in the morning. Last night was like those two Bush elections times ten.

It’s prosaic to say, “we have to go on, because what else can we do?” I was able to get up this morning and mostly do my usual routine. But I fear that a lot of people are going to decide they can’t keep going. I bet we’ll see rising suicide rates among minorities, LGBT folks, and maybe even women.

I have no comforting words. My mental-compartmentalization skills are working overtime to help me adjust to this, and they’re doing pretty well – but I feel guilty because it makes me feel emotionally detached from how I think many people are feelineg.

The next few years are going to be brutal for many people whose wealth is counted in less than 8 figures. I hope we all survive them.

I think the best thing we can say about the Bush presidency is that America survived to see the end of it. Although, looking around at the economic carnage we’re experiencing, it was a pretty close thing, and certainly we didn’t get much help from the administration itself.

Two recessions – this one often called the worst since the Great Depression. Two overseas wars, one of them ill-advised from the outset and largely irrelevant to making the US safer, and both of them quite expensive in both blood and treasure. The utter failure of the federal response to Hurricane Katrina. The ongoing gutting of the nation’s schools thanks to projects such as Leave No Child Behind. All adding up to a presidency which seemed to care little (if at all) for ordinary Americans, and was only interested in making a splash and further enriching its already-rich friends.

Has George W. Bush been the worst President in history? Perhaps not, but certainly he’s among the worst. The usual joke is to ask such a character not to let the door hit him on the way out, but honestly I’m okay with the door hitting him.

I’m not as enamored with Barack Obama as many are, although certainly I agree that he has the potential to be a great President. (I don’t think we’ve seen a truly great President since at least Kennedy, maybe Truman.) I hope that people can temper their expectations to account for the fact that his administration has a long way to climb to dig us out of this economic hole before they can really start building on the foundations again. That may lead to some disappointment in the next couple of years. (One almost wonders whether the Bush administration helped engineer the recession to make it that much harder for their successors to get anything done, or undo their disastrous policies. That’s maybe a little too cynical for even me, though.)

Still, the first step on the road back is to throw out the people who brought you to this place and elect someone reasonable. And it looks like we can put up a “Mission Accomplished” banner for that part.

However, the hard part has barely begun.

One thing I’m surprised didn’t get more attention during the Presidential campaign – honestly, I can’t recall it being mentioned more than in passing – is the impact the next President will have on the US Supreme Court. Consider the ages of the Justices now that Barack Obama has been elected:

• John Paul Stevens, age 88
• Ruth Bader Ginsberg, age 75
• Antonin Scalia, age 72
• Anthony Kennedy, age 72
• Stephen Breyer, age 70
• David Souter, age 69
• Clarence Thomas, age 60
• Samuel Alito, age 58
• John Roberts (Chief Justice), age 53

Unfortunately 3 of the 4 more right-wing members of the court are age 60 or under. But I wonder if John Paul Stevens has been waiting for this election to retire, while the other 5 Justices are certainly at the age that they might consider retiring in the next four years the way Sandra Day O’Connor did. And if Obama wins reelection in 2012, well, it’s conceivable that he could end up with 4 or 5 or maybe even 6 appointments.

(Okay, honestly I expect Scalia will remain on the Court until he croaks, but we can hope, can’t we?)

Given the disastrous results of the Reagan and Bush appointments to the Court, it would be wonderful if Obama had the opportunity to transform it back into something more reasonable.

I voted this morning. My polling place is 3 blocks from my house, so I always take a nice walk down there in order to vote and enjoy the weather. That one can take a “nice walk” there in early November is a clear sign that I live in the Bay Area and not in Wisconsin any longer. Anyway, there were 5 people in line when I got there, and I ran into both one of my neighbors and one of the guys I play Magic with. I guess we have a fairly quiet district. Or maybe everyone votes after work.

My political leanings are somewhere to the left of the mainstream Democratic party, but I’m not especially enamored with any of our small parties, so I typically vote party-line Democratic. I think Obama will make a pretty good President; the bar isn’t set real high for him to be our best President since LBJ. (I’m not hugely enamored of LBJ, either, but he was a President who did some great things and some awful things, which is still a step up from everyone since, who have generally been mediocre-to-awful.)

Although I voted party-Democratic in the national and state elections, I wasn’t real enthusiastic about doing so. I’ve been disappointed in the Pelosi/Byrd Congress, who haven’t really stood up to the Bushies. I’m not real fond of the California state legislature, either, although to be fair I think California’s state government is basically screwed: Federal mandates and an extremely-difficult-to-manage budget make it practically ungovernable except during boom times. The problems are partly structural (a 2/3 majority vote of the populace is required to raise taxes, and a 2/3 vote of the legislature is required to pass a budget), and partly because I think California is just too big and too diverse to govern at the state level. I think California would be better off if it were split into two states, probably along north/south lines. But that’ll never happen.

We had some interesting state propositions this time around:

• I voted against the “anti-freedom” propositions, 4 (parental notification of minors seeking abortions) and 8 (outlaw gay marriage). These measures are both just plain evil, rolling back freedoms and rights for many citizens. I think anyone who supports Prop 8 should also have their right to marry revoked – it seems only fair. I suspect 8 will fail, but I’m concerned that 4 will pass.
• Prop 1 is a bond measure for high-speed rail between San Francisco and Los Angeles. I voted against. I generally oppose bond measures as less efficient than passing new taxes, but I will occasionally vote for a county bond measure with a critical goal in mind. I also don’t think high-speed rail between the two cities will be more than a novelty. Plus, I’m very concerned with what it would do to the rail corridor on the SF peninsula, where I live, which hasn’t been worked out. I don’t know how this one will turn out, though.
• Prop 5 reduces sentencing for certain nonviolent crimes, while Props 6 and 9 strengthen law enforcement and impose tougher penalties. I think we lock up far too many people (over 1% of the US population is presently incarcerated) with far too little attention paid to rehabilitation, so I voted for 5 and against 6 and 9. (I suspect 5 will fail, 9 will pass, and 6 could go either way.)

County measure B is a tax increase measure to bring BART to San Jose. I’m really on the fence on this one, as I think BART is a good system which is well-run, but which is also very expensive due to poor design at its inception. I like it a lot better than “heavy rail” alternatives than CalTrain, though. But it’s expensive to extend. I ended up voting yes, although I suspect the measure is going to fail.

Anyway, I’ll be watching the results tonight. Five Thirty Eight is currently projecting a 98.9% chance of an Obama victory. One of their more interesting posts recently has been What a McCain Victory Looks Like.

I’m not as excited as some Democrats about an Obama Presidency, mainly because I think the Bushies have left the country in such horrific shape that the next President is going to have some huge hurdles to overcome just to hold things together. If the Bushies hadn’t screwed things up so soundly then I think it would be a much more exciting time. As it is, I’m just hoping things can turn around soon enough that the Democrats don’t lose control of Congress in 2010.

Still, getting the Repugnicans out of the Oval Office is a great first step forward.