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There are some interesting echoes between the election that first brought Joe Biden to within a heartbeat of the presidency and the one that now may deliver him the Oval Office. Back in 2008, the early part of the election was on a figurative “war footing” as the legacy of George W. Bush’s ruinous military misadventures took the spotlight. Hillary Clinton’s inconvenient votes in favor of the second Iraq War were the fulcrum that earned Barack Obama an important leg up in the primary in which he eventually won the chance to face John McCain, the champion of the famous “surge.”
But then, in September, the conversation changed amid a sudden crisis. In September, Lehman Brothers followed Bear Stearns into the Great Bank Beyond, and a daisy chain of unwise bets on synthetic derivatives unspooled, sending a generation’s worth of wealth to Money Heaven. Shock and awe was visited upon the campaign trail. McCain quasi-suspended his campaign in a superficial move to appear serious; that may have been the blink, the twitch, that locked in Obama’s election.
In the early days of the 2020 primary, Biden struggled to own the center square. A score of Democratic candidates fought on stage, and any number of directions for the party seemed possible. It looked like the Democrats were headed for an intense conversation about what kind of politics would be brought to a post-Trump era: the traditional Beltway brand or a more radical flavor. But as March approached, a new crisis began to stir, and the conversation shifted; the coronavirus pandemic was starting to burn across the globe. Within a fortnight, Americans would be locked down in their homes. Between those moments, Democrats came out on Super Tuesday and threw the kill switch on the Democratic debate, all but crowning Biden the nominee in a series of results made all the more extraordinary by the fact that they were handed down from states in which Biden had barely campaigned.
The most interesting thing about this parallel is the one obvious point of contrast. In 2008, with the world on fire, Democratic voters enthusiastically reached out for the riskier, more interesting candidate, eschewing the institutional experience of Clinton and McCain. Democrats in 2020 won’t be embracing the same ideas. The party’s response to Trump is now clear: Forget imagination, forget risks. The plurality of the base wants life to be safe and boring. In Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, they have a ticket that fully embodies the notion of an anti-climax. |
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The fact that Democrats have made the two names on their presidential ticket official is only the second biggest story of the week. The most important story involves the current crisis and the plain fact that we are unequivocally blowing it. This week, Helen Branswell of StatNews brought the news that the window to meaningfully deal with the pandemic “is rapidly closing” and that the “country seems unwilling or unable to seize the moment.” The reward that lies in wait? The bleakest winter in recent memory, filled with isolation, dread, sickness, and death—kind of like the spring and summer but even worse.
Well in advance of what lies over the horizon, Americans are already at the breaking point. The tales of the ordinary people who got ground up in the gears of the 2008 financial crisis are still seared in our collective memory. The stories we’re hearing this minute are worse: The rent is due and time is running out; something’s going to break; someone might take a “toaster bath” to escape the inevitable.
The Obama administration, tasked with bringing America back from the brink, made due with a package of economic stimulants that were modest enough to win the favor of moderates. It seems pretty obvious that such half-measures will not be sufficient in the first 100 days of a Biden administration, who will have to contend with the damage done by the previous administration and the fact that our foundations were in a rickety state long before Trump arrived.
The solutions that need to be brought to bear will likely require a massive rethink in our politics. If you want more radical politics, you may get it by dint of the fact that timid, “acceptable” ideas won’t bring us back this time. Biden himself is said to be, at least rhetorically, imagining a broader set of ideas—an “FDR-sized” presidency that he hardly envisioned at the outset of the campaign. If he is able to defeat Trump, that kind of ambition may be essential to avoid repeating a Jimmy Carter-style interregnum of Republican power. If the country isn’t in a state of real security in four years, Biden and Harris won’t be getting four more.
—Jason Linkins, deputy editor |
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| As J.C. Pan writes at our sister vertical Sold Short, the pandemic is probably the best time to start soaking the billionaire class. That being said, Libby Watson notes that the most pernicious divide that’s opened up in America since the coronavirus outbreak hit these shores is the one between the affluent professional class and the American working class. Casey Michel brings word of extraordinary doings in Belarus, where one of Europe’s longest ruling dictators may finally be hitting the skids. Osita Nwanevu takes stock in the way the media has treated Trump’s attacks on Biden’s faith as uniquely abhorrent and reminds everyone that–no, no!–this is just what Republicans do. Trump isn’t special, but he sure imagines himself to be, so much so that he sees all of American history as his own to appropriate, writes Matt Ford. Over on the “is America still a functioning country?” beat, Alex Pareene explores what happens when a Congress that’s forgotten how to be competent suddenly has to keep everyone alive. Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw goes deep into the pathologies that keep white people in thrall to the police, Bruce Bartlett documents the way Christianity has been deployed to uphold white supremacy, and Ian Allen and Danielle Christmas check in on how the most violent among those white supremacists view the direction America is taking. That’s quite a lot; but you may want to squeeze in time to read about how Jared Kushner is the White House’s Kanye West whisperer as well. |
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