Well, my pipe dream from yesterday of a Biden blowout and a chastened Trump certainly went up in a quick puff of bitter acrid smoke, didn't it? I was right about one thing, though. And that was the uniformly vapid, stunned, slack-jawed faces of the news personalities who had been confidently predicting a Biden landslide. They just couldn't keep up with each others' lame excuses and platitudes.
It feels like 2000 all over again. Hanging chads to go with your morning hangover, anyone?
Without winning the Senate, and even if he does finally squeak through, Joe Biden will be a terminally damaged president from Day One. I look on the bright side of this scenario, though. The honeymoon will be over long before he ever makes it to the White House if he does in fact make it to the White House. His failure to swiftly dispatch Trump says more about him than it does about the millions upon millions of voters who turned out in record numbers to cast their ballots this year, right in the middle of a pandemic. The trouble is that they turned out for Trump at least as vigorously as they turned out to vote for what is essentially a negative candidate in an empty suit, a/k/a the "Not-Trump."
Correction: Joe Biden's suit is empty only insofar that he lacks ideas to make life better for people. (More on what he's full of in a minute.) He not only refuses to make meaningless promises, he relishes rubbing your face in your pile of misery. There will not only be no Medicare For All (which, according to a Fox News exit poll conducted Tuesday, 70 percent of all voters of both parties desire) but he vows to veto such a bill if it ever crosses his desk. There will be no guaranteed income, no Green New Deal, not much of anything at all. Instead, his suit is full to bursting with war plans for the voters' sons and daughters, accolades for the "good rich," and ornery scolding of anti-racism protesters, whom on more than one occasion he has characterized as looters and property-destroyers. He and his party seem to be under the impression that their voting base (the ones who don't finance their campaigns and dictate policy, anyway) are a crew of masochists just dying for the whip and chain treatment from good old Uncle Joe.
It gets worse. Trump was not only holding his own as of Wednesday morning, he was actually picking up more support from Black and Hispanic people, and women. The one demographic where he's falling short is white men. More white men were voting for Biden than were voting for Trump. You know - the demographic that the liberal class has been denigrating for the past four years as racist sexist reprobates. So it will be interesting to see how the Democratic Party twists this inconvenient statistic into a big soggy undigestible pretzel. But I suspect it will have something to do with Russian disinformation and Putin meddling with the brains of Black people, Hispanic people, and women of all races, colors and creeds.
In other words, even if he hobbles over the finish line, Joe Biden will not enjoy much of a popular mandate. His political capital will consist of a handful of plug nickels in the pocket of his empty suit. The fruits of his victory will be shriveled and sour. The grimmest part is that he and his party will no doubt use their close call to move even further to the right, choosing to interpret the unexpectedly large turnout for Trump as the stupid voters' desire and need for even more punishment. As Barack Obama chided a disgruntled foreclosed electorate in announcing new anti-deficit measures when he lost the House in 2010, "You have to eat your peas!"
A decade later, it'll be the same old bipartisan story: the bottom 80 percent of the "soul of the nation" must be cleansed with the stiff wire brush of austerity.
Of course, when Joe Biden insipidly talks about fighting for the soul of the nation, what he really means is the rotten core of Neoliberal Capitalism and its defenders in the permanent Military/Surveillance State. Trump had the untoward effect of making too many people take to the streets, demonstrating against a police state whose main function is guarding the security and property of the grossly wealthy, who had already staged their own coup 40-odd years ago. They got Ronald Reagan to join financialized capitalism and government at the hip, not only creating a permanent ruling class but inculcating the philosophy of cutthroat competition and consumerism into the very fabric of everyday life. The destruction of organized labor was their coup de grace, with Bill Clinton putting on the finishing touches with the end of cash aid to the poor, the deregulation of Wall Street, and the media consolidation of the Telecom Act.
The elite owners are always in need a slick president who can pretend to be on the side of the lower orders to keep the lower orders relatively placated and subservient. With Donald Trump, however, they ended up with one of their own kind who was not adept enough to keep his mouth shut while doing their complete bidding. In that blunt way of his, he appeals to a sizeable segment of the population despite his criminal ineptitude in dealing with the worst pandemic in modern history.
Just weeks after recovering from the virus himself, Trump was holding multiple rallies a day. Biden barely even campaigned. It turns out that the Invisible Man was not such a hot candidate after all.
But do they really care if he loses, when they can fund-raise every single day as the Resistance Fighters of the Fake Opposition?
