The Ice Floe or the Endtimes

Chose your own adventure

I'm on the short side of 78. If I take my jacket off and go to put it on again in 3 minutes, I become quickly convinced that trolls or fairies are at work to drive me mad because said jacket has disappeared!

You know where this is going but I'm not trying to make excuses for President Biden whose party apparently set him out on an ice floe on June 27th, not caring if he survived.

His performance was, however, outdone in sheer horror by the former president who declared that his administration had discovered and utilized not only the vaccine but H2O!

He also asserted that “Democrat states” allowed the killing of babies after birth as a form of abortion and that tarrifs would be paid by China, not American shoppers. Maybe it's this season's “Mexico will pay for it” referring to the wall? How would we know though since not only did the CNN reader/moderators not question that; I have not seen one smartass pundit bring it up.

The pundit class, you would have noticed by now, have uniformly declared not only Biden's campaign dead but his presidency over.

Why, because they understand history so well, have crystal balls in the fire pit of their vacation homes or an ax to grind? My guess is it's a combination of celebrity-influence-chasing and hungry sharkiness. While demented comments by the former criminal-in-chief can no longer shock, seeing your kindly Grandpa Joe turn into your nonsensical Uncle Joe whom polite company ignores, can be more shocking.

We have two separate questions to address: 1) can Joe continue to govern with that breathy voice when he has bad hours or even days, 2) or more importantly, can he campaign and beat Trump?

On the first it seems clear that the Biden administration under toxic opposition has passed groundbreaking legislation and moved the country forward (while administering the worst foreign policy since LBJ-how many kids did you kill today?) As to campaigning, it's a question but not a conclusion. No folks, it's not a conclusion, Biden is out campaigning and seemingly doing a good job.

I took some of my thinking from reading Rebecca Solnit, with whom I have more in common politically than I do with any NYT editor.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/06/biden-trump-race-rebecca-solnit?CMP=share_btn_url

Here is what she says about the campaign, “But candidates do not win elections by themselves. Elections are won, to state the obvious, by how the electorate turns out and votes. The electorate votes based on how they understand the situation and evaluate the candidates. That is, of course, in large part shaped by the media, as Hannah-Jones points out, and the media is right now campaigning hard for a Democratic party loss.”

We have historic precedences for presidents who continued to “govern” after becoming incompacitated-Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D Roosevelt.

Wilson had a stroke as he lost his fight for the US to join his baby, the League of Nations and to push for the right to self-determination for emergent nations (in words only but these points influenced far flung places for the last century.) He spent the last 2 years of his presidency removed from serious decisions and activities. FDR was always on the verge of serious illness due to his bout with polio in early adulthood. Months before the world war he waged came to an end, he slipped into weakness with fewer and fewer hours of coherence until he died a few weeks before liberation. In fact many historians said he was weak and seriously ill when he won his last campaign in 1944.

More needs to be written about why the level of worldwide discontent is threatening the status quo everywhere. No, the economy is not great for everyone and yes migration is at WWII highs. Anxiety is now a planatery force for a movement to authoritarianism.

Democrats with a fantasy for a minirevolution if Biden is pushed out, are the ones who need a nap. Biden has the majority of the delegates. The last convention that brought us a progressive candidate resulted in a landslide for Nixon and the time before it when a president declined to run, a slide-in for Nixon.

My guess is basic gut-checking politics and whether or not you admit it, all Politics is based on gut-checking. Most young people who see a doddering man mushing his words will likely not vote for him, not to mention those for whom Israel's murderous support is unconscionable, but they will either not vote or end up marking his little box.

Older folks may now have gathered a bit of sympathy they had not noticed feeling before combined with terror at Project 2025 and its bloated, discolored leader and his coup-enducing Court, who will fill in the box for scrappy Joe and Kamala Harris.

I haven't brought myself to a place of imagining that most Americans will chose authoritarianism but even if they did, wouldn't it be with a more attractive, less hideous standard bearer?

Those of us who have some experience with electoral politics know there's a deeper, longer game to winning elections and it is unrelenting-full of strange bedfellows, quick turnarounds and good messaging.

Door knocking, texting and going to meeting after mind numbing meeting are crucial activities. Opportunities for quick fixes end the way most ponzi schemes do. Somebody walks away with your treasure. Don't let it be your freedom to bodily autonomy too.

PS. The Squad is still with us