Me and the fellas finished our Walt Whitman 1855 Leaves of Grass reading group. Great is life.
The election is over. I mostly agree with the analysis here from Ben Rhodes, and share a similar view about the challenges of change in the "deep state" by Moynihan.
Change is hard. A lot of change at once is hard. The world will not stop for you to change things. Bush had plans, then 9/11 happened. Trump had plans, then covid happened. Biden had plans, then Ukraine and Israel happened, while dealing with covid era consequences.
Trump and his enablers are mostly motivated by resentment. Their ideology will blind them to the failures of their changes. They will inevitably overprioritize in the wrong areas.
They will face the same outcome as Captain Ahab. Instead of continuing with regular whaling, they will pursue that elusive white whale, Moby Dick. Their Moby Dick is the deep state. The system is complex, maybe too complex. But by thinking they can just change some parts and use the power of that behemoth bureaucracy is a fools errand. I won't spoil Moby Dick, but it does not end up well for Ahab and the crew. The whale wins.
In the meantime, the Democrats can govern from the rear, to learn how to effectively govern like Mitch McConnel did. They can transform the DNC from a losing machine to a winning machine. They just need to dig deep, think about the American values, the American government, the world we are in and where the people are.
The less resistance Trump faces from his crew, like Ahab, the more he will realize he is fighting against his own ego. Some of his supporters will play the blame game. They won't let Biden say he did as good a job he could have done, as any country has done in the history of modern economics post-covid. People felt the pain of inflation and it is easy to blame Biden. That is fine, we can scapegoat the 80 year old. Trump will blame everyone but himself, but there are swing voters who matter and GOP supporters who will become disillusioned with the chaos, the resentment.
To keep the Moby Dick metaphor going, some people just want to go on a successful whaling trip and earn their fair share. Some know that our Ahab is searching for Moby Dick, some don't. When they find out, morale will drop. People will abandon ship. Mutiny might ensue. The good thing is Trump is so insecure that if he faces resistance from too many, or stocks go down, prices rise, and he seems to be unpopular again, he will most likely change course.
Overall, Biden did a decently solid job. People were tired of Trump, and in a time of great grief, people connected with the experienced, normal, and grief stricken Biden. He was a familiar face of the Obama era. But that only goes so far. Biden and the government did a fantastic job on the economy, but they lost the messaging war. The correct choice was the wrong choice politically, and Trump most likely would have done exactly as Biden did because Trump and Biden followed the same macroeconomic advice. Stimmy checks were the first part, but the other part of that recovery was trying for the soft landing. It was a lose-lose situation for Biden.
Biden's failures were accurately lambasted and his successes undervalued by the public, which is ok. But we have to go through Trump, and I am excited because just like Reagan and Bush, they will realize the party cannot fundamentally govern.