What could possibly happen in the last 2020 Presidential Debate, I wondered? Everything seemed to be set and done. That first debate was informative rather than chaotic because each of the performers did what each of them did: Trump a blowhard who says the venomous things he has extolled ever since he went down the Trump Tower escalator and Joe Bidden righteous in his principles and agenda even if he sometime has garbled his words, a viewer difficult to say that his childhood stuttering is worse than it has been for many years even though his voice does seem weaker. Each of the two characters are very familiar. There are few secrets of character to a presidential candidate. They are what they are at least as I have known them back to Harry Truman. Moreover, the voters have pretty much made up their minds, weeks ago ninety percent of them saying they wouldn’t change their minds. The polls have been stable in that the battleground states are mostly pro-Biden and Joni Ernst is a little bit behind in the Iowa Senatorial race by just a few points and Susan Collins is consistently behind in Maine by five points. Biden has for months had a constant nine or ten percent lead. Might as well vote and finish it, unless there is a late October Surprise, the canard against Hunter Biden having fizzled-- unless something comes up tonight. Also, voter irregularity is not likely to make a difference. Georgia and Texas are not likely to turn Democratic even though Gov. Abbott has run scared enough to insist on the scandalous behavior of restricting the number of places to deposit ballots so that there is only one of them in Harris County, which covers four million people in that it includes Houston. I thought that the vote meant that the access to the vote was supposed to be made available as part of the right to vote, but not so for some Republicans. So there is nothing left but the nail biting because the voters are mercurial rather than firmly implanted in their demographics. We will see what we can see.
The verdict that came in was that the debate was issue rather than anger oriented and so illuminated the differences between what is a Conservative and a Liberal division rather than a matter of personalities-- which I elevate to being a matter of “character”. Trump thought his enhanced Obama care was Socialistic while Biden thought it was Liberal incrementalism. Trump claims that opening up the economy is the most important thing to do because the coronavirus is moving through its course, while Biden says that mastering the coronavirus has priority and there should be funds supplied by the government to support all those impacted by the economic downturn, Republican Senators balking at the expenditure. Biden is against fracking only on federal lands and wants massive expenditures for renewable energy sources. Issues of corruption on both sides--which one is taking money from China--did not generate much interest. It was an October Surprise that poofed.
Like MSNBC, Kristen Welker is to be applauded for bringing up the issue of the children separated from their families when the Trump government cracked down on those aliens who had legally tried to ask for asylum in the United States. It had seemed an issue that had been overlooked because of the coronavirus. I am glad about this issue because it goes to the character of Trump as cruel. One could even forgive a President for having been slow to move on coronavirus, even if Biden will not let him off of that hook, if the President were otherwise admirable. But while that may have resulted in 220,000 dead so far for his mistakes in judgment, it is much harder to forgive the 500 children who have still not been reassociated with their mothers. That is evil, which can be defined as gratuitous suffering.
So Biden didn’t stumble and Trump was not as outrageous as he could have been and the commentators say that no one took the advantage, which means that Biden won because the days are ever dwindling without Trump doing something electric to shift voters as they had when Comey reopened his investigation of Clinton’s emails. Also, what sinks in is that people in 2016 really disliked Hillary and so turned off the election for reasons, as I have said, which escape me. She wasn’t a warm and fuzzy figure, but was it enough to refuse to vote for her? Maybe people thought that passing on the election was a luxury they could afford because she was going to win anyway. Democrats are running full tilt for the coming ten days because they are scared of what happened. Joe is more presentable than was Hillary and so should prevail over a President even his defenders think has serious character defects even if they like the Conservative line of law and order and opening the economy and not spending so much now that the rich people have got their cut.
So, after the debate, even Conservatives have conceded to the election, however much I have my fingers crossed. Those I discussed said the question was whether we would see the good, pragmatic, incrementalist Biden, or else his dark side, dominated by AOC and the Socialists and the Black advocates who are very different from Martin Luther King, Jr. who, after all, did think that all people should judge people by the quality of their character rather than the color of their skin, assuming that meant no race to predominate, while today it seems, I think, that Black advocates are long on righteousness and short on analysis, entitled by their history of suffering to think themselves entitled to understand how things work. Biden, consistently and accurately, as I think, is an incrementalist rather than a cover for Progressives because he was the one who voted consistently against the Socialists and the other groups so as to win the nomination. He did not waver then and that is as good a bet that he won’t do so when he becomes President. Pelosi and Schumer are his confederates not the Squad of Four. I hope Biden lives long enough to pursue much of his agenda. And however much Harris toys with being a Progressive, she was mentored by Willie Brown, a very credible incrementalist.
The truth, I remember telling students who queried, was that there is no legal requirement for a candidate to follow his promises once he (or she) is elected. It all depends on the voter to decide whether on character or party what the newly elected First Magistrate will do. People thought he would become “Presidential” once Trump was elected and now may be voting against Trump because he did not change as they had hoped he would. The mistake was believing that a seventy something man would change his spots. That judgment is one of the many burden’s on the electorate and so we trust a lot on the citizenry to be judicious, and sometimes they are wrong, our theorists insisting that the citizenry will continue the democratic experiment even if there are ebbs and flows. The electorate seems to be correcting a lapse of 2016 and we hope the damage will not have been too badly ruptured.
Most of them can be. I don’t mean just talking nasty to dictators and joining the Paris Climate Accords. A sensible approach to unnecessary police violence is easily done by a Democratic administration as is the movement forward on shifting to renewable energy is likely to get a lot of support because it provides many jobs. Remember that John Kenneth Galbraith thought America should build an ice mountain in Texas so as to create jobs and improve the economy, and renewable energy is more useful than that. A more difficult issue will be correcting the problem of the Supreme Court, which has not been well handled in its nominees in an ever increasingly partisan way for a long time now. Creating a Biden Commission on the Supreme Court may be different from other commissions which are just a way of tabling an issue. There are weighty issues to deal with and they can avoid both court packing, which is not illegal but is certainly political, or creating more states, like Puerto Rico or Washington, D. C, it being remembered that admitting new states was usually a balancing act, once of slave and free states and most lately of Alaska, which was at the time Democratic, and Hawaii, which was for the moment Republican, both admitted to the Union in 1959. Tread carefully about admitting new states. Puerto Rico may not want statehood because it would give up its exemption from the Federal Income Tax and has since the Twenties decided to remain as a Spanish language territory. Should it make English prevail? Washington, D. C. has no hinterlands, while all other states do. Maryland goes from the shore to the mountains and so is not just Baltimore. Even Rhode Island has farms. Is there something lost in having a state that is only urban? Maybe not, but consider.
Also try something clever about how to avoid nominations so contentious as with Bork and Kavanaugh, rather than just usual opposing points of view. I would also like to see a Senate restructured so that it can be something of a deliberative body that requires some minority of the party to join the majority party to get something done rather than make it too much like the House, which is done pretty much by just whichever party has the majority vote. But maybe that is just the past. We will see.
There are therefore no end of fascinating and consequential issues for Biden to face. I am, as usual, encouraged by having a leader of deep experience to manage this through even if I still rue the day that Chaney and Rumsfeld went reckless when they took power, I expecting them to further the Popi cautious approach. There are bound to be surprises and that makes me think politics as pleasurable a dramatic spectator support even though politics is, in fact, much more serious than that because it is so consequential. People’s lives and livelihoods are at stake.