The results of Tuesday’ selection, what with clear victories for Joe Biden in Mississippi, Missouri and Michigan, led James Carville to say that the Democratic Party had decided to move on from contesting who would be the nominee to opening the general election campaign against Trump. The Democrats had settled on their candidate. The end, to all intents and purposes, of the primary season, gives time to pause to consider the shock that was delivered to the political system by the fortunes of some of its contenders. Elizabeth Warren did not get many votes, She had about eight percent of the male vote in North Carolina, and even if you doubled that so that her female vote was 16%, that means she just wasn’t a popular candidate, regardless of gender. That may be because her policies were not all that attractive, or it may be because the electorate will not abide a woman candidate. Warren herself said that if you say that sexism played a part in her political race, you will be considered a whiner, but the truth of the matter is that the American people, male and female, just don’t accept the idea of a woman President. A woman in that role just does not sit well with them.
Think about that in the context of how ethnic groups and other categories have qualified themselves to be Presidential. We have had a Black President and so it is overdoing the matter to say that no one of color lasted very long in the present run around. It is like Hollywood decrying that there are no Black stars up for academy awards in some years in that there are years when Black actors do very well indeed. No ethnic group is guaranteed a place in the Final Four or Final Six. We have had a Jewish nominee for Vice-President. That was Joe Lieberman in 2000, and he was an Orthodox Jew who had to explain that he would go to an important meeting on a Saturday in violation of Orthodox restrictions because national security suspends him from religious obligations just as it allows doctors to treat patients on the Sabbath because the preservation of human life is paramount. The NY Times ran an article at the time on what Jewish theologians had to say on the matter, and someone responded that Joe was running for Vice-President, not Chief Rabbi, and so how he resolved such issues was his business. And this time around, Bernie Sanders and Michael Bloomberg, both non-observant Jews, were in the race, and it just wasn’t an issue, as far as I could tell.
So women have a right to wonder why their time is not yet. What is it about their presence at the World Series of politics that dismays people? Maybe women voters just do what their husbands tell them to do or have become so ingrained with sexist sentiments that they vote against themselves. But that is quite a condemnation of women because it would mean that their oppression is self-imposed, which makes them even more victims than I or anyone else who has known women would think them to be. Spinoza said in the Seventeenth Century that he could not see any reason that women could not be treated as the equals of men and was puzzled as to why that was not so and things have not changed from his times as much as many people would like. I know that sixty years ago I would have thought women would make more political and professional progress than either Jews or Blacks, and that just has not happened. So this time around is a real blow to Progressive thought. It reminds me of the documentary about Hillary that is making the rounds. She is widely castigated for being secretive and calculating her words. Well, given the way she was lambasted for things that never happened, as with Benghazi, and Vince Foster’s “murder”, and an investigation into her finances by Ken Starr turned up nothing until Linda Tripp snuck the Monica story through the transom, that was quite understandable a posture to take. Hillary certainly had the gravitas and the training and the experience to be President but women did not turn out in droves in 2016 to support her.
Now there is another background condition that is going to come into play in the coming general election: mental capacity. People I know who will support Joe Biden say that he seems mentally diminished, and it is certainly true that he looks old for his age, like death warmed over. But although he garbles sentences, which he has done since he entered public life, he was more clear on the debate stage in presenting his views on tax policy, health care policy, and trade policy, than any of the other candidates, and he seems to get no credit for that. Moroever, Trump supporters are also saying that he seems to be going senile, and so I certainly see mental fitness as becoming a campaign issue, with Biden supporters also engaging the issue, Trump not trusted by his own staff to appear before the public to give updates on the Coronavirus crisis. Is he on something or is it just that he never was very swift or emotionally well balanced? Will Biden and Trump consent to an impartial evaluation of their mental acuity? I doubt it because Trump, for one, has never had an honest report on his health, and because such tests are not really relevant because it is the performing intelligence that is to be judged, not a psychological investigation of mental competence. Trump didn’t know what Pearl Harbor was about. Did that testify to his general lack of knowledge or to a mental infirmity? It doesn’t matter.
We have been through something like this before. A number of psychiatrists, without examining him, said that Barry Goldwater was psychologically unfit to be President even though the truth was that he was a simple man without a profound appreciation of the issues. We went through it again when George McGovern picked Sen. Thomas Eagleton as his running mate, only to have it revealed that Eagleton had had shock therapy treatments in his youth. That led Eagleton to withdraw as the Vice Presidential nominee, the presumption being that a person once treated in that way could not serve as someone a heartbeat away from the Presidency. Are we in more enlightened times today about one or another kind of mental affliction? We will see just how gruesome and nasty people will get about Presidential mental capacity. It seems to me that the judgment of both candidates, Biden and Trump, remain intact. The question is which judgment you prefer.
Bernie Sanders said today that he was in the race despite his poor showing on Tuesday. He says that his issues motivate people and that he has an appeal with the younger generations, the last of which is true but does not show up with their increased participation at the polling place. Young people are less likely to vote even if they have feelings about the issues and want politicians to pay more attention to their needs, such as abolishing student loan debt. Young people have told me they are too busy to vote. I suspect otherwise. The young do not vote because they do not have enough confidence in themselves as voters. They don’t understand politics and government well enough to vote with the confidence they have in selecting a cell phone or cell phone plan, even though there is no educational credential required to vote (except there is one for naturalization) because voting is a non-violent way for a population to express itself and decide on leadership and feel participants rather than victims of the political system rather than voting being a test of the wisdom of the people, however much the Founding Fathers hoped and thought inevitable that would be the case, the fate of a republic, as Montesquieu had said, resting on the virtue of the electorate. Self-disenfranchisement on the part of the young may be a good thing, the only people then remaining in the voting pool those who think they know enough to vote.
Bernie says that he will confront Biden at the next debate with some specific questions. That is Bernie keeping it mannerly. The real question is whether Biden will perform so badly that even some of his supporters will come to doubt whether he is sharp enough to confront Trump who will use every opportunity to diminish him even though that will be not done with arguments because Trump is just not very good at that, disdain and rancor his strong suits. We will see.
A word about the coronavirus. I am afraid that we are letting public health measures take precedence over keeping open those institutions which are necessary for the continued well being of our society. It may be possible to dispense with rope line hand shakes and large rallies, but what if the epidemic is here into election season and the election itself? Are there to be no rallies, no motorcades, no public press conferences? Are we to retreat into bunkers? People have to be able to vote and to assemble to display who and what they favor. The right to assemble is there in the Constitution. Closing universities means that the rest of the term is lost forever because education either takes place or it doesn’t, and here universities are playing it safe by sending their students home so that families rather than the universities have to take care of students who get sick. The media are abetting the coronavirus frenzy. So far there have been thirty deaths and about a thousand cases in the United States, this in a population of 337 million people. Most cases seem to be mild, most of the deaths restricted to nursing homes and cruise lines. Sure, don’t find yourself in a nursing home and don’t take cruises, which were always breeders of viral diseases. And sure, wash your hands and knock elbows. But don’t bring commerce or education to a close. I am old and so in a high risk category. But I am also in a high risk category for the flu, and my flu shot, I have been told, is not a certain protection. But no one suggests I not go to the movies or the supermarket because I might catch the flu. So be reasonable, or at least until the statistics get much, much worse than they are now and the National Guard has to be mobilized to carry out police and quarantine functions. Then, as happened during the Black Plague, we will have to redraw the lines concerning what is life as usual. And, oh yes, don’t use the coronavirus as another excuse for allowing the federal government to make rich people richer.