President Biden’s First Day
(David Brooks, NYT) [Mr. Brooks writes well, he is insightful, let's see how he does here.]
The first thing you’ll notice is the quiet...there will be no disgraceful presidential tweets and no furious cable segments reacting to them on Inauguration Day.
Donald Trump himself may fume, but hated and alone. The opportunists who make up his administration will abandon him. Republicans will pretend they never heard his name. Republican politicians are not going to hang around a guy they privately hate and who publicly destroyed their majority.
But there will be a larger quiet, too. For two decades American politics has centered on a bitter culture war between the white working-class heartland and university-bred coastal elites.
Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were all emblems of this university class, and it was easy for the Republican media wing to gin up resentment against them. In 2016, Trump beat Clinton among the white working class by a crushing 28 points.
But Biden is not an emblem of this coastal elite...He graduated from the University of Delaware in 1965...
It’s very hard for conservatives to demonize Biden because he comes from the sort of background that Trumpian conservatives celebrate. He elides all the culture war divides. He doesn’t act superior...because his family taught him to despise status games of all sorts.
It will become immediately clear that in a Biden era politics will shrink back down to normal size. It will be about government programs, not epic wars about why my sort of people are morally superior to your sort of people. In the Trump era a lot of people...got manic about politics.
It will also become immediately clear that in a highly ideological age, America will be led by a man who is not ideological.
This week a few of us columnist types spoke with Biden about his economic plans. His most telling sentence was, “I’ve kind of tried to shed the labels and focus on the nuts and bolts of this.” [That's pragmatism.]
I asked him to describe the big forces that have flattened working-class wages over the past decades. Other people would have spun grand theories about broken capitalism or the rise of the corporate oligarchy. But Biden pointed to two institutional failures — the way Republicans have decentralized power and broken Washington and the way Wall Street forces business leaders to focus obsessively on the short term. [I heard with my own ears Biden say this week, “It is way past time we put an end to shareholder capitalism, the idea that the only responsibility that a corporation has is to its shareholders” and I thrilled to it. That is spot on and it is the reason Wall Street is ao short-sighted—they want to keep the dividend checks flowing to their only constituency, the shareholders. They have a responsibility to their workers and to their workers’ families, too; not to, or not solely to, shareholders. Those people are speculators. That would transform American capitalism, and that is what I think needs be done. That is having the mother of all birds eye views but not seeing theory, seeing concrete actions that have structured in dysfunction.]
...
His economic agenda, promoted under the slogan “Build Back Better,” is about that, not some vast effort to remake capitalism or build a Nordic-style welfare system. The agenda is more New Deal than New Left.
[Well, Dave's gonna like that. He proudly represents the establishment and he has written previously that the 2020 election is the last chance to save his bastions. I think capitalism as it is practiced in the U.S. is broken. I favor economic democracy, democratic socialism. To me “Build Back Different would be Better.]
In the two speeches he has delivered so far there are constant references to our manufacturing base — infrastructure, steelworkers, engineers, ironworkers, welders, 500,000 charging stations for electric cars. “When I think of climate change, the word I think of is jobs,” he declared.
[When I think climate change, the word I think of is NOT jobs. There are less jobs in climate change than no climate change. There's more health in climate change, but not more jobs.]
The agenda pushes enormous resources toward two groups: first, African-Americans, who have been pummeled by deindustrialization for decades; and second, white working-class Trump voters. This looks like an attempt to rebuild the New Deal coalition and win back the white working class who should be a core of the Democratic base. Biden’s populist “Buy American” messaging is just icing on that cake.
[That is not going to happen. The New Deal coalition was 80-90 years ago. Come on. Elevate your guns a little higher. This is not the same country demographically, economically, culturally, any -lly. It's just not. You're not going to bring back those '40's jobs. They are gone and they are gone forever. Pittsburgh will never be the furnace of America again. (There aren't even any steel furnaces in Pittsburgh anymore. This is the same mesmerizing lure that Trump promised. And that he didn't deliver. It can't be done. It can't be delivered.]
I’ll be curious to see if it’s possible to create millions of manufacturing jobs [Really, Dave? Come on.]— or if technology means there’s only a need for relatively few workers. I’ll be curious to see if he can tamp down the Democratic media and activist wings, with their penchant for wildly unpopular moral gestures like “defund the police” and “decriminalize the border.”
[Policing is broken, just like Washington, just like Wall Street, just like America's economy. We have to start over on all four. We have to defund the police and substitute a different model altogether; we have to re-centralize policy direction in Washington and we have to re-align Wall Street with the national interest. Those are three enormous tasks.]
I wonder if the economic crisis will obviate all this. With mass unemployment the need will be to get money out the door immediately on Day 1. Launching infrastructure projects and clean energy industries takes a lot of time.
[Biden and David Brooks are eliding over something here:
Yesterday there were 77,000 Cases so that we've passed 70,000 for the second time is not as pertinent as that yesterday we were much closer to 80,000 than 70,000. Deaths, I don't know the exact number today, July 17, but Trump is averaging Killing near, not quite, but near 1,000. I've had to update the number at least each of the last three, and maybe four days.
The current economic crisis is the flip side of the Trump Epidemic. Trump made a hash of both. I have not heard Biden say one thing about what he will do to stop the epidemic dead. And that should be the first thing he does on Day 1. The 2019 economy will be recreated if the epidemic is ended. Biden elides over this because to end the epidemic businesses are going to have to close once again. There is no way around this (unless there's a vaccine). Biden has got to inflict more economic pain before the he reopens the country again and for the last time. He better get it right. He can do that only if he re-centralizes policy in Washington. It's a national epidemic that drifts right over state lines in the air; the economy is national. Only coordinated action from the Center can stop the epidemic dead. Then he can leave to the states, the "fifty little laboratories" to get the economy back to pre-epidemic levels. And then, once the economy is back, he must, from the Center direct the restructuring of Wall Street.]
Coronavirus Live Updates: U.S. Reports More Than 70,000 New Cases for Second Time
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/17/world/coronavirus-cases-update.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=HomepageYesterday there were 77,000 Cases so that we've passed 70,000 for the second time is not as pertinent as that yesterday we were much closer to 80,000 than 70,000. Deaths, I don't know the exact number today, July 17, but Trump is averaging Killing near, not quite, but near 1,000. I've had to update the number at least each of the last three, and maybe four days.
That graph snippet is through July 16. The seven-day ave line has gone up every day since July 5 with the exception of July 13 and 14 where the average was an identical 724. For the most current seven-day it's at 744, the highest in over one months.
The current economic crisis is the flip side of the Trump Epidemic. Trump made a hash of both. I have not heard Biden say one thing about what he will do to stop the epidemic dead. And that should be the first thing he does on Day 1. The 2019 economy will be recreated if the epidemic is ended. Biden elides over this because to end the epidemic businesses are going to have to close once again. There is no way around this (unless there's a vaccine). Biden has got to inflict more economic pain before the he reopens the country again and for the last time. He better get it right. He can do that only if he re-centralizes policy in Washington. It's a national epidemic that drifts right over state lines in the air; the economy is national. Only coordinated action from the Center can stop the epidemic dead. Then he can leave to the states, the "fifty little laboratories" to get the economy back to pre-epidemic levels. And then, once the economy is back, he must, from the Center direct the restructuring of Wall Street.]
But I do know that if he can win a chunk of the white working class (44 percent of the electorate, according to Ruy Teixeira), he will realign American politics.
[Okay. I'll go with that. Wasn't too long ago that Barack Obama, to whom Joe was veep, and Bill Clinton before them, got big ol' "chunks" of the white working class. Clinton especially.]
Biden is a moderate... But he has found a way to craft an agenda that could reshape the American economy and the landscape of American politics in fundamental ways.
[His birds eye view of the economy is good! I applaud. But he is not addressing the immediate crisis to the economy, the epidemic.]
Joe Biden may turn out to be what radical centrism looks like.
[Okay. Whatever that is.]
