IT REALLY IS THIS BAD

"What have you done for me lately" matters

In Virginia, Democrats didn’t just lose the race for governor. They lost the race for Lieutenant Governor, they lost the race for Attorney General, and they lost the House of Delegates, which they held 55-45, but will now have a Republican majority.

That’s a clean sweep, as they say.

Chuck Todd, of all people, did a devastating analysis of the loss this morning. He pointed out that while McAuliffe won the DC suburbs of Northern Virginia, he didn’t win by the margin Biden did a year ago. And then, in every other county, he underperformed both Biden last year and Ralph Northam when he won in 2017. And in each of those places, Youngkin not only out-performed what Trump did last year, he outperformed what Gillespie did in 2017.

Democrats. Didn’t. Show. Up.

But the independent “swing voters” did. And they swung.

The voters are indeed fickle, and they always have been. In the off-year election of 1942, FDR lost his “New Deal majority” in Congress, when New Deal Democrats and moderate Republicans in the Midwest lost to conservative Republicans, who joined with the “Solid South” conservative Democrats and proceeded to stop everything so thoroughly that Roosevelt was resigned to likely losing to Dewey in 1944.

What had happened was, Democratic voters didn’t show up. They were “disappointed” by the news over the 11 months since Pearl Harbor. The victory at Midway and the landing at Guadalcanal, which was being reported as being as close to disaster as it was, even through wartime censorship, didn’t change the fact the war wasn’t being “won.” The Democrats weren’t “delivering.”

Those Democrats who didn’t show up lost a helluva lot more than they ever thought they did. They lost the “Second New Deal.” Roosevelt and his advisors had a whole package of reforms and additional New Deal programs they intended to introduce in the new Congress. The short description is “The World War II GI Bill for everybody - with national health care.” Had those Democrats showed up that first Tuesday in November, we would live in a very different America.

And then, the following Saturday, American forces successfully landed in North Africa, and the “march to victory” was underway. Had it happened a week earlier, Things Would Have Been Different.

Franklin Roosevelt didn’t need anyone to tell him that a victory before the election would have meant everything. In the summer of 1944, with the US now winning everywhere, with the Axis in retreat everywhere, the American drive in the Pacific had come to the point where a decision had to be made: where do we go next?

Admiral Nimitz and the Navy wanted to invade Formosa (now Taiwan). Everything about that made strategic, war-winning sense. There were lots of airfields on Formosa. The geographic position would make it possible for American air power to decisively strike the Japanese in China - they controlled all of the eastern part of China, and getting airpower into China to attack them was close to impossible; possession of Formosa would have made it possible. Then there was the fact that Formosa was close enough to Japan that B-29s could be based there rather than the more-distant Marianas, which would make their operations over Japan much easier; in addition, the other American heavy bombers could make it to Japan from Formosa.

Had we taken Formosa, it’s likely today would be very different, because Japan would have surrendered sooner, and the Chinese Communists wouldn’t have been in the commanding position they were in for the post-war resumption of the Chinese Civil War; Mao might not have won in 1949. There’s all kinds of other good things that would have resulted from a decision to take Formosa.

The problem was that Douglas MacArthur, the most supreme egotist who ever wore the uniform, wanted to make good on his promise to the Philippines, made when he was ignominiously chased out in 1942: “I shall return.” Never mind that, in the grand scheme of things, taking the Philippines didn’t change squat and was The Wrong Move. The islands were out of range of Japan; it would take at least six months to defeat the Japanese forces there, fighting from island to island in the archipelago; it would divert half the American force from the ultimate goal and divert the majority of the Army Air Forces in the Pacific.

It would, however, repair MacArthur’s wounded ego, and there was nothing more important than that, to the general. When he met resistance to his plans to take the Philippines after finally winning two years of small battles to re-take New Guinea, an accomplishment done on a shoestring as regards manpower and supplies that demonstrates he did know generalling when it came to tactical strategy, he rose up and declared that if he was refused, he would resign his command and retire from the Army, and return to the United States to tell the American people how they had abandoned their “little brown brothers who trusted us” in the Philippines. And then he would campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.

MacArthur might have been fighting a relatively small-scale distant war, but everyone in America knew about it, and knew what a great and fine general Douglas MacArthur was. That was because, as General Eisenhower - who had spent five years as Big Mac’s chief of staff in the Philippines before the war - noted, “the largest part of his staff was in the public relations department.” Literally, every single report that was sent back to the papers in America about the war in the Southwest Pacific Area theater had to go through his public relations staff; it had to meet the approval of the “Bataan Gang,” his senior staff of sycophants; it had to pass muster with the general himself if necessary. When you control all that, you can make the world believe whatever you want them to believe about your “greatness.”

MacArthur as the Republican nominee in 1944 was a real political threat. FDR had no trouble understanding that.

That July, FDR and his wheelchair got put on a Navy cruiser and he traveled all the way to Pearl Harbor to have it out with Admiral Nimitz and General MacArthur about what he was going to do. (As an aside, when he got there, he went to the Navy hospital in Honolulu, where the worst-wounded were being cared for, and had himself wheeled through the wards in his wheelchair - the only time he ever publicly displayed his disability - and let the soldiers missing arms and legs, whose lives were forever changed, see their president as someone like them, who had nonetheless transcended; men who were there later said that seeing him like that changed their lives, for the better - we don’t have leaders like that any more.)

MacArthur came to Hawaii reluctantly, believing he would be over-ruled, and his staff was already planning his departure from command; they were in touch with Republican Party operatives and already discussing a short campaign before a coronation at the party’s September convention. Roosevelt knew this.

At the meeting, each claimant’s staff made their presentations about why their plan was the one that should be chosen. It was clear to observers which was the war-winning choice.

Roosevelt asked Nimitz, “When can you invade Formosa?” Nimitz replied it would take time to organize forces, but it was possible the invasion could happen in January, 1945.

Roosevelt asked MacArthur when he could invade the Philippines. MacArthur said if he was provided enough transport shipping and it arrived quickly, he could land in the Philippines by the middle of October, 1944.

The 1944 presidential election was the second Tuesday in November. The Republicans in Washington were feeling more certain of victory every day.

Roosevelt made his decision. The fact that the Philippines would be returned without a fight following the defeat of Japan didn’t matter. FDR decided in favor of keeping his sworn enemy at a distance, letting him assuage his ego in the Philippines rather than the White House.

MacArthur’s forces landed on the island of Leyte on October 20, 1944. The Japanese were decisively defeated in the Battles of Leyte Gulf on October 24-25, the biggest sea battle in history. The papers were filled with nothing but American victories during the ten days before the presidential election of 1944. FDR won a more decisive victory than he had since 1936. The president had “delivered,” and the voters rewarded his efforts.

In all the good news, no one paid attention to the one small piece of bad news: at 11:15 a.m. on October 25, a single Japanese Zero fighter popped unexpectedly out of the clouds and deliberately crashed into the escort carrier USS St. Lo, which caught fire, exploded, and sank with a significant loss of life 30 minutes later. The “divine wind” had begun to blow.

It took seven months for US forces to chase the Japanese out of the Philippines, with several ships sunk and many badly damaged by the Kamikazes, the “divine wind;” none of this affected the outcome of the war, other than to delay the end by some 3-4 months, which would have been before Josef Stalin could make good on the promise he’d made at Yalta, to enter the Pacific War 90 days after the defeat of Germany, which he did. There would have been no major Soviet post-war presence in Manchuria, to help Mao, to provide “proof” that the communists had defeated the Japanese. No soviet occupation of North Korea and installation of Kim Il Sung there.

But the president had “delivered.” As Clausewitz once noted, “War is politics by another means.”

My point is, the voters are fickle. Always. They want to know “What have you done for me lately?”

Last year, Joe Biden won on not being Donald Trump, and on being the guy who would defeat the virus and make everything better with good things for Americans. Those of us who follow all this and understand (mostly) how things work can explain why that hasn’t happened. “The average American voter” doesn’t know any of that; they stopped teaching Civics and “How a bill becomes a law” 40 years ago. Immigrants who come to this country have to know how things work, to pass a test for citizenship; that test has been given to “native born” Americans, and the majority of them flunk.

For the average American voter, watching the sausage get made in real time is a demonstration of “Democrats in disarray.”

Delivering the infrastructure bills sometime in the next several weeks - or even later, if the demands of the “moderates” for a full CBO score on the reconciliation bill are met, which they probably will be, since they are 10 votes which is enough to stop the House vote on the bill - is like invading Formosa in January 1945. It could win the war, but it didn’t win the election.

Winston Churchill once said that “the best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.”

We’re about to see that truth, in spades.

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