WORDS TO LIVE BY NIOW FROM LUCIAN TRUSCOTT

Cross posted from my friend Lucian K. Truscott IV’s Substack:

Where we stand now

Lucian K. Truscott IV

I have been reading the comments to my posts over the last few days – there are hundreds of them – and I detect if not a panic, at least some extremely heightened concern about this election and what its outcome will be.  Readers have swung from bleak if not black depression to what amounts to an unshakeable faith in the Democratic Party and Democrats turning out to vote in November.

It’s not a wonderful position in which we find ourselves in the middle of the summer before a presidential election in November.  Everyone knows that.  But I think it’s important to realize that it’s not the end of the world.  I don’t really want to start out by talking about polls, but I think it’s necessary to get some kind of snapshot of where we are now. 

A couple of recent national polls have the race as tied, which considering the panic after the debate is not bad at all.  I realize national polls are not the ones that matter – the battleground states are.  And here, I’ll turn this whole thing about polls over to Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, who I think is one of the smartest people on the planet about politics, but moreover, someone who is not given to following the conventional wisdom as it comes down from On High in the Washington D.C. Punditocracy.  I have subscribed to Talking Points Memo since it started in the 1990’s, so this opinion about Josh isn’t something I came up with overnight.  Here is Josh on the polls.  He is speaking of the polls since the debate disaster:

“As I said in the first day or two of this, it would come down to whether the bottom fell out in Biden’s support in the swing states. In the week or so after the debate, Biden’s numbers went from tied or one point back (when he needs to be one or two points ahead to win) to two or three points back. That’s as much as a three-point shift in what has been a pretty static race. That’s real, but it’s not the bottom falling out. And in fact, it’s begun shifting back in Biden’s direction. (Whether it gets back to where it was, who knows?) I don’t think that means Biden has some kind of momentum, necessarily — just that the downward bump was always at least partly ephemeral. A few days ago, people involved in campaigns — but not the Biden campaign — described the scale of it to me as what you expect from a convention bump.”

I am pretty much in agreement with Josh.  The story right now is, we could be in a much better place, but we’re not.  But we’re also not in a ditch we can’t climb out of.

I should explain that I’m looking at the status of the race at this moment in terms of Biden being the nominee after the Democratic convention in August, because unless and until he makes a decision to turn over the reins, that’s where we are.  But I think Josh Marshall’s assessment of the polls applies more generally to where another Democrat such as Kamala Harris would be right now, should she suddenly become the nominee.  They’ve done some polling on Vice President Harris and she runs two points ahead of Trump in some national polls, but the same reasoning about national polls applies to her numbers, too.  There have been stories that the Trump campaign is scared of running against Harris, but most of the stories come out of the Political Genius Commentariat Class who have been listening to the same sort of whispers from the Trump people as they have been listening to from Democratic campaign operatives and so-called “strategists.”  And by now, you know what I think of them.

Josh Marshall describes this mid-summer slump as a kind of “stasis,” and I think he’s right.  I also think it’s why a lot of people are as uncomfortable as they are about where we stand on July 12, 2024.  I see this discomfort in the comments from readers, and I also see a measure of dissention the stasis has caused.  People are nervous.  I get that.  They should be.  So am I.

But that doesn’t mean the Democratic Party car has been in a wreck on the highway to election day in November.  We’re still rolling down the road with Biden as the nominee, for now at least.  It is possible that things could change and change quickly if enough Democratic Party “stakeholders,” as Marshall calls them, put a really serious squeeze on the Biden campaign.  Some serious squeezing is already happening, with a story out today that “large donors” have put a hold on $90 million in contributions if Biden remains at the top of the ticket.  More members of Congress have called on Biden to withdraw, and we’ll have to see how that goes. 

But I think if a wave turns into a tsunami among elected officials, serious Democrat donors, and people who run Super Pacs and other fund-raising groups allied with the Democratic Party, we will see some fast recalculating by the Biden campaign and Biden himself.  I take President Biden at his word when he said last night that if his advisers come to him and prove that he can’t win, he will step aside. 

Which raises a whole ‘nother question:  what would it take to “prove” to Biden that he can’t win?  We are stuck wondering what that means as well.  That adds to the uncertainty in the air that is causing so much tsuris among Democrats.  People don’t like uncertainty.  We don’t like not knowing stuff.  That’s part of what makes us Democrats. 

Republicans, on the other hand, don’t have to live with uncertainty because they are by nature followers.  They like having an authoritarian figure telling them what to think and how to react at all times.  What this means is that they don’t like thinking for themselves.

But we’re Democrats and thinking for ourselves is a big part of what makes us Democrats.  We have even begun to see some analysis of this political situation pointing out that this is what makes Democrats a healthy political party.  Republicans come off, in this view, as a failed party because they rely on their authoritarian nature for a party structure.  I would add that Republicans aren’t a political party anymore.  Lots of people call them a cult, and that is probably as good a word as any to describe them.  But until they come up with some way to release the grip Trumpism and MAGAism have on the party, they are sentenced to be a party of the past in a time when the future is moving so quickly toward us, it’s hard to keep your footing.

So that’s where we are, in a kind of stasis where it’s hard to keep our footing, which seems like a contradiction in terms because it is.  It’s unprecedented to have two white male octogenarians running for president when the electorate is younger and comes in more colors than it ever has. 

It's the world we live in, and I for one, am glad we’re in this world and not in some other.  Despair goes along with being a Democrat.  I could list examples of missed political opportunities of the past, mistakes that Democrats made, but you know them as well as I do.

As the old cliché attributed to Churchill goes, “democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried.” I would apply that theory to the Democratic Party as well.  As out of control as things may seem now, they could be worse.  The Republican Party stands as the best example we have of how worse things could be.  Which means, in the end, that we have to work hard and get out the vote to win in November with Biden or with Kamala Harris or with anyone else, as long as they have a “D” next to their name.

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