Posted on 11/11/2024 3:36:43 AM PST by lasereye
After today, Bastiat’s Window will move past the 2024 election for a bit and focus again on healthcare, economics, the Mideast, and popular culture. But here are a few more thoughts on the paradoxes and ironies that got us to last week and where it all might lead. We’ll examine how Joe Biden’s 2020 victory harmed Democrats and benefited Donald Trump. We’ll look for the silver lining that Democrats ought to see in 2024’s results. And we’ll explore the virtues of choosing candidates on ability rather than on symbolism.
Today, my best guess for 2028 is J.D. Vance versus Josh Shapiro. Philosophically, I have major disagreements with both, but either would be an able and attractive face for America on the world stage. Their debates would feature two young, articulate, cerebral, amiable, accomplished leaders—far from the cacophonous brawls between Trump and the trio of Clinton/Biden/Harris. In other words, less “Garden of Earthly Delights,” and more “Peaceable Kingdom.” Less “Night on Bald Mountain,” and more “Ave Maria.”
Recently, Democrats shook their fists and bellowed to the Heavens about the need to expand the Supreme Court, abolish the filibuster, override state abortion laws via federal legislation, and choose presidents by popular vote. All to save Our Democracy. So far as I can tell, all such talk has ceased—as if there were a great disturbance on the Left, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. It’s never wise to seek powers that you would fear in the hands of your adversaries.
Joe Biden’s 2020 victory may have been the worst own-goal in Democratic Party history. If Donald Trump had been re-elected that year, he would now be finishing four years plagued by COVID, lockdowns, race riots, school closings, economic doldrums, and impeachment theater. His revolving-door mayhem of staffers and appointees would likely have accelerated. Democrats would have been spared the Biden-to-Harris-to-Purgatory saga and would today be watching Trump recede in the rear-view mirror.
Instead, Democrats managed to take back the White House just as civil order and Biden’s cognition were both shattering. Even with those twin problems, however, Biden could have set modest goals and retired after one term (as had been expected). With no disastrous debate with Trump, he would be remembered as a Rutherford B. Hayes, Chester A. Arthur, Calvin Coolidge, or Gerald Ford—a brief but calming bridge over troubled waters. Democrats would have been free to conduct an orderly search for his replacement.
But anyone expecting such from Biden ignored or knew nothing of his half-century as a lucky lightweight, laden with vindictiveness and hubris. His enormous power as chair of the Senate Judiciary and Foreign Relations Committees came from seniority, not from the esteem of fellow Democrats, who never seriously considered him for a leadership position.
Once president, Biden’s elephantine ego persuaded him to be transformational, rather than transitional—another FDR or LBJ, rather than the fortunate and brief-lived beneficiary of Trump Fatigue. He and his minions hoisted scimitars aloft and slashed wildly at the Supreme Court, fiscal discipline, free speech, internal combustion engines, petroleum production, gas stoves, equality of opportunity, border control, parental rights, student loans, and—in ways as numberless as the stars—Donald Trump. Biden saddled Democrats with Kamala Harris as VP and then as would-be successor. After Harris’s ignominious defeat, Democrats are enraged by the fact that as president, Biden behaved like … Biden.
Conversely, Donald Trump’s 2020 defeat was his greatest gift. A large percentage of Americans were weary of the high drama of his tenure, and many more would likely have become so had he served eight straight years. Now, however, Trump re-enters office with voters furious about much of what transpired under Biden and Harris. The prosecutors, politicians, journalists, plutocrats, and entertainers tormenting Trump greatly overreached and have been ignored, overridden, embarrassed, and emasculated. Trump has had four long years to regroup and plot out details for a second term. He acquired powerful and previously unthinkable allies (e.g., Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, Sam Altman, Tulsi Gabbard, RFK, Jr.) plus sizable numbers of supporters among African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Native Americans, Jews, Muslims, Catholics, labor unions, and Gen X-ers. The steady barrage of lawfare afforded him martyr status—enhanced by two or three assassination attempts.
Love him or hate him, if Trump serves his full term, he will now be the central protagonist in a twelve-year stretch of American history—one month and a few days shy of FDR’s presidency. Bracketed by Trump, Biden has effectively been reduced to a supporting role in the Trump saga—a feeble opposition leader temporarily huddling in the Oval Office and unceremoniously dropped in the dumpster by his own party. In place of the anodyne Mike Pence, Trump tapped the young, intense, telegenic J.D. Vance—who now holds the inside track for 2028.
Trump and Vance won every single swing state, and lost New Mexico, Virginia, New Jersey, Minnesota, and New Hampshire by under 6%. Add those five states to 2024’s haul and the 2028 Republican electoral vote jumps from 312 to 358. Trump and Vance lost New York, Colorado, Illinois, and Maine by under 12%; add those to the pile and the Republicans win 418 electoral votes. These aren’t predictions—just warnings that Democrats had best rethink their strategies. Podcaster and Obama alum Jon Favreau has said that Biden’s internal polls, in fact, showed Trump winning over 400 electoral votes, had Biden remained in the race.
When British voters ousted Winston Churchill in 1945, his wife, Clementine, tried cheering him up by saying his defeat might be “a blessing in disguise,” to which he replied, “At the moment it seems quite effectively disguised.” Democrats would do well to recall that anecdote in the wake of Kamala Harris’s loss. My two most recent columns (“The Thrill of Victimy, The Agony of DEIfeat” and “Kamala Harris’s Oakland Problem”) discussed Harris’s foibles as candidate and officeholder. As VP, she experienced repeated missteps and embarrassments in diplomatic ventures. Her shocking inability to field questions or offer coherent messages helped sink her candidacy. Post-defeat, stories are swirling about her campaign’s dysfunction, ruinous spending on staff and celebrities, and failure to achieve anything tangible from the billion dollars spent. She never provided convincing evidence that she had genuinely abandoned the far-left stances that helped sink her abortive 2020 presidential run.
Allow me to speculate. Had Harris become president, these problems would have worsened and received vastly more publicity. Democrats in 2028 would have been saddled by Harris as they were by Biden in 2024, with no easy way out of the dilemma. Democrats could have faced an extinction-level event on the order of 1976, 1972, 1964, or 1932. Now, Democrats can wipe the slate clean, with Biden and Harris gone from the scene and—if the party is smart—with Pelosi, Schumer, the Clintons, and the Obamas similarly relegated to the party’s wax museum. For a model, they might take a look at what Tony Blair and Gordon Brown did with New Labour in 1994—and what Bill Clinton did with the New Democrats around the same time.
By the way, after his own “blessing-in-disguise,” Churchill rose to power again in 1951—though he and his party didn’t win the popular vote that year.
The aforementioned “The Thrill of Victimy, The Agony of DEIfeat” recalled Kamala Harris’s decision to skip the Al Smith Dinner, thereby forfeiting an opportunity to reach millions of Catholics. Instead, she sent the hosts a painful video in which she awkwardly interacted with a hyperkinetic has-been comic who unwittingly reinforced the notion that Harris’s most important qualification for the presidency was her gender. This video represents the logical terminus of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion); the Left so thoroughly bought into their obsession with demographic quotas that they applied it to the presidency—perhaps forfeiting the White House in the process. In a conversation with a friend who is high in Catholic circles, I suggested that one ought to refer to Harris’s Al Smith Dinner video as her “Agnus DEI.” Initially, I didn’t include this observation in my essay, for fear of offending Catholics. My friend gave me the thumbs up to use the pun, so I’ll trust him and post it here.
A reader commented last week that:
“If Democrats want a woman president then they need to present ‘a woman of substance.’ Trouble is, they don't seem to have any.”
I disagreed, and immediately offered him a specific name. But before identifying her in the next section, let me offer some friendly advice to despondent Democrats: in 2028, try to find an excellent candidate who would be an excellent president. Don’t aim for An Historic First. You did that twice in the past decade, and the trophies you got were not the ones you wanted: (1) First Woman to Lose to Donald Trump, and (2) First Woman of Color to Lose to Donald Trump.
Here’s my suggestion: Try looking for candidates in unconventional places, and you might coincidentally find a woman and/or person of color ideally suited for the task. Talent, not gender, carried Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, and Angela Merkel to power. In 2016, Republicans looked in an unconventional place—the business world—for their nominee. Donald Trump’s only antecedent was corporate titan Wendell Willkie—the Republican nominee in 1940. Without Trump in the race, the GOP in 2016 might well have turned to yet another business leader, who just happened to be a woman—Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard. So perhaps some female CEO is waiting in the wings to return Democrats to the White House.
But when the esteemed reader suggested that Democrats have no women of substance to offer, I immediately suggested one impressive counterexample—Associate Justice Elena Kagan. In 1916, Republicans persuaded Charles Evans Hughes to leave the Supreme Court to run for president. He came within a hair of sparing America a second Woodrow Wilson term. Today, Elena Kagan is 64 years old, loaded with gravitas, brilliant, personable, accomplished. She would be a star on the international stage.
Kagan was Deputy Director of Bill Clinton's Domestic Policy Council. As Dean of Law at Harvard for six years, she excelled at attracting talent and raising money. She was Solicitor General of the U.S. for a year. She has spent fourteen years on the Supreme Court and is the heaviest hitter on that side of the Court. I have no idea how she'd do at retail politics, but I guarantee she’d do far better than Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris did.
I don’t actually expect Kagan to run for president and only mentioned her as the type of unconventional candidate that Democrats might like to consider. To run, Kagan would have to step down from the Supreme Court, thereby giving soon-to-be-President Trump yet another appointment—not likely to happen.
SCHADENFREUDEAN ANALYSIS
Excerpt from Frannie Block, The Free Press Frannie Block at The Free Press writes of therapeutic sessions to help diplomats-in-training at Georgetown University cope with the 2024 election. As shown above, students have been offered tea, cocoa, self-care, Legos, mindfulness exercises, milk, cookies, coloring books and crayons, snacks, and self-guided meditation. Consider this: if you need psychological counseling and care because your candidate lost the election, it’s a fair bet that you’ve needed psychological counseling for quite some time.
An earlier Bastiat’s Window essay (“Polls, Pols, and Poli-sci: Extraordinary Scholarly Delusions and the Madness of Experts”) disdainfully described the 2024 Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey, which ranked U.S. presidents in order of “greatness.” A New York Times article bore the following title and subtitle:
“Poll Ranks Biden as 14th-Best President, With Trump Last: President Biden may owe his place in the top third to his predecessor: Mr. Biden’s signature accomplishment, according to the historians, was evicting Donald J. Trump from the Oval Office.”
“Never mind.”
Once president, Biden’s elephantine ego persuaded him to be transformational, rather than transitional—another FDR or LBJ, rather than the fortunate and brief-lived beneficiary of Trump Fatigue.
A good summary of how ridiculous and delusional Biden is. I think a lot of historians will see Biden along those lines.
He views Shapiro as the frontrunner for 2020. Most people assume it's Newsom. If they both run, I wonder if Shapiro will portray Newsom as too far to the left. A Dem accusing another Dem of being too far to the left never happens these days. I assume one reason is that a huge number of Dems are way to the left and they tend to be the most likely to vote in primaries and caucuses.
"If Donald Trump had been re-elected that year, he would now be finishing four years plagued by COVID, lockdowns, race riots, school closings, economic doldrums, and impeachment theater. His revolving-door mayhem of staffers and appointees would likely have accelerated. Democrats would have been spared the Biden-to-Harris-to-Purgatory saga and would today be watching Trump recede in the rear-view mirror."
What a bunch of Horsed Poop. This is sophomoric and classless.
The county map behind Kramer is a nice touch...
Author seems confused with contradictions, for example: “Democrats could have faced an extinction-level event on the order of 1976, 1972, 1964, or 1932. Now, Democrats can wipe the slate clean”
How so? 2024 is an ‘extinction-level’ event compared to much in the past. Reagan’s second term was 49 states and came close in MN. Funny how somebody’s past always follows them around but not mentioned much by the left. The Harris/Biden era will never be forgotten.
“...and the trophies you got were not the ones you wanted: (1) First Woman to Lose to Donald Trump, and (2) First Woman of Color to Lose to Donald Trump.”
LOL, also not mentioned is President Trump also beat the TWO female candidates. This will no doubt be front and center in the coming months, large portions of the left will pick up abortion as their main topic as they continue to tread in quicksand.
Excellent analysis.
Shapiro could very well be the democrat nominee, which makes it imperative the RNC makes every effort to strengthen and expand voter registration in PA and build infrastructure in NY. The RNC should hire Scott Pressler and put him in charge of the operation in that region. Same with CA, start building infrastructure there, too.
It makes the assumption that had Trump won in 2020 the following years would have been identical to what happened. First the border crisis would be non existent. The economy would have been in much better shape as well.
The author thinks Elena Kagan is a woman of substance and could win the presidency.
Only if the American electorate were happy electing a woman who looks like Fred Flintstone, but I doubt it.
Also: No war in Ukraine.
No October 7 in Israel, because Iran would not have been reinvigorated by a Biden administration.
No catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan, instead an orderly one where we kept Bagram.
Elena Kagan LOLOLOL!!!
The author of the wall between fbi and cia that directly resulted in 9-11.
That’s the ticket, yeah!
Yes, excellent analysis.
Americans should “wipe the slate clean” of democrats. 2024 is a good start. Lots of cleaning to do though. They’re very dirty.
He’s more right than wrong. If Trump had been reelected the BS claims that he was “mishandling” Covid would have continued non-stop. I wonder if Covid would still be front page news even today.
Trump’s staffing problems were real and he will do a much better job on that this time. The reason for the problems was that he was selecting people recommended by establishment Republicans.
He is obviously correct that Harris would never have been nominated had Trump won in 2020. Maybe there would have been another impeachment too. His claim about economic doldrums is stupid.
AND-— where we didn’t give away Billion of $$$$$ of military equipment
I can see my county from here!
Trump...”just taking out the garbage for the American people”
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.