Well, this was predictable. NPR reported that China’s ambassador to the US warned that the US could face a possible “military conflict” with China over Taiwan:
“If the Taiwanese authorities, emboldened by the US, keep going down the road for independence, it most likely will involve China and the United States, the two big countries, in a military conflict.”
It isn’t a coincidence that China raises the specter of war while the US is focused on a possible threat by Russia in Ukraine. This week, 39 Chinese military aircraft flew near Taiwan, including two of China’s most advanced warplanes, their J-16D jets. Military analysts think that the J-16D has capacity to interfere with Taiwan’s defense radar systems and could make a huge difference in combat.
This is more evidence of how strategically fraught America’s legacy global policies are in a multi-polar world. Russia is threatening NATO and our Western allies, while simultaneously, China threatens our strategic position in Asia. We haven’t fought a two-theater war in 77 years, and haven’t won a war since.
It’s ironic that neither Taiwan nor Ukraine are formal mutual defense treaty partners with the US, yet US defense hawks think we should defend either or both. On to cartoons.
Surviving is difficult when you live in the wild:
Some voices on the Right support Russia:
Breyer retires, but opinions differ on who owns the right to replace him:
There seems very little Republicans can do to stop Biden from filling this seat, since there’s no filibuster for Supreme Court nominees. That was taken away by Mitch McConnell, during the nomination of Neil Gorsuch.
Mitch looks for a loophole:
The never-ending Republican hissy fit:
Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, “MAUS”, is a memoir about the Holocaust. It was banned last week by a school board in Tennessee. In the book, the cats are the Germans while the mice are the Jews:
Dawn, Zabriskie Point with Panamint Range in background, Death Valley CA – January 2022 photo by Rick Berk Photography
Various thoughts on a snowy Saturday in Connecticut.
First, in a turnaround from recent polls, a Marquette Law School nationwide survey of adults finds that Biden leads both Florida Gov. DeSantis and former President Trump in hypothetical 2024 matchups:
“In a head-to-head matchup, DeSantis is supported by 33%, while Biden is supported by 41%. A substantial 18% say they would support someone else, and 8% say they would not vote.
In a Trump versus Biden rematch, Trump receives 33% to Biden’s 43%, with 16% preferring someone else and 6% saying they would not vote.”
The survey was conducted between Jan. 10-21, 2022. It surveyed 1000 adults nationwide and has a margin of error of +/-4 percentage points. There are always a few outlier polls. Could this be accurate?
Second, even before Justice Breyer announced his retirement, Republicans already had their usual hissy fit over Biden’s decision to name a Black woman to the Supreme Court, implying that she would be an “affirmative action” hire. Republicans on Twitter are prejudging any Black woman nominee as inherently inferior and underqualified.
Ilya Shapiro, a conservative lawyer who will soon teach at Georgetown Law, made it clear that he thinks being Black and a woman means the person is innately unqualified for the Supreme Court. In a since-deleted tweet, he lamented that since his preferred candidate for the job “doesn’t fit into the latest intersectionality hierarchy so we’ll get a lesser black woman.”
Shapiro is the same guy who wrote in 2009 that Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination “confirmed that identity politics matter… more than merit,” showing that this is who he’s always been. Wrongo is appalled that my alma mater just gave this guy a job.
George Washington University’s Jonathan Turley tweeted that Biden’s pick will cause uncomfortable moments on the Court because:
“…when the justices will hear arguments on the use of race in [college] admissions, one member will have been selected initially through an exclusionary criteria of race and sex.”
He thinks it will cause uncomfortable moments for the White majority on the Court. This is from the same crowd that was fine with the White Catholic Amy Coney Barrett, who had never before been on the bench or even argued an appeal, being on the court.
Third, more about yesterday’s discussion on education, in which we said that the Right-wing is using the slogan of “parental control” to rationalize imposing changes in school curricula and libraries. A school board in Tennessee voted unanimously to ban “Maus,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust from being taught in its classrooms because board members said the book contains material that was inappropriate for eighth grade students. Members also objected to a cartoon that featured a drawing of a “naked” mouse.
Wrongo has read “Maus” and recommends it to readers of all ages.
And there’s this gem from Indiana: HB 1362 mandates that teachers adopt a posture of impartiality in any conversation about controversial historical events. It goes on to state that in the run-up to a general election, students must be taught that: (emphasis by Wrongo)
“Socialism, Marxism, communism, totalitarianism, or similar political systems are incompatible with and in conflict with the principles of freedom upon which the United States was founded. In addition, students must be instructed that if any of these political systems were to replace the current form of government, the government of the United States would be overthrown and existing freedoms under the Constitution of the United States would no longer exist. As such, socialism, Marxism, communism, totalitarianism, or similar political systems are detrimental to the people of the United States.”
We’re now seeing a deadly combination against public education: parents plus legislators following the marching orders of a Right-wing media complex that spews disinformation.
Time for us to kick back and enjoy our Saturday Soother.
If you live in the Northeast, you’re not going to be driving or working outside today, what with the 50+ mph winds and the 1-2+ ft of snow. So start by brewing up a cup of Pearl District Blend ($17.00/12 oz.) from Portland, Oregon’s Cycletown Coffee Roasters.
Now grab a seat by a window and listen to Giuseppe Verdi’s “Va, pensiero“, also known as the “Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves“, from his 1842 opera “Nabucco”. It recollects the period of Babylonian captivity in Jerusalem in 586 BCE. Here it’s performed outdoors in front of a large audience in Naples, Italy by the orchestras of the Theater of San Carlo, and the National Academy of Sainta Cecilia, in July 2009. It’s not totally on point for Thursday’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day, but it’s beautiful:
The WaPo reports that House Republicans are putting together policies to run on in the 2022 mid-terms, and at the top of their list is tapping into parental discontent at how local schools are managed. They plan to focus on parental control of school curricula and school closures.
The new strategy is based upon last year’s gubernatorial race in Virginia, where Republican Glenn Youngkin won in a purple state by promising that parents would have more say in their children’s education. Younkin’s win was seen as a political earthquake by both Parties.
Now Republicans plan to use public education as a national political wedge issue. The strategy behind this is based on polling by the Democratic polling firm Anzalone Liszt Grove Research (ALGR) which gained prominence following Youngkin’s victory when they surveyed 500 Virginia voters. In an NYT article based on that poll, the Times stated:
“…polling showed that school disruptions were an important issue for swing voters who broke Republican—particularly suburban white women.”
Rachel M. Cohen, writing in The New Republic, says that the school closure issue may be overblown. But she thinks there are many other reasons for Democrats to be worried regarding schools.
Parents were frustrated about the fallout Covid visited on school-age kids. Many parents were forced to work from home or to leave the workforce to supervise their kids’ education, and to otherwise care for them when formerly, those kids would have been in school:
“But outside Twitter and op-ed pages, many surveys and studies have shown that actual parents and voters hold much more nuanced views. They can hate the harms of distance learning….They can express frustration with their circumstances but maintain that not all problems have…clear villains.”
While Democrats did poorer politically in 2020 than expected, it isn’t clear that it was because of school closures, as the questions surrounding schools changed almost on a weekly basis.
When kids returned to school in the fall of 2021, the Delta variant was circulating, kids were wearing masks, and individual classes were subject to rolling shutdowns after positive tests. However, the vast majority of children were physically back in school buildings full-time.
The University of Southern California’s Understanding America Survey surveyed parents four times during the pandemic: from October 2020 when 29% had fully in-person school, through October 2021 when 93% were in person. They found that parents’ concerns about their child’s learning declined significantly.
But public opinion shifted after the efforts by some on the Right to demonize the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT) which examines the history of institutional racism in America. Since last summer, we’re seeing a widening of the Republicans’ war on CRT. Republicans have passed legislation in Florida, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Iowa, Idaho, along with Texas and others, placing significant restrictions on what can be taught in public school classrooms, and in some cases, in public universities.
Republicans are saying they must protect students from CRT, but they can’t show examples of it actually being taught in schools. Once again, we’re seeing Conservatives pushing a concocted claim and the entire Republican Party playing along.
OTOH, Democrats must know that it’s impossible to win elections by telling voters that their concerns are imaginary.
In a nationwide poll conducted in early December 2021 by Global Strategy Group, researchers found just 13% of Democrats and 27% of independents described school closings as a “very concerning” issue compared to 60% of Republicans. However, slightly more Democrats and independents (17% and 39% respectively) were now saying that they were very concerned that Democrats were promoting Critical Race Theory in schools:
Opposition to CRT is now a proxy for the need for more parental input at schools. From Cohen:
“Mario Brossard, a senior research vice president at the Democratic polling firm Global Strategy Group, who conducted polling in October on CRT, told me, ‘It is clear that the discussion or the talking points around having parents have more input into the curriculum’ is being used as a euphemism for CRT. ‘The folks who are anti-CRT are fairly well entrenched, and they hold those sentiments quite strongly’…”
Again, Virginia showed Republicans the way forward. A Fox News voter analysis survey conducted by NORC polled over 2,500 Virginia voters right after the gubernatorial election. It found a stunning 72% of respondents said the debate over teaching CRT in schools was “an important” factor to them, with 25% calling it “the single most important” factor.
This is the basis for the Republican move to politicize how schools are administered. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has released a “Parents Bill of Rights” that would create new mandates for school districts. They would require that districts post curriculum and school budgets, as well as lists of books in school libraries. McCarthy’s document asserts that parents have a “right to be heard.” School boards almost uniformly allow for public comment, though recently many across America have shut down meetings because of public disruptions and threats of violence.
According to the WaPo, Newt Gingrich is advising McCarthy on the issues that will resonate with voters in the November election. Just when you think things can’t get worse, Newt makes a comeback!
For Democrats, the 10 months until the mid-term should be enough time to make it clear to voters that parental input into how their schools are managed has always been a cornerstone of Democrats’ local politics.
But nothing will change the now-deeply ingrained distrust of local officials on the part of many Americans.
Sunrise with sea smoke, Curtis Island Lighthouse, Camden ME – January 2022 photo by Daniel F Dishner. Sea smoke forms on Penobscot Bay when the air temperature is colder than the water temperature.
On Tuesday, Wrongo took aim at the New York Times for it’s confusing editorial that misstated how to use an economic tool, and then went on to use that tool incorrectly.
The media, including the NYT, have become a source of both misinformation and disinformation. We really have two media, the mainstream one and the right-wing one. Although most of the disinformation is centered in the right-wing media, it’s becoming less clear to Wrongo that, at present, the mainstream media can (or will) help to defend our democracy.
If you doubt that, look at the November Marist College poll which found, by 42% to 41%, that American adults see the Democratic Party as a greater threat to democracy than the GOP.
The broader results were that 81% of Americans believed there is a “serious threat” to our democracy, including 89% of Republicans, 80% of independents, and 79% of Democrats. That was the poll’s headline. But buried in the cross-tabs was the answer to which Party presents the bigger threat – the 42% to 41% split.
This is mostly the result of our media that defaults to sensationalism rather than trying to explain complex issues. One group slavishly supports a GOP that is full of cranks, bigots, conspiracy theorists, and careerist politicians with flamethrowers. They’re also the media that say things like “intolerance of racism is worse than racism”.
The other side makes a pretense of non-partisanship while echoing many right-wing talking points.
We’ve learned over the past few years that the right-wing media has more control over setting the national agenda than the mainstream press does. The idea that the Party that’s trying to protect and expand voting rights is wrecking democracy isn’t just a misconception—it’s the result of an orchestrated assault on reality. And nearly half of Americans believe it.
In early December, Dana Milbank wrote in the WaPo about how the media has treated Biden as badly as – or worse than – Trump. Milbank had a data analytics company examine more than 200,000 mainstream news articles about both the Trump and Biden presidencies. Milbank wrote that: (emphasis by Wrongo)
“During 2020, when the Trump administration’s response to and dishonesty about the pandemic led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, when he refused to denounce white supremacists at a debate and launched serial assaults on democracy, he got slightly more favorable coverage in the mainstream media than Biden has received since August.”
Remember that Milbank’s review covered articles and mentions in the mainstream press. Milbank concludes by saying:
“We need a skeptical, independent press. But how about being partisans for democracy? The country is in an existential struggle between self-governance and an authoritarian alternative. And we in the news media, collectively, have given equal, if not slightly more favorable, treatment to the authoritarians.”
Does the mainstream media have the power to try to counter this? The big question is how will the mainstream press cover the 2022 mid-terms and 2024 presidential campaign?
People want to be light and breezy, but Wrongo‘s brand is accuracy. Things have been really bleak for many years. And Wrongo has become short-tempered with those in the media who continue to deny just how deep the hole has become.
After the 2020 election, America had a chance to recover from the anti-establishment efforts of Trump’s administration. It was clear that Biden wouldn’t be able to do all that much, because of the slender Democratic majorities in both Houses.
It was a gamble for Biden and the Democrats to wrap every promise into one big bill that would set us on a course for changing the “economic paradigm”. In the end, that was a failure. Governing isn’t simple, especially with such narrow majorities.
And that’s where Democrats are now, paying a heavy price for overpromising and Biden’s naive expectations that he would work magic with Republicans getting some of them to vote for his agenda.
Biden and the Dems could still rebound. Passing a smaller, more focused version of Build Back Better, along with an easing of inflation, and a return to something like normal on the virus front could bring a fall comeback wave.
But it will also take a mainstream media that understands and accepts its role with a resolve at least equal to that of the right-wing media.
Let’s close with a palate cleanser. Biden has an uphill fight. He should take inspiration from The Temptations doing “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me” live on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1969. Eddie Kendricks’ falsetto was the best:
The Sullivan Show aired on CBS from 1948-1971. For 23 years it aired a wide variety of popular culture.
Santa Catalina Mountains, Saguaro NP, Tucson AZ – December 2021 photo by Paul J Van Helden
Last Saturday, the NYT had an editorial called “President Biden’s Economy Is Failing the Big Mac Test”. The Times said that when the average worker’s paycheck doesn’t buy as many hamburgers from McDonald’s as it did last year, Biden’s in trouble.
Unfortunately for the NYT, that isn’t what the “Big Mac test” is about. They properly credit the idea to The Economist magazine, which originated it in 1986. It was intended as a semi-humorous illustration of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP). PPP basically tells economists what the comparative strengths and weaknesses are of each country’s currency by looking at the cost of the same “basket of goods” across geography.
The thesis is that in a free market, foreign exchange rates should adjust to equalize the price of goods and services across different nations.
According to The Economist, the Big Mac PPP denotes the exchange rate at which the Big Mac would cost the same in the US as it would in other countries. There are all sorts of comparison problems with the Big Mac index. Russia has one of the cheapest Big Macs, despite the fact that Moscow is among the most expensive cities in the world.
But the Times didn’t want to talk about exchange rates at all. It wanted to make a point about US prices in the time of Covid, and Biden’s so-called failure to control them. It says:
“The dollar figures on workers’ paychecks rose handsomely over the past 12 months. But for most workers, that wasn’t enough to keep pace with the highest inflation in several decades, which eroded the value of each of those dollars….The purchasing power of the average worker’s weekly pay declined by 2.3% from December 2020 to December 2021.”
True, and that sounds bad, but maybe we should add some context. First, Investopedia says that US sales of Big Macs have been falling since the 1980s. Second, the NYT itself says a few paragraphs later: (emphasis by Wrongo)
“Lower-wage workers have seen particularly strong wage growth. For workers in the bottom third of the wage distribution, Arindrajit Dube, an economist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, estimates that average wage gains have exceeded inflation.”
Just guessing, but Wrongo thinks that lower-wage workers are likely to be the primary market for Big Macs. And if workers in the bottom third of wage distribution are experiencing the strongest wage gains, maybe that’s what the Times should refer to as a Biden BFD!
And apparently, the Times doesn’t read its own business section, which on Monday said that US fast-food menu prices rose by 8% in 2021. For you non-economists, that means McDonald’s prices rose at a rate faster than US inflation, but instead, the NYT editorial board says Biden blew it.
The NYT tries to take what is a useful way to teach something about comparative exchange rates and forces it to say something critical about Biden. The title of the editorial says that Biden is failing, but in the fourth paragraph, they say:
“Mr. Biden inherited an economic crisis precipitated by the coronavirus pandemic, and his administration deserves credit for orchestrating a fiscal response on a scale commensurate with the nation’s need. The outstanding achievement of Mr. Biden’s first year in office was the passage of an economic aid package in March that shielded Americans from the economic effects of the pandemic and helped to deliver a faster recovery than in other developed nations.”
They seem confused. Later, they say:
“The challenge now is to bring inflation back under control without undermining the economic recovery. The work will mostly be done by the Federal Reserve, not by Mr. Biden or his administration. The role of presidents in shaping the nation’s economic fortunes is generally overstated.”
So presidents really don’t have a big role in improving the economy, except that Biden caused bad inflation, which he can’t fix, because that’s the job of the Federal Reserve.
Does any of this make the NYT sound smart to you?
As someone who was a working adult in the 1970’s and 1980’s, Wrongo remembers truly high inflation. He remembers having a 14% home mortgage. Today’s inflation doesn’t compare to that, something that the editorial board of the NYT must know.
There is so much media laziness in America today. The NYT missed a chance to educate the public about why the prices of various products are increasing. Instead, they settled for an easy criticism of Biden.
Landscape Arch, Arches NP, UT – January 2022 photo by Peter Ferenz
Let’s talk about the elephant in the room in the standoff between Russia and Ukraine: NATO. Back in the early 1990s, Clinton wanted to have it both ways with his Russian counterpart, Boris Yeltsin. He wanted to expand NATO while at the same time, partnering with Russia.
Yeltsin wasn’t having any of that. He accused Clinton at a summit of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, (CSCE) that the US was “trying to split [the] continent again” through NATO expansion. Putin believes that today.
NATO’s expansion, either in the form of full members (or in increased military activities), has now been the policy of five US presidents: Clinton, GW Bush, Obama, Trump, and now, Biden. So, a couple of questions:
Did NATO’s expansion to the east of a reunified Germany increase the security in Europe and reduce the risk of a major war in Europe?
Did NATO’s expansion in membership increase the safety and security of the American people?
The answer to both is a no. NATO expansion post 1990 hasn’t helped the original European allies and has done nothing to improve the security of the US. Arguably, we’re worse off today than in 1990.
Today there are true splits within NATO. Germany, its most important country, isn’t on the same page about Russia. From Der Spiegel:
“The US wants to impose harsh sanctions on Russia if it invades Ukraine. But the German government is putting on the brakes out of fears over the economic consequences and what punitive measures could mean for energy supplies for a country that gets much of its gas from Moscow.”
Germany’s conflicted about Ukraine. Der Spiegel reports that last week, the US CIA director William Burns held a meeting in Bonn with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Burns told him that if Russia attacks Ukraine, Berlin must take a clear stand.
Biden also wanted to meet with Scholz in Washington. It would have been an opportunity for them to closely coordinate steps in dealing with Russia, but Scholz refused to go and meet him. We have a problem when Russia is building up to the biggest European military threat since the end of the Cold War, and the German Chancellor is unable to clear his schedule to meet with the American president.
Having declined the Washington visit, Biden dispatched Secretary of State Blinken to Berlin, and like the CIA director, his message was – Germany must participate in tough financial and economic sanctions if Putin strikes.
Despite the European ambivalence, Russia’s move to surround Ukraine with troops may be a strategic error. Europe has wanted to become a kind of giant economic Switzerland, independent but neutral. Today, it’s trying to come to grips with the fact that Russia wants to push NATO as far back as it can by recovering former Soviet territory.
Russia making NATO into a target seems to have revivified NATO a bit. It was more or less in slumber before Putin’s move against Ukraine and his demands of NATO and the US. Europe, the US, and NATO are walking a tightrope now, since there’s a fine line between diplomacy and “appeasement”.
The US and NATO countries all have entrenched maximalist military hawks who will attack any politician that surrenders an inch to Russia in the current situation. That’s an understandable position. In the last decade, Russia broke up Georgia, it ended the revolution against Assad in Syria, while securing its naval base there. It annexed Crimea albeit with local popular support, sent troops to Libya and Africa, supported Armenia against Azerbaijan, and recently “preserved” the non-elected government of Kazakhstan.
Can/should this be allowed go on forever? Is this the right time to push back hard?
There is no military solution that will keep Russia out of Ukraine. When Wrongo was a member of the NATO forces, the accepted strategy was that US and European troops on the ground were a “tripwire”. It was clear that the Soviet Union had vastly superior military assets amassed on Europe’s border. And Europe’s border was at that time, East Germany. Berlin was just 300 miles from Bonn, a day’s trip.
The counter to the Soviet’s military superiority was NATO’s potential use of tactical nuclear weapons. We could stop their ground forces reasonably effectively before they could get to Germany’s capital. The basic NATO position was to fight long enough with conventional forces to make the possibility of nuclear escalation plausible.
Today the situation is similar. Russia has vastly superior military assets amassed on Europe’s border, but the distances are greater: From Smolensk on Russia’s western border to Warsaw in Poland is about 500 miles, and it’s 1,075 miles from Smolensk to Bonn, Germany.
That breathing room explains Clinton’s flawed reasoning for NATO expansion. But, since the West has said that it will no longer use tactical nuclear weapons, it has limited options if it faces a limited invasion of say, Ukraine, a non-NATO member.
This leaves the US with trying to find a diplomatic solution, one which doesn’t look like appeasement, one that the many NATO members will also find acceptable. Having to compromise will mean finally admitting that we are part of a multipolar world.
Is Washington ready to go there yet? Very doubtful. Our path is fraught with danger as we careen from crisis to crisis. Something has to change or we’ll misplay a hand and be back where we were in 1939.
It’s time for NATO, Europe, and the US to wake up! It’s hard to see a sensible compromise that doesn’t look like appeasement, but it’s their job to find it for the rest of us.
To help them wake up, listen to John Mellencamp and Bruce Springsteen perform “Wasted Days”, from Mellencamp’s “Strictly a One-Eyed Jack” album, released this week, it’s one of the three songs featuring Springsteen:
Sample lyric:
How much sorrow is there left to climb
How many promises are worth a dime
Who on earth is worth our time?
These headlines could say: “Biden Fails to Fix All of the World’s Problems in a year.”
What’s driving much of this “presidency in peril” coverage is Biden’s approval ratings. Some results are truly discouraging, while CNN’s poll of polls, released Thursday, found that 41% of Americans approve of the way Joe Biden is handling his job while 54% disapprove.
Still, Biden and the Dems need a mid-course correction. On to cartoons.
Can diplomacy solve the crisis in Ukraine?
The Senate failed to pass voting rights. Republicans wouldn’t help:
Republicans don’t want to look back one year, but they certainly don’t mind looking back at the 1950s:
The administration is sending rapid tests via the post office. Have they heard about Amazon?
Plenty of news this week about Trump and January 6. The dogs are gathering:
Oregon City Bridge, OR with Willamette Falls in background – January 2022 photo by Sanman Photography
Gallup says that the Dems are losing the battle for hearts and minds. Their most recent poll shows a dramatic shift over the course of 2021, from a nine-percentage-point Democratic advantage in the first quarter to a five-point Republican edge in the fourth quarter. Here’s a chart showing the bad news:
More from Gallup:
“Both the nine-point Democratic advantage in the [2021] first quarter and the five-point Republican edge in the fourth quarter are among the largest Gallup has measured for each party in any quarter since it began regularly measuring party identification and leaning in 1991.”
Gallup points out that the GOP has held a five-point advantage in a total of only four quarters since 1991. The fourth quarter of 2021 was the first time Republicans held a five-point advantage since 1995, when they took control of the House of Representatives for the first time since the 1950s.
Republicans have only held a larger advantage one time, in the first quarter of 1991, after the U.S. victory in the Persian Gulf War led by then President George H.W. Bush.
We’ve known that the Democrats aren’t at the top of their political game for months. The current issue of The Economist reports that while Biden looked great in 2020 as an alternative to Trump, in 2021, with Trump virtually invisible, Biden managed to look less compelling:
“Americans find themselves being led through tumultuous times by their least charismatic and politically able president since George H.W. Bush.”
The Economist listened in on a focus group of 2020 Biden voters conducted by Conservative pollster, Sarah Longwell. There were eight panelists, all under 30, from Georgia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania:
“Asked to grade the president, the group…gave him four Cs, three D’s and an F. And it was not a hostile crowd. All the group’s members were Biden voters, and none regretted their vote. Indeed, if asked to support the president again in 2024, all said…they probably would…”
While a few things have been accomplished, much of the progressive agenda hasn’t. So half of the Democrats are mad at Biden for not accomplishing more. The focus group was young, and just one of them watched cable news; the rest got their facts from social media, where the president’s two recent good speeches barely register.
Ezra Klein points out that Biden learned from the weak Obama effort at stimulus after the Great Recession. He met the pandemic crisis with an overwhelming fiscal stimulus, supporting the passing of the $2.2 trillion CARES Act (passed during the Trump administration) and then adding the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan. Biden made it clear that he preferred the risks of a hot economy to mass joblessness.
From Klein: (emphasis by Wrongo)
“That they have largely succeeded feels like the best-kept secret in Washington. A year ago, forecasters expected unemployment to be nearly 6% in the fourth quarter of 2020. Instead, it fell to 3.9% in December….Wages are high, new businesses are forming at record rates, and poverty has fallen below its prepandemic levels.”
Since March 2020, Americans have saved at least $2 trillion more than expected. A JPMorgan Chase analysis found the median household’s checking account balance was 50% higher in July 2021 than before the pandemic.
But we now have inflation, supply chain issues and most importantly, we still have Covid. This may not be the presidency Biden wanted, but it’s the one he’s got. Biden has problems with the media. Crises sell, after all. But the reason Biden’s approval numbers are so underwater is that neither side thinks he is fighting for them.
Biden’s a career politician who survived by steering toward the middle of his own Party. That’s fine when you’re an incumbent Senator in the liberal Northeast, but not when you’re fighting a war of attrition against a Republican opposition that wants to destroy you and your Party.
Remember Biden’s talking point in his 2020 campaign was that this was a fight for the soul of America. He was right, but both Biden and the Party have drifted away from that and from designing programs that would rescue America’s soul.
If the Dems are to win in the 2022 mid-terms and the 2024 presidential election, they must start acting like they’re fighting for us. There’s no grey area in American politics. The entire Party must unite behind fighting the Republicans and Trump.
Democrats need to be on the offense – all day, every day.
How about taking a few minutes for a musical palate cleanser? Since we need Biden to find his way home to the Democratic Party, Let’s watch Rachael Price, lately of Lake Street Dive, along with the Live from Here Band with Chris Thile, performing in 2018 a cover of Blind Faith’s 1969 “Can’t Find My Way Home“:
Blind Faith was a Supergroup comprised of Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood, Ginger Baker, and Ric Grech. They released just one album. Winwood wrote this and sang lead, despite Clapton’s reputation.
A new Quinnipiac University Poll, conducted between January 7 – 10 of a nationwide sample of 1,313 adults shows that Americans are confused about which Party is protecting voting rights:
This is another example of poor messaging by Democrats. Republicans have been trying to suppress voting in many states, and the Republicans in Congress have prevented Democrats from passing legislation to protect the right to vote for all citizens. But only 45% say Democrats are protecting the right to vote and 43% say it’s the Republicans. That’s within the poll’s margin of error of 2.7%, meaning it’s a virtual tie.
There are only three cohorts with more than 50% saying that one Party is better. Women (52%) and Blacks (86%) say it’s the Democrats, while Whites (51%) say it’s the Republicans. It’s also interesting that 12% apparently have no opinion about which Party is better for voting rights. Whatever the reason why this poll is so close, it isn’t good for the country. On to cartoons.
Let’s vote our way out:
More GOP inflation:
Sen. Sinema is just not that into him
Are Sen. Manchin’s priorities misplaced?
Supremes reject federal government’s right to set rules for public safety:
(The mandate would have covered about 84.2 million Americans. OSHA estimated (before Omicron) that the rule would save 6,500 lives and prevent 250,000 hospitalizations over a six-month period.)
Sea Smoke, Willard Beach, Portland, ME – January 2022 photo by Rick Berk Photography
Tom Friedman had a column in the NYT proposing that in 2024, Biden should drop Harris and run instead with Liz Cheney. When Wrongo read that, he poured a big glass of Bushmills 21 single malt.
The thrust of this, and other musings about 2024, is that Biden is a weak candidate who is further dragged down by Harris. That may be true. But assuming Biden is up against Trump again, who are the additional voters who will vote Democrat because of Cheney, and who otherwise would not do so?
We’ve learned in the past weeks that Biden can give good (and tough) speeches, as he did in calling out Trump in the Capitol Rotunda on the anniversary of Jan. 6. And in Atlanta on Tuesday for voting rights, where he said:
“I ask every elected official in America: How do you want to be remembered? Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?”
Those words set a great example for how Democrats need to message in order to win.
It’s a good message, but what happens next on voting rights is crucial: Democrats can stick with Senate Majority Leader Schumer’s plan and lose on a vote to consider suspending the filibuster rules to pass voting rights. Everybody knows that Schumer’s plan will produce nothing meaningful. Can they instead find a compromise with Republicans (and Manchin and Sinema) to get some form of a voting bill passed? Wrongo favors getting something done, even if the Party’s left wing isn’t happy with the outcome.
Biden and the Democrats also need to message better on several other dangerous political issues.
First,schools are going to be a big problem for Democrats in the mid-terms and beyond. Politico has an article: “How School Closures Made Me Question My Progressive Politics” where the author says her son’s school was closed when Trump was President. It’s open now under Biden, but she’s still mad at the Dems.
Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot fought with the Chicago teacher’s union about keeping schools open. This exposed divisions between traditional Democratic constituencies, the union, and a majority-Black populace. Keeping schools open has become a nationalized issue. As the NYT noted, it’s a problem for Democrats everywhere:
“Because they have close ties to the unions, Democrats are concerned that additional closures like those in Chicago could lead to a possible replay of the party’s recent loss in Virginia’s governor race.”
The Democrats messaging on schools should echo what CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said: “Schools should be the first places to open and the last places to close.” Biden also needs to side with parents and students. If reopening schools is a top priority, testing needs to be available and free to schools. And he needs to call out the teachers unions: “No one should be keeping schoolhouse doors closed, especially not our friends in the unions.”
Second, crime is also going to be an issue in Biden’s re-election campaign as well as for the Democrats in the mid-terms. We all know that the call to “defund the police” was a political disaster. Democrats need to change the conversation, particularly since they didn’t deliver on a long-promised bipartisan police reform bill last fall.
Dems need to be completely clear that they oppose defunding the police. Biden can lead by saying: “Somefolks think that we shouldn’t put criminals in jail or they downplay the dangers of violent crime. They are wrong. We have to protect our families and our neighborhoods.”
The messaging should include: “Continuing the fight for social justice shouldn’t come at the cost of public safety.” Dems could also point to the hypocrisy of Republicans who claim to “Back the Blue,” but then turned a blind eye to the attacks on Capitol police officers on January 6.
Third, immigration isn’t going away as an issue. The Dems should be saying that America benefits from the presence of immigrants. But border security is important, along with an enforceable system that decides fairly who can enter the country, and who should stay.
This will be a huge 2022 talking point for Republicans. They will say it’s proof that Democrats want immigration solely to increase the number of Democratic voters. Biden and Dem mid-term candidates should be saying: “Only American citizens should be allowed to vote.”
It isn’t the media’s job to fight the Dems’ partisan battles, despite Dems wishing that were so. Democrats need to ramp up their messaging game. The Democratic Party doesn’t have a true coordinated effort to counter the right-wing disinformation ecosystem, and are suffering because of that.
“If the Democratic party had relentless, full-time people working as a team to fight the right-wing disinformation war, it would be more effective than all the traditional media outlets combined.”
Democrats have to get better at politics if they expect to hold the House and Senate in 2022.
Oregon City Bridge, OR with Willamette Falls in background – January 2022 photo by 
