Editorials

"America's present need is not heroics but healing; not nostrums but normalcy; not revolution but restoration; not agitation but adjustment; not surgery but serenity; not the dramatic but the dispassionate; not experiment but equipoise; not submergence in internationality but sustainment in triumphant nationality."

Who’s talking here? ..It could be Joe Biden, couldn’t it, except perhaps for the last phrase, and even that might be read as a newly-minted condemnation of NAFTA. The mood this sentence portrays goes a long way to explain why the majority of voters on Super Tuesday went for Biden and not Bernie.

The vote could be a tribute to the era of No-Drama-Obama, a promise by Go-Slow-Joe that things will calm down once again if he’s elected president.

The technical term for a guy like Biden, at least now that he’s pushing 80, might be nebbish, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing in the eyes of weary voters.

Biden is dull, that’s for sure, and that’s his main charm. People seem sick and tired of the turmoil which accompanies the current administration, so Biden represents a return to normalcy, a time, even before Obama, when some paternal Old White Guy or other had things under control.

What Democratic voters are exhibiting is a kind of battle fatigue. Does the phrase “return to normalcy” sound familiar? It’s the Republican slogan for the election of ’20—that is to say, of 1920, when Warren G. Harding was elected on a promise to help the nation recover from the stress of the World War. 

Harding won in a landslide with more than 60% of the vote, but turned out to be one of the country’s worst presidents. Among other things, he presided over Teapot Dome before dying in his third year in office, to be succeeded by Calvin Coolidge, another failure. 

When I was a small child I had a book about the Teapot Dome scandal which I barely remember. I do know that one page showed a cartoon dinosaur (code for Sinclair Oil) under a lift-up flap which pictured the dome of the U.S. Capitol, representing how some in the Harding administration illegally gifted favored oil companies with lucrative contracts. 

Corruption in Washington: It’s an old story. 

One losing candidate in the 1920 election was a Socialist, Eugene Debs. He campaigned from jail and got about one million votes, but he lost. 

Last week’s electorate, a century later, did not appear to be looking for anyone’s revolution, any more than the 1920 voters were. They don’t seem to want any excitement: no socialists or women need apply. 

There are a few more primaries ahead, but only one candidate is still standing in Biden’s way, and he’s an unapologetic socialist who has never offered normalcy. Voters aren’t looking for revolution, no matter how often Bernie Sanders tells them they should be. 

Elizabeth Warren is a different case. She suffered from two handicaps. 

First, there’s the “it’s not me” syndrome. That would be the legions of “progressives” who just don’t believe that the country is ready for a woman president. 

People are so sick of Trump they’re trying to second guess their fellow voters, often ineptly. Even fellow women. 

An academic public intellectual of my acquaintance, a well-known feminist, told me after the 20bb16 election disaster that she’d never again vote for a female candidate. She thought that the results proved that there weren’t enough votes from women to elect one of their own, and she believed most men would never vote for a woman. 

In other words, 

“ I would vote for a women, but they won’t.”  

Warren’s other problem is that she’s just too damn smart for some women and many men. Heard from a middle-aged woman who should know better: “She sounds too much like a schoolteacher.” 

And? What’s wrong with that? 

For most people their earliest and most indelible impression of a powerful authority figure was their fourth grade teacher. She (usually) was someone trying to rein in their incipient autonomy. 

Fourth grade is notoriously hard to teach for that reason, and many don’t do it well. When some adult objects to how Warren sounds, they’re channeling their inner fourth grader. 

“She can’t tell me what to do!” 

There’s a technical term for what some don’t like about Warren. 

She’s uppity. 

That label is drawn from the experience of her African-American brothers and sisters, who have learned the hard way that as an outsider you have to be twice as good as your privileged competitors, but you mustn’t let them know that you know you are. Otherwise they’ll call you uppity. 

Anyone who doubts that Elizabeth Warren is exponentially more qualified that any one of the three old guys who are still in the race, or for that matter than all three put together, should watch Rachel Maddow’s long interview with her on Thursday. 

If only she were in charge of the U.S. response to the Corona virus, we wouldn’t be in such a dreadful mess now. Listen to this interview to see how she’d handle it: 

 

What Warren didn’t promise was “a return to normalcy”. Her analysis of what’s wrong with this country is every bit as caustic as that of Bernie Sanders, but her remedies stop short of a socialist revolution. She’s pragmatic enough to realize that even though we don’t have some sort of ideal single-payer health insurance system at the moment, crisis intervention is needed now with whatever tools are at hand. Bernie, on the other hand, isn’t offering any plan. 

The difference between Warren and Sanders is something the mainstream media (or as I prefer to call them, the nattering newsies) just can’t grasp. 

This NYT article is a prime example of how they’ve consistently gotten things wrong: Why Warren Supporters Aren’t a Lock to Get Behind Sanders 

Quote: “There is certainly significant overlap between the core support of Mr. Sanders and Ms. Warren, the party’s two leading liberals.” 

Oy veh! Generations of heated discussions in the cafeteria of City College of New York, going all the way back to the 30s, come to naught! 

If Bernie’s anything, he is NOT one of the Democratic Party’s “leading liberals.” 

He’s part of the historically vocal contingent which has always used “liberal” as a pejorative, contrasting it with the much more Politically Correct “progressive”. He’s a veteran, for heaven’s sake, of YPSL and SDP, if perchance you remember those relics of bygone tendencies. 

Warren, on the other hand, used to be a Republican. 

Anyone who doesn’t know that Mr. Sanders and Ms. Warren are not joined at the hip as the party’s “two leading liberals” shouldn’t be writing about politics in the New York Times (or anywhere else). 

A major reason we’re plagued with low-information voters in every election, including those youngsters who didn’t turn out as predicted to put Bernie over the top, is the poorly educated journalists who are supplying information today without remembering yesterday. 

If I were queen, I would ban the use of many fuzzy words which are mucking up the discourse: progressive, liberal, neo-liberal, moderate, conservative, neo-con, socialist, leftist…and many more. It would clear the air for candidates to provide a real, fact-based discussion of exactly how we got here and where we might go in the future, for those voters who want a return to some semblance of the normalcy which none of those labels exactly captures. 

I even have a campaign slogan for Joe to use: Be Bored By Biden. Might work. 

 

 

.