Political Assassinations and Cynicism

This past week, there was one attempted political assassination, and one successful political assassination. 

Yeah, in Biden's case, he made his own decision, as long as it was the decision the power brokers and big party donors wanted him to make. What we witnessed was the transparent exercise of political power by the people who actually hold it. We saw in plain view how the mechanisms of decisions  actually work in Washington, the gears of the political class turning. They said they were reading the polls. I'd argue, as I have before, that polls at this stage of the game mean close to zero, and all the numbers did was give a patina of legitimacy to a process that was already underway. The last 538 analysis I saw - a comprehensive survey of all the most recent polling and other important variables thrown in for good measure -  mid-last week showed Biden beating trump 54 times out of a hundred. Biden's downslide was accelerated by the spineless Democrats abandoning him, and so it became a self-fulfilling prophecy for him to leave. That's my general read on what we witnessed. Politics is a vicious game, and driven by big money donors and party power brokers, with the lowly voters along for the ride.      

But what irks me the most is that the reason the Democrats gave for the hit job was that they needed a candidate who can defeat trump, which is absurd for two reasons. First, it's impossible to determine that with any certainty. Second, it's aiming at the wrong target. For a political party every election should be about choosing the best person to be President, not the best person to beat the other guy. The voters understand this, but the parties still apparently don't. They think that every election is a binary choice, one candidate or the other. Putting aside that there are sometimes 3rd party candidates who play highly disruptive, even decisive, roles in that equation. The proposition is fundamentally untrue. The choice is always at the very least between one candidate, another candidate, and the couch, and in most elections the couch wins by a landslide. Voters hate the choice they are being offered so they opt out. I've been around for elections with some very dreary candidates, Walter Mondale, Mike Dukakis, Bush father and son all come to mind. The current election was set up as perhaps the worst choice ever, which is what trump was counting on. He knew he had a base of supporters who would walk over burning coals to cast a vote for him - or attend all his rallies, which might be worse. Biden didn't have that kind of support. That's now changed potentially. The beauty of what has just happened is that by having the tables turned on them, the Republicans have now wasted untold millions of dollars and years branding trump's presumptive opponent the 'Biden Crime Family', playing political games for naught. Trump was likely only a truly viable candidate as long as the cynicism and disinterest of the electorate was maximized by a match-up that was the same as 2020. Now it's trump who is the old, low-energy, fumbling, bumbling candidate with a cognitive (and moral) impairment. If the Democrats fail to take advantage of this situation by beating each other up in a nomination contest it will be the worst case of political malpractice in American history.

I'll make a final obvious but perhaps most important observation. Biden did something that would have been unimaginable for trump. He put the interest of his party and his country first. Biden has done that his whole life. Trump has done the exact opposite every day of his. Each in his own way is an exemplar of his party. This election surely highlights in stark contrast the essence of what animates the two parties; the Democrats pursue policies that benefit the least advantaged and therefore the greatest good of society. The Republicans operate under the premise that the greatest good of society is to maximize individual self-interest. That this election is any kind of contest remains to me sort of mind-boggling, but I guess it does illustrate the push and pull of American society.  

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PS. Yesterday at my cottage on Lake Champlain. Something rarely seen (in fact I've only seen it once before in 30 years). A bald eagle perched on the tree outside my house. It landed at about noon, just before Biden announced that he was no longer seeking reelection, and stayed until around 3:30 PM.