The last time a Presidential election occurred during the kind of crisis currently facing the country was 1932. I’m not saying it was as bad now as it was back then. In 1932, we had no banking system, no industrial output, millions of dispossessed people moving around from place to place. But if you look at the 1932 election versus what happened this year, it’s hard not to see some parallels between the two events.
First and foremost, the incumbent President in 1932, Herbert Hoover, never really admitted that the situation was all that bad. The day after the stock market crashed, Hoover went on the radio and said, “The fundamental business of the country is on a sound and prosperous basis.” He retained this positive attitude throughout the campaign, minimized the degree to which government should intervene in economic affairs, and lost the 1932 election by 472 electoral votes to 59 EV’s.
Trump only lost this year’s election by 74 EV’s and 4.37% of the popular vote. But his approach to the Pandemic is remarkably similar to how Hoover responded to the Great Depression – downplaying the severity of the crisis, pushing this phony, private-enterprise solution known as ‘Warp Speed,’ avoiding any discussion about public health measures that would have minimized the spread of Covid-19.
I notice that every time Joe introduces a new member of the Cabinet or someone who will play a high-level role, the nominee always ties his/her agenda to a plan or program designed to mitigate the pandemic’s effects. Joe himself has promised to re-open the schools and get the vaccine into at least 100 million distribution centers in his first 100 days.
Franklin Roosevelt was the first President to consciously promote a ‘hundred-day’ program after taking the oath. Joe is basically doing the same thing. He’s also promised to undo all those phony executive orders issued by Trump in his first hundred days.
So, Joe goes down to Georgia and does his thing. And the best the alt-right can come up with is another round of kvetching about Joe’s son. It turns out, by the way, that Jared Kushner is also under investigation but that’s okay, he’s just a son-in-law, not a son.
After Barack gave that ass-kicking speech at the 2004 Convention, he started planning a Presidential campaign for 2008. The first thing he and Axelrod did was take a few bucks from Penny Pritzker and do a survey of which publications were most frequently read by Americans in order to get their news. Don’t forget that 2008 was pre-social media days.
It turned out that the most popular way Americans learned about the world was by reading the tabloids like The National Enquirer while they stood on the supermarket line. I’m afraid the national media on both sides of the political divide has increasingly become no different than somewhat classier versions of those rags.
To show you how badly asinine political reportage has become, I keep seeing national surveys which find that a ‘majority’ of Republican voters believe that the election was a ‘fraud.’ The GOP-minded media proclaims these results to be true, the alt-left media (Politico, Guardian) state that such polls show a “dramatic decline in Republican voters’ faith in the system.”
To its credit, The (failing) New York Times tried to sort these polls out to determine whether the folks who believe the election was rigged really believe such an idea or are just pissed off because their guy lost. On balance, these polls seem to indicate a little of both, but that’s the usual way that the NYT reports everything – gotta hear from both sides. What they should do is go back and run the same survey in 6 months when Trump will be gone and forgotten, and the GOP has to start ramping up their political narratives for 2022.
That’s right folks. We’re only 6 months away from the early beginnings of the next election cycle which, thanks God, will give all the political tabloids their next chance to promote themselves. God Bless the U.S. House of Representatives and the fact that every House member has to stand for election every two years.