Rx for success: How to win now and in 2022
The depth and breadth of the damage Donald Trump and his enablers have wrought on the federal government is impossible to convey in a simple sentence. Those with experience, expertise, and institutional memory have been driven out in droves, leaving rows of empty cubicles (and a few Trumpist moles) in every major department and agency.
Trump’s goal is not hard to understand. The wildly smart Ezra Klein, writing in his first major piece after his move to the NYTimes, quotes two political scientists as saying that populism feeds not just on socioeconomic discontent, but on claims of ineffective government as well. If government is broken, that invites an autocrat to take control. Thus, the infamous Trump line, “Only I can fix it!”
Joe Biden is inheriting the full blast of four years of nihilism and deliberately bad government. COVID-19 is on a rampage. The economy is a total mess for most. China has capitalized on the mischief Putin has sown, elevating its stature in the world while America’s alliances are left tattered. Global warming has accelerated at a pace that was completely unimagined; while at home, racists and white supremacists have been supported and emboldened.
All of this happening at a time when the Democratic majorities in both houses are hanging by a thread. Worse, the President’s party usually -to use an Obama term- “takes a shellacking” in mid-term elections, a phenomenon well established by political scientists.
I may well be blinded by my fondness for Biden, but I think he’s got this pretty well in hand. But just in case he’s looking for advice, here’s my Rx for Success:
President Joe Biden
(Credit: Doug Mills/NYTimes)
Don’t underestimate the appeal of normalcy. After four years of chaos, mayhem, lies and bluster, it’s really nice to see a president who not only has a clear grasp of policy, but can express it in actual sentences in English that use more than 50 vocabulary words. You just have to believe that except for the craziest of Trumpers, people will come to value that more and more.
Fix the poor battered government. That means filling the empty seats with people who actually know what they’re doing, restoring decision making based on truth and science versus whim and wild theories, and use that expertise to solve the immediate problems of the day, which is to say, make that vaccine available sooner than anyone thought possible. Want to see how well this works? Look at what the new administration has already done for Dr. Anthony Fauci!
Don’t forget to boast. President Obama saved the country from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. One of the tools he used was new research that showed people would spend more stimulus money sooner if they didn’t notice that they had received it. In other words, you can take the money you received in a separate check and save it for a rainy day; but, if a change in tax rates makes your paycheck a little larger, you’ll spend that money now. The extra spending that resulted from this strategy may have saved the economy, but it killed Obama in the midterm elections because he didn’t get credit for it. Joe Biden has learned that lesson, and he’ll be sure we know the benefits of his actions.
Stare down the Republicans. To be successful and to help our tattered nation, we need to divide and conquer the Republicans. We need to egg on the Trumpists to be as batshit crazy as only they can. Voters can then choose whether they really want to return to that or not. Meanwhile, court the Establishment Republicans, make deals with them when you can, but as Edward-Isaac Dovere suggests in The Atlantic, make them vote early and often to demonstrate and document when they are standing in the way of measures the voters want to see enacted.
Get impeachment right. No one has a stomach for impeachment, but the actions taken by Donald Trump are simply too egregious to ignore. So make this trial vivid using lots of video clips that can make it to the evening news, make it compelling, make it simple, and for the love of God, make it end fast. We don’t have to win a conviction, but we do have to walk away feeling that we made a case that reasonable people will accept.
My hope is that if President Biden and Vice President Harris take these five prescriptions faithfully for the next two years, 2022 may have some happy surprises in store for us. After all, we sure deserve some happy surprises!
If you liked this, please follow me here or subscribe to the NKC Occasional Update here.