Why Do So Many Republicans Back Biden: Aside From Trumpophobia, There's The Shared Value: Austerity

All those Republicans backing Biden... they should close out the campaign with a song and dance routine about how much they love Austerity. After all, the whole political class can unite around that-- both parties-- minus a handful of outliers like the Squad and some of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Biden himself is an Austerity Democrat-- always has been, always will be. In fact, when you look at the Democrats Schumer has handpicked as his team to go up against the Republican austeritarians in November, every single one of them is an Austerity kind of guy (or gal):

• Mark Kelly (AZ)
• Al Gross (AK)
• Hickenlooper (CO)
• Jon Ossoff (GA)
• Theresa Greenfield (IA)
• Barbara Bollier (KS)
• Amy McGrath (KY)
• Sara Gideon (ME)
• Steve Bullock (MT)
• Cal Cunningham (NC)
• Jamie Harrison (SC)
• MJ Heger (TX)

The two anti-Austerity Senate candidates, Marquita Bradshaw in Tennessee and Paula Jean Swearengin in West Virginia are not being supported by Schumer or the DSCC, You can contribute to both or either of their campaigns here.) As in all things Democratic Party-wise, they aren't as bad as the Republicans. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported that "some Republicans are hoping to vote on a cheaper, pared-down version of the aid bill they unveiled last month, although some GOP aides said they saw early signs that it wouldn’t be able to muster a Senate majority. The new proposal, referred to as the skinny bill, is expected to cost about half of the earlier $1 trillion legislation, in an effort to appease GOP senators worried about the price tag of the federal government’s efforts in response to the coronavirus pandemic." Skinny bill? It's an Austerity bill... in the middle of a pandemic and a recession that will likely turn into a Depression.

Here's how the scam works: Republican austeritarians run up gigantic deficits while faking reluctance or giving in to pressure. Then, the country up shit's creek, a Democrat is elected and Democratic austeritarians get busy bringing down the wasteful and corrupt deficit the GOP created. Repeat ad nauseum. This little dance will suit Biden just fine.

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal quoted one of his top manservants, Ted Kaufman: "When we get in, the pantry is going to be bare. When you see what Trump’s done to the deficit… forget about Covid-19, all the deficits that he built with the incredible tax cuts. So we’re going to be limited." Yes, Trump did a terrible job. That's why a nothing like Biden is going to win. But the pantry bare? What the hell is this idiot talking about. The pantry in his home could be bare-- although that seems unlikely-- but the federal government doesn't have a "pantry" to go bare.

Kaufman's statement caused a stir among progressives who've somehow persuaded themselves Biden's spots have miraculously changed color since they announced their support of him. That there is no room for any big federal projects was always built into the Biden cake; Kaufman just spilled the beans to people who don't want to hear it out loud. As I've tried explaining again and again-- Biden will win, the Democrats will take the Senate (with Schumer's Republican-lite menagerie) and Pelosi's meaningless and hopelessly disabled majority in the House will grow. Nothing will be accomplished and Democrats' hopes will be dashed-- like they were in 2010 after 2 years of Obama-- and the Republicans will defeat dozens of worthless Democrats in Congress, while Democratic voters sit on their hands. Get used to it. It's part of having chosen Joe Biden.

Adam Christensen just won his primary in the bid to become the Rep from FL-03 in the Gainesville area. "Would someone please explain to me why it is that whenever billionaires and hedge funds or banks want money we just handed out to them without thinking about the consequences," he asked yesterday. "But anytime that normal people need the basics we the 'pantry is empty'. This Fake Austerity, Corporate Welfare mindset is what has destroyed the Middle Class and Rural America. The American people are done being lied to. They are done being told that if they invest in the biggest companies in the world and bail them out that they will someday get that money back. It’s time we actually invest in people and stop letting those who have stolen our money for 40 years tell us “what is best for America."

Eric Levitz explained how this all works in his New York Magazine column, Biden Has Nothing To Fear But Fear Of Deficits Itself. Unemployment is still a catastrophe, as is the bankruptcy rate in mid-sized and small companies-- and "thanks to the GOP’s obstruction of COVID-19 relief, tens of millions of Americans just saw their monthly incomes slashed by $2,400, while cities and states throughout the country are preparing for mass firings of public workers. The macroeconomic consequences of these developments have yet to fully register. As is, more than 28 million Americans are at high risk of eviction before year’s end, according to a report released by the Aspen Institute earlier this month." So now is a time to pull the austerity rabbit out of the hat? Levitz is as sure of what a bad idea that is as are economist Stephanie Kelton and anyone in Congress who doesn't have their heads up their asses. "At present, the U.S. economy is on a neo-feudal trajectory," he wrote. "Almost all recessions hit the poor harder than the rich. But the COVID-19 crisis has been exceptional in its inequity. The sectors most vulnerable to a pandemic-induced collapse in demand-- such as restaurants and hotels-- are also among those most heavily staffed by low-income workers."

In this context, restoring full employment (and some semblance of shared prosperity) will require a combination of massive fiscal stimulus and progressive redistribution. Biden has given some indications that he understands this. Before the pandemic, the Democratic nominee pledged to spend $1.7 trillion over a decade on a green jobs program; last month, he vowed to spend $2 trillion over four years on climate stimulus. The overall price tag on his economic program is roughly $3.5 trillion according to Bloomberg. And if Congress fails to pass another round of COVID-19 stimulus before next year, that figure would ostensibly be higher (presumably, Biden agrees with House Democrats that the federal government should provide states and cities with nearly $1 trillion in fiscal aid). Encouragingly, Biden’s apparent openness to a robust stimulus program is shared by some self-styled fiscal hawks in Nancy Pelosi’s caucus. In July, the chair of the centrist New Democrat Coalition, Derek Kilmer, told reporters that “getting bogged down in trying to identify offsets is not appropriate in an emergency.” The bulk of Kilmer’s moderate allies voted for the $3.4 trillion Heroes Act in May of this year.

...In 2009, a unified Democratic government declined to provide the economy with the level of stimulus necessary for spurring a rapid recovery in deference to deficit-phobia; specifically, the White House asked for less spending than its own economists believed to be warranted on the merits because it felt that a $1 trillion bill would be politically toxic. As a result, the post-2008 recovery was the slowest and weakest in modern U.S. history. That sluggish rebound had immense human costs as America’s most vulnerable workers-- those with limited education, disabilities, or criminal records-- were effectively locked out of the labor market for a decade. But the toll of inadequate stimulus was also macroeconomic: Since World War II, every time the U.S. economy entered a downturn, it eventually caught back up with its pre-recession growth trajectory-- until 2009. By failing to rapidly re-match workers with jobs, policymakers durably reduced our economy’s productive capacity as discouraged Americans permanently left the labor force and capital fell out of use.

Of course, as we know now, the Democrats’ decision to prioritize national debt minimization above full employment did not actually curb the growth of the national debt. To the contrary, it simply gave Donald Trump and the Republican Party more fiscal space to fill with tax cuts and Pentagon budget increases.

Critically, this historic spending spree has not triggered any of the adverse economic consequences that deficit hawks would have predicted. As the federal deficit soared, inflation and interest rates remained extraordinarily low. America has little trouble finding buyers for its debt or maintaining price stability. And by supplying global investors with the safe assets they demand-- in the form of U.S. debt securities-- America’s fiscal profligacy has arguably helped stabilize the global financial system.

Alas, Kaufman is nevertheless citing Trump’s profligacy as a reason why the party must once again condemn America’s most vulnerable to years of poverty and involuntary unemployment. Separately, the fact that Kaufman emphasizes the Trump tax cuts as a constraint on fiscal space raises questions about the sincerity of Biden’s commitment to repealing the bulk of those tax cuts.

A charitable reader might conclude that Kaufman merely takes a pessimistic view of the politics of deficits and taxation. Which is to say: He believes that Biden will lack the Senate votes to repeal the Trump tax cuts and enact green stimulus. But the metaphor Kaufman deploys, a bare cupboard, suggests that he believes there is an objective constraint on the government’s spending power, not a political one.

And this interpretation is buttressed by the fact that Biden himself has voiced nearly identical sentiments... [and is a] "deficit hawk at heart."

An optimist won’t have that much trouble dismissing these grim portents. After all, most of the moderates in Nancy Pelosi’s caucus voted in May to supply Donald Trump with $3.4 trillion in election-year stimulus (after already supplying with the $2 trillion CARES Act relief package). Is the party really going to be less willing to stimulate the economy during a Democratic president’s honeymoon than it was amid a Republican president’s reelection campaign?

On the other hand, if Democrats do eke out a Senate majority, Chuck Schumer will need the support of some of the most conservative lawmakers in the party to pass legislation. If the Biden administration is ambivalent about its own fiscal agenda, it’s hard to see how it will allay the doubts of Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, and their ilk. And if Biden’s promised green stimulus ends up amounting to nothing more than a campaign-website decoration, then America will “build back worse” for the second time this century.

Manchin and Sinema? Wait 'til we start having to deal with senators like Hickenlooper, Cunningham, Greenfield and Kelly! Oh... and the GOP-lite Biden administration. THIS Biden, suckers!!

UPDATE: Nate McMurray-- "Forget This Austerity Nonsense"

Nate is taking on western New York Trump enabler and hereditary multimillionaires Chris Jacobs. This morning, Nate told me that in these vastly unprecedented times, "we have seen over and over Democrats obliterate their agendas by stumbling into GOP minefields of talking points and false choices. Forget this austerity nonsense. It doesn't make economic sense. Not just how we spend, but also how we tax, are indicative of the country's priorities and values. In Washington I will fight tooth and nail to hold the President to an aggressive plan of action on the COVID-19 pandemic, the healthcare crisis, reducing income and wealth inequality, tackling climate change, and strengthening Social Security and Medicare instead of putting them on the chopping block. I'm often asked what the greatest issue facing my district and the country is. It has become clearer and clearer: there are too few with too much economic and political power, and too many with too little. Instead of pontificating about austerity to fix Trump's years of horror, it's time to put the working class first and stop making them subsidize the rich. Fair taxation, combined with national spending that truly reflects the magnitude of the threats we face and the values we share as compassionate Americans, is our path forward. Ted Kaufman should stop worrying about 'empty pantries' in Washington, and worry more about the millions of empty pantries in the homes of struggling, working-class Americans that need a President and Congress ready to act boldly and decisively."


 

What Makes A Voter Decide To Support One Candidate Over Another-- If The Candidate Backs Medicare-For-ALL Or If The Candidate Is Listed First On The Ballot?

Earlier today, we looked at a New York Magazine, piece by Eric Levitz, Voters Are Turning Against Trump In Places Hit Hard By COVID-19 as an introduction to a new study by political scientists Lynn Vavreck, Christopher Warshaw and Ryan Baxter-King who looked into the political consequences of COVID-19 fatalities for Trump and other Republican candidates. But there was more to Levitz's report than the study. He also talked about the failures of democracy and without using the f-word, the rise-- electorally-- of populist fascism.

"In recent years," he wrote, "the rise of anti-intellectual, plutocratic 'populism' throughout the Western world has tested progressives’ faith in actually existing democracy. When a pack of wellborn drunkards complicit in ruinous austerity wins the hearts and minds of working-class Britons-- by mendaciously championing a policy that will make them poorer-- it can be hard to summon warm feelings for popular sovereignty. And when the GOP can prioritize tax cuts for the rich at a time of record-high corporate profits, opioid overdoses, and income inequality-- and maintain its support among nonaffluent voters-- a liberal might be forgiven for wondering if rational self-government isn’t another God that failed." ... In Democracy for Realists, the political scientists Larry Bartels and Christopher Achen argue that voters largely cast their ballots on the basis of their acquired social identities, not informed policy preferences (of which most have few). The authors maintain, however, that democracy functions as a constraint on misrule, as voters tend to punish incumbents for major losses suffered on their watch." Ergo: survivors of the pandemic even in red areas, turning against Trump and the Republican Party that enabled him.





The Democrats count on "waves" like the anti-Trump/anti-Republican wave of 2018 and what looks like an even bigger one this year. Why? Because their tent is so big that they can no longer run on a shared policy vision. Whatever was left of a national Democratic Party that kind organize credibly around the interests of the working class was killed off by Bill Clinton's absolute and unflinching embrace of neoliberalism and corporatism. Obama did little to turn that around and Biden will be far worse than Clinton on his worst day. Sooooo... all we really have left of a national party on the left is a coalition of identity politics.

I know-- we've played this before, but let me urge you to listen to Biden's words about how he sees human nature. "Lobbyists aren't bad people"-- his whole family are a bunch of lobbyists, so he may be just a bit prejudiced. "People who accept money from them aren't bad people-- he does and has for decades and decades so, again... a bit prejudiced. "It's human nature." It's a defense of bribery and corruption. Yeah, yeah... I know, Trump is worse... the classic greater of two evils.





Thank God I don't live in a swing state and don't have to wrestle with the idea of holding my nose and voting for Biden, the lesser evil. I used to say that Biden is so horrible that even if I lived in the most swingy state-- say Florida-- I would never lower myself to vote for the vomit in front of me just because there is also a pile of stinking diarrhea also in front of me. Now I'm less certain about that, although there is no way to ever know what I would actually do if I had to face that conundrum. Medias Touch has no hesitate: The rule of law or... Trump:





I read some academic papers that I want to share about what motives people to vote for one candidate or another. Although I feel that Bartels and Achen are correct that many people decide who to vote for irrespective of policy agendas. This paper, Why People Vote makes the point that "Rather than voting based on political ideologies, political parties, or candidates, sometimes voters cast votes based on specific policy preferences. In 'issue voting,' voters cast their vote based primarily on specific political issues. In the context of an election, issues include 'any questions of public policy which have been or are a matter of controversy and are sources of disagreement between political parties.' According to the theory of issue voting, voters vote based on policy preferences; they compare the candidates’ respective principles against their own in order to decide who to vote for."

In other words, is one candidate supporting Medicare-for-All and the Green New Deal and the other candidate opposing both or not very interested in either? That is usually enough for most Blue America members, but Blue America members aren't like most voters. The paper goes on:

A voter does not need to have an in-depth understanding of every issue or know how a candidate stands on every issue, rather a voter should have a sense of which candidate he or she agrees with the most. Voters use many different tactics to rationalize their view on a particular issue. Some people look at what has happened in the past and predict how they think a particular issue will affect them in the future.

Issue voting is often contrasted with party voting. A 2010 University of California, Davis study found that voters switch between issue voting and party voting depending on how much information is available to them about a given candidate. Low-information elections, such as those for congressional candidates, would thus be determined by party voting, whereas presidential elections, which tend to give voters much more information about each candidate, have the potential to be issue-driven.

A voter’s understanding of parties’ principles is strengthened and developed over time as a person gains experience with more political events. In order for an issue to create the foundation for party choice, a voter must first be concerned about a particular issue and have some knowledge about that issue.

In order for a person to be an issue voter, they must be able to recognize that there is more than one opinion about a particular issue, have formed a solid opinion about it, and be able to connect their opinion to a specific political party. According to some studies, only 40 to 60 percent of the informed population even perceives party differences, and can thus partake in party voting. This would suggest that it is quite common for individuals to develop opinions of issues without the aid of a political party.

Here's an outline of the author's assertion of why people do vote:

Socioeconomic Factors

• Wealthier people are more likely to vote, as they generally possess the resources and time to be active in politics.
• Of all the socioeconomic factors impacting voter turnout, education has the greatest impact. The more educated a person is, the more likely they are to vote, as they have a better understanding of how the system works, how to influence the system, and why participation is important.
• A person is more or less likely to vote depending on their occupation. Managerial or professional workers are more likely to vote, and the unemployed are the least likely group to vote.

Gender, Age, Religion, Race and Ethnicity

• Traditionally people ages 30 to 65 are most likely to vote, but recently young people have been coming out to the polls more frequently, in part due to mobilization via social media.
• Since the 1980s, women have voted as much or more than men, removing the idea that there is a gender gap in certain types of political participation like voting.
• Different ethnic groups also have unique voting trends. African-American voters vote as much as other voters of the same socioeconomic status, and Asian voters have lower voter turnout rates. Latinos tend to vote less than other groups, but their vote has been rising in importance.
• People may vote due to religious convictions or socially conservative viewpoints, such as those voters who identify with the Christian right. Voters identifying with the Christian right have high turnout rates and vote frequently.

Party Identification

• Since the 1960's more people have chosen to be independents rather than identify with either Republicans or Democrats, which means that less and less people vote based on their identification with a specific party.
• Some argue that a person’s party identity is a relatively fixed social identity, formed by personal experiences, family beliefs, or social environment. Others claim that party identity is flexible, and that people change their party identity according to their experiences and rational choice.
• Party identification is not just an individual identity; it can also be important for groups. Social, economic, racial, and other similar groups can become aligned to certain parties, and then vote according to that party identification.
• When people identify very strongly with one party, they tend to vote for that party consistently. This can lead to straight-ticket voting.

Political Ideology

• Voters typically agree with one of the main political ideologies ( liberalism, conservatism or moderates) and they vote according to the beliefs of that particular ideology.
• Libertarians are less organized and well-known than conservatives, liberals or moderates, but are a significant minority ideology. They believe in social liberties, but conservative economic policies.
• Moderates fall somewhere in between liberalism and conservatism on the spectrum of political ideologies.
Approximately 35% of Americans identified as moderates in 2010, and these voters tend to vote either Republican, Democrat, or neither.
• Liberals believe in progressive social policies and more government provision of positive rights, such as healthcare or education. Liberals tend to vote Democrat, and in 2010, roughly 25% of Americans identified as liberals.
• Conservatives prefer to maintain the status quo and believe in socially conservative policies, as well as limited government intervention in the economy. This is a prominent ideology in US politics, as roughly 40% of Americans self-identify as conservatives.

The Candidates

• While party loyalty, political ideologies, and specific policy issues are important to voters, candidates ‘ personal popularity may also be a crucial factor for voters.
• In recent years, more and more voters are identifying as independents. This partisan dealignment means that more and more people do not base their votes on party identification, and may be more likely to vote based on short-term criteria like the likeability of a specific candidate.
• Campaigns attempt to create an image for their candidate. By presenting a candidate in the right way, campaigns hope to make their candidate look like a more attractive and desirable choice than the opponent.

The next paper, The Psychology of Voting by Jon Krosnick, asserts that "One thing voters sometimes do is vote for the first name they read on the ballot, just to get the decision over with. As a result, candidates get about 2.3% more votes on average when their names are listed first on a ballot than when they’re listed later. And that’s the average gain-- in about half of races, the fist-listed candidate gets even more votes, as much as 6% or 7% sometimes." How horrible is that for a candidate who spends so much time in developing a message and so much money on getting it out?

Krosnick came to the conclusion that "the single most powerful predictor of a person’s vote choice is his or her political party identification, as a Republican, a Democrat, an Independent, or a member of another party. Usually, a person affiliates with a party because that party shares his or her preferences on the handful of policy issues that he or she cares most deeply about. So voting based on party is an easy way to vote for the candidate who will push government to do what you want it to do most. Second, research has shown that voters’ perceptions of candidates’ personalities (their intelligence, their knowledge, their trustworthiness, and their ability to be strong leaders) also predict some people’s votes very well. And people’s assessments of the health of the country predict other people’s votes."

[T]he single most powerful predictor of a person’s vote choice is his or her political party identification, as a Republican, a Democrat, an Independent, or a member of another party. Usually, a person affiliates with a party because that party shares his or her preferences on the handful of policy issues that he or she cares most deeply about. So voting based on party is an easy way to vote for the candidate who will push government to do what you want it to do most.

Second, research has shown that voters’ perceptions of candidates’ personalities (their intelligence, their knowledge, their trustworthiness, and their ability to be strong leaders) also predict some people’s votes very well. And people’s assessments of the health of the country predict other people’s votes. So it looks like most Americans vote according to the principles of representative democracy, but guardianship democracy and performance appraisal are approaches alive and well, too.

Recent psychological research has turned up some interesting quirks in the ways people evaluate presidential candidates, many of which are surprises to political consultants and campaign advisors. For example, most campaigns save their advertising money for the end of the campaign, so they can put ads on television during the final weeks or days of the campaign. This approach is based on the assumption that voters are most influenced by what they learn most recently. But it turns out that in politics as in all other areas of life, first impressions are very powerful and inertial. Once you form an impression of a person, it colors how you interpret new information about the person. So candidates would get more bang for a buck spent on advertising if they spent it early in a campaign rather than late.

Another popular assumption among political observers is that most Americans are pretty cynical about politicians and expect the worst from them. But instead, political psychologists have found that when Americans begin to learn about a new politician, they approach him or her optimistically, hoping for a “white knight” to appear who will be competent, trustworthy, and effective. That means that new politicians coming onto the national scene for the first time aren’t fighting quite the uphill battle many observers think they will.

Another interesting finding from political psychological research is that people don’t treat good and bad information about a candidate equally. If a little creature is to survive in the forest, it must optimistically look everywhere and anywhere for food, but it must also be hyper vigilant for any signs of danger, so it can make a quick escape when necessary. In a similar way, voters are especially attuned to unfavorable information about political candidates. Learning one bad thing about a candidate does much more damage to the candidate’s image than learning one good thing helps. So it is no surprise that we see so much negative advertising: a dollar spent criticizing your opponent will help you more than a dollar spent spreading the word of your good qualities.

How Badly Will Trump's Mismanagement Of The Pandemic Hurt The Republican Party In November?

Starting To Lose My Temper by Nancy Ohanian

Writing for New York Magazine, Eric Levitz introduced his readers to a new study by political scientists Lynn Vavreck, Christopher Warshaw and Ryan Baxter-King who examined the political consequences of COVID-19 fatalities for Trump and other Republican candidates for federal offices. Their conclusion-- and Levitz's-- is that Voters Are Turning Against Trump In Places Hit Hard By COVID-19. "Although Trump’s political decline is more modest than one might hope," wrote Levitz, "given the widespread tendency of the mass public to rally behind incumbent leaders when faced with an acute crisis-- and the exceptional power of right-wing media in the U.S.-- the fact that the president’s mishandling of the pandemic has turned his reelection into a long shot is cause for encouragement."

He wrote that Vavreck, Warshaw and Baxter-King "set out to determine whether the rise in COVID-19 deaths is directly costing Trump and the Republican Party voter support. To explore this question, they looked at whether areas with a high level of accumulated COVID-19 deaths by the end of May were less likely to support the president and his party, after controlling for all other relevant variables (such as the partisan and demographic composition of areas impacted by the virus and changes in national public opinion during the period in which deaths rose in those areas). Here’s what they found:

The gap between stated voting support for Mr. Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr. grows by about 2.5 percentage points in Mr. Biden’s favor when a county has extremely high levels of coronavirus-related deaths relative to when it has low levels … A doubling of cases per capita in a county over the last 60 days drops Mr. Trump’s two-party vote margin against Mr. Biden by a third of a percentage point-- a seemingly small gap, but not when you consider that several recent elections have been won by narrow margins. In 2016, the critical state of Michigan was won by less than a third of a point; Wisconsin and Pennsylvania were won by less than a point. And some places are seeing a tripling or quadrupling of cases.

Levitz continued, sadly, that "Ordinary people do not reliably hold their leaders accountable to their interests and avowed preferences in our present social context, which is to say: in a society where civic and communitarian institutions are in decay, economic power is concentrated in the hands of the few, and most people rely on television news for their political information. One could read this fact as an indictment of ordinary people’s capacity for self-government. But it could also be interpreted as an indictment of an economic system and social order that frustrates that capacity. The grotesque class and regional inequalities that define American social life were not born of tyrannical majorities but of reactionary and/or technocratic elites who enacted regressive tax, trade, and monetary policies, often in defiance of popular preferences. (And, of course, the most democratic features of America’s constitutional order were not what put Donald Trump in the White House; its most counter-majoritarian did.)

The study from Vavreck, Warshaw, and Baxter-King suggests that when voters are exposed to the worst consequences of Trump’s misgovernance-- not through cable news or social media but through the lived experiences of friends and neighbors-- they become more likely to hold their leaders to account. To improve and fortify our democracy, we must strive to provide Americans with the tools, information, and social institutions necessary to make the less spectacular failures of governance politically salient.

The 3 researchers concluded that "COVID-19 deaths could cost Trump and other Republicans several percentage points in the 2020 election. This could swing the presidential election toward Democrats, with particularly high effects in swing states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Arizona, and Florida. All of these states had tight margins in the 2016 presidential election. Michigan’s margin was particularly narrow (.2%) as was New Hampshire’s (.4%), suggesting that COVID-related fatalities may be consequential not only at the individual level in 2020, but also in terms of Electoral College results. In addition, a number of swing Senate elections are in states currently suffering from an explosion of COVID-19 cases, including Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, and Texas. The growing pandemic increases Republicans’ vulnerability in these crucial states. These narrow margins in recent elections, coupled with the realization that fatalities from COVID-19 are not unlike casualties of war in voters’ minds, suggest that a winning strategy for President Trump and other Republican candidates on the ballot in 2020 should be to adopt mitigation strategies to limit the spread and consequences of COVID-19 in the American population. Increasing fatalities from the disease lead to losses for Republicans."

What's More Repulsive To You-- Republicans Switching To The Democratic Party Or Democrats Switching To The Republican Party?

Yesterday, a piece in the Washington Post by Erica Werner and Jeff Stein-- Trump administration pushing to block new money for testing, tracing, and CDC in upcoming coronavirus relief bill-- couldn't be more damaging to Trump's reelection campaign if it were designed specifically to do just that. With most of the country-- including big majorities or Democrats and independent voters-- now certain that Señor Trumpanzee can't handle the pandemic and is just making everything significantly worse-- defunding the efforts to competently confront it is both murderous and suicidal for Trump and the Republican Party, as Nancy Ohanian illustrated with her drawing Murder/Suicide recently:

"The Trump administration," they wrote, "is trying to block billions of dollars for states to conduct testing and contact tracing in the upcoming coronavirus relief bill, people involved in the talks said Saturday. The administration is also trying to block billions of dollars that GOP senators want to allocate for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and billions more for the Pentagon and State Department to address the pandemic at home and abroad, the people said. The administration’s posture has angered some GOP senators, the officials said, and some lawmakers are trying to push back and ensure that the money stays in the bill. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to reveal confidential deliberations, cautioned that the talks were fluid and the numbers were in flux. The negotiations center around a bill Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is preparing to unveil this coming week as part of negotiations with Democrats on what will likely be the last major coronavirus relief bill before the November election.

The two parties are far apart on a number of contentious issues, such as unemployment insurance, but the conflict between Trump administration officials and Senate Republicans on money for testing and other priorities is creating a major complication even before bipartisan negotiations get under way. Some lawmakers are trying to reach a deal quickly, as enhanced unemployment benefits for millions of Americans are set to expire in less than two weeks.

One person involved in the talks said Senate Republicans were seeking to allocate $25 billion for states to conduct testing and contact tracing, but that certain administration officials want to zero out the testing and tracing money entirely. Some White House officials believe they have already approved billions of dollars in assistance for testing and that some of that money remains unspent.

...Trump has repeatedly questioned the value of conducting widespread coronavirus testing, arguing that if there were fewer tests conducted, the numbers of infections would be lower. Coronavirus infections and deaths are on the rise in many states.

Most of the new cases are in "red" states. Yesterday's 10 states with the worst one-day confirmed cases (along with how many cases each state has per million residents):

• Florida +10,328 (15,717 cases per million Floridians)
• California +8,806 (9,692 cases per million Californians)
• Texas +7,945 (11,398 cases per million Texans)
• Georgia +4,689 (13,174 cases per million Georgians)
• Arizona +2,742 (19,408 cases per million Arizonans)
• Tennessee +2,517 (11,178 cases per million Tennesseans)
• North Carolina +2,386 (9,340 cases per million North Carolinians)
• Alabama +2,143 (13,304 cases per million Alabamans)
• South Carolina +1,552 (13,132 cases per million South Carolinians)
• Ohio +1,538 (6,319 cases per million Buckeyes)

Eric Levitz hit on a reason Republicans are letting Trump get away with this kind of behavior: the GOP has turned into a party of ignorant-- often stupid-- losers, in other words, Trump's coalition. Traditional Republicans are abandoning the party and many are perfectly comfortable with Biden and his conservatism. The Republican coalition is getting smaller. According to Gallup, just 39% of voters identify as Republicans (as opposed to 50% who say they are Democrats). This is a big change since just last February. Levitz thinks that the reason could have something to do with "having your party’s standard-bearer counsel the public to inject disinfectant while a pandemic kills 140,000 Americans and plunges the nation into the worst recession since World War II... it could do the trick." But that isn't precise point of his column.

[A]nother significant way that the GOP coalition is changing is that its voting base is becoming more working-class. And if this November does bring a “blue tsunami,” that fact could theoretically have some bearing on how the Republican Party rebrands and rebuilds in the aftermath.

Donald Trump’s erosion of support in recent months has been driven by the defections of white voters in general, and college-educated ones in particular. A variety of recent polls have found Biden leading Trump among the latter by roughly 30 percentage points. Although the president’s standing among non-college-educated whites has declined significantly in recent weeks, he still boasts a roughly 20-point lead with that demographic in the most recent surveys.

Counterintuitively, the president’s grip on a sizable minority of nonwhite voters has scarcely loosened: In recent polls from CNN, Monmouth University, and the New York Times, Trump’s share of the African-American and Hispanic voting blocs remains about where it was in 2018 exit polls-- which was itself a bit higher than his share in 2016.

...[S]ince the Latino and African-American voting blocs are more working-class than the electorate as a whole, one effect of the GOP holding its ground among nonwhite voters-- while bleeding white college-educated ones-- is to render its coalition less affluent and highly educated than it was in 2016.

xxBlacks for Trump

This is the scintilla of truth behind Ted Cruz’s remarks on the Federalist Radio Hour Thursday.

“The big lie in politics is that Republicans are the party of the rich and Democrats are the party of the poor. That just ain’t true,” the Texas senator told the right-wing outlet. “Today’s Democratic Party is the party of Silicon Valley billionaires. Today’s Democratic Party is the party of Michael Bloomberg. It is the party of power, it is the party of suppression, it is jackbooted thugs who will enforce their will through force.”

Setting aside Cruz’s last remark (by all indications, the president wants the GOP to be known as the party of jackbooted thuggery), he is narrowly correct that the Democratic Party boasts more support from affluent voters than at any time in its modern history (although American billionaires still donate predominately to the GOP, and controlling for educational attainment, Republicans still soundly beat Democrats among high-income voters).

And yet: If the GOP is becoming more working-class, in terms of its coalition’s demographic composition, there are few signs that it is becoming a party “for the working class,” in the sense of governing in the interests of workers as workers. By the same token, while the Democratic Party is becoming more affluent demographically, its economic policies have grown steadily more progressive over the past decade. Since taking control of the House of Representatives on the strength of the party’s support in suburban districts, Nancy Pelosi’s caucus has passed a $15 minimum wage, The Protecting the Right to Organize Act (a pro-union labor-law reform bill), and pushed to have the CARES Act provide Americans with the highest unemployment benefits on offer anywhere in the world (albeit, on a disastrously temporary basis).

By contrast, since Donald Trump eked out an Electoral College majority by making significant inroads with lower-income white voters, he has established himself as (at least arguably) the most economically regressive Republican president in history. He began his presidency with an attempt to throw 14 million low-income Americans off Medicaid, and then proceeded to shower wealthy capitalists in tax cuts, make it easier for corporations to cut costs by poisoning children, and gutted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, among other reactionary things.

Now, with tens of millions of Americans freshly unemployed, upwards of 20 million at risk of eviction by autumn-- and state governments poised to layoff public-sector workers and slash social services due to cratering revenues-- the Republican Party is putting its principled commitment to slashing welfare provision above its political interests. There is no evidence that the CARES Act’s $600 weekly federal unemployment benefit is starving the U.S. labor market of much-needed workers by making joblessness more rewarding than hard work. On the other hand, there is copious evidence that such benefits have stabilized personal income levels in the U.S., thereby preventing a much sharper recession.

Nevertheless, the party of “single moms” and “steelworkers” finds the theoretical threat of American workers having the power to turn down an unattractive job offer from an employer-- without suffering a significant loss of living standards-- so offensive, it is fighting to slash the incomes of 32 million Americans (in the middle of a pandemic, just months from Election Day).

Meanwhile, the party’s other top priority for the next COVID-19 recovery package is to immunize employers from workplace safety lawsuits.

...Given the hegemony that business conservatives have enjoyed over the American right’s core institutions of policy and leadership development, the safe money would be against the Republican Party embracing a remotely prolabor economic agenda in the coming years, even if there were a significant faction within the GOP advocating for such a turn. As is, there is only a cohort of opportunists who’ve wedded marginally heterodox views on a few discrete issues to vituperative denunciations of a rootless, godless professional-managerial class.

So, the GOP is (almost certainly) not becoming a party for the working class. Whether it will become the preferred party of 51 percent of working-class voters is less clear. Given the relative sturdiness of the GOP’s share of non-college-educated voters throughout three years of reactionary policy-making-- and five months of catastrophic misrule-- it seems possible that well-packaged pseudo-populism may be all the party needs to grow its blue-collar wing. All true friends of American labor must do what they can to guard against that possibility.

Did You Know That In The U.S. There Is No Party That Favors Peace

War-mongers Jason Crow (D-CO) and Liz Cheney (R-WY)

Last week, the House Armed Services Committee-- an aggressively devoted tool of the Military Industrial Complex regardless of which party controls Congress-- voted on an amendment by Jason Crow (New Dem-CO) and Liz Cheney (R-WY) to prevent Trump from withdrawing troops from Afghanistan. As expected, it passed, 45-11. Think about that: a committee controlled by Democrats voted to prevent Trump from getting U.S. troops-- who, remember, are being assassinated by criminal elements to earn Russian bounties-- out of the 100% pointless and unwinable war in Afghanistan. How the hell did that happen? Maybe you think the Democratic Party is something different than is? Possible? Our troops have been fighting and dying there for 2 decades and we've wasted over a trillion dollars--much, if not most, of it finding its way into the hands of corrupt Americans and corrupt Afs-- and 2,300 American lives and God knows how many Afghan lives.

Do you recall how last cycle one of the DCCC gimmicks was to run military vets and call them heroes? A lot of them got elected and, guess what-- they all suck-- every single one of them; no exceptions. SUCK! Of the candidates who ran by flaunting their credentials as military heroes, each of them has earned a ProgressivePunch "F" score, even the one who pretended to run as a progressive, Maine reactionary Jared Golden (who Blue America was tricked into endorsing and supporting and even persuading Nancy Ohanian into doing a piece of art for!).

BIG Mistake!

There are 31 Democrats and 26 Republicans on the overstuffed committee, where it is extraordinarily easy to earn bribes from the Military Industrial Complex. Here's how the Democrats voted:

• Adam Smith, chairman (New Dem-WA)- stay in Afghanistan
• Susan Davis (New Dem-CA)- stay in Afghanistan
• James Langevin (RI)- stay in Afghanistan
• Rick Larsen (New Dem-WA)- stay in Afghanistan
• Jim Cooper (Blue Dog-TN)- stay in Afghanistan
• Joe Courtney (CT)- stay in Afghanistan
• John Garamendi (CA)- stay in Afghanistan
• Jackie Speier (CA)- stay in Afghanistan
• Tulsi Gabbard (HI)- withdraw troops
• Donald Norcross (New Dem-NJ)- stay in Afghanistan
• Ruben Gallego (AZ)- stay in Afghanistan
• Seth Moulton (New Dem-MA)- stay in Afghanistan
• Salud Carbajal (New Dem-CA)- stay in Afghanistan
• Anthony Brown (New Dem-MD)- withdraw troops
• Ro Khanna (CA)- withdraw troops
• William Keating (New Dem-MA)- stay in Afghanistan
• Filemon Vela (Blue Dog-TX)- stay in Afghanistan
• Andy Kim (NJ)- stay in Afghanistan
• Kendra Horn (Blue Dog-OK)- didn't vote
• Gil Cisneros (New Dem-CA)- didn't vote
• Crissy Houlahan (New Dem-PA)- didn't vote
• Jason Crow (New Dem-CO)- stay in Afghanistan
• Xochitl Torres Small (BlueDog-NM)- stay in Afghanistan
• Elissa Slotkin (New Dem-MI)- stay in Afghanistan
• Mikie Sherrill (Blue Dog-NJ)- stay in Afghanistan
• Veronica Escobar (New Dem-TX)- stay in Afghanistan
• Deb Haaland (NM)- stay in Afghanistan
• Jared Golden (ME)- stay in Afghanistan
• Lori Trahan (New Dem-MA)- stay in Afghanistan
• Elaine Luria (New Dem-VA)- stay in Afghanistan
• Anthony Brindisi (Blue Dog-NY)- stay in Afghanistan

I spoke with Ro Khanna after the vote and he told me that "It is appalling that the time Congress would choose to wake up from its slumber on matters of war and peace is to mandate perpetual war and restrict bringing our troops home. Let's be very clear what just happened. The Cheney Crow Amendment is to the right of Trump’s foreign policy and it’s scary how many people voted for it."

Republicans who voted against the bill: Mo Brooks (AL), Bradley Byrne (AL), Scott DesJarlais (TN), Jim Banks (IN) and Austin Scott (GA), although I think one or two others who missed the vote added their names in opposition to the Crow/Cheney amendment.

It confuses some progressives when Trump actually wants to do the right thing-- even if it isn't for "pure" reasons. But in this case, Democrats on the committee should have voted against Crow (one of those DCCC military heroes who was elected in 2018 and has done nothing but suck shit since) and Cheney. I mean anyone can get their head around the idea than a Cheney can bewares then even Trump, right? Anyway, New York Magazine's Eric Levitz set out to help Democrats bridge the gap between righteous Trump hatred and getting out of the fuckingwar already: Please Don’t Prolong a Pointless War Just to Show Russia Who’s Boss. He reminded his readers that "Throughout America’s longest war, top Pentagon and civilian officials deliberately misled the public about the endeavor’s likelihood of success in a bid to insulate their adventure from the threat of democratic rebuke. As the Washington Post reported last fall, summarizing the upshot of various confidential government documents it had obtained, 'it was common at military headquarters in Kabul-- and at the White House-- to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.' John Sopko, the head of the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, put the point more plainly: 'The American people have constantly been lied to.' Amid the lies, war crimes, tens of thousands of civilian deaths, egregious corruption, and revival of the Afghan opium trade, some positive developments have accompanied the U.S. invasion. Afghan women have made some real gains in their personal liberty, however limited and fragile. But the U.S. has neither the will nor the capacity to deny the Taliban a role in governing the country. The peace deal that the Trump administration struck with that group in February was an acknowledgment of the inevitable; as such, it was a productive step forward. Under the agreement’s terms, the U.S. will fully withdraw its troops in 14 months, so long as the Taliban upholds its commitments to, among other things, bar Al Qaeda from operating in areas under its control, and participate in 'Intra-Afghan talks' with the government in Kabul, opposition politicians, and various representatives of civil society about the future governance of the country."

To uphold its end of the bargain, the Trump administration plans to reduce America’s troop presence from its current level of 8,600 to 4,500 by this autumn.

But this week, a bipartisan group of House lawmakers erected new barriers to that withdrawal... [T]he House’s conditions are senselessly prohibitive. It’s difficult to see how one could ever withdraw military forces tasked with preventing the formation of terrorist safe havens without increasing the risk of “the expansion of existing or formation of new terrorist safe havens.” But that is not a rational basis for prolonging a 19-year war. The U.S. cannot maintain military occupations in every country where Islamist militants could conceivably gather and plot violence. Nor should it. As COVID-19 and climate change are making clear (or should be), terrorism is a relatively trivial threat, one that has diverted precious resources from pandemic prevention, green-energy transition, and other efforts necessary for mitigating the genuinely catastrophic challenges to Americans’ safety and security.

Congress’s (uncharacteristic) decision to interfere with the executive branch’s conduct in a foreign war was not explicitly tied to recent revelations concerning Russia’s apparent efforts to place bounties on U.S. troops in Afghanistan. But given the prominence of that story, it seems reasonable to worry that the issue influenced the House’s action. Especially since one of the amendment’s sponsors suggested that the U.S. must respond to Russia’s treachery by dispelling any question of America’s “will” to defend its interests.

Congress is right to investigate allegations of Russian targeting of U.S. troops and the Trump administration’s handling of relevant intelligence. But Russia’s actions have no bearing on the wisdom of prolonging an unwinnable war. If anything, the vulnerability of U.S. troops to such attacks constitutes an argument for quicker withdrawal. Extending military quagmires to demonstrate our resolve to Moscow was crazy when it was still the world’s second greatest power; doing so now that Russia is a declining petrostate with modest regional influence would be utter madness.

I'm not so sure about this report by Saagar Enjeti, but it's not out-of-hand dismissible and it's definitely worth carefully considering. Listen with an open mind:

Will It Be Fair To Refer To The Coming Great Depression As "The Trump Depression?"

I was born in 1948. My grandparents used to tell me about the Great Depression. There's no one alive today who was a sentient enough being at the time to remember it first hand. And many Americans under 40 relate to it about as much as they relate to the Battle of Yorktown. Yesterday, both the New Yorker and New York Magazine published vital pieces on the Great Depression and what it has to do with us in 2020-- Susan Glasser for the New Yorker and Eric Levitz for New York. Hint: our White House is occupied by Donald J. Trump.

"In September 2006," wrote Levitz, "Nouriel Roubini told the International Monetary Fund what it didn’t want to hear. Standing before an audience of economists at the organization’s headquarters, the New York University professor warned that the U.S. housing market would soon collapse-- and, quite possibly, bring the global financial system down with it. Real-estate values had been propped up by unsustainably shady lending practices, Roubini explained. Once those prices came back to earth, millions of underwater homeowners would default on their mortgages, trillions of dollars worth of mortgage-backed securities would unravel, and hedge funds, investment banks, and lenders like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could sink into insolvency. At the time, the global economy had just recorded its fastest half-decade of growth in 30 years. And Nouriel Roubini was just some obscure academic. Thus, in the IMF’s cozy confines, his remarks roused less alarm over America’s housing bubble than concern for the professor’s psychological well-being. Of course, the ensuing two years turned Roubini’s prophecy into history, and the little-known scholar of emerging markets into a Wall Street celebrity."

Roubini isn't buying onto the nonsense about a V-shaped recovery. He sees an "L-shaped depression," although he expects thing to get better before they get worse. "He foresees," continued Levitz, "a slow, lackluster (i.e., 'U-shaped') economic rebound in the pandemic’s immediate aftermath. But he insists that this recovery will quickly collapse beneath the weight of the global economy’s accumulated debts. Specifically, Roubini argues that the massive private debts accrued during both the 2008 crash and COVID-19 crisis will durably depress consumption and weaken the short-lived recovery. Meanwhile, the aging of populations across the West will further undermine growth while increasing the fiscal burdens of states already saddled with hazardous debt loads. Although deficit spending is necessary in the present crisis, and will appear benign at the onset of recovery, it is laying the kindling for an inflationary conflagration by mid-decade. As the deepening geopolitical rift between the United States and China triggers a wave of deglobalization, negative supply shocks akin those of the 1970s are going to raise the cost of real resources, even as hyperexploited workers suffer perpetual wage and benefit declines. Prices will rise, but growth will peter out, since ordinary people will be forced to pare back their consumption more and more. Stagflation will beget depression. And through it all, humanity will be beset by unnatural disasters, from extreme weather events wrought by man-made climate change to pandemics induced by our disruption of natural ecosystems."

Levitz's interview with Roubini is something you should read unless something like this will keep you up nights:

There’s a conflict between workers and capital. For a decade, workers have been screwed. Now, they’re going to be screwed more. There’s a conflict between small business and large business.

Millions of these small businesses are going to go bankrupt. Half of the restaurants in New York are never going to reopen. How can they survive? They have such tiny margins. Who’s going to survive? The big chains. Retailers. Fast food. The small businesses are going to disappear in the post-coronavirus economy. So there is a fundamental conflict between Wall Street (big banks and big firms) and Main Street (workers and small businesses). And Wall Street is going to win.

Not scary enough for you? How about this? Is this the kind of thing you can lose sleep over?

You’re going to start having food riots soon enough. Look at the luxury stores in New York. They’ve either boarded them up or emptied their shelves,  because they’re worried people are going to steal the Chanel bags. The few stores that are open, like my Whole Foods, have security guards both inside and outside. We are one step away from food riots. There are lines three miles long at food banks. That’s what’s happening in America. You’re telling me everything’s going to become normal in three months? That’s lunacy.

The Republicans have lost their minds entirely if they thing that Donald Trump and the crew of misfits and sycophants he's hired to run the government are the right people to save the country. And the Democratic electorate is just as clueless, passing on Bernie and Elizabeth in favor of Status Quo Joe, who only looks "good" in comparison to Trump but is certainly not up to this job:

The market, as currently ordered, is going to make capital stronger and labor weaker. So, to change this, you need to invest in your workers. Give them education, a social safety net-- so if they lose their jobs to an economic or technological shock, they get job training, unemployment benefits, social welfare, health care for free. Otherwise, the trends of the market are going to imply more income and wealth inequality. There’s a lot we can do to rebalance it. But I don’t think it’s going to happen anytime soon. If Bernie Sanders had become president, maybe we could’ve had policies of that sort. Of course, Bernie Sanders is to the right of the CDU party in Germany. I mean, Angela Merkel is to the left of Bernie Sanders. Boris Johnson is to the left of Bernie Sanders, in terms of social democratic politics. Only by U.S. standards does Bernie Sanders look like a Bolshevik.

In Germany, the unemployment rate has gone up by one percent. In the U.S., the unemployment rate has gone from 4 percent to 20 percent (correctly measured) in two months. We lost 30 million jobs. Germany lost 200,000. Why is that the case? You have different economic institutions. Workers sit on the boards of German companies. So you share the costs of the shock between the workers, the firms, and the government.

Meanwhile Susan Glasser wants to remind us that the GOP is all about diversion. They want the electorate to think about anything rather than the "side"-effects of the pandemic. "In recent days," she wrote, "the Republican-controlled Senate has not considered any major legislation related to the virus and the historic havoc it has wrought on the country’s public health and economy. Nor does it have any current plans to do so, leaving the fate of a three-trillion-dollar relief measure passed by the Democratic-controlled House last Friday uncertain... Trump right now is mass-proliferating diversions, from last week’s spurious 'Obamagate' to this week’s threat to withhold federal funds from Democratic-led states that make it easier for voters to cast ballots by mail this fall. If it seems as though Trump is generating more controversies than usual these days, that’s because he is. He is a superspreader of distraction. It’s an excellent way to make one forget, at least for a while, about the death and economic destruction currently rampaging across the country."

Of course Trump is trying to distract. The emerging politics of the pandemic are not good for him, nor are they likely to get better. They have recast the fall election as a referendum on Trump’s basic competence to lead the country through a once-in-a-century convergence of crises. During the pre-pandemic impeachment era, Richard Nixon was the inescapable historical point of comparison for Trump’s corruption-ridden Presidency. Now it is Herbert Hoover. Running for reëlection after the stock market crash of 1929 and three failed years of trying to stop the Great Depression, Hoover promised Americans that “Prosperity Is Just Around the Corner.” Upbeat predictions amid bread lines didn’t cut it, and Hoover lost badly. The brutal political reality of running for another term while the country is experiencing mass unemployment is one that almost no President can overcome. In fact, the last time an American incumbent successfully won during a recession was in 1924.

Then again, Hoover’s campaign slogan seems like a winner today compared with the clunker Trump has been trying out in recent days: “Transition to Greatness!” On May 7th, Trump débuted the phrase, saying at a White House appearance with Texas Governor Greg Abbott that, while the economy was cratering now, he expected that late this year-- preferably, right around the November election-- it would begin to “transition into greatness.” A fantastic 2021 would follow. “I think next year we’re going to have a phenomenal year,” the President insisted.

The line stuck with him. By the next day, at an appearance with Republican members of Congress, Trump was calling it his new campaign mantra, claiming to have invented it on the spot (although he had used the same phrase just the day before), and insisting it was a more brilliant advertisement for his reëlection than anything the professionals could come up with. “It’s a great term. It just came out at this meeting,” he told the Republicans as reporters looked on. “That’s right. It came out by accident. It was a statement and it came out and you can’t get a better one. We can go to Madison Avenue and get the best, the greatest geniuses in the world to come up with a slogan, but that’s the slogan we’re going to use: ‘Transition to Greatness.’ And it’s starting right now.”

I suppose it’s not a surprise, more than three years into his Presidency, that Trump will lie about anything, even the coinage of a campaign slogan, but on simple grounds of political malfeasance alone this one seems to be an epic Presidential fail. It’s safe to say that nobody ever got reëlected to anything by promising a “transition.” You would think the guy whose 2016 success was aided by a catchy campaign slogan on a red baseball cap would know a dud when he sees one. Politicians win by attacking the other team, as Trump did so effectively four years ago, by ripping off Ronald Reagan’s 1980 promise to “Make America Great Again.” It is a lot harder to do that if you’re an incumbent, and harder still if you’re the incumbent at a time of epic death and economic suffering. If the record you’re running on is so bad that your own slogan vows to do better next time, it’s hard to envision winning. Yet that is exactly what Trump is selling these days. “TRANSITION TO GREATNESS,” Trump tweeted this Monday, at 4:39 a.m. On Tuesday, emerging from a lunch with Senate Republicans, he explained once again his theory of the case. “It’s a transition to greatness,” Trump said. “Above all, next year, you are going to have a tremendous year.” On Wednesday, he promised, on Twitter, a “normalization!” that somehow, miraculously, will take America out of this mess, “now that our country is Transitioning back to Greatness.” Madison Avenue is surely grateful that Trump is claiming responsibility for this at least.

The U.S. is reporting 95,379 deaths today (Friday), 1,116 more death since Thursday. By Memorial Day the U.S. will be very close to the gruesome 100,000 mark, most of whom should not have died, had our political leaders-- foremost Trump-- done their most basic jobs of protecting the country. This week presidential historian Robert Dallek, writing for Time, reminded his readers that "Herbert Hoover, who won the election of 1928 and had a reputation as a brilliant mining engineer and highly successful businessman, likewise struggled to respond to the stock market crash of 1929 and economic collapse beginning in 1930. The problem for Harding, Hoover and the Republicans who controlled Congress in the 1920s was an unyielding faith in free market capitalism. Convinced that the markets would automatically turn up, as they had in 1921, Hoover repeatedly urged the country to believe that prosperity was right around the corner. With conditions worse than ever and unemployment reaching 25% of the work force in 1932, Hoover lost the presidency in a landslide to New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt... Roosevelt’s leadership fostered renewed hope, with expanded job opportunities provided through public works projects, including dam-building and flood control that protected the environment, as well as projects for artists and writers. As important, his administration humanized America’s industrial economy with Social Security to insulate seniors from hardships, unemployment insurance and minimum wages and maximum hours that gave laborers unprecedented protections from market swings. On the strength of that success and his leadership in World War II, he won a record four presidential elections." Stuck with a status quo nothing as the Democratic nominee, what we need to do now is elect as many progressive as we can to Congress-- like the men and women you'll find listed by clicking on the thermometer on the right.

Trump, who is no student of history, says that he has presided over the best economy ever in the United States and accomplished more in his first year and a half in office than any previous occupant of the White House. Never mind that the coronavirus has triggered a precipitous downturn with over 1.4 million Americans infected and more than 89,000 fatalities. In the beginnings of a reelection campaign in which Trump has to explain away nearly 15% unemployment, the worst since 1933, he is predicting a third-quarter resurgence and a fourth-quarter expansion that will carry over into next year.

...Certainly no one can blame the pandemic itself on Trump, but he has overseen a slow and shortsighted response to the infectious virus. The Washington Post has cited more than 18,000 questionable statements he has made, including numerous outright lies. His credibility problem has played a significant part in making him the first president since polling began in the 1930s to go through almost four years without achieving 50% public approval-- evidence that many people cannot square his rhetoric of alleged accomplishments and self-congratulation with public realities.

There is no question but that the country is facing a national crisis demanding an imaginative response like FDR provided with his New Deal. We can’t simply talk our way out of this challenge by ordering cities and states to reopen public businesses without an escalating death toll. The lackluster response to the economic problems of the 1920s shows just how cheap talk is in this kind of situation: leaving massive national problems to work themselves out without serious federal intervention only made things worse.

...Today, Americans are once again facing the consequences of a failure to act, and a mistaken belief that a miracle solution is on its way. The past has already shown that there is a better way forward-- but as the coronavirus crisis continues, it only seems more likely that FDR’s is not the history Trump plans to repeat.