Election Postmortem Gerry OShea
President
Clinton’s political guru James Carville’s oft-repeated statement of election
wisdom that “it is the economy stupid” was deemed not to apply in advance of
this year’s presidential election. How could any other issue supersede a raging
virus that was causing nearly a thousand deaths a day, with every poll showing that
most people blamed President Trump’s incompetent handling of the crisis?
Amazingly,
exit polls on election day revealed that the COVID crisis was rated third on
the scale of importance by voters. Racial division showed at second and at the
top again, number one, came the economy.
About a week
before election day the Federal Reserve Board announced that the Gross Domestic
Product (GDP) had expanded at a record 33.1% in the third quarter. This was
welcomed like manna from heaven by President Trump and all Republican
candidates. They argued that this never-before-achieved growth rate was proof
that conservative Republican economics were working, and they assured people
that the fourth quarter would show similar record numbers.
This
extraordinary progress in productivity and employment led to a sense of hope
that the dark clouds were lifting. Few people adverted to the fact that the
growth numbers had collapsed by 31.4% in the second quarter and that the Feds
were predicting a decline of 6.5% in the GDP for the whole year.
A week after
the election on November 3rd , Pfizer, the multi-national
pharmaceutical company, announced that their tests on the development of a
coronavirus vaccine came through with an unprecedented 90% success rate. The
company CEO, Albert Bourla, boasted of this achievement as a historic event – “a
great day for science and for humanity.”
The
president had spoken frequently about the imminence of a vaccine which, of
course, he hoped would happen before election day. Imagine the impact on voters
if a 90% effective COVID preventive treatment was announced in late October.
Mr. Bourla asserted that the timing of their statement had nothing to do with
the elections in the United States. This claim elicited a wry smile from the
president and his top advisors.
Actually,
Trump and the US government contributed nothing to the Pfizer research, but one
can imagine the ownership claims that would have been made by the White House
of a 90% prevention vaccine and how this might influence an electorate shaken
by the cursed pathogen.
The president spoke frequently about the
growth of company share prices during his time in office, and indeed the Dow
Jones numbers have increased substantially since he was elected in 2016. It is
estimated that 20% of voters, about 30 million, have retirement funds called Tax-Deferred
Annuities (TDA) invested in Wall St. They get quarterly reports and their
spirits are buoyed if the numbers in their portfolios are going in the right
direction. This provided an important electoral fillip for President Trump.
The president scored well in gauges of
economic wellbeing, slightly ahead of his opponent in this singular area. In
one poll his positive efforts registered at 56%. In a strange anomaly, Trump’s
job approval rating as president hovered around an ominous 44% since he started
in office. The first statistic suggests a clear path to re-election for an
incumbent, but the latter one indicates a steep mountain to climb for any
president who is so consistently perceived as inadequate.
Slogans
matter in every campaign. The cry to Defund the Police was meant to tie the
level of government funding to needed police reforms. However, the actual words
allowed Republicans to promote the idea that Democrats are against strong
policing practices. Joe Biden repudiated the slogan but it damaged Democrats on
November 3rd.
Initial
results favored the president as he won Florida and Texas easily. Democratic
leaders in both states looked to a huge turnout of Hispanics to move the needle
in their direction. They were disappointed when they lost heavily in the two
states, and they feared that these results were a worrying augury for other parts
of the country. Those results were showing in Trump’s favor on the night of the
election, and he was also hundreds of thousands of votes ahead in the crucial
swing states, called the Blue Wall, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
The president, feeling empowered and succumbing
to his need for instant gratification, declared himself the winner. Never mind
that he announced that the election was “rigged” before a vote was cast. The
antics around his claim of victory brought to mind a memorable event in Ireland
in 1982. Malcolm McArthur, a well-known upper-crust socialite in Dublin,
murdered a nurse, followed by another killing, and he then headed for shelter
in– of all places – the home of the acting attorney general.
The prime
minister, Charles Haughey, was flabbergasted when he heard the story,
describing it as grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented. Conor
Cruise OBrien, an opposition member of parliament and prominent intellectual,
mockingly suggested that the acronym GUBU should be used to avoid the drum roll
of adjectives. That shortened version is still heard in Ireland to describe
unusual and unexpeced happenings.
The
president’s declaration of an “easy” victory with tens of millions of votes to
be counted beggared belief. As time went on, when the numbers began to show Joe
Biden moving ahead, he accused the election system of fraud, praising the count
where he was winning but making allegations of malfeasance where he was down. Yet,
he and his lawyers could not show even one credible example of voting irregularity.
GUBU on steroids!
President
Trump’s actions and his party’s compliance brought to mind the first election
in East Germany in 1946 after the end of the Second World War. The
Moscow-backed Socialist Unity Party, SED for short, was heavily defeated, but
the headline in their newspaper read “Great Victory for SED.” And that puppet
government lasted for 44 years.
The final results
show Biden far exceeding the number of electoral college votes for victory and
winning the popular preference by more than five million while adding five
states that Trump carried in 2016 to the Democratic corner. A thorough victory
from any perspective.
The election
has been called by the networks and President-elect Biden has addressed the
country stressing the need for reconciliation and an end to demonization and lurid
partisan accusations. Most of the major world leaders have called to
congratulate the new president-elect, and he has proceeded to name a commission
to advise him on a comprehensive plan to beat the awful virus, just as he
promised.
However,
President Trump, still in tantrum mood, refuses to concede and, indeed,
continues to claim victory and he is actually developing budget plans for 2021.
Adding to the sense of GUBU, most Republican lawmakers remain in lockstep with
him. The president dismissed the Defense Secretary, Mark Esper and two of his
top aides leaving people wondering what he has in mind for the Defense
Department during the last few weeks of his presidency.
There are
two possible reasons why a defeated candidate won’t concede his loss and leave
office. The poet, John Milton, captures one of these in Paradise Lost
when he considers Satan, defeated in the imagined heavenly war and consigned to
chaos, the black hole of remorse, dejection and tears, but still shaking his
finger defiantly at God:
All is
not Lost; the unconquerable will,
And study
of Revenge, immortal hate,
And the
Courage never to Submit or Yield.
This kind of
heroic depravity does not apply to Donald Trump who takes out his negative
frustrations by playing golf and pouting angrily when asked what proof he has
that his defeat in Michigan by 150,000 was due to “illegal suppression.”
The other
explanation for why he is refusing to accept defeat is far more credible. This
man was raised by a powerful and amoral father who drilled into him that he
must never be a loser. And he has lived the life of a grifter, achieving
satisfaction by intimidating and crushing people who crossed him – family
members, contractors, politicians.
His niece
Mary, an eloquent and impressive psychologist, describes him as a narcissistic
sociopath, a sick man and a bully whose first instinct is always to dominate
and humiliate any opponent. In addition, his shallow emotional make-up cannot
deal with the clear fact that he was beaten easily by the man he dismissed as a
weak opponent, Sleepy Joe.
The leader who demeaned black people, warning
that the Democrats would encourage them to move to and pollute the suburbs, was
defeated by a massive turnout of African-Americans in Philadelphia, Detroit and
Atlanta. He is a loser because of them. The law of karma applies. The people
that he openly despised brought him down.
This story,
loaded with GUBU, is not finished yet.
Gerry
OShea blogs at wemustbetalking.com
Comments
Post a Comment