Our nation is shaped by the constant battle between our better angels and our darkest impulses. It is time for our better angels to prevail.
– Joseph R. Biden, Jr
Much like everyone else, my mind over the past several weeks (/months/years) has been a maelstrom of thoughts and emotions, most of them centered on the pandemic and the presidential election. So to help clear my head, I thought I’d do a “brain dump” of sorts and share some of my (many) thoughts on last week’s election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to be the next President and Vice President of the United States, respectively. After which I hope to calm my mind and refrain from (overt) political punditry here for a while. Here goes nothing…
+ It took four painfully long years, but with the news on Saturday that Joe Biden had earned Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes to claim victory and become the President-Elect, Donald Trump finally lived up to his promise to Make America Great Again.
+ Or as The Washington Post correspondent Philip Bump so astutely encapsulated The End, “The man who said he wouldn’t play golf as president learned that he would no longer serve as president while he was playing golf. An almost Shakespearean coda.”
+ I look forward to Kamala Harris being a visible and productive Vice President and a much larger, more competent figure than her predecessor Mike Pence. Pence more than lived down to the expectations of John Adams, who once dismissed the VP position as “the most insignificant Office that ever the Invention of Man contrived or his imagination conceived,” while reaffirming FDR VP John Nance Garner’s more succinct appraisal that “The Vice-Presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm spit.”
+ I’m excited for empathy’s return to the White House, for images of the president and vice president once again smiling around other people (once we control this pandemic), and for more iconic photos like this one that have their own Wikipedia page:
+ Clearly Joe Biden is a man destined for greatness, which I can say with confidence since a) his Secret Service code name is “Celtic” and b) he’s the first US President with whom I’ve shared a birthday. 😆 ☘️ 🎂
+ If a picture is worth a thousand words, then this tweet is worth at least a thousand more, conveying as it does the abject desperation that comes with suddenly realizing your relentlessly dishonest reality distortion field just lost its mojo at the worst possible time:
+ At the same time, I empathize with all the Trump supporters in Michigan and elsewhere who showed up to echo his sentiments outside vote tabulation sites, screaming for election officials to “STOP THE COUNT!” After all, three days earlier my Dallas Cowboys had been up 9-7 at halftime and so I’d yelled for them to stop the game, but then they’d gone ahead and played the entire second half anyway, letting the crooked Philadelphia Eagles pull another 16 points out of who-knows-where to steal a win they didn’t deserve. It was a fraud on the football-watching public and an embarrassment to our country. The Cowboys were getting ready to win the game. Frankly, they DID win the game. And I asked myself, what’s the NFL come to when a team that’s won only 2 games in 8 tries can’t change 100 years of league rules to avoid a reality that doesn’t align with its own unhinged fantasy?? So yeah, I could empathize.
+ And speaking of counting votes, huge respect to all the election officials, poll workers and dedicated volunteers who saw to it that democracy was served by diligently counting every vote while MAGAt-driven, conspiracy-fueled chaos swirled around them.
+ To me, Twitter is to social media what that first Presidential debate was to civil discourse. That said, if you’re trying to explain (or understand) America’s two-party system in the year 2020, these election-night tweets from each party’s youngest member of Congress are a great place to start:
(This was a day before Cawthorn vowed to “work to bring an end to partisan politics.” Strong first step, Madison.)
+ I’ll leave it to the presidential historians & professional pundits to provide the 1,000+ words to accompany this “mic drop” graphic from Jennifer Bendery of HuffPost:
+ The longer the president protests the results of the election without a single shred of legally admissible or acceptable evidence, and the longer he cripples the nation’s ability to transition to a new leader by refusing to concede (none of us expect “gracious”), the clearer it becomes that he doesn’t give two f*cks about the country or the Constitution he swore to uphold.
+ And while we’re calling out faux patriots, nothing is more un-American than enablers like South Carolina’s newly re-elected (and re-emboldened) Senator Lindsey Graham parroting the president’s baseless claims of voter fraud, while suggesting that the Pennsylvania legislature (which has a Republican majority) choose its own set of electors to override the will of the voters. As a far-right pipe dream, this is as dangerously undemocratic as it gets, though it may not even qualify as rock bottom for a seasoned sycophant like Graham, who freely admitted on the Fox News Channel on Sunday, “If Republicans don’t challenge and change the U.S. election system, there will never be another Republican president elected again.” It’s the ultimate hubris—the GOP doesn’t need to change, our democratic elections (which already favor Republicans thanks to the electoral college) do.
+ In fact, you can’t throw a pebble without hitting a glaring inconsistency in the campaign’s “voter fraud” argument. If the accusation is true, for instance, then why wasn’t the same underhanded strategy used to Hillary Clinton’s benefit in 2016? And why then is Adrian Fontes, the official in charge of counting those same “controversial” ballots in Maricopa County (Phoenix), currently losing his own re-election bid by a narrow margin?
+ A mandate for hope: Although many progressives (including several friends) with 2016 PTSD quickly turned dark and started thinking in doomsday scenarios as the initially GOP-heavy vote totals rolled in on election night, Democrats ended up winning the White House convincingly with the most votes in US history, plus they maintained their majority in the House of Representatives despite losing several seats, plus they still have an outside shot—with one unresolved Senate race in Alaska and two January runoffs in Georgia as of this writing—to win the Senate. I’m more cautious optimist than election analyst, but I’d call that a successful night.
+ I like to imagine soon-to-be-unemployed White House Senior Adviser Stephen Miller’s upcoming résumé: Results-driven racist with a passion for fascism seeks like-minded employer to broadly scapegoat individuals at fault for my own character failings. Problem-solving disrupter unburdened by transparency or accountability. Track record of success in managing cross-dysfunctional teams, kidnapping children from their parents, and jumping into a girls’ track meet mid-race to publicize my deep-seated self-esteem issues. Available immediately.
+ When I consider who is best positioned to carry forward the self-immolating torch of Trumpism and re-energize his followers for the next presidential election, it’s certainly not any current member of the House or Senate (no matter how many shoes Ted Cruz kisses) nor any of the president’s equally unqualified and forever-dependent dependents. Instead, taking into account 45’s reckless disregard for the truth, his carefully crafted persona as a reality TV bully, and his complete socioeconomic disconnect with the demographic he deigns to represent, I’m convinced Tucker Carlson will be the GOP presidential nominee in 2024. Only the power of the presidency could surpass the power and paycheck that comes with being the Fox News Channel’s most popular provocateur. (Disclaimer: I hope I’m wrong.)
+ With nearly 240,000 Americans dead from COVID-19 and those numbers climbing quickly, this was a presidential election in which voting Republican could literally kill you.
+ Speaking of which, why is the media continuing to report on escalating COVID-19 infections and deaths? My president assured me they would stop talking about it on November 4.
+ No matter what an erratic lame duck president does in the next 70 or so days, it looks like Anthony Fauci will outlast his sixth administration and presumably stick around to advise his seventh on how best to navigate this pandemic. Because science always wins, and until our policy reflects that fact, this virus will continue to devastate the nation.
+ I’d love to sit here and say with conviction that the pollsters got it all wrong for the last time and that I’m officially over them… but come 2024, I’m sure I’ll play Charlie Brown to their Lucy, taking my running start and trying in vain to kick that football all over again.
+ The ultimate irony to Joe Biden winning Georgia may be that he owes his victory to his opponent’s #1 strategy this election season, voter suppression. Without it, Stacey Abrams (a force of nature if ever there was one) almost certainly would have won the governorship in Georgia in 2018, in which case she would not have started Fair Fight Action to organize, educate and advocate to promote free & fair elections across the state. The tireless activism of Abrams and her team is the single biggest reason Joe Biden became the first Democrat since Bill Clinton in 1992 to win Georgia. How’s that for karma?
+ I grew up a comic book junkie, and while a nearly 78-year-old Joe Biden may be no Superman, it certainly does feel like the country took a heroic step forward this week in its battle for Truth, Justice & the American way.
+ And on January 20, the whole world will watch as the President-Elect transitions into his new role as the 46th President of the United States, while the current president makes his own transition from one-time leader of the free world to classic flight risk. Note to Secret Service: you may want to keep an eye on the back doors at Mar-a-Lago.
+ Bottom line: I love my progressive and conservative friends alike, but we all deserve so much better than the past 4 years. We need the Republican Party in this country, just not the untethered version we’ve seen in recent years that peddles easily refuted lies and cuckoo conspiracy theories, led by a petty, score-settling Narcissist-in-Chief and bolstered by his enablers. Nor do we need the bomb-throwers who rail mindlessly against the corruption and inefficiency of government while doing everything in their power to make that a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Naively optimistic as it may sound, I know huge challenges like a global pandemic, climate change and income inequality can be conquered when we set aside personal differences and agree to work together (case in point, Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act which passed the Senate on a 60–39 vote and which provided an additional 20–24 million Americans with health care coverage). Because Bill Clinton said it best: “There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.”
Now we just have to roll up our sleeves, get out there and prove it. 🇺🇸
