Back to Normal Fails

 

Back in 2018, the NYTand all right thinking campaign consultants were giggling and acting shockedabout the undignified doings of this character named Trump, who was president.Instead of doing what presidents are supposed to do – remaining solemnly in the Oval Office, trying to look like a stuffed goose who was all about war for freedom, he was acting like a huckster, going out to rally his troops up and down the country.

The campaign industry people were right in the short run: the legislative races on the national level went against Trump. But in the long run, what an excellent strategy! This was not only using tweaking the demonstration form, merging it with the campaign rally, but it was hooking up the party to a national populist movement.

Now, of course, we have a D majority in the Senate and House and a D president. And they sit there helplessly as the R SCOTUS takes away everything the Dems produced in the last fifty years. They sit there helpless and the campaign industry geniuses think, hey, great time to cash in, sending out millions of spam ads, and the usual talking heads say, vote like your life depended on it. All pretending like the car is gonna move when it don’t have no gas, Sally.

Biden is sorta hopeless. I don’t think he has the energy or temperament to be a barker. What we need, desperately, is a barker. We have several women, as a matter of fact, who could do it. But instead of coordinating with these women – instead of going out there and in Trumpian manner vilifying the six outlaws, the six demagogues on the court, sitting on the citizenry – instead of making this a real fireworks election – we are getting pallid emails to VOTE! As if this was a just discovered thing. As if VOTING as in restoring the Civil Rights act of 1965 had not been voted down unceremoniously in Congress, without much after effect by the Dem executive branch. On to UKRAINE!

Trump, being a buncombe artist, discovered how to merge the kind of street politics that go into demonstrations and the political machine that is party politics. The Dems are so entirely blind to this obvious phenomenon in the age of Reality TV that they have planned – as far as I can see – nothing to make this a national campaign. Nothing about inflation, nothing about Roe Rights, nothing about the striking down of concealed weapons carry, nothing about how to limit, nay, dissolve the unconstitutional and undemocratic power of, the Court. Nothing, as the Fool said in King Lear, will get you nothing.