gut punch or relief?
I’m saddened. He’s a good man, and deserved better of his party and, it may be, of his country.
I didn’t watch the debate, not because I feared Biden would botch it, as apparently he did, but because I try to limit my exposure to the short-fingered vulgarian. From the accounts of friends who watched, though—and pretty much everything I’ve read—he fumbled badly. It didn’t seem to me as though a bad night should determine the outcome of the race, but as more and more Democrats piled on, as well, of course, as the “prestige press,” I had begun to fear that the campaign would not survive taking all that incoming fire from both sides plus the Fourth Estate.
That Biden has lost a step is apparent. It may even be that the White House staff has been pulling, to an obviously lesser extent, if so, an Edith Wilson. And I suppose there are grounds for concern as to how he might get through a second presidential term that would finish up just a couple of months past his eighty-fifth birthday. FDR, I have read, commenced a steep decline at the end of 1943, and thereafter was only “himself” for a couple of hours a day: any decisions that needed his input or sign-off had to be slotted into that golden interval. Of course, by that time he had assembled, so to say, a well-oiled administrative machine, a government that ran domestically and fought a global war abroad without his direct oversight. But Cæsarism and senescence ain’t a good mix, and we have now halved that risk.
So, Harris. I regarded her as a showboater before she was elected to the Senate; was presently surprised thereafter. She did not secure traction in a crowded field during the 2020 primary season, but this time out she has a thicker résumé and more, if you will, momentum, and while it is never prudent to underestimate the Democratic Party’s fractiousness and capacity for self-immolation, the prospect of a revanchist Trump Restoration ought to concentrate the collective mind wonderfully.
And I think the other side, after being drunk with post-debate triumphalism for three weeks, will fear her candidacy, I expect they’ll turn the racism and misogyny to eleven—but really, at this point that’s by way of preaching to the choir, innit?
cordially,
I didn’t watch the debate, not because I feared Biden would botch it, as apparently he did, but because I try to limit my exposure to the short-fingered vulgarian. From the accounts of friends who watched, though—and pretty much everything I’ve read—he fumbled badly. It didn’t seem to me as though a bad night should determine the outcome of the race, but as more and more Democrats piled on, as well, of course, as the “prestige press,” I had begun to fear that the campaign would not survive taking all that incoming fire from both sides plus the Fourth Estate.
That Biden has lost a step is apparent. It may even be that the White House staff has been pulling, to an obviously lesser extent, if so, an Edith Wilson. And I suppose there are grounds for concern as to how he might get through a second presidential term that would finish up just a couple of months past his eighty-fifth birthday. FDR, I have read, commenced a steep decline at the end of 1943, and thereafter was only “himself” for a couple of hours a day: any decisions that needed his input or sign-off had to be slotted into that golden interval. Of course, by that time he had assembled, so to say, a well-oiled administrative machine, a government that ran domestically and fought a global war abroad without his direct oversight. But Cæsarism and senescence ain’t a good mix, and we have now halved that risk.
So, Harris. I regarded her as a showboater before she was elected to the Senate; was presently surprised thereafter. She did not secure traction in a crowded field during the 2020 primary season, but this time out she has a thicker résumé and more, if you will, momentum, and while it is never prudent to underestimate the Democratic Party’s fractiousness and capacity for self-immolation, the prospect of a revanchist Trump Restoration ought to concentrate the collective mind wonderfully.
And I think the other side, after being drunk with post-debate triumphalism for three weeks, will fear her candidacy, I expect they’ll turn the racism and misogyny to eleven—but really, at this point that’s by way of preaching to the choir, innit?
cordially,
