EASTER 2022 -- THE ESSENCE OF JOE BIDEN

EASTER 2022 -- THE ESSENCE OF JOE BIDEN

It's very hard to be an optimist these days.

Inflation is as high as it's been in forty years.  Political opportunists in the Republican party are embracing that fact and sending it into battle in an effort to rid Congress of Democrats and the White House of Joe Biden.  

The media -- ever wary of being tagged as liberals and therefore ever-vigilant in making sure that GOP talking points get more than their fair share of time -- remind us of all of  this every day.  If we liberals push back, they point out that the contrary voices are being published.  

And they are . . .

Sort of.

But it's not front-page headline news.

You have to look.

For those willing to leave the front page for the distant recesses of the op-eds, Paul Krugman argues that the current inflation is more pandemic and supply-related and therefore more like the rising prices just after World War II than the endemic price hikes of  the 1970s.  The message is this is not transitory but it isn't endless either.  

For those willing to read The American Prospect, Robert Kuttner will point out the corporate profiteering helping to drive  the price side of the equation and the absence of the kind of social policies (child care, principally) needed to help combat a tight labor market. Yes, Virginia, available day care for the kids and health care for grandma will put a lot of people back to work and -- get ready for this -- increase the supply of workers, increase the supply of goods, and drive down prices.  

For those willing to subscribe to Heather Cox Richardson's substack-based Letters From an American, she'll recite the stupendous job growth over the last fifteen months, the fact that Americans survived the pandemic with more money in their bank accounts thanks to the government, and the reality that Covid could have been a personal economic catastrophe for more of us.  

The worst thing that can happen with Covid is that you die.

The second is that you get sick.

But bad as it was, second place could have been a lot worse.

Winding up sick is bad.  

Winding up sick and broke is . . .

As the toddlers say . . .

More bad.

We didn't.

And we have jobs.

Thank you Joe Biden.

Can I get an Amen for the guy?  Or a Hallelujah?  Or even some grudging respect?

Alas . . .

No.

The American memory is short.  And when its media eco-system is plagued with fact-free actors whose self-interest is advanced by forgetfulness, it becomes even shorter.  There's no sane world in which Donald Trump should beat Joe Biden in any 2024 re-match.  But in today's polls, they're even and some have Trump ahead.  So . . . 30,000 lies, "fine people" among neo-Nazis, ingesting bleach, pussy grabbing, the imminent destruction of privacy, reproductive and gay marriage rights by his three appointees to the Supreme Court, and an attempted coup on January 6 have been . . .

What?

Forgotten.

Well, that's how you get a Joe Biden stuck with an average approval rating of 41% for the past two months, notwithstanding a booming economy with the lowest unemployment rate since 1969, NATO resurrected from the prior administration's not too subtle attempt to kill it, and a war in Ukraine where the good guys are holding their own and may even beat the KGB autocrat who runs Russia and who Trump never had a bad word for.

Spare me the chorus of GOP naysayers who claim Biden didn't do enough early enough to arm Ukraine or sanction Putin and his cronies.  

Their guy froze $400 million in military aid in an effort to bribe Ukraine into investigating Hunter Biden, and regularly threatened to have the United States withdraw from NATO  and thus eliminate the only real threat restricting Putin's appetite for reconstructing present-day Russia in the model of his beloved USSR.  If Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania remain free, it will only be because they are now members of NATO.  And if Ukraine beats Russia, it will in part be because the western world united to provide the arms needed to do so.

I think it's way too premature to count Biden or the Democrats out.

In either the mid-terms or 2024.

Much of the populist energy that became wind in Trump's sails was based on their anger at a neo-liberal consensus that had led to gross inequality.  The Democrats are the only party at least trying to mitigate some of that.  The GOP is good at allowing Fox & Friends to stoke anti-Biden sentiment with the latest faux outrage over non-problems -- kindergartners aren't being groomed to change their sex and Ketanji Brown Jackson didn't go easy on pedophiles.

But that's all they have.

They can't confront inequality because they actually . . .

Are for it.

Nor has Biden exhausted his appeal.

He wasn't supposed to be a Senator in 1972 or a President in 2020.  He's stared death in the face and suffered personal tragedies that would have rendered most of us unwilling or unable to carry on.  But he did. In the words of his beloved Pope Francis spoken just this past Palm Sunday, he knows "things are never over . . . [W]e can always come back to life."  

When he spoke these words, the Pope was talking about forgiveness and redemption and preaching the faith that  his resurrected God (and mine) "can bridge every distance, and turn all mourning into dancing."

He certainly did not have Biden's political survival in mind.

But he could have.

For Biden has repeatedly come off the canvas, counted out only to return and be counted on.  

And  he is doing it again.

With NATO and Ukraine in a diplomatic coup de theatre that just might save western democracy from both the autocrats' whip and its own ennui.

And  with an economic plan that might ameliorate some of the inequality neo-liberalism created and wean its populist victims from Trump and the right wing's phony culture wars.

In their rush to judgment, the critics constantly miss the  essence of Biden:

There's always been a little Easter in him.