By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, May 03, 2020
The dating conventions b.c.
and a.d. were early victims of
cultural vandalism at the hands of those who cannot bear the thought of C. or
D., and they were replaced with b.c.e.
(“Before Common Era”) and c.e.
(“Common Era”), leaving history bisected by the same apparently unmentionable
Event but the Event itself unspoken. The 2020 presidential election can be
divided with the same convention, having been launched in the now misty
distance of history b.c.e. —
Before Coronavirus Epidemic — a very different time from the present.
Republicans in May c.e.
are worried. Trump’s poll numbers are down, and that does not seem to be the
result of Trump’s Trumping his way through a press briefing and spit-balling
daft ideas about mainlining Lysol or giving the old lungs a good scrubbing down
with Clorox. Democrats are worried, too, having apparently just realized that
Joe Biden is, was, and always shall be, Joe Biden.
May is a mess. What is October going to look like?
Barring some new dramatic development, Trump’s argument
for himself going into the election is going to be, roughly: “Things were going
great thanks to my policies, and then we suffered a setback from an
unforeseeable and unpreventable epidemic originating in China, which I have been
calling a threat for years. Thanks to my deft management, the horrible
worst-case scenarios we all heard about never came to pass, we minimized the
economic fallout to the extent that doing so was reasonably possible, and we
positioned ourselves for a rapid recovery.”
If we take the Congressional Budget Office forecasts of
April 24 as a guide, the second quarter is going to be an economic horror show,
with real GDP crashing by 11.8 percent. For perspective, that crater will be
deeper than the biggest
quarterly decline in recorded U.S. economic history. How did that play out
in presidential politics? It’s complicated. That earlier record-setting
quarterly decline happened in 1958, during the presidency of Dwight D.
Eisenhower, and the economy bounced back rapidly, growing just under 10 percent
in the third and fourth quarters of that year. By the time the election of 1960
rolled around, the economy was back in the dumps, and Ike wasn’t on the ticket.
But, even so, Vice President Richard Nixon pressed the charismatic young Jack
Kennedy in the closest election since 1916. The Eisenhower recession surely
hurt Nixon, but it was not dispositive.
(Here I repeat my usual disclaimer: Much of what we
believe about the relationship between presidents and economic performance is
pure superstition, but that does not change how those beliefs influence
elections.)
The CBO forecasts describe a different situation for
Trump. That harrowing 11.8 percent Q2 crash is expected to be followed up by
strong growth (5.4 percent) in Q3 and modest growth (2.5 percent) in Q4. Looked
at another way, the economy in Q2 is expected to be declining at an annualized
rate of 39.6 percent and then to grow in the following quarters at an
annualized rate of 23.5 percent and 10.5 percent, respectively. That’s an
absolute roller coaster, but a roller coaster headed upward on the eve of the
election.
On the flip side: The unemployment rate for Q2 is
expected to be catastrophic at 14 percent — and to get worse in Q3, deepening
to 16 percent. The unemployment numbers going into October are going to be
horrible and, worse for Trump, moving in
the wrong direction. The CBO expects that to reverse in the fourth quarter,
ending the year at a much-improved but still awful 11.7 percent. Trump may get
some credit for the GDP numbers but still get gutted by the unemployment rate.
That is a problem for an incumbent president whose case for himself has mainly
been an economic one. His prospects are going to be dependent on whether
Americans are moved more by the fresh memory of the pain they have been through
or by the fresh hope of the recovery that will — all of us must hope — by then
be under way.
Again, for the purposes of setting the stage for the
election, it does not much matter whether the assigning of credit and blame is
fair or sensible. Do not expect the world to weep over the possibility that
life has been unfair to Donald J. Trump. There is the possibility that things
could go worse than the CBO has forecast. There also is the possibility that
there is a major resurgence of coronavirus infections between now and the
election. Consider that in Texas, which is in the early stages of reopening,
there was a record increase in coronavirus deaths on Thursday and that Dallas
County reported a record number of new cases on the same day.
Those are, in total, some potentially grim prospects.
The great ray of sunshine in the Trump camp is one Joe
Biden of Delaware.
Trump may be facing ugly polls, economic catastrophe, and
a biblical plague on the land, but he also is almost certainly facing Joe Biden
on Election Day.
Biden, who is struggling under allegations that he
sexually assaulted Tara Reade, a former aide, has named former senator Chris
Dodd to head his vice-presidential search committee. This is political
malpractice in one very obvious way and one less obvious one.
First, the obvious: Chris Dodd’s Joe Biden problems are
worse than Joe Biden’s Joe Biden problems, and they include an account of
then–Senator Dodd and Senator Ted Kennedy sexually assaulting a waitress, in
public. This is not a story from some right-wing fringe blogger — this was from
Michael Kelly,
writing at the time for GQ. Joe
Biden has pledged to name a woman to the VP spot, partly to muffle his Joe
Biden problems, and this is who is running the show on his behalf?
What, Harvey Weinstein wasn’t available?
The less obvious problem with the Dodd arrangement is
that Biden and other Democratic leaders are overwhelmingly rich, old, and white
in a party that isn’t. Promising to put a woman on the ticket — but only if she gets the stamp of approval
from a 75-year-old white male millionaire party hack — is a dramatic
illustration of where the real power still is held in the Democratic Party.
What Biden has done here is to emphasize that in the Democratic Party of 2020,
women and minorities rise at the sufferance of Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, and
their ilk, and that men such as Chris Dodd are the hurdle everybody else has to
clear to get there.
Joe Biden made that choice — and, worse for his campaign,
the brain trust around him allowed
him to make that choice.
Some Democrats believed that nominating the familiar vice
president intimately associated with the sacrosanct person of Barack Obama was,
politically speaking, foolproof.
They underestimated the fool.
What are the next six months going to look like? Picture
two enraged old men fist-fighting on stilts — in a minefield, in a tornado,
after a flood.
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