By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, July 01,
2024
Happy Canada Day, eh.
In other news …
Conservatives talk a great deal about bias in the press,
almost always referring to viewpoint bias: This guy is pro-Democrat, that guy
is anti-gun, that newspaper doesn’t like evangelical Christians, etc. But that
is not the only kind of bias in journalism, or even the most important kind of
bias. One very, very powerful kind is drama bias—I mean the bias toward
excitement, toward big stories, toward stories with a kind of literary or
cinematic quality. A reporter is happy if he’s working on a story, but he’s
happier if he’s working on a bigger story, and happiest if he’s working on the
biggest story of the day.
Journalists are not making up those stories about Democrats
having panicky conversations about dumping Joe Biden as their 2024
candidate following his
disastrous debate with Donald Trump—a debate that left many people who are
not bitter partisans wondering sincerely whether Biden is really credibly able
to finish up his current term, much less ready to serve another. It is not easy
to make quondam game-show host and pornographic dabbler/diddler Donald Trump
seem like the relatively safe, confidence-inspiring choice, but Biden was out
there looking like you wouldn’t want him in the driver’s seat of a Buick, much
less the big chair at the White House. So, those conversations are really
happening.
But they almost certainly are not going to mean very
much.
We want them to. And by “we” I mean those of us who make
our livings from clicks and subscriptions and advertising sales, and those of
us who have invested way too much of our lives in the tumbling minutiae of
competitive democracy. It would be a huge story: Who would play
Alexander Haig and leave Joe Biden with the political equivalent of a bottle of
whiskey and a revolver? Who would take up the nomination? How would
Kamala Harris be pushed aside? Can Kamala Harris be pushed aside? Must
Kamala Harris be pushed aside? Etc.
My sense is that if something dramatic doesn’t happen
this week, then nothing is going to happen. Indeed, even now one already senses
that the moment has passed, that any sense of urgency there was has dissipated.
Inertia is one of the most powerful forces in the universe, right up there with
greed and stupidity. One suspects that if Biden were going to have a
come-to-Jesus moment, he’d have had it by now. Biden doesn’t seem to be one of
those guys who wants to slow down and spend more time with his family—and, given the
family, it is difficult to blame him: He is a patriarch of putzes. One
might be tempted to appeal to his patriotism, but Joe Biden is, first and
foremost, a textbook example of the stunted sort of man who has never
discovered anything he cares about more than himself. Of course, the irony of
such a man losing his position to Donald Trump would be practically
Shakespearean.
Democrats are already wandering
onto the path of least resistance: the “parliamentary” strategy.
Democrats terrified by Biden’s obvious disability and
dreading his likely—at this point, very likely—loss to Trump
but too cowardly to do the right thing and put the (political) knife in his
back have a comforting story to tell themselves: “We don’t have to convince
Americans that Biden is up to the job. We have to convince them that a Biden administration
would be up to the job, that the Democratic agenda is preferable to the
Republican agenda, that—the country having failed to collapse since 2021—there
is no reason to suspect that it would collapse under a second Biden term. We’d
have such figures as Antony Blinken and Janet Yellen keeping steady hands on
the tiller while Rudy Giuliani and Peter Navarro languish in bankruptcy or jail
or whatever, kept at a respectable safe remove from the levers of power. It’s
us or those mean Republicans.”
That’ll probably work pretty well for Labour leader Keir
Starmer, whose party
is set to crush the Conservatives in the U.K. elections on Thursday. Yes,
who Starmer is and what sort of man he is matter to British voters, but what
Starmer et al. are saying in their campaign is less “Vote Starmer” and more
“Vote Labour, Especially Considering What an Absolute Bag of Dicks the
Conservatives Have Proved To Be Lately.”
But the United States is not the United Kingdom. We do
not have a parliamentary system. Whoever the president is in 2025, he is
reasonably likely to be dealing with a Congress in which at least one house is
controlled by the opposite party—and if he doesn’t start that way, he’ll
probably end up that way in two years. In some ways, the U.K. prime minister is
a much more powerful figure (in his context) than is the U.S. president—the
prime minister is the executive and the head of the legislative branch and is
much less constitutionally constrained than is the U.S. president.
The difference—the important one—is that the president of
the United States is the president of the United States, and is
therefore in possession of vast powers enjoyed by no British or European head
of government, or, indeed, any head of government anywhere in the world. And
there’s the weirdness of Americans’ sacralizing attitude toward the president:
To put it in American terms, the British PM combines the power of the president
with that of the speaker of the House; to put it in British terms, the American
president combines the power of the prime minister with the special cultural
status of the monarch.
That’s a lot to invest in one guy, often a jackass, in
one office. But that is how we do it. And that is why Democrats are not going
to reelect Biden on such proffers as: “Sure, he’s basically an eggplant, but
he’s a Democratic eggplant.” Or: “Of course the president is going to be more
or less incapacitated, but just think of who we could get in there as deputy
assistant undersecretary of health and human services. And do you really want
Donald Trump hand-picking the next person to wield the awesome powers of the
office of the Supervisor
of the Motion Picture Preservation Lab? Somebody has to run the Federal
Theater Project—is it gonna be us or them?”
I have suggested in the past that presidential candidates
should try to run as administrations. (I know: They can’t, because
there’s aweird law
against promising people appointments.) In the United Kingdom, they have
the “shadow Cabinet,” with members of the opposition taking on the job of
nitpicking the work of this or that Cabinet minister, and extending that to an
electoral feature in the American context would, I think, enrich our elections.
I don’t think it matters very much who the secretary of agriculture is (those
ethanol bastards are going to get paid, no matter what) most of the
time, though I will thank Brother Stirewalt for his recent interview with Henry
Wallace biographer Benn Steil, reminding us that it does sometimes matter
who is secretary of agriculture.
The USDA is prime humor material, of course, but it very
often does matter who is secretary of state, of commerce, of energy, who is
administrator of the EPA, etc. There is no circumstance under which I would
support Trump’s bid for the presidency, but it is not difficult to imagine one
of the parties or the other putting up a candidate who is himself unimpressive
or objectionable but who nonetheless manages to put together a team that might
make a thinking person feel a little better about voting for him. I think that
if the Democrats had put up someone like Michael Bloomberg—a competent
administrator with whom I have vehement policy disagreements—and if Bloomberg
had put together a campaign shadow Cabinet with a bunch of other competent men
and women (even competent men and women well to the left of where I’d like them
to be) a lot of conservatives and conservative-leaning moderates would have
felt just about okay voting for that ticket over the guy who, you know, tried
to stage a coup d’état the last time he was entrusted with power. Many
of my Democratic friends will insist that those same conservatives and
moderates should feel good about choosing Biden over Trump, too, but the
normative case is beside the point: Maybe they should strongly prefer
Biden to Trump, but they don’t.
And Biden and his team, in a case of astonishing
political malpractice, have given
them no reason to. They have made almost no effort to reach out to that
persistent 20 percent of voters who opposed Trump in the Republican primaries,
voting for Nikki Haley or another candidate even when doing so was guaranteed
to be fruitless. In 2020, Biden—who had been running for president since before
your favorite correspondent was old enough to vote—floated to the top of the
Democratic stew because he was seen as being simultaneously moderate enough and
partisan enough to be sufficiently appealing to a sufficient number of the
important Democratic constituencies. The idea was that, while most Democrats
didn’t particularly love Biden, they would fall in line behind him and do what
seemed to them most important: beat Trump.
The problem for the Biden campaign in 2024 is that
uniting the major Democratic constituencies behind Biden will not be
sufficient to beat Trump. The 2024 electorate is not the 2020 electorate.
Biden probably will once again win the majority of the votes of young people,
African Americans, Hispanics, women, etc., but he probably will win smaller
majorities: less than the 57 percent of women he won in 2020, less than the
87 percent of African Americans, less than the 65 percent of Hispanics, less
than the 60 percent of voters 18-29 years of age, etc. Biden has real
problems with young voters and African American men, among others. And if
you are not the kind of slavering partisan who would crawl across a field of
broken glass to cast a vote against Trump—did Biden give you something to
vote for in that debate? I cannot imagine that he did.
The Biden campaign is astonishingly clumsy. Democrats
believe, with good reason, that abortion politics are on their side, but it is
difficult to paint Trump as an abortion radical when he is a lot less radical
on the issue than his party is. He is, strange as it is to write, the most
important moderating force on the abortion issue in the Republican Party today.
(Yes, that is purely self-interest—we are talking about politics, are we
not?) Trying to cast Trump as the radical on immigration runs into the opposite
problem: Trump is a radical on immigration, but the electorate is closer to the
immigration policies Trump has described than it is to the immigration policies
(and non-policies) Biden has enacted. Biden’s trying to blame persistent
inflation on Trump is a political loser, too: It is a very plain confession of
impotence.
We live in a weird political time, but at least one of
the old rules still applies: You win by putting together a bigger voter
coalition than the other guy. Biden and his team have shown themselves so far
entirely unable to do that, which is why so many people are dreaming about
Democrats swapping in a last-minute asinus ex machina, an asinine
proposition if ever there were one. As I said on The
Dispatch’s post-debate show, what I learned from 2016 was to be
suspicious when I feel extraordinarily certain about something. So, maybe I’m
wrong.
But I’m not wrong.
Words About Words
From our
friends at Slate:
The Taylor Swift Economy Has
Overtaken London. I Went to Its Epicenter.
No, you didn’t.
The word epicenter is used as though epi were some
kind of intensifier, as though epicenter meant very center or precise
center or something like that. But what epicenter means is: not
the center. The prefix epi- means near, often near and above or
near and preceding. The epicenter of an earthquake is the point
on the surface of the Earth above the center of the underlying seismic
action. The center of the earthquake is underground. The epicardium is
the outermost layer of the heart, just as the epidermis is the outermost
layer of the skin; epigenetics is the study of factors in gene
expression adjacent to, but not directly involving, genetics, meaning
the composition and configuration of the DNA sequence proper. The dura mater
is a membrane around the brain and spine; an epidural anesthetic is injected
into the space around the dura mater. (Don’t go poking into the dura
mater—it is one tough mother.) Epi also is used to mean in addition or
supplemental, as in epilogue and epigram.
More Wordiness
Alas, this is not a unique
error.
Look at what else is happening in
those very regions when it comes to home insurance: Providers are either
retreating from or dramatically heightening their prices in states like California,
Texas,
Florida,
and New
Jersey, thanks to their unique susceptibility to climate change.
I should send a note of thanks to Slate, the
incompetent editing of which gives
me so much
material.
If California, Texas, Florida, and New Jersey are all
similarly susceptible to climate change, then the quality they have in common
is, by definition, not unique to any of them. Unique means one
of a kind, not unusual or peculiar. The 26th Congress of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union diamond is unique—there is only one, and
there is no other named diamond with quite so stupid and evil a sobriquet. (I
much prefer the much more charming name—and story—of the Amarillo Starlight.
The market for unique diamonds is … an Enigma.)
The Bodleian’s copy of Venus and Adonis from 1593 is unique,
the only surviving copy in the world. A particular copy of Douglas Hofstadter’s
Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental
Mechanisms of Thought has the unique distinction of being the first book
sold on Amazon.
And, of course, you are unique.
Just like everyone else.
Furthermore …
A toy
rocket launcher isn’t a weapon, BBC.
But when she was arrested in late
February, the police found tens of thousands of euros in cash in her Berlin
flat and five weapons, among them a Kalashnikov assault rifle and a replica
rocket launcher.
Come on, dudes.
Economics for English Majors
Unexpected, huh? From
the Wall Street Journal:
High interest rates have had an unexpected
impact on U.S. housing. Instead of triggering a fall in home prices, as
happened with commercial real estate, costlier mortgages have pushed
residential values higher. The value of the median
existing home rose to a record $419,300 in May, according to the National
Association of Realtors. Before the pandemic, it was $270,000.
Blame the “lock-in” effect of
ultracheap mortgages secured when interest rates were low, which are trapping
owners in their homes. It is an unforeseen consequence of years of easy money.
Two-thirds of outstanding U.S. mortgages have a rate below 4%, according to Morgan Stanley’s housing
strategist Jim Egan. Were these homeowners to move, they would have to pay
close to 7% for a new 30-year mortgage. The gap hasn’t been as wide since at
least the late 1980s.
I don’t have any particular beef with Carol Ryan’s
report, but I did get a little hung up on the word unexpected. That
higher mortgage rates might lock up a great deal of the housing supply was both
foreseeable and foreseen. As an American
Enterprise Institute paper put it back in 2021, higher mortgage rates may
not slow down the increase in house prices if there is a severe supply
constraint. Markets are driven by supply and demand, and, in some
markets—particularly for big-ticket items such as houses and automobiles—supply
and demand are very strongly influenced by financing options.
There are many buyers who do not care as much what a car
or a house costs in toto as they care what their monthly
payment is going to be. That makes more sense with a house than with a car,
of course: Most people who buy houses expect (with no guarantee but not without
some reason) that they’ll be able to sell the house in 10 years or 20 for more
than they paid for it, so (the thinking goes) acquiring a debt and an
offsetting asset at the same time is more or less a wash (or better, if the
house’s value goes up a great deal), so what’s top-of-mind is managing monthly
expenses. (If you buy a car expecting it to appreciate, you’d better be paying
cash for collectable classics; that’s a risky proposition, too, something like
investing in art. You won’t find out for a while whether you’ve engaged in investment
or consumption.)
That being the case, it was reasonably predictable that
people with relatively low interest rates on their mortgages would not be eager
to swap those loans out for new mortgages with rates two or three times higher,
paying much more monthly for the same real level of housing consumption. If
rates go down, you might swap a $300,000 house for a $400,000 house, provided
the monthly payment doesn’t get too much bigger; but if interest rates are
going the opposite way, you’re not going to be as quick to switch—which means
your $300,000 house doesn’t go on the market.
You know what would make Americans feel like they had
more housing options?
More housing.
In Conclusion
Nobody in Joe Biden’s world is going to listen to me
about this, but they might listen to the editorial board of the New
York Times:
Mr. Biden answered an urgent
question on Thursday night. It was not the answer that he and his supporters
were hoping for. But if the risk of a second Trump term is as great as he says
it is—and we agree with him that the danger is enormous—then his dedication to
this country leaves him and his party only one choice.
The clearest path for Democrats
to defeat a candidate defined by his lies is to deal truthfully with the
American public: acknowledge that Mr. Biden can’t continue his race, and create
a process to select someone more capable to stand in his place to defeat Mr.
Trump in November.
The problem is that Joe Biden is too stupid, too
arrogant, too selfish, and too unpatriotic to do the right thing—which is to
say, his character is the same as it was before his mind decayed to its current
state. And so to avoid a relatively minor embarrassment, he has chosen a path
toward enormous shame. And that is completely in keeping with what we’d expect
of Joe Biden at any age.
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