Happy Days
Following a bathetic twilight
November 8th 2020
David Brin, the futurist and SF author, gave me an earworm yesterday. Normally that’s an annoying thing, but not this time: the song was “Happy Days Are Here Again.” I’m sure you know it. “…the skies above are clear again, let us sing a song of cheer again, happy days are here again.”
The song, popularized in the 1932 FDR campaign, became the unofficial anthem of the Democratic party up until about 1980, when centrists took over the party and decided they could win more by appealing to corporations than they could appealing to people. The thinking was that if they behaved like Republicans – back then a sane if wrong-headed party – they would attract Republican voters, or at least get right wing Democratic voters back. It didn’t work, of course, and we didn’t see a Democratic president again for 12 years. Bill Clinton wasn’t interested in evoking FDR, but came up with a cheery anthem of his own: “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow.”
In this election, Trump relied more on music than did the Biden campaign, but it was severely undercut that Trump used the music without permission and usually over the vociferous objections of the artists involved.
“Happy Days Are Here Again” is apt, not because Biden is a populist leftist, but because his inauguration will bring about one of the great gusts of hope that occasionally punctuates American life. That happened (obviously) in 1932 when the nation was in the verge of collapse. We saw it again in 1960, when the New Frontier pointed to a rosy future. In 1980 Reagan was there to restore America’s reputation as the Shining City on the Hill. Clinton offered tomorrow. Obama offered Yes We Can.
This one is a bit different. Biden didn’t offer a grand vision or a great sense of optimism. He was a return to normalcy ofter four years of the most loathed and incompetent president in American history. Oh, that’s happened before: two of the gusts stemmed from a public view of presidents who were seen as weak and/or unable to do the job, Hoover and Carter. (Both went on to become public heroes after their political lives ended, but that’s not going to happen here). Biden didn’t have the charisma of a Reagan or an Obama, and time will tell if he has the boldness and courage of the seemingly affable “go-along-to-get-along” Franklin Roosevelt, but he steps over an aching void left by his predecessor. He’ll have to seriously screw up to not have the support and well-wishes of a majority of the American people, including sane Republicans.
There is a way to screw it up, of course. There was jubilation similar to what we’re seeing today when Nixon left office, and it lasted for several days before Ford preemptively pardoned Nixon. Ford may have hoped it was a step toward reconciliation and forgiveness, but it had the opposite result. Most of the goodwill that Ford had gained from simply not being Nixon vanished, and it set Republicans on a poisonous path where they believed that the law and basic morality no longer applied to them, and they could do what they wanted and get away with it. It lead to the excesses of the Reagan era, and the undermining of justice by Bush’s midnight pardons on his last day in office. We saw increasing contempt for those values under Bush the Lesser, before Republican ethics and morality collapsed entirely in the age of Trump. Both Clinton and Obama undermined their own administrations by trying to reconcile with thieves and liars.
Biden must not be another Ford, or Clinton, or Obama. I don’t think he would do anything as fantastically stupid as pardoning Trump preemptively, and I suspect he won’t “negotiate” half his sought-after policies away before negotiations even began, as Obama did with the public health initiative, but it isn’t enough not to coddle the crooks of the Trump administration or to be weak in negotiations; he must show the Republicans that he isn’t fucking around and undo much of the damage that has been done.
Biden needs to annul every XO Trump signed on day one. If there are any that had any merit, he (or Congress) can revisit them. Biden’s tax reforms are laudable, but he has to work with Congress to revoke the Trump giveaway.
He and the Senate must work together to annul the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett. It was passed out of committee despite a lack of a quorum, and the woman is dangerously unfit for the job. Nor is just ignoring quorum rules trivial; it is a bedrock of democratic procedure.
Biden has got to be hard-nosed about this, and show Republicans that he means business. Republicans need to learn that the tactic of holding the country hostage for their mad fringe wants will no longer be tolerated. The age of Newt Gingrich ends now. No more blackmail. He may even attract Republican support on the Barrett issue, since most were coerced into voting for her by the McConnell/Trump sledgehammer and may feel emboldened now.
I hope Biden will have the vision and courage to do, not just the easy things, but the difficult things. He might, but he will need the support of people like us—strong, vocal, steadfast support. He might be a great man, but as a president, he can’t do it alone.
On a more humorous note, there were three events that sort of summed up the mindlessness, the incompetence, and the utter lack of class of the Trump era.
First, there was the very strange press conference Giuliani and a team of lawyers staged at the Four Seasons in Philadelphia. Not the fabled hotel; a landscaping business in one of the seedier parts of town, located (as many of us are) between a porn shop and a crematorium. That may have been the absolute end of Giuliani’s carrer. We may hope.
Kimberly Guilfoyle offered a lap dance to the big-ticket fundraiser who gave Trump the most money. No, really. In some states, that would be formal grounds for a charge of prostitution. Gavin, count your blessings.
And finally, they had a strange “Trump vigil” in Redding, California yesterday. As the reporter (who kept calling it a “visual”) spent 8 minutes telling us little or nothing, Trumpkins stood somberly, Trump flags draped over shoulders, bemoaning the fact that godless communists were coming to take their guns, their god, and no doubt their expensive private medical insurance. The cult of Trump is a doomed one, but like all cults, will survive until the last member dies or forgets who Trump was.
And finally, to quote a popular Facebook meme, “I’m so glad Rush Limbaugh lived to see this day.”
