The ELECTION IN FIVE EASY POINTS

CAUTION - The picture does not reflect my thoughts here.

A friend wrote on one of my Facebook posts unrelated to the actual post - “Without meaning to disrupt your tour of our favorite Other country,  I do have 2 questions: who really won the US election, and what “should” the outcome be? I am, as you well know, asking this respectfully, mi amigo.”  Well thanks, amigo.

I think my friend thought this question might cause me discomfort.  If he did, he was wrong.  Elections in the US have many levels.   Let me offer five propositions about the recently concluded election, before the final vote is cast tomorrow (December 14) in the Presidential race.  But this election was not just about who lives in the White House.

#1 - Biden won the Presidency

From my perspective, a lot of the electorate was tired of Trump’s histrionics.  I believe he sealed his fate with the first debate performance.  It was horrid.   Who really lost in this election were the pundits and pollsters.  Both groups look increasingly like buffoons.  At the beginning of the cycle many of those dopes were predicting a big blue wave.  They were off by more than a scooch.  The GOP picked up 13 seats making Pelosi’s Speakership held there by a mere 9 seats.  In the Senate, the GOP lost two seats in Arizona and Colorado, while the Dems lost one in Alabama.  Worst case for the GOP is a 50-50 split.

That is not to diminish the positive things that the Trump administration did.  In spite of claims to the contrary, economic growth after the tax and regulatory changes adopted by the Administration were tangible.  Two statistics bear repeating - first, for the first time in a couple of decades, at the beginning of 2020 the number of jobs available exceeded the number of job seekers, that led to a real (after inflation) growth in incomes for the lowest paid workers.  His results in getting several players in the Middle East to regularize relations with Israel are positive.  I believe the ultimate result in the Presidential contest was not a strong positive reaction to Biden's Harding-like basement campaign but a desire to try to return to at least a bit more civility. 

#2 - There were some shenanigans in the election

There is plenty of evidence that there were irregularities in the election, but let me say at the outset, I do not believe they were determinative of the final presidential result.   We moved into a new election regime without a great deal of thought about how to assure electoral integrity.  So while that horrible example from 2018 of ballot “harvesting” seems to have been stopped, I believe that the new system was not without some things which reasonable people could help to improve in the next cycle.   But there were also benefits, a large group of voters decided to participate - turnout was amazing.  I think they were motivated.  Ideally, after we get through with the quibbles about this or that, thoughtful people should think carefully about electoral security.  We might well have transitioned into a new era with electronic voting.  But we did not think carefully enough about issues like when each state can begin and end the election and when counting can begin and end.   Some states prohibited counting until after election day - that seems like a silly rule.   Some states were looser than I think they should have been in accepting ballots long after the election.  In one agonizingly close congressional race in New York they even found a dozen votes in a drawer a couple of weeks after the election - that is simply wrong.   

We might also think about adopting the system for domestic voters that expats used in this election.  At the beginning of the cycle, realizing that we would be in Mexico, we tried to figure out how to vote.  There was a Federal site which required one to verify registration and then hooked us up with our local county registrar.   We faxed our completed ballots to the registrar and they confirmed we had voted. They confirmed back that they had received our ballots.

As noted earlier, I don’t believe the irregularities influenced the outcomes to a material level.  But get ready for tons of conspiracy narratives.   I am not a fan of Biden on many levels (Neither of us voted for President) but I hope he is smart enough to resist buying into the lunacy of the BC coalition (Bernie and AOC).  If he does buy the BC approaches, 2022 will look a lot like 2010.

While I think it is appropriate to make sure votes are counted correctly, I think Trump's continued unwillingness to accept the result looks a lot like nullification movements in the mid-part of the nineteenth century.  For those who have either a pathological dislike of Trump or an unrelenting support for him, we need to stop both.

I have a Spanish tutor in SMA who is excellent.  On Friday we talked about the perspective of time in politics.   There are two phrases which we spent a good deal of time on the tendencies of politicians to ignore long term consequences (a largo (or corto) plazo).   One of the priorities that all of us in what PJ O'Rourke calls the "Far Middle" is to begin to think about how to restore civil discourse.  The problem seems to be imbedded in most of the democracies around the world.

#3 - The voters made were pretty sophisticated in their choices.

Nancy Pelosi’s majority in the House was diminished by 13 seats, included in that list were four seats in California.  And based on the results in the legislative races across the country, the dems failed to win one legislative house.   One democrat commentator suggested “There’s a significant difference between a referendum on a clown show, which is what we had at the top of the ticket, and embracing the values of the Democratic ticket,” said Nichole Remmert, Ms. Skopov’s campaign manager. “People bought into Joe Biden to stop the insanity in the White House. They did not suddenly become Democrats.”

For my money, on the initiative front, Californians scored a trifecta.  They voted down by a narrow margin (sorry it was not higher) the idiotic proposal to create a split roll for commercial and industrial property.  Businesses are already fleeing the California environment and this nonsense would have exacerbated that trend.   The proponents argued that the multibillion tax increase would have no effect on our already lousy business climate and the voters saw through that bunk.   An attempt to reinstate affirmative action was rebuffed by a higher margin than the original proposition that passed the ban. (Prop 209).  Finally, the attempt to move Gig industries back to 1930s style labor law (an unabashed attempt by the SEIU to organize UBER drivers and others) was REJECTED by a huge margin.   Let's hope that the author of this nonsense does not come back with a variation (small chance).  

Then there was the attempt by the SEIU to buy a Sacramento Board of Supervisor’s seat in our home district.  The victorious candidate has been a resident of the district for his entire life. We supported him after hearing him in a candidate’s forum in the Spring. He seems remarkably untied to ideological extremes.  He had some good ideas about how to deal with homelessness  (which is a much smaller problem than in the camping area formerly known as the Bay Area) and infrastructure and even some thoughts on economic development.  His opponent took a series of positions which would satisfy AOC.  The former newspaper called the Sacramento Bee rode his candidacy like a racehorse.  But the good guy won.

#4 - The MAGA brand may be shifting

Dan Henninger, the astute deputy editorial page editor for the WSJ, noticed that rejection of the "do as I say not as I do" authoritarian policies of governors like Cuomo, Newsome, and Whitmer are on increasingly tenuous ground.  They should be.   But the people who are rejecting the arbitrary exercises of authority are not traditional Magaistas. A good poster child is the owner of a restaurant in LA who spent a lot of her own dough to construct a safe outside site for her patrons only to be closed down by  Mayor Garcetti's order for closure of all restaurants. Somehow the Mayor thought the ban should not apply to a production crew to set up a commissary next to her closed restaurant.

For a good part of this pandemic we’ve heard a “one best way” approach to the pandemic. No alternative views were acceptable.   So for example, Anthony Berenson, detailed examples of suppression of alternative points of view.   The media suppressed a Danish peer review study on the efficacy of masks.  Amazon refused to allow a KDP monograph from Berenson that questioned whether some policies we’ve adopted, almost without question, were efficacious.  While the Great Barrington Declaration (by three distinguished epidemiologists) did not get the coverage it should have, holes have begun to appear in the orthodoxy of both the media and the medical/political establishment.  Science is a process not an unalterable set of models.

Does that mean we should drop all safety strategies?  Of course not.  Should we support the loons on the right who support conspiracy theories of all flavors?  Nope.  Where we are going was seems to have been explained in the SCOTUS decision released on Thanksgiving Eve - ROMAN CATHOLIC DIOCESE OF BROOKLYN, NEW YORK v. ANDREW M. CUOMO, GOVERNOR OF NEW YORK.  The decision said the state of New York could not discriminate between bars and churches.   It carefully did not accede to claims of some of the evangelicals that the First Amendment expression clause allowed unlimited gatherings. While the decision was remanded to a lower level I it did provide guidance by arguing that if you can have 50 people in a bar you should also be able to have a similar number in a church or synagogue.  The only disappointment here was that the Chief Justice for some reason sided with the minority.   Justice Gorsuch made the right argument about as clearly as possible - “Government is not free to disregard the First Amendment in times of crisis. At a minimum, that Amendment prohibits government officials from treating religious exercises worse than comparable secular activities, unless they are pursuing a compelling interest and using the least restrictive means available.”  Roberts’ tortured dissent bought the BS that Cuomo has used more than once.   “There is simply no need to do so. After the Diocese and Agudath Israel filed their applications, the Governor revised the designations of the affected areas. None of the houses of worship identified in the applications is now subject to any fixed numerical restrictions.”   That sounds to me like a license for officials like Cuomo to reach for the stars and then to pull back when their ploy looks like it will be rejected. It is not as if he has not tried this approach before.  Specious is too kind to describe the Chief’s logic.  I am not sure who the Chief thought he was playing to but it certainly was not to the Constitution.

#5 - Who knows what will happen on January 5?

The 2020 election has two important elections to be decided before the inauguration of Biden.  Both are in Georgia.   There is tons of money descending into the state.  I watched part of the Loeffler-Warnock debate and was not impressed with the incumbent.   And while I think the debate format in these times is not helpful to understanding candidate positions, I think it was a mistake for Perdue to reject another debate with Osler.

So the final result for 2020’s election will have to wait until January 5 and 6 (the day of the specials in Georgia and then the Congressional confirmation of the Electoral College vote).   But as a response to my friend - who won the election?/ And what should be the outcome?   My response is "aren’t both answers obvious?"  The more we can frustrate the political class - the more I’m satisfied.

AN UPDATE ON THE BOOK 

This week I talked to an editor about working on "Of Course It's True, Except for a Couple of Lies".   I did a work count of the manuscript and it is almost 180,000 words.  I was impressed with the editor and thus will cycle the manuscript into her workflow perhaps in February.   Not being a fan of War and Peace I will spend the next couple of months refining the three sections.

We also discussed options on publishing.  At this point we are planning two editions - a traditional paperback and an Ebook.   As I have investigated options there are multiple options in publishing both versions.   As this progresses I will keep you informed.