Americans have nowhere to go

Democrats have utterly failed to provide voters an alternative to Trumpism

One of the topics before the nation currently garnering buzz is trepidation among Democrats about Joe Biden.

There’s of course the matter of his frailty. Not every 79-year-old is markedly losing physical robustness, but Biden sure is. The increasing incoherence of his remarks and the stumbling on the Air Force One steps are unsettling signs.

Then there are his lame excuses for the worst inflation in forty years. He trots our that hackneyed-in-the-extreme evergreen “corporate greed,” sometimes couching it as “price gouging,” which depends for its definition on the highly subjective criterion of what a “reasonable” price is. He’s also fond of blaming inflation on Vladimir Putin.

Actually, to a considerable degree, inflation is due to the disdain that Biden, like most Democrats of the last twenty years, has had for the cheap, abundant, consistently available normal-people energy forms, preferring instead play-like energy forms that do not hold their own in the marketplace.

And while much of what Biden has wanted to do in terms of federal spending has (thankfully) not come to pass, his incessant talk about subsidies for things like prescription-drug price controls, child care and pre-K, long-term care and electric vehicles - actually, he uses the term “investing in” - makes markets jittery. To be sure, the gargantuan spending package the administration did get Congress to pass - the American Rescue Plan - sure as hell did contribute to inflation.

The two outlier Democrat Senators - Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema - kept the even more profligate Build Back Better package from becoming law, but there aren’t any other Democrats thanking them for it. Were Joe Biden to decide he wasn’t going to run for re-election, neither of them would have any more of a chance as nominee contenders than Liz Cheney would among Republicans.

And while Joe Biden got some deserved kudos for shoring up Western unity in the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, his overall foreign-policy scorecard is a mixed bag, the most glaring F on it being the horrific blunder that was the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Even if Biden were to bow out, what kind of a bench of contenders could fill the vacuum? Kamala Harris is mainly known for two things regarding her performance as Vice Presiden: staff disarray and low morale, and uttering word salads nearly as leafy and wildly tossed as those of the Very Stable Genius. Sometimes one hears Pete Buttigieg’s name mentioned, but, seriously? What has he done to distinguish himself as Transportation Secretary, or, for that matter, what did he do to stand out as South Bend mayor other than alienate the city’s black community? And it must be said that, for all the cultural change America has experienced in the last couple of decades, a guy married to another guy would not be able to get enough votes from the general American public to put him over the top in 2024. Would Adam Schiff be able to rally a majority of the nation’s voters?

So it’s not only looking grim for Democrats in the midterm elections, but it’s hard to see how they convince the people of this country that they are worthy of getting another four years of policy-shaping.

Which leaves the Republican Party as the only - well, port in the storm doesn’t seem like an apt metaphor, does it?

One hears some talk about the GOP starting to move past a Trump era and forge the next phase of its identity based on a broader orientation to the state of the nation. DeSantis does seems to have growing appeal out west. But, sorry, Donald Trump is far and away the favorite potential 2024 presidential candidate among Republicans.

He can insult Bill Barr (by the way, he's trashed a whole lot of people who left his administration; did he not have any inkling during the hiring process in each case that the person was not going to be to his liking?), he can throw Mo Brooks under the bus, can even throw his own daughter under the bus. His base doesn’t care. In fact, a large portion of it thinks that kind of behavior is great.

No, the Republican Party is still going to be the repository of cowards, nuts and sycophants come 2024.

The blame for that lies squarely with Republicans themselves, but Democrats are to blame for not offering anything viable in the way of an alternative.