I am not going to predict the outcome of Tuesday's election, despite a temptation to do so. I have relied throughout the campaign on Nate Silver's analysis on his substack. His model shows tiny gains on Harris's part over the last few days, but Trump still has a marginally higher percentage chance of winning--a gap that is really irrelevant since we are having this election only once, not at least 100 times. A coin flip, in effect, will determine the winner. At the same time, Silver's simulations find a good possibility that whoever wins may do so by a comfortable margin in the electoral college, because most of the seven swing states may well go the same way. That would be blessing. We are now in the position of a combat soldier facing two more months of a hazardous tour of duty or a patient awaiting the results of a biopsy or CT-scan that will determine whether they have a fatal disease. Those situations, like this one, are so anxious that those involved would honestly prefer any outcome--even the worst one--to the continuation of their uncertainty. I feel that way about the election, and it would be easy to write a few paragraphs on the probable sources or consequences of either a Trump or Harris victory to pretend that it didn't exist--but it does, and I am determined to live with it for about three more days, and maybe more.
The current New Yorker, however, includes a fascinating article by Nicholas Lemann on what the Biden economic policies are actually accomplishing, and how little political difference they have made. I must have begun reading Lehmann in the late 1970s and I am now shocked to discover that he had only just graduated from college at that time, and that he is actually seven years younger than I am. He has always been interested in the lives of ordinary people. He runs down the major pieces of legislation that passed during Biden's first two years, and he argues (most debatably in my opinion) that they may have been more significant than what Lyndon Johnson managed to do. He focuses on the infrastructure bill and the Build Back Better Act, eventually passed as the disastrously renamed Inflation Reduction Act after Joe Manchin rejected it in its original form. Those acts are reshaping parts of the American landscape with transportation improvements and new factories to build microchips, electric cars, and clean energy technology. Politically, however, they seem to have had no impact whatever, partly because Kamala Harris never talks about them. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg has been the administration's point man traveling the country to inaugurate new projects, but the media, as far as I can see, ignores him. This, as Lemann mentions at one point, contrasts with FDR, whose measures had an immediate impact, and who spent a lot of time traveling the country to speak at the dams and bridges and other projects. That is why the Democrats increased their Senate and House majorities in both 1934 and 1936.
It does seem that great things nowadays take a lot longer to accomplish than they did in the middle third of the twentieth century--if they can be accomplished at all. Compare the interstate highway system to the California high-speed rail project, for instance. The marketing failure, however, is another matter Joe Biden spent 36 years in one of the safest Senate seats in the country, working behind the scenes. He failed in two attempts to market himself to the American people as a presidential candidate before becoming vice president. More importantly, successive Democratic presidents from Clinton onward have spent their political capital on one or two pieces of legislation during their first two years--usually getting one of them, in Biden's case getting three--only to lose the House of Representatives in the midterms, and with that, any chance of doing anything further. Obama got Obamacare, but it took another three years to roll it out, and the roll-out was a public relations disaster. Biden in his first few years did nothing about the issue the voters cared about most--inflation. Rather than focus on their actual accomplishments, Biden and then Harris made Donald Trump the biggest issue in the campaign, continually repeating that his election was an entirely unacceptable outcome--even though half the country obviously disagrees. Harris has emphasized this even more in the last few days of the campaign, while promising, like Clinton, Obama and Biden before her, to help the middle class.
Two things, it seems to me, are hurting the Democratic establishment in our era. The first is the sense that their policy proposals are so obviously right that they don't have to explain them to the nation. That was how they handled NAFTA and other trade agreements, and Obama's finance-friendly, "top-down" approach to recovery from the Great Recession. The second is the rise of Trump, which has convinced them that not being Trump should secure their victory. That strategy failed in 2016, barely succeeded in 2020, and has a 50-50 chance of succeeding now. Balancing that, perhaps, are the Dobbs decision and new red state abortion laws, which have given the Democrats what looks like a winning social issue.
Nearly half a century of neoliberalism has left much of our population in a precarious economic state. I have been struck by the complete failure of the government to even try to affect inflation--quite a contrast to our last bout with inflation in the late 1960s and all through the next decade, when Nixon may have saved his presidency by imposing wage and price controls. Lemann shows that Biden did take some long-term steps to improve the lot of ordinary Americans in the heartland--but those steps had to be highlighted and sold. The administration preferred to fill its favorite newspapers with headlines about Donald Trump's legal problems, which have not captured the country's admiration.
