It is what it is

This Chris Cuomo interview with Biden last night about his conversation with Trump regarding COVID-19 highlights in some ways why many of us had Biden ranked very low among the 20 or so serious contenders for the Democratic nomination (Serious here is defined very broadly to exclude obvious joke candidacies like Williamson, Gabbard, and the 107-year-old guy from Alaska who got dragooned into the race by a couple of teenagers doing a school project or something. Not looking up the details.)

In the interview Biden comes across as very old — he seems to have a kind of washed-out look and affect — and therefore more than a bit shaky. His respectful attitude toward the moral monster in the White House might be 11th-dimensional campaign chess (No malarkey! I can work with well-intentioned Republicans! Let’s get back to normal! etc.) designed as pablum for the crucial demographic of profoundly disengaged and/or hopelessly naive idiots who want “the politicians in Washington” to stop fighting and come together to Do the Right Thing. Let’s hope so, though I suspect Biden doesn’t have to act very hard at all to get with that particular script, assuming that’s what it is. (As to those crucial swing voters, I forget which LGM poster used this analogy: the poster likes to work on cars as a kind of serious hobby, and s/he described election day as “everybody work on your own car today” day.)

Electing Biden is, it should be unnecessary to say, utterly crucial for preserving any semblance of a defensible political system in this country (nearly as important: getting control of the Senate back). Everyone reading this should do everything they reasonably can to make those things happen. Nevertheless Biden winning the Democratic nomination is a failure of the process, when there were, conservatively, a dozen better actual as opposed to merely hypothetical options presented to the voters.

Obviously these particular observations aren’t constructive in that regard: they’re just a form of venting, as I — and I imagine many of you — come fully to grips with where we are and where we might be heading. Sue me if I post too long.