Impromptus

Heebie-jeebies in ’24, &c.

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Left: President Joe Biden speaks to reporters in South Lake Tahoe, Calif., August 25, 2023. Right: Former president Donald Trump in a police booking mugshot released by the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office in Atlanta, Ga., August 24, 2023. (Kevin Lamarque / Reuters; Fulton County Sheriff's Office / Handout via Reuters)
On Biden, Trump, Pence, Asa, MTG, Hillary, Simone Biles, Jim Abbott, and more

Monday was Labor Day. And Labor Day is the traditional kickoff of a general-election campaign. So we are a year away from that campaign. The smart money says that next year’s race will be like 2020’s — except that Biden will be the incumbent and Trump the challenger.

If Trump becomes president again, it will be the responsibility of the voters. “Here, the people rule.” But Joe Biden will bear some responsibility too. He could have been a one-term “bridge” and thrown his party’s nomination open. But he has chosen to run again, which entails considerable risk.

To be clear: If I were president, wild horses couldn’t prevent me from running for reelection, probably. But I would not necessarily be right.

(My detractors can rest easy: I got no shot at dog-catcher, much less the U.S. presidency.)


More in Donald Trump

• Speaking at a news conference the other day, Brian Kemp said, “The bottom line in the state of Georgia — as long as I’m governor, we’re going to follow the law and the constitution regardless of who it helps or harms politically.”

I thought, “Lordy, here is one Republican who’s goin’ rogue, by adhering to the rule of law.”

• Jonah Goldberg had a tart and apt remark:

And Kevin D. Williamson had a scalding, incisive column: “The Whited Sepulcher: On the supposed heroism of Mike Pence.” I agree with all of it. At the same time, my line is something like this:

Yes, Pence cleared a low bar on January 6 — he did not betray his oath. Yet, in TrumpWorld, that bar is not especially low. Some wanted to kill him, because he would not betray his oath. He would not cooperate in an attack on our democracy.

Was Pence for years an “enabler”? I would say so, yes. Since then, however, he has reverted to pre-Trump Pence. He has gone to Ukraine, for example. He has stood up for the right of Ukraine to defend itself against invasion and attempted subjugation. He has backed U.S. aid to Ukraine.

He provides a stark and — to me — welcome contrast with Trump, DeSantis, Ramaswamy, et al.

I’m not a psychologist, but I suspect that his thinking goes something like this: “This may be the end of the line for me, politically. But, if I go, I’m going to go — I’m going to finish — as my authentic self.”

• A report in the Washington Post begins,

A former leader of the far-right Proud Boys group was sentenced Thursday to 17 years in prison, just shy of the longest punishment imposed on a participant in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.

“That day broke our tradition of peaceful transfer of power, one of the most precious things we had as Americans,” U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Kelly said as he sentenced Joseph Biggs, 39, of Florida. “We don’t have it anymore.”

The defendant’s attorney was Norm Pattis. Here is some more from the Post’s report:

“There is a crisis of legitimacy in this country,” Pattis said, but “to suggest that this is the responsibility” of the Proud Boys “is silly.” He questioned why Trump was not charged with seditious conspiracy when he was indicted on other felony counts related to the 2020 election. “They heeded the president’s call,” he said, and are now being punished “for taking their president seriously.”

Interesting.

• Asa Hutchinson is a pre-Trump Republican. He also has a great deal of experience. He has been a U.S. attorney, a congressman, the DEA administrator, a Homeland Security official, and governor of Arkansas. His views are conservative — concerning the role of government, economics, foreign policy, law enforcement, etc. Personally, he exudes decency. He is now running for the GOP presidential nomination.

Obviously, he has no chance. But I’m glad he’s in the arena. I’m glad his candidacy is on the menu. He gives pre-Trump Republicans something — someone — to vote for. The nat-pops have plenty of choices. Others deserve choices too.

(I’m for a market in candidates, as in other things.)

• For years, when I heard “Haley,” I thought Haley Barbour. I’m getting used to thinking Nikki Haley. In the NBA, “A.D.” always meant Adrian Dantley to me. I had to get used to thinking Anthony Davis . . .

• Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.) is an Alex Jones guest. I have not quite gotten used to this: mainstream Republicans appearing on the Alex Jones show. He is such a hateful, harmful liar. Greene is very close to Kevin McCarthy, the speaker of the House, who pours praise on her. This is the world we live in.

Donald Trump, too, was an Alex Jones guest. This was during the 2016 presidential cycle. The president-to-be said to Jones, “I just wanted to finish by saying that your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down. You’ll be very, very impressed, I hope, and I think we’ll be speaking a lot.”

• Adam Grant, a professor at the Wharton School, penned a column headed “The Worst People Run for Office. It’s Time for a Better Way.” Said he, “. . . if we want public office to have integrity, we might be better off eliminating elections altogether.”

He continued,

If you think that sounds anti-democratic, think again. The ancient Greeks invented democracy, and in Athens many government officials were selected through sortition — a random lottery from a pool of candidates. In the United States, we already use a version of a lottery to select jurors. What if we did the same with mayors, governors, legislators, justices and even presidents?

Here is what I wanted to quote especially:

A lottery would also improve our odds of avoiding the worst candidates in the first place. When it comes to character, our elected officials aren’t exactly crushing it. To paraphrase William F. Buckley Jr., I’d rather be governed by the first 535 people in the phone book. That’s because the people most drawn to power are usually the least fit to wield it.

• Very interesting is an article in The Atlantic by Michael Powell: “A Democratic Senator Defends ‘Rich Men North of Richmond.’” The subheading reads, “A hit country artist offended progressives who couldn’t recognize his song as a primal cry of pain.”

The senator we are talking about — the defender of “Rich Men North of Richmond” — is Chris Murphy, of Connecticut. He was “struck,” writes Powell, “by the anguish encoded in a haunting song by an artist who struggles with alcoholism and depression, and who lives in a camper in rural Virginia.”

Murphy said the following to Powell: “To just ridicule and dismiss the things that he is saying is a real lost opportunity. I worry that we are entering a world where we don’t talk unless people are 110 percent in alignment with us.”

I thought of Hillary Clinton and her infamous appearance at a fundraiser in September 2016. Everyone knows she said “deplorables.” That word will be hung around her neck forever. It will be part of our political vocabulary for generations.

Her fuller remarks are interesting. Said Clinton, to those Democratic donors in New York,

We are living in a volatile political environment. You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. . . .

Now, some of those folks, they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.

But the other basket — and I know this because I see friends from all over America here — I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas, as well as, you know, New York and California — but that other basket of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change.

It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything [Trump] says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroine, feel like they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.

• There is almost nothing sweeter, in all the world, than a comeback. You’re flat on your back and up you spring. “Simone Biles wins record 8th U.S. gymnastics title,” reads a headline. “The victory cemented a dominant comeback to the top of the sport just weeks after Biles returned from a two-year break to focus on her mental health.”

That article is here. Sweet, and thrilling.

(The world, or some of it, came down on Simone’s head in the summer of 2021. I wrote about this in an Impromptus, here.)

• Let me reflect for a moment on another athlete.

We had Jim Abbott at the University of Michigan (in my hometown of Ann Arbor). Yes, he was a star pitcher. But do you know that he had played quarterback for his high-school football team? And it wasn’t a rinky-dink high school either — it was Flint Central.

What an athlete. What a man. His achievements are awe-inspiring. Chalk one up for the human race, in the form of Jim Abbott.

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