American Politics

[Tiny 12]

But now hes on PBS and has a column in NYT.

So he must say certain things or he will be unemployed before 8 pm est.

He must say nice things about Barry Hussein, and Biden.

And that Orange man is a meanie.

Or else.

So you need to learn how to read between the lines to decipher what hes trying to say.

After I read the piece I googled him and saw he was a Republican, so did think the piece was kind of curious. Your explanation makes sense.

[Tiny 12]

I can't remember who it was that said it best, deport every single illegal alien.

And when you're finished goto the cemeteries and dig up the dead ones.

Just mi dos pesos!!

I draw the line at large breasted Cuban strippers. We need all we can get. Have you ever tried to chase poontang in Cuba? It's a pain in the ass. It's better if they come here.

[Tiny 12]

Love the way you guys bring up Solyndra but ignore the fracking technology boosted by Energy Department grants. Not every project is a winner but many are!

The cost of the green pork in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) will exceed $1 trillion according to researchers at Wharton and Goldman Sachs.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...r-later#xj4 y7.

The DOE's fracking-related grants and research were valuable to the industry. But I doubt the cost was 1/100th of $1 trillion. It may have been less than 1/1000th.

I don't have a problem with reasonable government expenditures on R&D for renewable energy, or for that matter a reasonable tax on carbon that wouldn't apply to exports. But $1 trillion in subsidies and incentives is way over the top. It's pissing off our allies and trading partners too, who rightly believe we're running roughshod over the WTO rules we agreed to.

I read an article on the Biden Administration's renewable energy czar and some of the projects he's encouraging, that I'm too lazy to try to look up. It sounded like he was unwisely throwing money around.

[EihTooms]

Personal savings before COVID were running around $1. 5 trillion, and they're currently $700 billion. Biden's American Rescue Plan (ARP) caused them to spike to 5. 7 trillion at the end of March, 2021! So there was a hell of a lot of money sloshing around that did indeed contribute to inflation.

That's not the main reason to criticize the ARP and the other legislation passed by Democratic politicians in 2021 and 2022, though, which in total represented over $5 trillion in unfunded spending. The main reason is the effect on the national debt. Yeah it would be great if the government could just hand out free money forever. But it doesn't work that way. Eventually you have to pay the piper.

As to job openings, there were 7. 8 million at the end of February, 2021, slightly higher than the level pre-COVID, just before the ARP was passed. Job openings did go on up to a peak of 12 million in March, 2022. So how much of that was because of jobs created by your beloved Democratic Politicians' legislation? And how much was because the lazier among us decided to sit on their asses a while longer because they got all that free Biden money?

I can't speak for the Marquis, but I have no problem making legal immigration of skilled foreigners easier. We need more scientists and engineers and the like. And I have no problem with a guest worker program that does not lead to citizenship. And finally I have no problem with immigration of foreigners from socialist countries like Cuba and Venezuela, especially women in the 18 to 30 age bracket, who are more likely to vote for Republicans than Democrats after having suffered the hardships of far left governments.

"Before Covid".

"Pre Covid".

Lololol.

Tell us more about American Nirvana before Trump's typically atrocious Repub stewardship of the economy and national security eventually laid the foundation for and created Trump's Pandemic.

How wonderful were things for the wealthy before Coolidge, Hoover and the Repub Congress' Great Recession?

How long was FDR a "failure" because he hadn't fully restored and recovered every crap result for the wealthy from that Repub disaster?

Yeah, yeah, we know, Obama came into office in the midst of GW Bush's spectacular economic and national security failures and was slammed by idiot Repubs for not fully recovering us from it as fast as previous Dems recovered us from previous Great Repub Disasters. Oh, my my my, "the slowest recovery since blah blah blah".

Remember? LOL.

Biden took over in the midst of Trump's Pandemic, Trump's Worldwide Economic Disaster, Trump's Violent Insurrection, etc, etc, etc.

Stop making us laugh with your sad lament that he has not yet fully recovered America to the condition it was in when Trump could coast on the amazingly positive trajectories he inherited from Obama-Biden while Trump was doing diddly squat except coming up with funny and insulting nicknames for his critics from a golf cart.

[Elvis 2008]

Tiny, this stuff is junk. This one was the best of the bunch. A total of 3030 participants were randomly assigned to the recommendation to wear masks, and 2994 were assigned to control; 4862 completed the study. Infection with SARS-CoV-2 occurred in 42 participants recommended masks (1. 8%) and 53 control participants (2. 1% Although the difference observed was not statistically significant, the 95% CIS are compatible with a 46% reduction to a 23% increase in infection.

If the difference is not statically significant, then the intervention does not work. Period! This % reduction is mental masturbation, a gimmick to sell an intervention that drug companies love, and it is meaningless if it does not reach statically significant.

The authors are making a big deal about 11 less infections in the mask group, and they lost 1100+ people to follow up. Do you know what this means, "Multiple imputation accounting for loss to follow-up yielded similar results. " I sure as hell don't.

I'm confident they provided protection.

At best, that means they prevent one infection out of 300+. Is that what people think when they wear masks or do they think it protects them 100% of the time? When you say you feel confident, does that confidence mean a less than 1% chance of working?

Elvis, I had this thrown at me a couple of times when I'd walk into restaurants during COVID wearing a mask and acquaintances would accuse me of making a political statement. That's ridiculous. It's a scientific and medical issue. It has nothing to do with politics.

If you are going to mandate something, it needs to work. Period! When you mandate something proven not to work, it is not medical. It is not scientific. It is purely political. When you wear a mask under the guise of preventing infection, all you are doing is virtue signaling and making yourself feel safer. You are not safer. You just feel that way.

[MarquisdeSade1]

To get cut off by that retard LMAO.

https://www.rt.com/news/582722-biden...ss-conference/

[GDreams]

I do not draw the lesson that Bidenomics is working. The Ryan McConnell Trump corporate tax cut in the long term will help more than Biden's sugar high. By lowering the corporate rate from the highest in the developed world to the middle of the pack, American companies can be more competitive. If Ryan had gotten his way and replaced the corporate income tax with a value added tax with refunds to exporters, we'd probably be running a trade surplus.

And the imposition of the GILTI tax on foreign earnings of American companies encouraged them to invest more in the USA, rather than overseas. The GILTI tax was also part of the Republicans' 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

Yes, Biden's industrial policy will increase investment and jobs in the USA. But how many future Solyndras (bankrupt manufacturer of solar cells championed by Obama) are among the recipients of Biden's pork? And the government spending on this will increase the national debt by trillions. Better to let the free market work. David Brooks at the start of the piece appears to recognize this, in criticizing China. I'm not sure why he contradicts himself at the end.

Love the way you guys bring up Solyndra but ignore the fracking technology boosted by Energy Department grants. Not every project is a winner but many are!

[MarquisdeSade1]

"I do not draw the lesson that Bidenomics is working. The Ryan McConnell Trump corporate tax cut in the long term will help more than Biden's sugar high. By lowering the corporate rate from the highest in the developed world to the middle of the pack, American companies can be more competitive. If Ryan had gotten his way and replaced the corporate income tax with a value added tax with refunds to exporters, we'd probably be running a trade surplus.

And the imposition of the GILTI tax on foreign earnings of American companies encouraged them to invest more in the USA, rather than overseas. The GILTI tax was also part of the Republicans' 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

Yes, Biden's industrial policy will increase investment and jobs in the USA. But how many future Solyndras (bankrupt manufacturer of solar cells championed by Obama) are among the recipients of Biden's pork? And the government spending on this will increase the national debt by trillions. Better to let the free market work. David Brooks at the start of the piece appears to recognize this, in criticizing China. I'm not sure why he contradicts himself at the end. ".

But now hes on PBS and has a column in NYT.

So he must say certain things or he will be unemployed before 8 pm est.

He must say nice things about Barry Hussein, and Biden.

And that Orange man is a meanie.

Or else.

So you need to learn how to read between the lines to decipher what hes trying to say.

[MarquisdeSade1]

"Personal savings before COVID were running around $1. 5 trillion, and they're currently $700 billion. Biden's American Rescue Plan (ARP) caused them to spike to 5. 7 trillion at the end of March, 2021! So there was a hell of a lot of money sloshing around that did indeed contribute to inflation.

That's not the main reason to criticize the ARP and the other legislation passed by Democratic politicians in 2021 and 2022, though, which in total represented over $5 trillion in unfunded spending. The main reason is the effect on the national debt. Yeah it would be great if the government could just hand out free money forever. But it doesn't work that way. Eventually you have to pay the piper.

As to job openings, there were 7. 8 million at the end of February, 2021, slightly higher than the level pre-COVID, just before the ARP was passed. Job openings did go on up to a peak of 12 million in March, 2022. So how much of that was because of jobs created by your beloved Democratic Politicians' legislation? And how much was because the lazier among us decided to sit on their asses a while longer because they got all that free Biden money?

I can't speak for the Marquis, but I have no problem making legal immigration of skilled foreigners easier. We need more scientists and engineers and the like. And I have no problem with a guest worker program that does not lead to citizenship. And finally I have no problem with immigration of foreigners from socialist countries like Cuba and Venezuela, especially women in the 18 to 30 age bracket, who are more likely to vote for Republicans than Democrats after having suffered the hardships of far left governments. ".

I can't remember who it was that said it best, deport every single illegal alien.

And when you're finished goto the cemeteries and dig up the dead ones.

Just mi dos pesos!!

[Tiny 12]

"I also left out the Woodrow Wilson Worldwide Pandemic of 1918. Wilson should have had secret CDC agents imbedded throughout Spain to prevent spread of the flu to other countries. ".

The American Renaissance Is Already at Hand.

Sept. 7, 2023.

A man in a hard hat and overalls stands atop a building tugging on leads from a crane, as the sun glares in the background.

Credit. George Etheredge for The New York Times.

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David Brooks.

By David Brooks.

Opinion Columnist.

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Two megatrends have shaped American life since the 1980's: The rise of China and the hollowing out of American industry.

China's economic boom prompted a thousand predictions that it will soon surpass us as an economic power, that the 21st century is going to be a Chinese century, that America is an aging, decadent nation destined for second place.

The hollowing out of American industry fed the sense that capitalism is betraying the middle class. America has a parasitic financial sector, but we don't make things anymore. Manufacturing jobs got outsourced to China and Mexico, and wages stagnated.

These two trends contributed to the sense that America is in decline to the angry, gloomy pall that has settled over political life.

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But it's beginning to look as if those two megatrends are reversing.

China does not look like a growing dynamic power, but a troubled, stagnating one. Growth rates are falling. The unemployment rate for those ages 16 to 24 in urban areas is at a demoralizing 21 percent. Private investment is sluggish. A forecast from Bloomberg Economics now projects that the size of the Chinese economy will not successfully surpass the size of the American economy despite its vastly greater population.

The causes of China's stagnation are myriad and deep: An overinvestment in real estate, the decline in foreign investment as the state become more menacing, the decline of exports, the demographic doom spiral. Since 2016, the actual number of births in China has fallen by nearly 50 percent.

But the core problems are endemic to the regime: Centralized authoritarian control is incompatible with a wide-open, innovative, free-flowing modern economy. Industrial policy may look good for a short time, but it ossifies. China now has a plethora of zombie corporations, which suck up subsidies without successfully competing in the marketplace. Open information flow is crucial to any nation; when the state suppresses information unflattering to the regime, then everything is bound to sink into mediocrity.

As the Chinese economy deflates, American industry is looking less hollow. America has a net gain of 530,000 manufacturing jobs since January 2017. The manufacturing boom has been torrid of late. Since late 2021, investment in the construction of manufacturing facilities has more than doubled.

Much of that boom is happening in the mountain West, the Upper Midwest and parts of the Southeast. Chips, electric vehicles, renewable energy sources and batteries are being manufactured in places like Michigan, Kentucky, Minnesota and Arizona.

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Over the last few years, for example, scads of tech firms have decided to invest in manufacturing plants in formerly rust belt Ohio: Intel ($20 billion), Amazon ($7. 8 billion), Google ($3. 7 billion). According to a Hoover Institution study, Ohio in 2020 attracted almost 14 times more new capital projects per capita than California.

In short, capital, construction and manufacturing are flowing back into many places that have taken their hits. Since 2011, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, wage growth has "accelerated more for high school graduates than for college graduates. ".

What lessons are we to draw from these two ongoing turnarounds? The first is that there's a lot of resilience and dynamism in America's brand of broadly free market capitalism. As I've noted before, in 1990 the European and American gross domestic products per capita were nearly neck and neck. Since then, America has surged ahead. American labor productivity increased by 67 percent between 1990 and 2022, compared to 55 percent in Europe and 51 percent in Japan.

In 2012 I heard a commencement speech by Dr. Atul Gawande that introduced me to the phrase "failure to rescue. " he reported on a study that found the best hospitals don't necessarily prevent bad things from happening, but they're really good at rescuing people when they have a complication to prevent failures from becoming catastrophes.

The American economy, especially in the Midwest, is kind of like that. Many of those places have experienced economic decline, but governments and people have shifted and adapted, and they are bouncing back.

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The second lesson I draw is that Bidenomics is working big time. President Biden promised to help America outcompete authoritarian China and to heal some of the economic divides at home. Both those goals are being achieved.

According to the Treasury Department, over 80 percent of the investment made through the Inflation Reduction Act is going to counties with college graduation rates lower than the national average. Nearly 90 percent of investments are being made in counties with below-average weekly wages.

I know many of you think Biden is too old, but I'the vote for a 100-year-old who could keep delivering results like that.

The third lesson I draw is that the right-wing populists are hopelessly outdated. Take, for example, the writer Sohrab Ahmari, who argues that "the state must also take a far more active role in coordinating economic activity for the good of the whole community. " But China's industrial policy illustrates the classic downsides of excessive state interference. Even the vaunted German model, one of the great success stories of the 20th century, is showing its age. German manufacturing output and gross domestic product have been stagnant since 2018.

American politics is dysfunctional, our social fabric is in tatters, but somehow our economy is among the strongest in the world. Our economic competitors stumble and fall; we stumble, and somehow bounce back.

I do not draw the lesson that Bidenomics is working. The Ryan McConnell Trump corporate tax cut in the long term will help more than Biden's sugar high. By lowering the corporate rate from the highest in the developed world to the middle of the pack, American companies can be more competitive. If Ryan had gotten his way and replaced the corporate income tax with a value added tax with refunds to exporters, we'd probably be running a trade surplus.

And the imposition of the GILTI tax on foreign earnings of American companies encouraged them to invest more in the USA, rather than overseas. The GILTI tax was also part of the Republicans' 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

Yes, Biden's industrial policy will increase investment and jobs in the USA. But how many future Solyndras (bankrupt manufacturer of solar cells championed by Obama) are among the recipients of Biden's pork? And the government spending on this will increase the national debt by trillions. Better to let the free market work. David Brooks at the start of the piece appears to recognize this, in criticizing China. I'm not sure why he contradicts himself at the end.

[Tiny 12]

Seat belts work, Tiny. Masks do not. You are being like a Democrat / Fauci here. The science shows masks do not work.

https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr...6207.pub6/full

The pooled results of RCTs did not show a clear reduction in respiratory viral infection with the use of medical / surgical masks. There were no clear differences between the use of medical / surgical masks compared with N95/ P2 respirators in healthcare workers when used in routine care to reduce respiratory viral infection.

Elvis, I had this thrown at me a couple of times when I'd walk into restaurants during COVID wearing a mask and acquaintances would accuse me of making a political statement. That's ridiculous. It's a scientific and medical issue. It has nothing to do with politics.

Again, the studies I've seen based on experimental evidence and the physics, chemistry and biology of mask material, aerosols, droplets, and the virus indicate good quality masks worn correctly should reduce transmission of the COVID virus. Since I used good quality N95 and KN95 masks and wore them properly, I'm confident they provided protection.

A population study is much less likely to persuade me. Nevertheless, here are some population studies that indicate masks did indeed reduce transmission of SARS-CoV-2:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....act_id=4307646

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/...mm6947e2-h.pdf

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33205991/

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2015954117

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34637377/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33347937/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35143470/

Your paper lumped influenza in with COVID-19. Please note that influenza is more commonly transmitted by contact, while COVID-19 is more commonly transmitted by air. So yeah, I wouldn't think masks would work that well for influenza. The Cochrane paper did break out COVID-19 for medical / surgical masks, but not for N95/ P-2 respirators. Based on a quick glance, it does appear that the N95/ P-2 masks did reduce transmission of COVID-19 for COVID and for influenza, and more for COVID.

Again, I'm not advocating mask mandates. I did and I will however use N95 and KN95 masks when I believe it makes sense, regardless of what other people think.

They worked for about six months in 2021, and the government knew they were failing and kept lying about how effective they were. What was terrible is the worst period of shaming is when the vaccines started failing. The vaccines were rolled out too quickly and not properly evaluated for safety. If the manufacturers of the vaccine did not have immunity, you and I both know they would be sued into bankruptcy. I said this a million times, but the first rule of medicine is do no harm. It is not "do something to show you care" because when you "do something" without solid proof it works, you can do harm, and the vaccines and lockdown did enormous harm with little or no benefit.

I fully support protecting vaccine manufacturers from liability. Otherwise the plaintiffs attorney, who like the teachers unions work hand-in-hand with the Democratic Party, would bankrupt them, like they have many other companies. I agree the CDC painted an optimistic picture of how effective they are. I disagree with you about "the first rule of medicine is do no harm. " I believe it's a numbers game. And for vulnerable people, the aged and the immune compromised, the choice was a no brainer. Get the vaccine. Build your immunity the easy way, through vaccination, rather than the hard way, through infection. For middle aged people, I believe it was a no brainer too in the past, before people had built immunity through infection. Right now I'm not so sure. And apparently based on its recommendations, neither is the CDC.

But like I said Tiny, I had the time of my life during the pandemic. I flew on empty planes, stayed at $1000 resorts for $100 a night, and met the highest quality women there were after they got laid off of work. I never had such high quality pussy for so little money in my life.

I agree with that. I kind of miss travel during COVID. I strapped on my very uncomfortable, medical grade N95 mask and rightly or wrongly believed I was invincible.

[Tiny 12]

You and your Brother, Tiny, should try to get your Repub Phoney Outrages in sync.

He says Biden's economic recovery legislation was too much, created too many jobs, drove up incomes and put so much money in Americans' pockets that they could afford to pay higher prices and jack up inflation.

You say Biden's border policies somehow already filled the nearly 9 Million more open and available jobs than there are applicants to take them and dark skin foreigners are driving down wages.

I just don't know which brilliantly unsubstantiated pro-Repub Bothsider argument to get unnecessarily upset about anymore.

Personal savings before COVID were running around $1. 5 trillion, and they're currently $700 billion. Biden's American Rescue Plan (ARP) caused them to spike to 5. 7 trillion at the end of March, 2021! So there was a hell of a lot of money sloshing around that did indeed contribute to inflation.

That's not the main reason to criticize the ARP and the other legislation passed by Democratic politicians in 2021 and 2022, though, which in total represented over $5 trillion in unfunded spending. The main reason is the effect on the national debt. Yeah it would be great if the government could just hand out free money forever. But it doesn't work that way. Eventually you have to pay the piper.

As to job openings, there were 7. 8 million at the end of February, 2021, slightly higher than the level pre-COVID, just before the ARP was passed. Job openings did go on up to a peak of 12 million in March, 2022. So how much of that was because of jobs created by your beloved Democratic Politicians' legislation? And how much was because the lazier among us decided to sit on their asses a while longer because they got all that free Biden money?

I can't speak for the Marquis, but I have no problem making legal immigration of skilled foreigners easier. We need more scientists and engineers and the like. And I have no problem with a guest worker program that does not lead to citizenship. And finally I have no problem with immigration of foreigners from socialist countries like Cuba and Venezuela, especially women in the 18 to 30 age bracket, who are more likely to vote for Republicans than Democrats after having suffered the hardships of far left governments.

[MarquisdeSade1]

"You and your Brother, Tiny, should try to get your Repub Phoney Outrages in sync.

He says Biden's economic recovery legislation was too much, created too many jobs, drove up incomes and put so much money in Americans' pockets that they could afford to pay higher prices and jack up inflation.

You say Biden's border policies somehow already filled the nearly 9 Million more open and available jobs than there are applicants to take them and dark skin foreigners are driving down wages.

I just don't know which brilliantly unsubstantiated pro-Repub Bothsider argument to get unnecessarily upset about anymore. "

https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2023...dle-influence/

https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2023...with-migrants/

[EihTooms]

Joe and the junkie suck HIV dripping cock.
https://www.breitbart.com/economy/20...with-migrants/

https://www.breitbart.com/national-s...credit-system/

You and your Brother, Tiny, should try to get your Repub Phoney Outrages in sync.

He says Biden's economic recovery legislation was too much, created too many jobs, drove up incomes and put so much money in Americans' pockets that they could afford to pay higher prices and jack up inflation.

You say Biden's border policies somehow already filled the nearly 9 Million more open and available jobs than there are applicants to take them and dark skin foreigners are driving down wages.

I just don't know which brilliantly unsubstantiated pro-Repub Bothsider argument to get unnecessarily upset about anymore.

[MarquisdeSade1]

"Deadbeats like Trump and his Crime Family cost Americans billions per year picking up the tab for their scams.

LOL. "Dems are legalizing shop-lifting"! Lolol. Oh my goodness gracious me. So now stealing a stick of gum is a misdemeanor instead of a felony in California. BFD. LOL.

Trump overstated net worth by up to $3. 6 billion per year, NY AG alleges in new filing.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/08/trum...ndroidappshare

Good lord. As if Trump's creation of Trump's Pandemic, Trump's demands to shut down businesses and schools across America, Trump's crashing worldwide economies and destroying global supply-chains that caused hyper-inflation everywhere, Trump wiping out millions upon millions of jobs, Trump flushing Trillions down the shitter with nothing for America to show for it, Trump wiping out Trillions more in USA household wealth, etc, etc wasn't bad enough. ".

Just step aside Dirty Joe (for health reasons and to spean more time with your family LOL Joe and Hunter in the same cell in Florence Co) before you're impeached and indicted.

Why Is Joe Biden So Unpopular?

Sept. 9, 2023,7:00 am ET.

President Biden, seen in profile.

Credit. Leigh Vogel for The New York Times.

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Ross Douthat.

By Ross Douthat.

Opinion Columnist.

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Joe Biden is an unpopular president, and without some recovery, he could easily lose to Donald Trump in 2024.

By itself, this is no great wonder: His two predecessors were also unpopular at this stage of their presidencies, also endangered in their re-election bids.

But with Trump and Barack Obama, there were reasonably simple explanations. For Obama, it was the unemployment rate, 9. 1 percent in September 2011, and the bruising battles over Obamacare. For Trump, it was the fact that he had never been popular, making bad approval ratings his presidency's natural default.

For Biden, though, there was a normal honeymoon, months of reasonably high approval ratings that ended only with the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. And since then, it's been hard to distill a singular explanation for what's kept his numbers lousy.

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The economy is better than in Obama's first term, inflation is ebbing, and the feared recession hasn't materialized. The woke wars and Covid battles that disadvantaged Democrats are no longer central, and the post-Roe culture wars seem like friendlier terrain. Biden's foreign policy team has defended Ukraine without (so far) a dangerous escalation with the Russians, and Biden has even delivered legislative bipartisanship, co-opting Trumpian promises about industrial policy along the way.

This has created mystification among Democratic partisans as to why all this isn't enough to give the president a decent polling lead. I don't share that mystification. But I do think there's real uncertainty about which of the forces dragging on Biden's approval ratings matter most.

Start with the theory that Biden's troubles are mostly still about inflation — that people just hate rising prices and he isn't credited with avoiding a recession because wage increases have been eaten up by inflation until recently.

If this is the master issue, then the White House doesn't have many options beyond patience. The administration's original inflationary sin, the overspending in the American Rescue Plan Act, isn't going to be repeated, and apart from the possibility of an armistice in Ukraine relieving some pressure on gas prices, there aren't a lot of policy levers to pull. The hope has to be that inflation continues to drift down, real wages rise consistently and in November 2024, Biden gets the economic credit he isn't getting now.

But maybe it's not just the economy. Across multiple polls, Biden seems to be losing support from minority voters, continuing a Trump-era trend. This raises the possibility that there's a social-issues undertow for Democrats, in which even when wokeness isn't front and center, the fact that the party's activist core is so far left gradually pushes culturally conservative African Americans and Hispanics toward the G. O. P. — much as culturally conservative white Democrats drifted slowly into the Republican coalition between the 1960's and the 2000's.

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Bill Clinton temporarily arrested that rightward drift by deliberately picking public fights with factions to his left. But this has not been Biden's strategy. He's moved somewhat rightward on issues like immigration, in which progressivism's policy vision hit the rocks. But he doesn't make a big deal about his differences with his progressive flank. I don't expect that to change — but it might be costing him in ways somewhat invisible to liberals at the moment.

Listen to 'Matter of Opinion'.

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Michelle Cottle, Ross Douthat, Carlos Lozada and Lydia Polgreen.

The G. O. P. Primary: 'City on a Hill' or 'American Carnage'?

May 18,2023.

Or maybe the big problem is just simmering anxiety about Biden's age. Maybe his poll numbers dipped first in the Afghanistan crisis because it showcased the public absenteeism that often characterizes his presidency. Maybe some voters now just assume that a vote for Biden is a vote for the hapless Kamala Harris. Maybe there's just a vigor premium in presidential campaigns that gives Trump an advantage.

In which case a different leader with the same policies might be more popular. Lacking any way to elevate such a leader, however, all Democrats can do is ask Biden to show more public vigor, with all the risks that may entail.

But this is at least a strategy, of sorts. The hardest problem for the incumbent to address may be the pall of private depression and general pessimism hanging over Americans, especially younger Americans, which has been worsened by Covid but seems rooted in deeper social trends.

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I don't see any obvious way for Biden to address this issue through normal presidential positioning. I would not recommend updating Jimmy Carter's malaise speech with the therapy-speak of contemporary progressivism. I also don't think the president is suited to be a crusader against digital derangement or a herald of religious revival.

Biden got elected, in part, by casting himself as a transitional figure, a bridge to a more youthful and optimistic future. Now he needs some general belief in that brighter future to help carry him to re-election.

But wherever Americans might find such optimism, we are probably well past the point that a decrepit-seeming president can hope to generate it himself.

Another guy worth reading at NYT.

Douhat Edsall Brooks and Bret Stevens.