O’Biden
We just had a surprise visit (at least it was a surprise for me) from our dear friends from San Francisco/Sonoma. One of the things they do is is keep a list of great limited series shows based on true life events and movies of the same genre. I must admit, I haven’t considered that genre for its uniqueness, but when we do happen to watch one (as we did with Dopesick, Painkiller and The Offer), we have thoroughly enjoyed them. These tend to be dramatized non-fiction stories with top-rated stars portraying people and circumstances that have been in the news and for which we have a sketchy knowledge of the facts surrounding the controversy they are embroiled in. These movies and series give you a much stronger, more memorable sense of what exactly has gone on in a way that news reports may have washed over us in the crush of getting through our lives at the time they happened. They give us a chance to step back and learn the story much better by creating a realistic play of the events that is far more easy to grasp and understand in its entirety. If the old saying that life is stranger than fiction has any merit, these dramatizations go a long way to proving that point.
Last night we watched Game Change, the 2021 Netflix production about the 2008 election when John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his Vice Presidential running mate. This was recent enough history to be memorable on many levels. The hilarious scenes where SNL’s Tina Fey portrays Palin while Amy Pohler plays Hillary are used to highlight how jaw-dropping the impact on Palin and her campaign people like Steve Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace was in real-time. That was sort of an example of art imitating life being used to inform life and create art…a very wild path and a very entertaining and effective knowledge consolidator and remembrance all at once. What I had never realized before was that Palin, with her minimal awareness and knowledge of facts and the geopolitical setting, kept referring to then Vice Presidential candidate Joe Biden, as O’Biden. I guess Joe Biden just sounded like a contraction into O’Biden to her, and she kept saying it. It was a red flag to Schmidt and others that Palin really was a bit of a dope. Think of her as an early version of Kerry Lake, well put-together in appearance, but not altogether there upstairs.
That is becoming a sort of prototype for the average Republican voter, at least the ones that are getting interviewed and put on cable news every day as the non-Republican world keeps scratching its head and wondering how these people can support Donald Trump after all he has shown us of himself and his intentions and actions and all that Republican legislators (both Federal and State) that sycophantically follow and endorse him keep doing to prove that they have little or no interest in governing the country or serving the people, but rather just want to win elections and be in power. O’Biden is the perfect soundbite for the person who really doesn’t want to get caught up in the details of policy or facts. Let’s Go Brandon is nice for flags hanging from pickup trucks that cruise in from Valley Center, but I’m starting to think that a far better flag for them to fly would be an O’Biden flag.
The nice thing about O’Biden is that it can be used by both the right and the left at the same time. Have flags made up in blue with O’Biden for Democrats and red for Republicans. The red one can just represent a frustration with what BIden is not doing on the border for instance. Meanwhile the blue one can just mean all the things that Biden wants to do and is willing to do on the border but isn’t being allowed to by the Republicans that would rather wave their flag than solve their problems.
I read a term today in the New York Times called “class inversion” with regard to our political system. It is a phenomenon we have all witnessed and recognized. Where during the Civil War era when the Republican Party was formed, Republicans were the forward-thinking elitists who were abolitionists and believed in fairness and equality and Democrats were the staunchly conservative landed Southern elite. The working class was then Republican. Then, somewhere in the early part of the Twentieth Century, after Teddy Roosevelt, the Republican Party went through a class inversion and became the party of wealthy conservatives while the Democrats became the party of labor and the working class. Now, of course, we have witnessed yet another class inversion and the Democrats are characterized as the educated, liberal elite while the Republicans, while still led most often by the tax cut-loving wealthy conservative patricians, have mined the populist rage for the working class (especially the rural and less-educated working class) and enlisted them as MAGA Republicans. It’s a bit more of a mixed bag than that, of course, because we have some degree of class confusion in the inversion process since big labor (like Shawn Fain of the UAW) is trending Democratic while non-union labor (which often drafts behind the benefits gained by union labor, but refuses to pay dues and support those “damn socialists”) is solidly MAGA Republican.
I would suggest one refinement in my new O’Biden flag program. I think it best for the red flag to remain with the O’Biden spelling to keep it simple and recognizable for the shorthand (some might say ignorant) sense of reality that MAGA Republican voters enjoy these days. But I think the blue version of the flag for Democrats should perhaps be something like “Oh, Biden!” That is my way of saying that the impact of Bidenomics keeps blowing any thinking and rational economist out of the water. Just this morning I saw in the FT that the employment numbers came through at double the level of new jobs that anyone in the market was predicting. That probably explains why the Fed chose to keep rates static rather than reducing them, while reminding the public that it still plans to reduce them further this year. This economy is smoking hot while the Republicans are busy not creating productive legislation and instead smoking pot that things aren’t working well enough.
I have heard it said that Republicans have only one policy goal in reality and that it has nothing to do with such esoteric and altruistic ideals as immigration control and abortion control. It is to cut taxes and save its members more money in their pocket right now rather than invest in the productive expansion of our economy and driving positive social change. I can’t even fathom how Republicans can work their way through the confusion of calling themselves supply-siders when that is supposed to be all about promoting investment. Cutting taxes doesn’t promote investment (we have proven that since 1981), but Keynesian Bidenomics seems to replacing the Laffer Curve as the engine for actual productive investment. All I can say is, Oh, Biden! Way to go!
Right on…