The morning after

Last night was brutal. I only watched a little bit of the Biden-Trump debate. Biden fumbled things, stopped in the middle of his sentence, said something like we ended Medicaid or Medicare. It was bad.

Trump pounced on it and rightly so. He was spewing his own nonsense about how Biden was destroying the country, had done so much damage to the country.

I continue to think that Biden and other Democrats just fundamentally missed the electorate's message of the 2020 election which was: get rid of Trump but overall we aren't that enthused about the Democratic agenda more broadly and certainly not the more progressive components of it. If not for Trump's denial of the loss and then January 6, there's no way we would have picked up two Senate seats in Georgia.

And now despite the fact that Biden has done fine -- not without mistakes -- but a decent job. He has gotten some legislation through. He has stabilized things internationally after Trump shook up relationships with allies. Unemployment is low. Purchasing power has remained stable across income deciles -- though inflation has admittedly acted as an extremely regressive tax on consumption when an actual tax to sop up the excess liquidity printed during the pandemic could have bean progressive across deciles. The Republicans are politically savvy to bang on Biden about this but fundamentally they are at fault for making it what it is.

Anyhow, Biden's tone-deafness around traditional Republican concerns like regulation (where they have a point, to a limited extent) and taxes (where they are largely wrong) has created a situation where traditional Republicans are willing to do a deal with the devil and vote for Trump despite his election loss denials and other excesses. And Biden is making it easy for them to do so by refusing to acknowledge the fact that he is too old to stay in the race. Time for him to bow out.